Be a Mimic Writer and Enhance Your Writing Skills and Style

I have found one of the best and quickest ways to enhance my writing skills and style is by being a mimic writer. In fact, it is one of the most natural ways to learn the skill of becoming a writer. How better to learn than from the masters that have come before? In a way, it's an apprenticeship of shorts and gives a struggling writer the ability to get a deeper understanding of how the author manages to create a seamless piece of art.

How to be a mimic writer. The best way to do this is to pick a favorite author, or someone who has inspired you, and read everything they have written. Read like a writer. Pay attention to how the author is writing the story. Then take passages you like and copy them out word for word, punctuation for punctuation. Lastly, put the author's style into practice and experiment with your own words. I am not condoning plagiarism- far from it. What I am talking about is appreciating an authors work and using it to better understand that work and help you learn.

Using Body Language to Tell Your Story

I recently took an online class through my friend and fellow writer Michael Knost on body language, and wanted to share some of the highlights that I found helpful. This was a topic I knew some about from other writing sources, but his class really brought everything into prospective for me.

Body language is essential in creating believable characters. It's the subtle things like a smile in just the right place of a conversation, or a small touch of the hand that can change the whole way a reader perceives a character. When you show a character through their body language, you are allowing the reader to size up the character without spoon feeding information that might push the reader from the story. The reader wants to feel intelligent as he or she comes to their own conclusions. It's the writer's job (you) to be invisible enough to help lay out the signs or clues that get the reader to where you want them to go.

My Writing Progress

I know it's been a long while since I've posted on this blog. I do have a perfectly good excuse. I've been writing like a whirlwind on my new series of novels. It's been a fun, but tiring process of getting the story down as fast as possible. I posted a blog called Marathon Writer: Riding the High back in May, and well I've been riding that high ever since. I managed to finish that book (Shadow Games) and start on another one (Blood Feud), which I'm about 68,000 words into right now. The story is just huge with plot twists and events happening all over the place in my Universe called Ethia.