Exercise
People should exercise. They should exercise their body and their brain.
Most importantly, they should do style exercises. Why? It’s good for their body and brain.
No, I feel that style exercises are important because they test the writer’s capabilities. A true writer should be able to write like other writers while also coming up with a beautiful arrangement of words. Also by writing in other styles, you learn more about writing, about your own style or another way of writing something. Style is typically unique to every writer like a musician’s interpretation on a piece, but to improve, you sometimes need to look and imitate other’s. Indeed the exercise is a great way to make a writer a better writer.
If one does not want to improve writing, then style exercises are useless.
I was confused today when someone mentioned to me that the choice of tense could be part of the writer’s style. I am curious to what examples they mean. Is that something to even think about for a writer? If it’s past, you write in the past. If it’s present, write in the present. Not sure what my real question is, but those words “tense” and “style” have some kind of relationship. Not sure…
If I could write like anyone, I probably want to write like Shakespeare. But writing like him wouldn’t be very useful in this day and age. So my other answer would be Hemingway, short and sweet. I don’t really know how much effort Hemingway spent on his writing, but all the things he has written has the most fitting words. His short sentences have so much meaning in them. I hope to choose better words that fit in the sentence like him.
Maybe I would have to control my patience and let the right words come to me or just learn how to write concisely and find the words that say what I want to say.
Now Shakespeare. There is something about this man that makes me think, how could someone do what he has done. I can’t compare him to anyone else in history…not yet as there are still millions of people that I haven’t heard about. Reading Shakespeare is a pain, but the meaning of his words are worth every strange spelling and phrase that looks unmanageable to translate to modern day English. I love his crazy symbolism and his twisted characters. I would not want to write in his English but maybe write in the humorous way he does.
