Letters for Creatives #31: Imitate your favourite writers

Use material to write stories

View this in your browser

Welcome to Letters for Creatives. Thank you for being here. You can read the archive here.

If you feel that your friend would like Letters for Creatives, share the newsletter with them. The more of your friends sign up for the newsletter, the higher chance you would be in the top 3 on the leaderboard.

Image: Nong Vang on Unsplash

David Perell said that copying your favourite writers will help to improve your writing style. People do the same when they take poetry classes. But what it takes to improve is often our passion for improve. We need to find our material to create. Anni Albers indicated that we can create something innovative when we listen to the muse and follow what the muse wants us to create:

Material is a means of communication. That listening to it, not dominating it makes us truly active, that is: to be active, be passive.

The stories that inspire your writing may not be your favourite material but you create something out of the stories to see the outcome. It is when stream of consciousness writing comes in handy. Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and Stephen King used this method for their work.

Topics to write about instead of yourself

Malcolm Gladwell pointed out the reasons why you should not write about yourself.

• Since most people only interested in reading about famous and successful people, do not write about yourself but write extraordinarily.

• Unfinished stories interest readers more than those that have a complete ending. Leave your readers some space to think about your work.

Featured poem

Shae wrote a stunning poem with my April prompt returning to myself. Read the rest of the piece on her Instagram.

You were my favourite metaphor

Here’s what I remember:

A broken hymn. Throat of thunder. Drops of Jupiter in my eyes. A galactic revolution building in my chest. I woke with bits of andromeda stuck between my teeth, with your absence. Helios is ripe in my veins. Body devouring shivers, tongue of honey lime: I taste December full of kaleidoscope lovers made from dreams of gods and monsters. Cheeks full of moonlight. An oasis running through my lifeline. a nebula painted inside my throat.

I remember the insecurities hanging like rubies from my neck. Every inch of the cosmos resting beneath my skin like a fever. Pupils a Rorschach test. I exhale the darkness, cherry lipped. Let the planets align down my spine; pull the stars from the night and stitch them into my fingertips like burnt photographs, still smoldering.

Like a supernova they erupted, burst through me and I open my mouth: speak of how much the sun has seen. How it is dusted in hand-me-down hope with every rise. How I take to it, trying to return to myself.

— Shae

If you would like to support the publication, become a paying subscriber to read exclusive deep-dive essays and get early access to new poems and work from my upcoming poetry book.

Subscribe for free to get your poem, prose or story featured in April.

Until next time,

Celeste

P.S. I stumbled upon tree.fm, which let you listen to the sound of a random forest.

Related

9 tactics Ryan Holiday uses that will help you to be a better writer