Do you unconsciously copy?

[Steven Hunley]

Do you unconsciously copy who you've been reading? No? How about consciously like this guy?


From The Writer-

In high school he found out about Poe. He bought a Mina bird as a pet and tried to teach it to say, “Nevermore.” It wouldn’t. That’s also when he got into cough syrup. For laudanum you need a prescription. Nyquill was easy to get. So he Nyquilled it on Friday and Saturday nights. Heavily sedated weekends followed. Goths thought he was rather Gothic, but it was just the Poe. He wore too much black and tried to look as short as possible. He dated his cousin with intent to marry but she wasn’t having it. Halloween became his favorite holiday for a couple of years. He dated a Gothic Girl but she needed money to support her mascara habit and sold the bird when he was at a mortician’s convention in Las Vegas taking notes. It broke his heart. But that was OK since he was Poe anyway. He started a novel in this period and struggled to get a title macabre enough. Finally, he named it The Fall of the House on 35th Street.
It started like this:

“During the whole of a dull, dark, and oppressively soundless day in the autumn of the year, when clouds hung low and angry in the heavens, I had been passing alone in my Volkswagon, through a singularly dreary tract of Normal Heights near 35th and Adams. I saw within view the melancholy house I lived in. A sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. There was something about its vacant eye-like windows, the dried-up geraniums dying on the sills, and the decayed lemon tree out front with its utter depression of soul which I can only compare to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium. The lawn needed mowing and shadowed fancies crowded upon me like the ghostly white images of thousands of lifeless dichondra stems. It was southern California at its most dark and beastly.”

Nothing sold. He got a large file cabinet to hold the many rejection slips which were beginning to pile up.

[MANICHAEAN]

Steve
I don’t dislike it but it needs flow and lots more mixed, slightly obscure metaphors. Please refer to my review of the short story “Bumped.” It might recharge your batteries.
Best wishes
M.

[Lokasenna]

I had wondered whether this piece was a sort of riff on Borges's Pierre Menard - it's a similar idea, although Borges presents a much longer account. I think this piece does need some fleshing out, if I'm honest - but then I don't think it's really meant to be a short story in its own right?

As for copying, I'm sure we all do it with varying degrees of conciousness. Most of my output, particularly in my poetry, is very conciously in pastiche of someone else's style. I also know some people who attempt to copy the lives of great writers in a (usually unsuccessful) attempt to become a great writer.

[Emil Miller]

I don't know about poetry but in writing novels and short stories I would never copy, because it's something anyone can do. I like to think that what I have written is characteristic of myself and therefore has some originality, although I have limited novels to around 250 pp. in accordance with some of my favourite authors.
I have noticed the influence of certain writers reflected in some of the short stories offered on LitNet which, apart from showing too much or too little imagination, have that air of déjà vu so noticeable in the unoriginal. I think it is necessary to forget other writers, no matter how famous, and if one is writing in a particular genre, to write in a way that doesn't fall into the trap of using the clichéd style that often characterises it. If I am dazzled by a certain passage in a novel, I will go out of my way to avoid attempting anything similar as it's the only way to build an individual style. Take Ernest Hemingway and Philip Roth as examples, their very personal styles are constantly copied by would-be writers who lack the originality to write in their own way. In detective fiction Raymond Chandler set the pace for a lot of second or third rate imitators but Philip Marlowe is a million miles from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
Copying is the fate of those who may have something to say but don't know how to say it.

[AuntShecky]

This is pretty clever and the length is just right ("Brevity is the soul of wit.") The first part with the standard font shows how the writer tried to copy Poe's life, whereas the italicized lines show a conscious attempt at copying Poe's style! The first part initially reads like Hemingway's style--but the jokes are so funny, I'd said they were more like a comic's one-liners.

"It sold nothing." (Drop the "it"-- "Nothing sold.")

Rejection slips are nothing to be ashamed of. They are visible proof that you are a working writer. Years ago, I read a tongue-in-cheek essay in which the author stepped up to his father's challenge to amass 1000 rejection slips. Guess what happened along the way? He started getting acceptance letters and checks.

[Steven Hunley]

I see your point and it's corrected. I would read Hemingway and unconsciously do Hemingway. Same thing with everyone else. Right now it's Lawrence and his penchant for repetition. This guy (The Writer) was consciously copying style.

For me it's been more or less unconscious but still noticeable to a degree. See, that's what I call a disclaimer. I didn't do it. The writers that came before me made me do it. I unconsciously absorbed their stylistic devices.

[cacian]

copying is perhaps too harsher word. taking example or following in the same step is better. I take words/expressions and expend on them. for example often I see a title that inspires me to write. that is not copying that is giving someone an idea to write something else.