CONSERVATION IN THE CATHEDRAL

In the fiction workshops that I teach at Mason, I once had my students do an exercise as part of the revision process. Basically, building off of a couple of ideas I mention above, I ask each of the students to choose a favorite author, one whose works are of the kind and quality that the student him- or herself would like to write and then try to articulate what’s compelling or interesting about that author: style, content, theme the way the author describes a character’s face, the way the author handles dialogue, the way the author crafts a sentence whatever has drawn the student to this writer in the first place. After that, they are each asked to choose a passage from their respective author’s works and analyze it more closely for nuances of style and technique something that the student might take from this chosen writer and incorporate into his or her own writing, and then to turn to their own writings and actually incorporate it: try to describe the face of their own characters with the same accuracy or get the same snap in their own dialogue or push an exploration of an idea in that favorite writer’s work in a new direction in their own.