JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

If you want to write, but don’t know how to get started, and lack either the time or the temperament for a writing workshop, here’s a fast-track D.I.Y. Writing Workshop.

1. Choose the writer whose style you envy the most and wish to emulate. Not necessarily your favorite, most beloved writer, but the writer you want to sound like.

2. Pick a story or novel by this writer.

3. Copy it out in longhand. Every word and punctuation mark, exactly. Through this process you “reenact” the process by which the writer created the work and get insights as to how the structure came about.

The slower version is to read the writer’s work over and over again, until you have absorbed the writer’s rhythms. It’s a lot like listening to an album of songs a hundred times—you’ll realize that you’ve memorized every word, pause, drum fill and riff without meaning to.

When we read a work of fiction, we hear a voice in our head. This is the voice of the work. It does not necessarily sound like the author as heard in old interviews; it is the sound of the narrator addressing the reader directly. If you hear that voice repeatedly, you will get its rhythms and tonalities. First, you will try to replicate them. Later, when you have written a lot and figured out what your own style is, you will adapt them to your requirements. You may even ditch them altogether as they have served their purpose.

In lieu of writing workshops, we read the work of J.D. Salinger repeatedly, not to memorize the books but because we really enjoyed them.

Occasionally we get emails from students writing about our work (Thanks). They ask where we were born and what our lousy childhood was like and how our parents were occupied and all before they had us. Fine, biographical information may be useful, but to really understand, they only need to look closely at the work. The work should be allowed to speak for itself.

This is the first line of the first real short story we ever wrote.

This is the first line of The Catcher in the Rye.

Can you hear it?

Now here’s the first sentence of the short story that got us noticed by the literary grownups.

And here’s the first line of Salinger’s story Teddy, collected in Nine Stories.

Always acknowledge your debts to previous writers. It’s not as if you could hide them.

Read The Man in the Woods, a creepy story by Shirley Jackson (The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived In The Castle) at The New Yorker. There’s a cat in it.

Read our column, Cat People at InterAksyon.com.