Episode 22: Imitation as a way to find your voice

As a follow-up to “Episode 12: Here Are My Words”, Fable and the Verbivore revisit the imitation exercises that they used previously with poetry to refine their voices on the prose side of writing. Embracing again the exciting and intimidating place of reading our own words, we set out to delve into different ways in which we can use this practice to help analyze and refine our writing styles.

Pulling from Stephen King’s On Writing, C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, and Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, we each took a different approach with our inspiration pieces which served to show how dynamic this exercise can be depending on what aspects of your writing you are hoping to explore.   

The Verbivore choose to use a story setting, description piece from Stephen King’s On Writing (Pg. 173-178), as a way to look at his stripped down writing style and simple word choices to delve further into her own writing structure and editing preferences.

Fable turned to the opening sequence from C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces (Pg. 3), to explore the emotional interest and intrigue of this piece while also accusing the gods of treating mortals as their playthings.

And lastly, Fable shares a second piece where she retells an anecdote from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life (Pg. 85-88), that reads like a parable meant to illustrate the push and pull of the life of a creative.

We hope you enjoy the pieces that we share on this episode and would highly recommend this practice as a way to continue refining your own voice and analyzing what resonates with you as part of a given work of writing. We would also love for you to join us in this exercise as part of the 100 days project starting on April 7th and look forward to hearing what ideas and words you create. The hashtag we are using on Instagram is #imitatelikeawriter.

Into the woods,
Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

Fable mentions the poetry writing exercise that we completed and discussed in “Episode 12: Here Are My Words”, where we read poems and then attempted to recreate the works from memory or immitate the voice or style of the work with our own words. This idea came from Mary Oliver’s book The Poetry Handbook.

Fable and the Verbivore are participating in the 100 days project, each day posting a creative work (written, photographic, drawn, mixed media, etc.) from their personal Instagram accounts to the hashtags #The100DayProject and #imitatelikeawriter. “The idea is simple: choose a project, do it every day for 100 days, and share your process on Instagram with the hashtag #The100DayProject”.

We are keeping the scope of our projects to reflections of or inspiration from other works of writing, art, photography, theater, movies, and music. We will post our pieces along with the inspiration each day starting April 7th, 2020 for 100 days. We invite you to join us in exploring creativity together.

  • Additional information for the 100 days project can be found at: https://www.the100dayproject.org/

Books Mentioned:

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
’Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

#imitatelikeawriterBethany Stedman