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🏷️ Categories: Writing, Learning.
“Only through imitation do we develop our originality.” — John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
I often pay attention to how the passages of the works that captivate me are written.
They radiate such a distinct voice that, for days, my own writing remains infused with the essence of that voice. Some people believe that each author’s voice is something entirely their own, but the truth is that we are a mosaic of the things we have loved and the authors who have moved us. One way or another, the way you express yourself is influenced by the voices of others. There is nothing wrong with that; in fact, we can use that influence intelligently and consciously.
I’ll tell you about a simple writing exercise, but one with the potential to be among the most transformative. It is so effective that it feels like cheating.
Replication is exactly what it sounds like: replicating someone else’s work, but with a plan.
For this exercise, it is crucial to work on paper. With a pencil and notebook, we write more slowly. That slowdown is what allows us to think deeply about each word and absorb the author’s influence.
With that said, the next thing you should do is select the writing you admire most — the best of the best. Create a small collection of excerpts from your favorite works. Then your goal will be to closely observe those elegantly crafted sentences and discover what makes them excellent. Think about rhythm, structure, internal rhymes, rhetorical devices, vocabulary, theme…
Observe where the magnetism lies and write it down.
From here, you will practice two replication techniques.
1. Blind Translation
The key to this first exercise is forcing yourself to rewrite it in your own way.
You need to look closely and understand exactly what captivates you. Once you feel you understand that essence, do the hard work yourself: close the book and write the passage from scratch using your own tools.
Then place your version next to the original reference and compare them.
Blind Translation step by step:
Destruction Phase (Day 1): Choose the masterful paragraph and copy it exactly as it is. Right underneath, write a “plain” version. Remove the beautiful adjectives, the metaphors, and reduce complex sentences to the essential information.
Cooling-Off Phase: Close the notebook. Let at least 24 hours pass so that your visual memory of the original text fades a little.
Reconstruction Phase (Day 2): Open the notebook while covering the original (you can use a piece of paper or a card). Read only your “boring” version. Now your mission is to embellish it, give it rhythm, tension, and depth using your own writer’s tools.
The Diagnosis: Reveal the original and compare them line by line.
Example:
Original Text (Nabokov — Lolita):
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-li-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Li. Ta.”
Your “plain” version (Day 1):
I liked Lolita very much. She was my obsession and my sin. Her name is pronounced in three syllables, moving the tongue across the palate until it touches the teeth.
Your reconstruction attempt (Day 2):
“Lolita was the light that guided me and the fire that burned inside me. My greatest sin and my entire soul. When saying her name, Lo-li-ta, the tongue moves three times through the mouth, brushing the palate until it strikes the teeth.”
What do you learn by comparing them? When you put them side by side, you notice that Nabokov did not use weak connectors like “that guided me”; he chose something direct and powerful (“light of my life”). You will see how he used punctuation with a comma (“My sin, my soul.”) to break the rhythm, while you may have moved faster. These details are today’s lesson.
You will take your adjectives, expressions, metaphors, rhythm, and literary devices to the next level…
2. Contextual Transfer
This second method is an advanced step and requires more boldness. It consists of taking the style that fascinated you and transferring it into a different setting.
If the reference passage is a dense and psychological paragraph by Edgar Allan Poe, use it to describe something as ordinary as an email or a small everyday WhatsApp argument. By applying a structure that has already proven powerful, you separate the technique from the subject.
The emotional impact lies in how you tell it, not so much in what you tell.
Contextual Transfer step by step:
Mapping Phase: Copy the original text. With a pen of another color, mark its skeleton: Where are the pauses? Does it use long sentences followed by a very short one? What kind of words dominate (action verbs, descriptive adjectives, abstract nouns)?
Transfer Phase: Write an entirely new text about a different topic, but force yourself to fit your words into the same molds as the author. If the author used a triple adjective, you must use a triple adjective. If they used a semicolon to separate two opposing ideas, you must do the same. If they used an oxymoron, use one too.
Example:
Original Text (Poe — The Fall of the House of Usher — Gothic/oppressive structure):
“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn season, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country.”
Your version with a “Genre Filter” (Topic: Remote work and the office):
“During the whole of a boring, cold, endless Monday morning, when urgent and heavy emails piled up in my inbox, I entered alone, with my coffee, into a singularly tedious Zoom meeting.”
What do you learn by applying it? By forcing yourself to use Poe’s cadence (the accumulation of adjectives at the beginning, the pauses, the growing rhythm), you make something as ordinary as a morning at the office radiate that same aura of heaviness and exhaustion you want to convey. You learn to transfer emotions with force instead of simply giving the reader sterile words.
The Power of Replication
Cultivating this habit little by little will help you develop the skills needed to build a deep voice. You take your favorite influences as a compass and absorb them intelligently, intentionally. You are not copying; you are trying to consciously take as a reference what was already influencing you anyway.
I hope you give yourself the space and time to play with these two methods this week.
See you in the next letter.
Stay creative.
— Álvaro
Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:
The 5 Rules of David Ogilvy for Writing Texts Impossible to Ignore
3 Creative Lessons from Ray Bradbury Every Writer Needs Today
✍️ Your turn: If your current style were a “mosaic,” what voices would it be made of?
💭 Quote of the day: “We are born creators. We move what we learn from our head to our heart through our hands.” — Brené Brown, Rising Strong
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Impressive statistics on your Substack success. Meanwhile, those exercises are interesting. Some writing instructors used that technique at college levels.