Write Like the Masters: Emulating the Best of Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, and Others

288 Pages·2009·4.38 MB·english

by  William Cane

W r i t e L i k e
the Masters
W r i t e L i k e
the Masters
emuLating the Best Of
hemingWay, fauLkner, saLinger,
and Others
www.writersdigest.com
Cincinnati, Ohio
WiLLiam Cane
Write Like the Masters. © 2009 by William Cane. Manufactured in United States of
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cane, William.
Write like the masters : emulating the best of Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, and others
/ by William Cane. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-58297-592-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Fiction--Technique. 2. Fiction--Authorship. 3. Imitation in literature. 4. Style, Lit-
erary. I. Title.
PN3355.C265 2009
808.3--dc22
2009013326
Edited by Scott Francis
Designed by Claudean Wheeler
Illustrations by Joshua Roflow
Production coordinated by Mark Griffin
dediCatiOn
For Marilyn, my wife,
Who ate up my words,
And Kate, my daughter,
Who often ate the manuscript.
ta B L e O f
Contents
IntroductIon ...................................................................................i
chapter 1: WrIte LIke honoré de BaLzac ............................................6
chapter 2: WrIte LIke charLes dIckens ...............................................19
chapter 3: WrIte LIke herman meLvILLe .............................................27
chapter 4: WrIte LIke Fyodor dostoevsky .......................................37
chapter 5: WrIte LIke knut hamsun .....................................................48
chapter 6: WrIte LIke edIth Wharton .................................................60
chapter 7: WrIte LIke W. somerset maugham .................................72
chapter 8: WrIte LIke edgar rIce Burroughs ..................................83
chapter 9: WrIte LIke Franz kaFka ......................................................92
chapter 10: WrIte LIke d.h. LaWrence ..................................................104
chapter 11: WrIte LIke WILLIam FauLkner ...........................................116
chapter 12: WrIte LIke ernest hemIngWay ........................................128
chapter 13: WrIte LIke margaret mItcheLL ........................................143
chapter 14: WrIte LIke george orWeLL ................................................155
chapter 15: WrIte LIke Ian FLemIng .......................................................167
chapter 16: WrIte LIke J.d. saLInger ......................................................179
chapter 17: WrIte LIke ray BradBury ...................................................192
chapter 18: WrIte LIke FLannery o’connor ......................................205
chapter 19: WrIte LIke phILIp k. dIck .....................................................216
chapter 20: WrIte LIke tom WoLFe .........................................................227
chapter 21: WrIte LIke stephen kIng ....................................................238
concLusIon ..................................................................................248
acknoWLedgments ......................................................................251
BIBLIography ................................................................................254
IndeX.............................................................................................278
aBout the author ........................................................................282
intrOduCtiOn
So many people today are banging their brains out against their key-
boards and asking themselves, “Why can’t I write like the greats?” when
Sthe simple answer is that you can. First, though, you need to come to
grips with the fact that the greats were educated quite differently from
you and me.
Unfortunately, during the past eighty or so years writers have not
received instruction in a vital training method that their predecessors
routinely employed to improve their skills. Indeed, this neglected tech-
nique is one of the most important training methods ever developed
for writers, a technique which was used with spectacular results for two
thousand years but which was suddenly dropped from the curriculum.
Almost every great writer studied these methods, but you were proba-
bly denied access to them by a recent change in our educational system.
Chances are that when you discover this lost technique, and practice
this forgotten art, the experience will have an explosive impact upon
your writing and will do for you what it did for Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton, Pope, Swift, T.S. Eliot and countless others, infusing new life
into your work and jump-starting your creative career.
Wouldn’t you like to know the biggest difference between your edu-
cation and that of these well-known writers? I’m going to tell you in a
moment, but first let me ask one question. How often did you hear the
word originality mentioned when you were in school? In other words

intrOduCtiOn
how frequently were you urged to do new work, break new ground,
and write in your own voice? Like most students you were proba-
bly slapped silly by demands that you avoid plagiarism, be authentic,
and above all do original work. “Let me hear your voice!” professors
would say. Most of us can still hear the echoes of those demands ring-
ing through the halls of academia.
And that, believe it or not, is the problem.
You cannot become a terrific writer just—poof!—out of thin air.
It takes something preexisting, some structural savvy, some founda-
tion in technique, some underlying sense of the possibilities of lan-
guage before you can strip off your topcoat and tap dance across the
pages like Fred Astaire.
Before I explain exactly what was left out of your education, let
me tell you how I stumbled upon this deplorable state of affairs in the
first place. It all started in those long years before I went to law school,
years when I roamed the musty library stacks during my stint in col-
lege. Because I was president of the debating society, it was my job to
dig up as much evidence as I could against the other teams. So I would
stand for hours sifting through government documents on the swelter-
ing third floor of the library at Boston College. Then, for fun, because
I was also working at the college radio station, I would browse around
looking for material that I could use in the radio plays I directed. And
it was in this manner that one evening I stumbled upon a shelf—actu-
ally shelves upon shelves—of books about ancient rhetoric. It turns out
that these dusty volumes contained a gold mine of ideas that we could
employ in various soap operas which we broadcast to a small group of
loyal listeners.
But the other thing I discovered was that this subject—the sub-
ject of ancient rhetoric—was not being taught in any college writing
classes; not, at any rate, in any that I could find. Rhetoric had been
relegated to the speech communications department, where we got
some pretty tedious lectures on Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. The
upshot of my little digression is that rhetoric is the subject that has
been neglected in writing education; indeed, according to Edward P.J.

