...We thought of the friends who had been the best young writers we knew: one could tell what they had been reading because their letters suddenly started sounding like Faulkner or Austen or even Beckett. They went on to have their own voices, but at some crucial stage after first fluency and before a fully developed prose, they imitated their way to good writing, strong writing with a supple, complex, alive voice. in other words, they had read carefully and deeply, apprenticing themselves to the marvelous writers they were encountering.
Could I teach this?...
So asks Gregory Roper in The Writer's Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing". And I say amen and amen! I'm just reading the introduction so far, and I am already tracking seriously with Dr. Roper, and hoping the rest will make good on his purpose.
I have observed this with students, and particularly with my man of letters son. He had distinct "periods", and as a young graduate student, still does to some extent: we had a Dickensian stage, then Conrad, then Dostoevsky, then T. S. Eliot, and e. e. cummings. And I recognize that this is what he was doing. And in my students, it is the ones who sound like Washington Irving when we are imitating him, and sound like L. M. Montgomery when you find out they have been reading about Anne, that are the most natural, effective writers. The ancients, after all, chose imitation not because they pulled it out of their imaginative hats and decided it was so (like so much that surrounds us in progressive education), but because they observed that it worked. Like ancient rhetorical theory, their observations made the basis of their "rules", and for hundreds of years these methods succeeded in teaching writers their craft. What arrogance for educators in the early twentieth century, armed with Darwinian theories of progress and goals to remake schools into factories, to discard such wisdom!
I'll post more from this book as I continue reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment