Putting on the style

[Sandra Davies]

It’s not exactly plagiarism, not at all in fact, but at times it gives rise to concern that I am little more than a sponge.

The T10  prompt arrives around midday in Britain and if my memory serves me well (and it doesn’t always, so I have to resort to pen and paper) I carry it to lunch where reading is as essential as the inevitable cheese sandwich and an apple.

Yesterday I had ‘wind, wallow, white’ in my head and Melissa Kite’s weekly ‘Real life’ column in the Spectator to read - a self-deprecatory snappy journalistic-style rant.   What I then wrote was more reportage than story, albeit in my typical convoluted sentence style, beginning with winding sheets and digressing therefrom.

I even posted it, but after half an hour I took it down again and two hours later read the last chapter of A L Kennedy’s ‘So I am glad’.   Her writing style is one I ever aspire to (without knowing how she does it) but just a chapter was sufficient to re-jig my writing style brain (app? pattern? template?) and I continued with Colin and Daisy's tale.

[Sandra Davies]

@ Jeanette - I'm far from not claiming perfection, but I'd rather not bore ...

@ Teresa - I like that 'see like your heroes', and I am surprised at how impossible it is to lose one's own style, no matter how variable it can be in itself.   Proves all those people who analyse Shakespeare et al are on to something, although I doubt they're as clever as they think they are.

[Jeanette Cheezum]

I like the idea that you retrieved the prompt, thought about it and then wrote your story only to remove it.

Only a good writer takes those steps to improve her work, wanting the world to share her perfection.

 

[Teresa]

I just finished reading Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon.   In the end, it's all stealing.  No worries.  Pack it all in, then play it your own way, with your own style.  Francis Ford Coppola said, "We want you to take from us.  We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can't steal.  You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that's how you will find your voice.  And that's how you begin.  And then one day someone will steal from you."  Kleon said, "You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes."

[Gita]

I liked it that Daisy was honest about her needs and intentions. So many women have to dress up sex with "feelings of love" when all they wanted to start with was a good time in bed.

[Sandra Davies]

@ Gita - would that the magpie had the retrieval as efficiently sussed!

[Gita]

I think this perfectly describes the start-and-stop habit of writers. Not always, but often, we put our own work down, pick up some poem or article of others' and, four hours later a word appears (seemingly) from nowhere and we use it in a sentence. Later, we realize that the word came out of that day's reading.

All that shows, in my opinion, is that writing comes from some unconscious place where the magpie in us has hidden a shiny button.