Copy Like An Artist
A lesson on writing that you can learn to teach yourself.
The word Copy has very negative connotations in the creative world. It brings up notions of copyright lawsuits, plagiarism checkers and the age-old question of whether Ed Sheeran has the right to copyright a standard 4-bar chord progression. But that’s not what we are discussing today. Plagiarism is its own beast and I would never recommend passing off another artist’s work as your own, if not for the moral implications, then for the devastating effect it would have on one’s reputation.
No. What I want to talk about, is how you can improve your own writing, and honestly any art form, by taking inspiration from your peers. Taking a critical look at how they do what they do and then applying it to your own work. You’re doing this already, whether you know it or not, so let’s do it with intention, with purpose, and without compromising your creative integrity.
In other words: How to copy like an artist.
Active Inspiration
I was first introduced to the phrase “ Steal like an artist” in this video about improving your art style, by artist and creator DrawingWiffWaffles. It’s a common technique in the world of illustration, to first copy another artist’s work to learn a skill, before branching out and creating your own. And it got me thinking. This process could easily be used to improve any art form, any creative medium. When you’re learning to paint in school, they show you a beautiful still life by some master painter and ask you to recreate it. It’s not an original idea and it doesn’t normally create great art, but in the process of copying you learn a technique. You learn a skill. Copy enough times, learn enough skills, and you start to make the art your own.
So how does this process translate to the world of writing?
One doesn’t copy another author’s words to learn a skill. We don’t rewrite stories or trace over sentences.
No. Instead, we read.
It’s a well-known fact that the authors we read influence the way we write, that’s basic artistic inspiration 101. You’ll hear a little Lovecraft in Neil Gaiman, a little Gaiman in N K Jemisin, and a little Tolkien in all of us. But this process tends to be passive. We collect our inspiration over the years, letting another author’s words sink in and affect us on an emotional level, filling our bookshelves with beautiful titles and wondrous worlds. But when it comes to improving our own writing, we look away.
Instead, we go to a white screen, a blank piece of paper, and attempt to get better simply by doing.
Yes, the only way to be a writer is to write, and the more you write the better your work will get, but there’s got to be a more focused approach than simply doing something over and over until you do it better. Writing workshops, writing courses, these things are great, but I’m proposing something you can do right now, for free, with nothing more than the books you already own.
So, let’s give it a try. Let’s run our own little writer’s workshop, with just you and a few books. Let’s turn the passive process of learning from what we read into an active investment in your own work, in your own skill. Let’s get the books, that you’ve invested so much time into already,to start working for you.
Step one
Step one, you are going to find something you’ve written that you’re not happy with. Preferably, a finished piece of work, that for whatever reason, doesn’t spark joy in the way that you hoped.
Now, here’s the fun part. Put that piece away, we don’t need to read it yet. Go to your bookshelf and pick out a book you’ve read before. It doesn’t have to be your all-time favourite, but choose an author you admire. One that inspires you. An author that makes you say “I wish I could write like that”.
Flip to any page and start reading from the top paragraph. Don’t get carried away, this isn’t re-read your favourite novel time, just read a page or two to reacquaint yourself with the story. Then, go back and read it again.
On this second pass, instead of reading like a reader, I want you to read like a writer. I want you to study the sentence structure, the exact word choice. I want you to think about tone and voice, about plot devices and character development, about grammar and dialogue. Really break apart what it is you like about this style of writing. You’re not searching for the exact formula that makes up this writer’s voice, but rather, what is one thing they do well in this small excerpt? What is one thing that resonates with you as a reader, that you wish you could bring across in your own work?
Then, you’re going to write one sentence to explain what you’ve found.
Not an essay. Just one sentence.
For this exercise, I chose The Graveyard Book as my inspiration text, and after a couple of passes I came up with a few options for my One Sentence:
- I love the contrast in how Gaiman writes dialogue for his characters. You can really hear the different voices coming through the text.
- I love how he writes against the Hemmingway idea of minimizing hard-to-read sentences. He uses run-on sentences, long one-sentence paragraphs, lots of commas and starts sentences with But.
- I love how he uses societal gender assumptions against the reader, playing off what he knows people assume and giving us the opposite.
I had personally chosen quite a dialogue-rich piece initially to improve, so I chose option 1 to take into the next step, but any of these options would work well as a sentence to focus on.
Step Two
Step Two: We are going to take that sentence and bring it back to our original piece of work.
