After revising the first draft of Saint Arcology, I decided to take a few weeks before starting my next project. But I didn’t want to stop writing entirely; I needed to keep my word brain active. I decided to go with some copy practice: copying the prose of some of my favorite authors.
I’d read about a particular method: reading a paragraph or two, then attempting to write out that section from memory. Then go back and notice how your prose decisions are different (and presumably worse, if you’ve picked someone good) than the writer you are copying.
I started with this method, but found it difficult and frustrating. I’m not great a memorization, and I was putting too much effort into trying to remember what I had just read, and not enough into noticing the author’s stylistic choices. So I switched to a simpler method: open a book at random, read a few paragraphs for enjoyment, then copy those paragraphs directly.
I started with Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Gibson’s prose is information dense. He conveys a tremendous amount of meaning with a tight word budget. But on this read-through I was also struck by how vividly and precisely Gibson describes internal states. For example:
