Originally posted January 14, 2008. My thoughts these days are that writing is not a physical skill, but through this exercise (and the painting one, for that matter) you naturally study in more depth what’s going on. The mystery serial’s dead and off the net, and maybe it’ll stay that way.

When I first started writing fiction again in the middle of 2007, after a hiatus of over a decade, I realized that I had lost the cadence and flow of writing a story. Story writing is inherently an entirely different process from that of non-fiction. As a result, I had a tendency to stall, and stall badly.The damage was spectacularly bad on a couple of short mystery stories I wrote. I was filled with sadness and despair, but I kept going ’cause I’m like that.

One day, I stumbled across the thread of a wise writer, by the name of James D. McDonald, over at AbsoluteWrite called Learn Writing with Uncle Jim. One of his suggestions is to retype the first chapter of a novel:

Now, retype the first chapter. Do this with your writer’s eye, not your reader’s eye. Think about the lengths of the sentences, the lengths of the paragraphs, the sounds of the words. Think about the order of the scenes. Notice the dialog. How are the dialog tags rendered? Where is the point of view?

The point of this exercise is this: Have you ever gone to an art museum and seen the art students sitting there with their easels and oils, copying the great masters? The point isn’t to turn them into plagairists, or to make them expert forgers. The point is to get the feeling into their hands and arms of how to make the brush strokes that create a particular illusion on canvas. Writing is no less a physical skill than painting.

I thought that was pretty crazy, and didn’t try it at first.

One day I decided, what the heck.

Well, I don’t think it’s crazy anymore.

So let me take you on my journey of retyping “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”.

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