100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Copy something
Nine ways to overcome writer’s block

Yes, copy. From time to time take a few paragraphs from something that you enjoyed reading and sit down at the computer or with a notebook and copy them word for word. You will find yourself suddenly aware of the choices the writer made. You will look at the work from the writer’s point of view. In time you will feel like an insider, and you will say, “I know why he chose this word; I know why he made two short sentences here instead of one long one.” You will become more intimate with the writer’s words and with words in general, and your own writing will be better for it.

If you don’t have a favorite passage to copy, use this one from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s a favorite of mine.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.