Results of September Copy Practice

After revising the first draft of Saint Arcology, I decided to take a few weeks before starting my next project. But I didn’t want to stop writing entirely; I needed to keep my word brain active. I decided to go with some copy practice: copying the prose of some of my favorite authors.

I’d read about a particular method: reading a paragraph or two, then attempting to write out that section from memory. Then go back and notice how your prose decisions are different (and presumably worse, if you’ve picked someone good) than the writer you are copying.

I started with this method, but found it difficult and frustrating. I’m not great a memorization, and I was putting too much effort into trying to remember what I had just read, and not enough into noticing the author’s stylistic choices. So I switched to a simpler method: open a book at random, read a few paragraphs for enjoyment, then copy those paragraphs directly.

I started with Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Gibson’s prose is information dense. He conveys a tremendous amount of meaning with a tight word budget. But on this read-through I was also struck by how vividly and precisely Gibson describes internal states. For example:

She knows that it’s about meeting Stella, and hearing her story, and her sister’s, but somehow she no longer is able to fit it into her life. Or rather she lives now in that story, her life left somewhere behind, like a room she’s stepped out of.

If your prose isn’t including your character’s thoughts and feelings, you might as well be writing a screenplay. Gibson is a master at describing both internal and external settings. Another example of Cayce’s internal state:

Cayce takes a deliberately slow sip of tea-sub, looking away from the screen as she does. As long and flagrantly weird as the day has been, she senses that what she is about to read will be weirder still, and perhaps a lot more lastingly significant. Parkaboy does not joke about these things, and the mystery of the footage often feels closer to the core of her life than Bigend, Blue Ant, Dorotea, even her career. She doesn’t understand that, but knows it. It is something she believes she has in common with Parkaboy, and Ivy, and many of the others. It is something about the footage. The feel of it. The mystery. You can’t explain it to someone who isn’t there. They’ll just look at you. But it matters, matters in some unique way.

I’m right there with her. And because of prose like this, Cayce sticks with me long after I finish the book.

Next was Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks. Though Banks’s characters stick with me less, I love the descriptions of interactions between civilizations of different power levels, like this one:

The alien’s laughter tinkled. “Gracious, no. With a fleet of that nature you’d be restricted to civilizations no more sophisticated than your own, and, even the, more sophisticated civs would quickly step in to prevent such shenanigans.” The alien smiled, waving one hand at the image of the warship now frozen on the screen. “These are quite simple craft by Level Seven or Eight civilization standards; we ourselves would need a substantial fleet to cope with the sheer numbers involved, but it would hardly trouble us. A single large GSV could probably cope on its own even if they all came at it together. Standard tactics would be to slightly outpace them and turn them on each other with its Effectors; they’d destroy themselves without the GSV firing a single real shot. Even if they were magically equipped with hyperspace engines and were capable of performing a surprise 4D shell-surround manoevre, you’d bet on a GSV breaking out through them; it’d just brush them aside.”

The ships are the main characters of the Culture series; humanoids and other bios are there to help with conversations and action sequences. And that’s fine. When Banks writes real and messy human relationships (like in The Wasp Factory) it’s almost too intense.

Finally I copied from Game of Thrones by GRRM. I was reminded how easy his prose is to read, at least in Book 1. Every time I opened the book at random and started to read, I forgot that I had intended to do a writing exercise, and just kept reading. This happened literally every single time I picked up the book. Game of Thrones has plenty of action and gore, but the stakes are high even in the midst of a council meeting, or a conversation between one of the Stark children and their many potential enemies. It’s just such good storytelling.

“The king is gone hunting, but I know he will be pleased to see you when he returns,” the queen was saying to the two knights who knelt before here, but Sansa could not take her eyes off of the third man. He seemed feel the weight of her gaze. Slowly he turned his head. Lady growled. A terror as overwhelming as anything Sansa Stark had ever felt filled her suddenly. She stepped backward and bumped into someone.

Strong hands grasped her by the shoulders, and for a moment Sansa thought it was her father, but when she turned, it was the burned face of Sandor Clegane looking down at her, his mouth twisted in a terrible mockery of a smile. “You are shaking, girl,” he said, his voice rasping. “Do I frighten you so much?”

He did, and had since she had first laid eyes on the ruin that fire had made of his face, though it seemed to her now the was not half so terrifying as the other. Still, Sansa wrenched away from him, and the Hound laughed, and Lady moved between them, rumbling a warning. Sansa dropped to her knees to wrap her arms around the wolf. They were all gathered around gaping, she could feel their eyes on her, and here and there she heard muttered comments and titters of laughter.

All in all, I enjoyed the exercise, and will probably return to it with different authors at some point. Right now I’m reading a collection of novellas by Ursula LeGuin — she’ll definitely be in the next batch.