Me: Artistic Epiphany: Imitative Editing

When first learning to write, especially in college, students are given license to imitate a standing author in order to successfully find their own voice. This method has a mixed measure of success and can often lead the student down a very, very wrong path. The primary pitfall of this is: you often don't write like what you like.

I have always gravitated toward dark speculative fiction. I enjoyed the paranoia and agitation of Edgar Allen Poe as a young man and often daydreamed about penning lurid tales of slow and enthralling descents into madness. And it has remained a day dream. I enjoy, the Poe, the Bradbury, and the Barker, because they imagine in a way that I can not. It is the very fact that I cannot simulate their gifts which draws me back to them again and again. So sadly, my attempts to imitate them are some of the most frustrating and disappointing forays into writing I have ever experienced. It appears that imitative writing is not a viable path toward successful writing for me. So what now?

I think I've found my inspiration in a technique I've dubbed, "imitative editing". Imitative editing is my new method for allowing my true artistic intentions and sentiments to reveal themselves through a two step process. The first part is simple, I write a first draft without thought or concern about style. I simply write it out. "Jane went to the store." That's step number one. Then, I begin the process of editing with a single thought in mind. "How would Bradbury punch this up." Obviously, one can choose any author one likes.

Bradbury likes to tap right into your psyche by using general and very accessible terms. However, he rolls them out in a an extraordinarily effective manner. Take this excerpt from Dandelion Wine:

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

The prose itself moves from dreamy restfulness to bright-eyed wakefulness. We move from "quiet", "darkness", and "ease" to "freedom and living". Therefore I, like Bradbury, will take my reader through a transition with which they are familiar, while informing them of the world of my story. For the flourishing of detail needed to turn my lifeless, "Jane went to the store", sentence into something Bradburyesque I will use a tool I picked up from John August's blog. The Supersentence. So with the magic of this indispensable writing tool and my mission to edit as though I were Bradbury, my sentence becomes:

"Charged by her mother with the task of grocery shopping, Jane leaped from the stale dusty air of the house into summer daylight and bolted toward Bucky's Market. The sunlight felt clean and tingled her skin. But soon the moisture of the air surrounded her and squeezed her small body like a damp kitchen sponge in her mother's fist. Jane hit the door at Bucky's and the glacier of dry, cold air knocked the wind out of her. She shivered her way through her mother's list in the great white grocery aisles."

As deft as Bradbury? Surely not. But I have a far better idea of the story I'm trying to tell. And that's how I think you find your voice, by understanding the story you want to tell.