Writing Exercise: Study an Author
Writing Exercise:
Many
times we read books and then answer questions about the plot, the characters,
the thinking behind some of the stylistic choices. But I can’t think of many
times where I sat down and actually thought about how an author wrote. What is
there style? Why do we read them today? What makes them popular? Instead of
writing a book review, it’s more of a critique on what the author is writing
about. I did something similar to this in my The Last 3 Sci-Fi Books I Read post, where I looked at what the author did in each book that I could
learn from. Most recently, I dedicated a post to studying how Freud wrote and
what about his writing has helped him remain so influential, despite the fact
that he’s been disproven.
In this post, I’m going to explain how
you could use this writing exercise. If you are a writer, you could do this
with an author you would like to emulate or maybe one you would like to avoid
being like. If you are a teacher, then you could do this assignment with your
class and have them really look into what makes this author unique. Maybe it’s
one you assign them or one they can pick themselves. The idea is to figure out
what this author does well (or poorly) and to articulate it in words.
Step 1
First, give an overview of what most
people already know about this author. This refreshes the audience’s memory of
who this person is or if they are unfamiliar with this author gives people an
idea of what they are famous for. You want to answer the question, ‘What are
they famous for?’ Then from this baseline you can build your new insights and
further develop your author study. In my Freud post, I talked about how all my
psychology and some of my literature courses mention Freud.
Step 2
Next you want to give a bit of
background about this author. Who are they as a person? Especially, if who they
are as a person, plays into their writing in any way, you want to mention that.
Then explain how it relates to the writing. Let people know that this person
didn’t come up out of a vacuum. Maybe the historical context surrounding what
they wrote is important. But it’s important to generally keep these two
sections brief, as the meat of the author study comes in later.
Step 3
This section is also brief, but very
important. Tell about the book(s) you are using in order to get an idea of what
this person is like as an author. Give a one to two sentence summary about what
the book is about and how it relates to what you already know or didn’t know
about the author.
Step 4
Now you can get into the meat of the
exercise. You might want to plan this part out ahead of time. Talk about the
author’s writing style. Some questions you might want to ask yourself are:
How do they address the audience?
How do they keep the audience’s
attention?
Is there something unique about the
author?
What’s their style of writing?
How do they describe things?
What is their sentence structure like?
All
of these questions don’t have to be answered, but these are just jumping off
points to help you discover what about this author is unique.
Experiment
Play around with this add new sections, leave some out, or move them around it is up to you…
Let me know!
How did it go? What author did you do a
study o? What did you discover? What was your favorite part about this writing
exercise? Were there any parts where you were stuck? How did you get unstuck?
Let me know in the comments!
Notes:
Sources:
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