Mimicry Exercise Experiment #3

(This is the fourth blog post in a series on writer’s voice and style mimicry. Read the exercise explanation, exercise experiment #1 and exercise experiment #2 by following the links.)

After today’s experiment, I am left wondering, am I not experimenting with work that different enough from my own writing? I keep expecting to get hit with this ah-ha moment. While typing out the pages from other writer’s, I feel the author’s voice, I get where they are going with the characters, scene and story. I see how they are not shying away from using ‘was’, ‘had’, and ‘that’. I see how they are using ‘telling’ effectively. (Obviously, some rules are for breaking.) I see how they are giving us all those internal pieces we need to believe in the character and their actions.

Today I mimicked Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes which is in third person, past tense with several character POVs. Okay, I lied. I didn’t mimic. I typed out a full, single-spaced page (and a bit) in Word and then found I had no inkling to pick up the story on my own, imitating the style and voice. It wasn’t the story’s fault, as I love the story. The characters are great. The scene is something I can identify with. Yet, there was no desire to pick up someone else’s story and carry on with it. My muse doesn’t want to work that way. I found this in the other exercises, but managed to push through. However, today, my writing mind said “Enough!”. It didn’t simply apply the brakes, but it applied the emergency brakes too. It was not going there. So we didn’t.

Even though I didn’t mimic Jennifer Weiner, I did learn from the expert, so all was not lost. Weiner has a great way of zipping and zapping around back and forth through time and settings. The character is at home in bed, then we are transported to the doctor’s office, then to the delivery room 6 weeks prior, then back the apartment a few days before now, and again, back to the bedroom. All within a page or two as she weaves the story together, giving background, and setting up where the character is coming from psychologically. Very cool. With one simply cue, she has you in a different setting, pulling another important piece from the past, then zips you back to the present. She’s a pro!

This is the end of my mimicry experiment. While I don’t think I will mimic other writers as a way to improve my own voice–I think I have already found it–I will, from time to time, pick up a book  I admire and type out a page or two as a method for learning how another author has approached zipping around in the past, handled an intense scene, or slipping a little telling into a fast-paced scene.

Shop Indie Bookstores
A great chick lit book about motherhood.