Alan Cheuse
PASTICHE WRITING, OR MAKING IMITATIONS OF THE WORKS of fine writers, has helped my students at nearly every turn in their early writing careers. I've always looked to painters for examples. They send their students to the museums, where they copy portions of the canvases, or sometimes even entire paintings, of the masters. In this way they learn, among other techniques, how to use their wrists in brushstrokes of genius.
Pastiche making is not exact copying. (When we read Borges's story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” we see where copying can lead.) But it does ask the new writer to make his or her way along the same path as a master, to walk in their shoes and see with their eyes. My friend Al Young sometimes asks his students to copy a page from a great writer, keeping only the sentence structure but substituting their own nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech. This helps. So does copying a technique, as in, say, a view of the land in To the Lighthouse or the prairie in Cather's My Ántonia, in which the student writer substitutes his or her own landscape for the master's. One exercise that worked with great success for my students was to make over the opening pages of a Steinbeck novel—Cannery Row served well as a model, as did East of Eden—using the material of their own youth.
Alternate points of view on great scenes in modern fiction also offer a good way to get students to use their imaginations within the firm boundaries established by a master. In one such exercise I ask students to read Chekhov's story “The Kiss” and write the signal scene—the soldier in the dark room receiving a kiss from a mysterious woman—from the woman's point of view. In another I ask them to write an alternative view of Chekhov's great story “The Lady with the Pet Dog” from the points of view of Anna's husband and her Moscow lover's wife.
All this has worked to stretch the students' sense of what they can attempt and what they can achieve with their own prose.
Return to a story you love and replace the author's material with material from your own experience or imagination. Or return to a story you love and tell a different side of the story by experiencing and dramatizing the events through a different character's perspective.