Hi Friends, 

This is your weekly edition of The Friday Five Hundred, which is a slice of my writerly life packaged in nuggets of Present, Past and Future in five hundred words or less.

Present: This week, I attended a webinar called, “How to write like your favorite Authors” done jointly by Marion Roach Smith and Ron Friedman. Marion Roach Smith is a leading voice in writing memoir and Ron Friedman is known for his work in human motivation. His new book set to release mid June is called Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success. The basis of the session was that in order to be successful, one must be willing to learn from the greats in our respective field of creativity. Ron mentioned a case study in which there were two groups of Painters. The controlled group painted original paintings for three days straight. The variable group painted an original painting for the first day and took a break to paint and copy a work of a Classical Painter. On the third day, they went back to painting an original. The variable group produced a more creative set of stimulating works in comparison to the controlled group.  

Past: I’ve been led to believe that original work is best. If I copy someone then I’m cheating. I'd feel like cheap cologne at the 99 cent store that states: “If you love Ralph Lauren’s Romance then you’ll love Just Pink.” Never skimp on good perfume. Go for the original. With that being said, there’s a great deal of learning opportunity as we study the works we enjoy and try to emulate them. This is how we study genre and when we copy, we eventually bring our own individuality into it. 

In that same vein, I’ve been watching Larnell Lewis reverse engineer songs and play them on the drums. It’s fascinating to see him listen to a song he has never heard before and dissect the song in bars, beats and form in order to play it on the drums. I'd like to do the same with writing.

Ron offered a similar tactic for writers. Read a page of written work from an Author you would like to write as. Put it away and then try to recreate it from memory. When you look over it and compare the two, check to see which parts you missed. It might be the way the Author described the environment. It could be the natural way dialogue was presented. Whatever you missed is something you might want to look into working on and add to your toolbox of techniques.

Copying is a way to pay homage to the greats before us as we try to deeply learn how they created their masterpiece. In this manner, we hone our skills, inevitably bring our own voice, and contribute to the ongoing thread of creative conversations. Who knows? Someday, someone might be inspired to copy your work!

Future: This week, I’ll tap into being like Larnell Lewis and schedule some days to copy work from my favorite authors: Khaled Hosseini and Jhumpa Lahiri. I'm leaning into having fun with the process and learning something new.

Thank you for reading dear reader. I'll be back on Friday. Until then please take care of yourself and if you feel someone may benefit from this email, share it with them.

With lots of love,

Sana Fayyaz