JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #21
October 8, 2020
I was reading a novel the other day, and I was captured by an amazing passage. The prose in this novel overall is relatively workman, mostly invisible, sometimes bland. But every once in a while it's shot through with genius. When I finished the scene, I sat up and looked away from the book and said, out loud in my living room at 2 o’clock in the morning, "Wow!" I immediately wanted to go back over the previous two or three pages to dissect how that amazing sense of transport had been accomplished.
It reminded me of a time when I was about 9 years old and I wanted to write a story about dinosaurs. I was reading a book about people traveling through time and seeing dinosaurs, and there was a scene in the book where a Tyrannosaur and a Triceratops had a brutal fight. I wanted to write a story just like that, to depict a battle between a Tyrannosaur and a Triceratops. The problem was that at 9 years old I was caught up with the story I had just read and my every faltering step paled in comparison with the vivid scene I wanted to mimic. I didn’t know what to do. So I wound up copying the scene out of the book.
The problem with copying a scene directly out of another story and trying to pretend that it’s your own is that a scene in a novel is connected with the larger story of the novel. In order to appropriately steal it, you have to trim and revise sentences, to extract only those elements that are appropriate to your own ends, rather than taking on the needs of the novel. I remember simplifying sentences, skipping lines that dealt with characters I was not including in the version I was creating, and reshaping the dinosaur battle into a new thing.
I always felt like I was stealing, copying from someone else’s work. It was plagiaristic. But what I didn’t know at the time is that a writer needs to perform this exercise from time to time. We need to dissect other people’s writing and see how it works, how its pieces fit together, how the prose is capable of depicting scenes that capture our imagination. Sometimes it’s a good idea to type out the lines from the story just to get a sense of what it feels like to write like that.
This is also why we should read widely, pulling from many genres and styles. We have to discover what’s possible so that we can learn how it can be accomplished. And we have to steal those techniques so that when we face a challenge in our own work we have a large repertoire from which to draw.
Next: On Suspense