On Copying Out Other Writers' Words

The 5th day of the 1st month

Reading (and even better re-reading) completed works by a writer you want to imitate is an obvious way of learning from them.

Less obvious, though something I’d recommend, is copying their prose out by hand.

Now, don’t freak. Don’t take this the wrong way. What follows below is an extreme, and extremely admirable, case. I’m not saying go this far — though I think it wouldn’t be anything other than an education.

The writer Nadeem Aslam (Maps for Lost Lovers, The Golden Legend) gave a wonderful interview in which he talked about how he learned to write.

I wanted to find out:  What is a paragraph? How many thoughts are allowed on a page? What is a comma? What is a full stop used for? So I copied out the whole of Moby Dick by hand. Then I copied out As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Autumn of The Patriarch by Gabriel García Marquez, Lolita by Nabokov, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy… I still have those pages, it was before the typewriter, I was doing them by hand. So it was very important for me to do that.

As I said, don’t freak.

But what a book list! What a miniature canon! What a university!

Although I think that, for any writer, doing as Nadeem Aslam did would be transformative, it’s not something I’m doing more than gesture towards.

Here is a possibility, a truly other way, instead of drafting another novel or taking an MA in Creative Writing.

When I was starting as a writer, I didn’t copy out whole works. Nothing like it. But I did have several notebooks into which I would handwrite passages that puzzled me, or that I thought I could get more from. It wasn’t enough to re-read them, I needed them to pass through me. I wanted to experience their rhythms, pauses and emphases, and really to know where the tall and low letters fell. How did they make sense? What was the shape and texture and mass of the objects within them?

And this, as Nadeem Aslam implies, is the best way of answering those essential learner’s questions about commas, sentence structures, paragraphs, pages.

Alongside the copying, there is the learning of patience, and of self-suppression, that is necessary for any good writing.

What would be your reason for objecting to such a practice? Might something be learned just from asking yourself that question? Why would I not want to copy out the whole of Moby Dick by hand?

Some people hate their own handwriting, and say they can’t read it afterwards. But shouldn’t that, too, be addressed as a question? Why has it come to this?