Now, this is important. Before you start working on your own piece, your Inspiration Book is going back on the shelf, closed and out of sight. You don’t want to have it open next to you as you work, as the temptation to copy a turn of phrase or steal that one beautiful sentence is too great. The aim of the game here is to emulate, not reproduce.
We’re not trying to write exactly like another author, there is already one of them in this world, we don’t need two. What we’re doing, is attempting to learn the craft from the end result, work back from the book in our hands to the painstaking process of creating it. We are letting these authors talk to us through their work, attempting to take things apart to see what makes them tick.
As you go back through your work, think about the sentence you came up with, that one aspect you loved from the other author’s work, and try to draw that out in your own writing.
Find the places your writing misses the mark, where it falls flat and annoys you, and intentionally edit with this one sentence in mind. For my example, this entailed choosing some distinctive aspects to add to each character’s dialogue, making them sound intentionally different from each other by using colloquial terms, accents and turns of phrase. This isn’t normally how I write, but that’s a good thing. That’s kind of the whole poitn. I ended up with characters that sounded completely different from the way they normally do, and completely different from each other. Did my work end up sounding like Neil Gaiman? No. It was still entirely my work, but I was able to take one thing that I loved about another author’s style and slot it into my own writing.
Emulate, learn, grow.
Now, this idea is by no means groundbreaking. I am sure we were all forced to read Shakespeare in school, or spend hours slogging through Jane Eyre, but the difference here is we’re not just reading a book that other people have told us is great, hoping to passively let some practical knowledge pass through the pages. Authorly wisdom via osmosis. No, here, we are taking work that already speaks to us as writers, work that has most likely already affected the way we write, and we are actively using these influences to improve our writing, one small step at a time. We’re not reading to read, we’re reading to write.
Step Three: Rinse and Repeat
And the best part? You don’t have to do this just once!
Once you have edited your piece using one focus sentence, go back and do it again. Choose a different book, a different author, and pick another aspect to focus on in your work. If you are struggling with one particular thing, focus your book choice and excerpt reading on that one aspect. If you’re struggling with character introduction, read a couple of opening scenes by George R R Martin. If you’re having a hard time with humour, grab Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams off the shelf.
Do this as many times as you like until you have a piece of work you’re starting to love. Keep the techniques that work for you, and throw away those that don’t. Maybe you love how Oscar Wilde writes dialogue like his characters are quoting themselves, but when you do it, it sounds stiff and pompous. That’s ok, try something else. This process is unique to you, so play around with it and have some fun.
“In The Style Of” — Imitation vs Plagiarism
So what is the difference between learning from other writers and forging? What is the difference between writing a piece “in the style of” and plagiarism?
As I am oft to do, let me defer to a talent greater than my own to put this idea into words:
“When I read Ray Bradbury as a kid, I wrote like Ray Bradbury- everything green and wondrous and seen through a lens smeared with the grease of nostalgia. When I read James M. Cain, everything I wrote came out clipped and stripped and hardboiled. When I read Lovecraft, my prose became luxurious and Byzantine. I wrote stories in my teenage years where all these styles merged, creating a kind of hilarious stew. This sort of stylistic blending is a necessary part of developing one’s own style”
Stephen King in On Writing
As King so eloquently puts it, taking inspiration from others is a core part of your journey as a writer. Intentionally or not, those we read will inevitably turn up in our words and colour our work with their own flavour. It’s how we learn the craft, it’s how we find our voice.
The difference, therefore, is intent.
If one is taking influence and inspiration in order to improve and grow as a writer, that’s natural. Writing a “Lovecraftian Style” piece of work, or a “Tolkienesque” adventure is a brilliant and rewarding exercise. Neil Gaiman won a Hugo Award for what he describes as “H. P. Lovecraft /Arthur Conan Doyle mashup”, and we all know 50 Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fanfiction.
But if one is copying and rewording to try and pass off another’s work as their own, that’s plagiarism. It teaches you nothing, disrespects the original creator, and that’s not what we are aiming for here.
I would never claim to have plagiarized George R R Martin’s work, but that doesn’t mean the hundreds of hours I’ve spent with his words haven’t changed the way I write. Patrick Rothfuss changed the way I see magic systems, Victoria Schwab changed the way I build worlds, Tolkien made me understand language, but that doesn’t make my work any less my own. It’s not plagiarism to learn from the greats, and it’s not plagiarism to learn from your peers. You do so respectfully, with the intention to learn, as one artist learning from another.
