When a first draft is put on my desk, I’m not looking to be impressed.
I want to be let in.
I want to see if I can decipher who the writer was when they began writing a piece, where they got lost and where they landed by the end. I want to discover through their nuances, their style choices, their vocabulary, who is this writer in their heart of hearts?
This may seem like a tall order, but it’s not—not really. Because underlying all the layers of writing that can be turned in, what I want most is to feel that the writer is themselves, without pretense.
I don’t think I’m alone in aching for writing that whisks us all away. And what’s one way to do that? Well, Strunk & White say:
Write in a way that comes naturally.
Write in a way that comes easily and naturally to you, using words and phrases that come readily to hand. But do not assume that because you have acted naturally your product is without flaw.
The use of language begins with imitation. The infant imitates the sounds made by its parents; the child imitates first the spoken language, then the stuff of books. The imitative life continues long after the writer is secure in the language, for it is almost possible to avoid imitating what one admires. Never imitate consciously, but do not worry about being an imitator; take pains instead to admire what is good. Then when you write in a way that comes naturally, you will echo the halloos that bear repeating.
You were born to imitate
I was probably nine years old when I visited my grandmother and asked how she liked the letters I’d been writing her.
She said, “Well, they don’t sound like you.”
My heart dropped into my stomach. Grandma had a blunt, straightforward way. A stalwart reader and researcher, she never minced words. She grabbed my last note and tapped her fingers on words and phrases that confused her and that I instantly recognized from the 1994 version of Little Women I’d been watching (and then simultaneously reading) on repeat. They were some of my favorite moments I was trying to adopt into my own language of expression, not realizing that people in the 1880s used more flourish than necessary today.
As Strunk & White point out, imitation is the foundation of all language. We start by echoing back the facial expressions and sounds that surround us from a young age. This container for language never really leaves us. Whether it’s poetry in high school, research papers in college or answering to a publisher’s guidelines for publication, the sound of other people’s voices and their boundaries push back onto us. This is why surrounding ourselves with a variety of ideas, cultures and points of view is so important in the development of voice. When we read people we disagree with, the echo chamber surrounding our writer’s voice gets some walls pushed down.
Mary Oliver agrees with the usefulness of imitation. She says in A Poetry Handbook that imitation “is a very good way of investigating the real thing.” She