There is something comforting about enveloping yourself in someone else's style. People do it all the time with fashion, identifying with a certain group, sports, mimicking a touchdown dance or batting stance mannerisms, and it is really no different in writing. When you imitate the style of someone else, it is relieving because your writing is less personal. It isn't really your voice that is on the paper, at least it isn't if you did a good job. Sure some of you will shine through, but the majority of your work is to make people forget that they aren't reading the author you're imitating. Pastiches are a relatively new genre for me as a writer, I only discovered them last year in Coming of Age, but in the few that I've written, I've grown rather fond of them. There is no doubt that they are challenging, some voices are more difficult than others, but they are a perfect mix of creative freedoms in the direction of the essay, while still providing structure of how to write it. One of the hardest things authors say when you are just beginning to write, is finding your voice. With a pastiche, that is taken care of, and all you are left to do is internalize the voice and produce a great story.
Looking back at both my first pastiche, of J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, and the blog post I wrote on it, I realize that not a whole lot has changed in my approach to pastiches. I often do write a paragraph or so and then delete it, just to get "warmed up" in the voice. I would say it's nearly impossible to come into a pastiche cold and instantly get the voice and tone right. Sure there are sentence examples you can use, certain words or phrases that evoke images of a character to include, but it's all the things not on the page that you have to really grasp. Good books are more than just words on a page, and that has to be the goal in a pastiche of a good book, to get beyond the physical words and get to the next level.
This next level is the elusive part of writing pastiches that is also so enticing. Sometimes you identify with a character and their voice just comes. I felt that way about Holden I think, once I realized how to really write a pastiche. With other voices, it hasn't been so easy. I wrote a pastiche of Julia Taylor, a character most of you have probably never heard of (she's from Black Swan Green, a book I highly recommend). She is an 18 year old girl in 1983, and British. I was none of those things. Trying to rebuild her voice was a more step by step process. I had to first capture the British voice, then the female voice, and finally a dated one. Thirty four pages later I had some parts where I think I really captured her voice, but in between I fear there were points where I only captured pieces of it.
The same can be said for my pastiches from this year, I believe I had flashes of brilliance in the pastiche, but stretches that many readers would find slightly off. Of course my goal has always been, and will always be, to write perfect pastiches. I would never create a dialogue with the intention of ruining narrative flow, but sometimes as the author, the tone in my head doesn't match with the tone on the page. As a kind of added challenge to myself this year, and also to make a good study of the differences of authors' voices, I've decided that through all my pastiches I'm going to write "chapters" of the same story. The final pastiche I do this year will end my story, and then I will put them all together and read them sequentially, in all the different voices. It will be curious to see how much is consistent throughout them all, that would be my voice, and at that far removed point how much I associate each chapter with the influencing author. This distance I will gain from my work will be important in the maturation of my writing, because I hope it will allow me to find my voice, ironically enough by reading my best imitations of other, more famous, voices. I suppose ideally I won't find my voice through this exercise at all, though I do suspect my plan will work, but only time will tell.
This is a really interesting first-hand reflection on the odd process of trying to "inhabit' another author's style. It's true that, if writing is almost always personal in origin (even if we're writing about impersonal topics, the *way* we approach the topic, the sentences we form, the shape of our ideas are all distinctive to ourselves), there's something oddly impersonal about the pastiche, as if you're trying to hide your own presence as the author.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, though, I expect that this might serve as something like verbal calisthenics, to ultimately help make you a more flexible and in-control writer. Few of us are aware of stuff we do in writing as a "style" per se--we just try to find the words for what we want to say. Pastiching allows you to see how the abstraction "voice" actually means certain identifiable features of syntax, vocabulary, paragraph shape, and tone--it's not just some vague "essence," it's actually something that can be broken down and understood. Maybe some of these elements can find their way into your own voice as it continues to develop: for instance, just about every writer I know can benefit from Hemingway's emphasis on concision and efficiency and his distaste for extraneous adverbs. This doesn't mean adopting his style whole-hog, but you can learn something about how to frame a setting from trying from someone else's perspective.