Become Another Author

by Courtney Sherwin
(New Jersey)

I find a lot of my inspiration from my favorite authors, such as Thomas Gavin or Thomas Harris.

What I usually do, if I'm in a rut, is open one of my favorite books and start typing a paragraph in the book, verbatim. This allows me to actually feel the author’s words, his or her sentence structure, verb placement, etc. When I start writing on my own, I find that I pick up on the author’s writing mannerisms. This allows me to remove myself from my writer’s block. I can always go back and edit passages of my own work so that there is absolutely no plagiarism involved.

This technique is similar to art students who reproduce a famous artist’s paintings. It allows the student to actually feel the process the famous artist went through when creating his or her masterpiece.