One of my hobbies is to copy out books by hand into spiral notebooks in order to pay close attention to the word choice, sentence structure, etc. I find it relaxing (it’s a good way to pass time on planes or trains), and it helps get my brain into writer mode, and I often do a lot of productive thinking about my own writing while analyzing someone else’s. I started out with a few of my favorite books, though these days I mostly do “classics,” and I try to pick ones that have a style and voice as different from my own as possible. I just finished copying out Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which took me about two years. Writers sometimes think in terms of “scene” and “summary.” I tend to write almost entirely in “scene,” and One Hundred Years of Solitude is written almost entirely in “summary,” so it was interesting to contrast the two approaches and see what can be done with a more summary-based technique, though I’m forced to conclude that I still find a scene-based approach a lot more engaging. The novel also doesn’t vary much in terms of style, and the same sorts of incidents happen over and over again, so it maybe wasn’t the most exciting book to spend two years reading. (I really enjoyed the first 150 pages or so. After that I got a bit exhausted with it — I think I would’ve been content with a mere 35 years of solitude.) Still, the book does an amazing job of maintaining a mood and atmosphere throughout, and the ending was kinda cool.
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