So listen to what these writers are saying, come to their work as a student to a textbook, and let your bookshelf teach you something purposeful about the craft you love.
Learning from the Bad as well as the Good
Stephen King mentions this in On Writing: about how you can learn more from a book you didn’t enjoy than from a book you did, because you can analyze what the writer did poorly and correct those mistakes in your own work.
So for this exercise, I want you to find something you read recently that you didn’t like. A short story, the first chapter of a book (that I assume you never finished), anything where you remember being interested in the title but didn’t finish reading the whole piece. Now, I want you to reread that piece of work, and pinpoint the exact moment where you turn off as a reader. The exact point you lose interest, when your brain says “No, this isn’t worth my time”.
What was it that broke the spell?
Was it sloppy grammar or typos? Was it boring word choice or repetitive sentence structure? Or was it deeper than that? Was it flat characters or an unrelatable plot line? Was it weak motivations? Unresolved plot holes? Deux Ex Machina? Stilted dialogue?
What the reader in you picked up on was bad writing, plain and simple. There is enough of it out there and we all know it when we read it. But your task is to dig down and dissect it and find out exactly what it is that’s making it bad.
For example, let’s say you read a story where the characters don’t feel alive to you. Dig deeper into that. What is it that is making you not care about them? Are they one-dimensional or oversimplified tropes? Does the dialogue sound forced and not match the character’s tone? Do they make decisions and actions that go against their perceived nature just to further the plot? Are they weak, passive or bland?
Now remember, hating a character is not the same as not caring about them. I don’t think I’ve ever hated a fictional character more than Joffrey Baratheon in A Song of Ice and Fire, but that fierce feeling of hate was only possible because the character was so brilliantly written, every action he made was so purely him that it created a vibrant, fully realized villain we were all deeply invested in. Hate and love both require passion, energy, and buy in from the reader. Being indifferent to a character that’s passive, uninspired or irrelevant is the death of good writing.
And you can do this with any aspect of bad writing. If you thought the sentence structure was poor, have a deeper look at how many words they use in each line, how they lay out their paragraphs. What words did you find repetitive, where could they have used better description, or broken up the text? If the tone was inconsistent, try to pinpoint the sentences that sounded off to you, which words or phrases went against the original voice?
Once you’ve pinpointed where you think this piece of writing failed, you are again going to take that knowledge back to your own work. You don’t need to come up with just one sentence this time, write down as many points as you can, and comb through your work looking for these same pitfalls.
This exercise isn’t designed so you can have fun cutting someone else’s work to shreds. We all have to get the bad words out somehow, and every writer has reams of badly written prose in their history. What this exercise teaches you, is how to dissect the art form down to its most basic building blocks. How to take apart a series of words, and see exactly how they fit, or don’t fit, together. And learn from it.
You want to look at the George R R Martins of the world, the Brandon Sandersons, the N K Jemisins, the Terry Pratchetts, the writers that weave magic with every word, cast spells and build worlds, capture our hearts with the same 26 letters we all have access to. And then look at a few lesser creatures, feel the clunky word choice and thin story arcs, hear the music falter and break apart. And then take all that you’ve learned, and put it back into your own work.
So, I could leave you with a pithy quote from any number of authors about inspiration and learning the craft. About how all the best ideas have already been had, or how originality is simply taking inspiration from more than one place. But seeing as this whole exercise is about learning from others to improve your own craft, let me see if I can come up with something of my own…
“As writers, we learn from every word we ever read; good, bad, inspiring, infuriating. We know the authors we admire and those we avoid, and we know when our writing sings and when it falls flat. Instead of being a passive receptacle for the disembodied advice of our peers, seek out and learn from the work you cherish, dissect the voices on your shelves, put those paperbacks to work, and get in the habit of copying like an artist”
Franky Seymour, 2023, talking to herself in her kitchen
About The Author
Franky Seymour writes things you might consider stories.
She’s never in the place you left her, but can likely be found somewhere along the Pacific Northwest. She writes fantasy, fairytales, and stories that hold your hand as they lead you into the dark, and can occasionally be caught doing ‘real’ work behind the wheel of an ambulance. Her favourite trick is to tell you a story you don’t realise is a story until after you’ve finished reading it. Consider yourself warned.
You can find more of her work on her website, connect over on LinkedIn, or shoot her a message about anything from worldbuilding to wanderlust.
Originally published at https://frankyseymour.com on January 29, 2023.
