On Craft & Process: Copywork
Back in 2022, I was looking for fulfillment in my life that I wasn’t getting from my job. I went through a phase where I bought a synthesizer and started making electronic music. I picked up the mandolin again. I tried learning to paint Warhammer miniatures. I worked on an indie video game. None of it scratched the itch.
It was my wife who reminded me that there had been a time in my life when I wanted to write books, when I enrolled in college as a creative writing major just as the Great Recession hit. I signed up for a class on writing horror and never looked back.
That decision has been a great one, but it also opened me up to an insatiable hunger to improve and a never-ending stream of advertisements for books, courses, and products promising they can satiate it.
One of the first products I took a swing at was Mastering Fiction’s Copywork Masterclass. This post is not a review of their product. I think it’s great. This is about how I feel about copywork as a method of improving my craft.
I bolded and italicized my in that last sentence for a reason: different people will get different results from the same exercises. That’s the beautiful thing about writing. Ask one hundred authors about craft and process, and you will get one hundred different opinions.
So, what is copywork?
It is the practice of copying the work of great authors by hand in order to learn their stylistic habits.
The idea made a lot of sense to me at the time. There is study after study showing that writing by hand does more for retention than the alternatives. Copy enough great work and you would have to be an idiot not to notice some patterns, right?
In a structured course, where pieces were selected and arranged around specific prose and storytelling skills, copywork felt like a nice, quick way for young D.J. to level up.
In practice, I found the results a bit mixed. I set out to copy one piece a day, and the Mastering Fiction course did a nice job of adding marginalia to the selected work, calling out what to notice and what you might want to emulate in your own writing.
Mostly, though, my hand ended up really cramped.
I didn’t not improve as a writer over my twenty days with the exercise, but I also didn’t experience the leap the course’s advertising promised. Truth be told, I never really buy those sensationalist claims anyway.
Copywork does not make you subconsciously absorb the secrets of good writing. At least, that is not how it worked for me.
What it did do, and the path it sent me down, was make me much more critical of short stories as I read them. Why is the author using that turn of phrase here? Why are they telling me this but showing me that? How did they make the dialogue feel so natural in this section?
In the end, copywork became a three-week experiment that turned me into a more critical reader. I have not revisited the exercise since, but it did improve my craft and process by changing the way I think about what I read.
It is not a silver bullet, and my results were mixed, if ultimately positive. I think it is worth trying for yourself to see whether it unlocks anything in your own writing. That said, there are books on analyzing short stories that I got much more mileage out of, so maybe I will write about those next time.
Until then, as always, thank you for trusting me with your time, and thank you for reading my words.
