How copywork can improve your writing

Revisiting an old method of teaching writing and grammar

As a fiction editor, I sometimes see manuscripts which have fairly basic problems like dialogue formatting and other issues which are relatively easy to fix. While you can buy a book on how to write and format dialogue, and how to use dialogue tags and action beats, the best way to learn is to copy.

And I don’t mean plagiarism.

I mean copywork, an old method of teaching writing skills, and one used by famous writers from Robert Louis Stevenson, Benjamin Franklin, Jack London, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson.

In the case of Thompson, he copied out The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms not to steal, but to learn how they were written and structured. It’s a good example of learning from the greats. You don’t have to write like them when it comes to your own writing, but you might learn from their techniques and narrative choices.

Using copywork to improve dialogue writing

For those who struggle with writing and laying out dialogue, you don’t need to copy out a whole story or novel to learn. You can simply choose dialogue scenes from novels you like, then write them out. Try doing it longhand. It forces you to think more about each word you’re writing down.

That way you learn where the speech tags go, how they are punctuated, and when you can drop them altogether. You learn how to use action beats. You also learn how to write dialogue that doesn’t run on forever.

Studying scenes in published books can teach you how to keep dialogue on track and succinct. You don’t need to show an entire conversation, for example. You can cut into the middle of a conversation and then exit before the meeting is over.

How copywork teaches other writing skills

Copywork can also teach you about basic formatting and indented paragraphs, the use of line breaks, use of punctuation, pacing, and more. You can examine how much an author describes the world of their novel or short story early on - whether they take time to feed in details, and whether they leave most things to the reader’s imagination.

If you write historical novels, you can look at the opening pages of well-regarded books in the genre, and copy them out to see how much detail, info dumping, and world building there is. You can see how the writer introduces the main character(s) to the readers - in terms of telling versus showing.

If you’re struggling to write a battle scene, you could find battle scenes in published novels and copy them out to see how the author choreographed the action, dialogue, point of view, internal dialogue, etc, to create a powerful and pacy scene.

Copywork can teach you how the greats tackled basic writing skills. While you can read ‘how to’ books (and the best will include examples), copywork using targeted passages to solve particular weaknesses in your writing can go a long way to improving your skills and techniques.

Again, this is not about stealing other people’s work. It’s about learning from the greats - learning technique, layout, rhythm, and more.

Copywork exercise

You can give yourself a regular copywork exercise by choosing a short passage - could be dialogue, opening scenes in a novel, more dramatic scenes - and copying them out longhand to study, word for word, how these passages work. If you struggle with writing tension or conflict, you could choose several relevant passages from published novels and copy them out to see what the author is doing that you’re missing.

Are they using shorter sentences to drive pacing?

What else might they be doing?

While you can simply read the relevant passages slowly, it won’t have the same impact as writing them out. Writing longhand takes more time and thought.

Need feedback on your novel?

I’m a developmental editor currently open to new clients. I work with adult fiction - SF/H/F, historical, literary, thriller, and romance. I’ve worked on both standalone novels and series. I particularly enjoy working with newer writers and my manuscript critique and developmental editing packages have tiered options for different budgets.

I offer a free sample edit. You can find my website at the link below:

IndieCat Editorial