Prose: A Study Method
In the last few months, people have been advising writers to copy the prose of authors they admire to absorb that author’s style into their own... which does kinda sorta work. But, you’ll spend a lot of time just intuiting and building vague muscle memory. My method bypasses the need to spend hours copying someone else’s prose and forces you to actively learn new techniques. Plus, it can be applied directly to your own writing.
Mind you, this isn’t meant to be an exercise in making your writing better or worse, it’s about learning to absorb someone else’s style.
Most recently, I did this exercise with a snippet of Cormac McCarthy’s work. I wanted a small section of my story to sound McCarthy-esque, so I sat down the opening lines of Suttree’s first chapter and went through this exercise. I’ll share my process with you to demonstrate how it works.
Step 1 - Start with a piece of your own writing
Here’s the section I wanted to workshop:
I walked through Otel Valley, dragging blood behind me. I trekked across cavernous forests, paranoia following me. I heard the burning gods searching.
Step 2 - Find some prose you like
This is the section of Suttree I decided to use:
Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun.
Step 3 - Break the prose down into parts
In this step, I change each word of the author’s prose into its word-type (nouns, adjective, pronouns, etc.) I erase any punctuation because I’ll be adding my own.
This is McCarthy’s prose, broken down:
Verb Prep Noun Adverb Verb Noun Verb Prep Noun Adverb Verb Noun Prep Noun Noun Adj Prep Pronoun Verb Adj Noun Adj Noun Adj Noun Prep Adj Noun Conj Noun Prep Noun Prep (definite article) Adj Noun Verb Adverb Prep Adj Noun Adverb Noun Verb Conj Verb
Step 4 - Look for patterns
This step is moreso for when I’m combining multiple sections across a work or when I’m sourcing variety of authors, but we can look at McCarthy’s section to show you a bit of what I mean when I say ‘patterns’.
Uses very few conjunctions, which he is well-known for
Also doesn’t often use definite articles (i.e. ‘the’)
Puts nouns next to one another ( light, coronets)
Repeats the adj noun, adj noun one right after the other, using the same adjective (each twig, each grain)
Step 5 - Mad Libs
Use your original prose to fill in each of the word types, then add in your grammar. Here’s my resulting changes:
My original prose
I walked through Otel Valley, dragging blood behind me. I trekked across cavernous forests, paranoia following me. I heard the burning gods searching.
McCarthy
Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun.
My edit, blending styles
I walked through Otel Valley, hemorrhaging blood on county roads, heart cold inside a pale chest, an aching ribcage. Through cavernous forests without wind paranoia followed me into the arctic wilderness. Gods burned in the beyond, searching.
