Using Favorite Authors to Open Up Your Stories

When stuck, the simplest way for me to find out how to begin a story is to take the concept on from another writer’s point of view. I give the idea to Mark Twain or Edgar Alan Poe or Robert Louis Stevenson, then I write about a page in, using these familiar voices, and see where it goes. I’ve been doing this at least since high school. It’s my introvert’s version of mimicking a distinctive high school teacher.

From a learning perspective, it’s amazing. Just as singers find their styles by imitating favorite vocalists and art schools encourage students to reproduce the masters, writers can learn about style, pacing, and character development by creating faux versions of scenes they admire.

To do so may be difficult at first, but it gets easier with time. Naturally, the author’s work must be engaging (to you) and the author’s oeuvre must be familiar. It’s a good idea to read a few pages just before writing. Fresh exposure helps make the voice louder in your head. Then, put down one to three pages for a scene that is equivalent. (If the model is an action scene with jeopardy, write an action scene. If it’s a lover’s confession, write a lover’s confession.)

With practice, the style is apt to come through. For some fun, you can type up the original and two forgeries and see if friends who know the author can tell which one that author wrote. If they choose yours, you’ve got it.

Deeper than the voice is the perspective. Writers see life in distinctive ways. It shows in the subjects they choose to write about, the characters they focus on, the genres they prefer, and the ways the story questions are answered. Little Red Riding Hood would come out very differently if handled by Stephen King, Nora Roberts, or James Thurber.

By standing in the shoes of writers you love, you can find new perspectives on your own work. I had an idea I loved, and I could not find a way to turn into something fresh and powerful. So I actually gave the concept, ultimately, to six different writers. I had, over time, immersed myself in their work, and it was easy for me to grab, one after another, their stories from my bookshelf. It took me two hours to create these imitation pages. I liked most of the results, but one really resonated. I set it aside, and charged into the story using my own voice, and it’s one of my best writing experiences.

There is a genre of creating imitations. It’s called pastiche, and it usually is done as a parlor trick or for humor. (The most famous pastiche may be Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead.) That’s fun, but it’s not my point here. The purpose is to get a point of view on the concept or disrupt a writing pattern that has become a bad habit. Imitation can be a good tool, a little like role-playing or making deliberately different choices as an actor.

Beyond taking on a scene, you can use imitation to explore story in a more direct form. For example, I recently wrote up the premise for Sleepless in Seattle in a way I imagined Nora Ephron might have.

Original:

To win the love of her life (Sam), Annie must discover his identity, send a note that stands out from many competitors, defy advice and her own sense of what’s reasonable, dump a fiancé, and make it to the top of the Empire State Building before it closes or she will end up settling for a life that has only a pale shadow of the true happiness she longs for.


Then I created three variations…

Mark Twain’s version:

The path of true love winds, twists, burrows under fertile fields bounces off of rocks, and, sure, finds a path eventually after tearing up the countryside. Annie had foresworn herself to leave love and all its worst habits aside for good sense, but nature had other ideas. Or curiosity. Or blamed stubbornness. The only way to get that widower every gal wanted (so she wanted him, too) was with a lot of fibbing and relieving the ship of her life of all the ballast, including a so-called fiancé, who never knew what happened. Did I mention all the gals wanted this widower?

Dashiell Hammett’s version:

She uses the kid. That’s how she pulls off the impossible stunt of baiting a broken-hearted man to meet her thousands of miles away. If a few people got hurt along the way, what did it matter. Suckers always lost, and that included the all-too-convenient man she had set up to catch her if she fell. He really thought she loved him? She was smarter and tougher than any of them, and soon they’d all know.

Jane Austen’s version:

Approaching a man who nobly holds the memory of his lost wife is a delicate thing and liable to lead to society’s approbation, but Annie is willing to risk it for love. To succeed, however, she must first set aside her practical views of what a good match is. The fine attributes of her current fiancé, not to mention the commitment she’s honor-bound to keep, are not easily disposed of. Indeed, the unmistakeable correctness of her choice has the acceptance and blessing of her family, further complicating attempts at romance. Against all of this is the greatest challenge of all. winning the heart of a man she has never met. But to fail, means sacrificing her own heart forever.

I’m not claiming any of these are art or even entertaining. Since using imitation to explore story isn’t aimed work for publication, it doesn’t need to be good. And first draft is fine for these purposes. (Getting caught up in making an imitation perfect or entertaining may take you away from your own story if you’re not careful.) The value, even in these few words, written in about 15 minutes, was unleashing a cascade of possibilities. Mark Twain would spot the human folly, but also the good hearts within the characters. Dashiell Hammett might find in the situation a story about a flawed person fighting for fairness in a dark world, but suspecting, at best, a bittersweet outcome. Jane Austen would probably focus on how Sleepless offers ways to illustrate the social norms the shape us.

So, if Sleepless in Seattle had been my story, the exercise would have provided me with some interesting choices that otherwise never would have occurred to me. Not bad for 15-minutes work.