Reverse Engineering September 18, 2020 In his book, "Singing School," Robert Pinsky argues that young poets can learn from old poetry. "Models provide inspiration, which is different from imitation." He suggests a poet create his or her own personalized anthology by typing out poems they find "magnificent." By doing so, Pinsky says, a poet will study a poem through the act of reproducing it. I've mentioned before[1] that writers can use the same technique to improve their writing. But a writer should not only reproduce another writer's works, but analyze them. The study of other stories/novels/essays, combined with lots of butt-in-chair practice will, in my opinion, do more to improve one's writing than any other method, including books and classes (though don't rule them out entirely). So find writers whose stories move you and begin to pick those stories apart. Examine the vocabulary, the sentences, the paragraphs and all the way up to the overall structure of the piece. Get or print out hard-copies, so you can make notes in the margins. The goal here is to look at the how of the story to understand why it moved you so. Once you've done that, one way to carry the analysis further is to find out from biographies and interviews which writers influenced the writer that moved you, then read and analyze that writer's works. Continue this process as far back as you feel like taking it. For example, I've become a fan of M John Harrison's writing, and have spent some time examining his prose. But in an interview with Strange Horizons[2] he mentions that he learned a lot about writing from the early 20th century writer Katherine Mansfield[3]. So I've started reading her short stories and pulling them apart to see how they work. When I'm done looking at Mansfield, I may investigate which writers she said influenced her to learn even more. Reverse engineering works for poetry and the written word just as well as it does for other technologies. [1] https://www.andrewgudgel.com/blog/the-sincerest-form-of-learning.txt [2] http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/interview-m-john-harrison [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Mansfield (c) 2020 by Andrew Gudgel email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com