This quick course will help you establish a powerful writing habit: copying the greats.

There is something magical about copying. Simply by writing out another author's sentences, and then adjusting them, altering them, one's own artistic brain seems to be stretched, tested, strengthened.

I hoped you liked exercise one -- let's try something new today.

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I love exploring neighbourhoods and wandering down unfamiliar streets. This instinct has stayed with me no matter where I've lived: even after five years in Knoxville, I'm excited to find an unexpected street I can walk down, or a distant set of streets and homes, on a hilltop, I can suggest to my wife we should drive through.

Here's your challenge for today: describe yourself or a fictional character arriving in a new part of town. Try to write three - five sentences quickly, without too much deliberation. Vary the scope of your description from sentence to sentence, so one sentence takes in the whole area, while the next zooms in to examine one spot.

However, you should also, as much as possible, follow the example of this passage from Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Try to match, sentence by sentence, the sort of descriptions that Wharton uses. You shouldn't copy any actual words: rather you should try to replicate the point of each sentence, how it helps to build up a picture of this new area, and, at the end, how it reveals something about Wharton's protagonist, Archer.

Here's the paragraph:

It was certainly a strange quarter to have settled in. Small dress-makers, bird-stuffers and "people who wrote" were her nearest neighbours; and further down the dishevelled street Archer recognised a dilapidated wooden house, at the end of a paved path, in which a writer and journalist called Winsett, whom he used to come across now and then, had mentioned that he lived. Winsett did not invite people to his house; but he had once pointed it out to Archer in the course of a nocturnal stroll, and the latter had asked himself, with a little shiver, if the humanities were so meanly housed in other capitals.

Does that make sense? Don't take too long to think: try to write your paragraph in under fifteen minutes.

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Let me know what you think of this exercise below!

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Yours,

Daniel

Day Two Arriving somewhere new [Copy the Greats]

This course is only available for enrolled students only.

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