Before Hunter S. Thompson wrote “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” he wrote the Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
This is something I learned from Chelsea Cain sometime last year, when I was still living in the trailer. This was for her November Experiment, where she shepherded a bunch of aspiring novelists and escorted us across NaNoWriMo. I paid $1,000 to be a part of a support group, where we would meet every week and talk about our novel writing progress. I might have gotten 30,000 words in and petered out, trying to force a book that simply wasn’t working.
But that shouldn’t stop you from writing a novel. You can write a novel, it just doesn’t have to be your own.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote the Great Gatsby to see what it felt like to write the Great American Novel. He sat there with the book open on his lap, drinking Chivas Regal and smoking Dunhills, and retyped F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book word for word.
Rumor has it, maybe I heard it from Suzy Vitello, that Tom Spanbauer would have his students do the same thing from chapters he though they could benefit from. Reading the Great Gatsby and then Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you can still see the outline, the general shape of Nick Caraway in Duke. Those books were talking about the same thing: the fallacy of the American Dream.
Where Fitzgerald was looking at Jazz and bootlegging, Hunter was looking at drugs and gambling. Mind-altering excess in the pursuit of happiness where there was none to be found, the both of them.
Some precedent: Vincent Van Gogh was known to recreate the paintings he likes in his own style. For example: the Sower, by Jean-Francois Millet.
In my immediately family, I am easily the worst artist. When I was little, pre-school age, I would hang out in my uncle’s room, upstairs in my grandmother’s house. It always smelled like pot, and all over the walls were his paintings and drawings. When I asked how to draw like him, he just said, “Just draw something that you already like. Then you can change it and it’s yours. My friends would get pissed when I was at their house and we were building Legos, and I would just make whatever they were making, and then add a few things on top of it, and call it mine.”
Quentin Tarantino, more or less, traced Lady Snowblood in order to make Kill Bill.
Sergio Leone traced Yojimbo in order to make the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Sam Esmail traced Fight Club, American Psycho, and Trainspotting to make Mr. Robot.
Instead of drawing, I usually just got a contact high, and ate endless amounts of Reese’s cups and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So I got dumb and fat and talentless and all of the other things that generally points someone towards being a writer instead.
Think of a novel chapter or a short story as a drawing and put it on a lightboard. Rewrite it word for word, and the next time you go on to write your own story, pay attention to how you retain the style.
This works for poetry too. And because poems aren’t as long, I found it worthwhile to rewrite poems by hand. Consider, rewriting by hand, word for word, the lyrics to your favorite song. If it hasn’t already been committed to memory, and you are a song writer, this might also influence how you write lyrics.
My roommate, Oliver Rock, draws and paints, and he often starts from tracing a few figures or characters, and then elaborates on them, adds his own elements, and boom: the painting belongs to him.
One time in college, I was taking a writing comics class with Bryan Michael Bendis, and I went to the art studio of another friend, Hector Ornelas. He had a projector pointed at a canvas, and on that a canvas a movie theater full of people all looked back. He stood in the front of the canvas with a black brush and painted each person, and by the end the painting looked less like his reference photo and more like something born in his brain.
Another tip, straight from Bryan Bendis himself, is to crack open a comic, and rewrite the script judging by the panels. Pay attention to the key objects and spell out the details as best you can. What is the angle of the panels? Whom are they centered on, what is their facial expression, if that’s important?
Not that Brian Michael Bendis would use his own work as a source to teach us, but take a look below at these panels from Sam and Twitch. If you are an artist, yes you can totally get away with tracing these panels. They are fantastic for rendering cloth, water, and perspective. If you are a writer, then the smaller panels near the bottom learn you to establish tempo for your beats.
In middle school, I got into a huge argument with my friend who thought that Miley Cyrus was the one who wrote “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” not Cindy Lauper. That fear came right back for Trent Reznor when Miley covered Head Like a Hole in Black Mirror. And God bless your heart if you think Hurt is a Johnny Cash song.
As of right now, I have a folder where I keep my tracings of short stories. I have traced the following so far:
Onesome - Garielle Lutz
Pool Night - Amy Hempel
In a Tub - Amy Hempel
And Lead us Not Into Penn Station - Amy Hempel
The Annex - Amy Hempel
The New Lodger - Amy Hempel
The Toad Prince - Chuck Palahniuk
I am currently working on tracing The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon by Tom Spanbauer. The goal is to have that traced before the end of November, and it’s about 350 pages long. I’m guessing that’s going to put me somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 words typed. I will probably fail in my deadline of doing this before the end of November, but honestly, I’ve racked up so many failures I’m becoming a bit of a professional.
We can only hope to be loved and paid for by the ways that we fail.
Until next time,
Colton Merris
I didn’t realize this was a common thing. A few years back, I decided to use Romeo & Juliet, since it’s such a tried and true framework, but I wrote it noir style. Perhaps I’ll try again with something more substantial. Great insight, Colton!
In high school, one trumpeter was a lot better than the rest of us. You know what he did differently? He listened to great records and played along. I guess you could call that tracing. Of course there were also the Arban's drills, which he practiced a lot more conscientiously than the rest of us. Small writing exercises on specific techniques might be the equivalent..