Write Like
the Masters
Corbett, widely regarded as the most accomplished living scholar in
this field, the key components of rhetoric were phased out of Ameri-
can education around 1930.1
Why should you care whether rhetoric was phased out? After all,
isn’t rhetoric simply sound and fury signifying nothing but persua-
sion? Sure, it may be that, but it’s also much more than verbal volleyball
and pontificating propagandism. Rhetoric also encompasses methods
of being felicitous with words as well as techniques for mastering style.
In its purest form rhetoric also deals with the arrangement of material
and the selection of topics for clear, artful, entertaining presentation.
Rhetoric, among other things, teaches how to contrive an introduc-
tion that will seduce a reader, take him by the nose, and never let him
go until he reaches the last paragraph. You want to do that don’t you?
Of course you do!
Allow me, then, to introduce you to one aspect of rhetoric, one
teensy-weensy aspect of it that can literally salvage your writing career,
infuse your style with new vim and vigor, and give you a voice equal
to the voices of the best and brightest who came before you. It’s all in
this book about the classical rhetorical technique of imitation. Yes, this
is a book about imitation, a method of writing instruction that has
dropped off the map, fallen through the floor, and disappeared from
the face of the earth as far as modern education is concerned.2 And
yet imitation is arguably (according to Aristotle, Cicero, and numerous
other authorities) the most effective rhetorical device for learning your
licks as a writer.3
Too simple to be true? Well, consider for a moment that musicians,
such as the Beatles or the Beach Boys, or whoever else you download
onto your iPod, learned their craft by doing covers of other artist’s
songs. Put more simply they began their own careers by imitating the
1. Corbett 1971:32-33, 627.
2. As one highly-respected contemporary novelist—who knows the secret—points out, “[I]n the
eighteenth century imitation was the chief way of learning to write” (Gardner 1983:26).
3. Cicero, for example, called imitation his first principle of rhetoric (Murphy, Katula, Hill, and Ochs
2003:172).

intrOduCtiOn
work of other artists. Only after they had mastered these basics did they
venture to write their own material. Why, then, aren’t writers allowed
to do the same? Why aren’t they instructed and encouraged, for heaven’s
sake, to do the same? That’s the lesson taught by the classical technique
of imitation.
And that’s the lesson of this book. You too can imitate the greats,
and in the process absorb elements of their style that will make your
writing sing. The point is that the rhetorical device of imitation will
help you grow as a writer, just as it helped Milton, Melville, Flaubert,
Faulkner, Dickens, and Shakespeare. More importantly, you cannot
expect to reach your full potential as a writer unless you learn to absorb
from other writers by using the technique of imitation.4
This book explains this time-tested method of improving your out-
put that modern writers never learned in school, a method of helping
you write better that can work wonders and transform producers of
plodding prose into Salingers, Hemingways, and kindred butterflies, all
of whom flutter through their stories as if doing so were the easiest thing
in the world. To be sure, the techniques taught in this book will help you
in your work like nothing you’ve ever learned before. As a professor of
English I’ve used these techniques to coach a generation of students. I
know these methods work, and by the end of the book so will you.
The chapters that follow will make up for what you missed in
school. I’m going to introduce you to the classical device of imita-
tion by examining the work of twenty-one notable writers, pointing
out exactly how you can adopt their techniques in your own writing.
Like a painter absorbing the elements of style necessary for composi-
tion, tint, and tone, you’ll learn the fundamentals of your craft—includ-
ing how to master the essentials of prose rhythm, character portrayal,
and story development, among many other topics—so that you can
advance in skill and ability and learn from those who have gone before,
just as they learned from the greats who preceded them.
4. Many great writers not only practiced imitation but sang its praises, freely admitting that it helped
them in their work. Dante, for example, stated that “To attain perfection we must copy the great
poets of the past” (Reynolds 2006:59).

Write Like
the Masters