Chapter Twenty-Five
Write Like Poe
Reshape, Revise, and Reimagine Great Literary Styles to Discover Your Own Voice
While teachers urge beginning writers to find their own voices and critics praise established authors for their unique styles and sensibilities, I’ve experienced considerable success in borrowing other writers’ voices and, ahem, emulating their literary techniques.
I’ve been faux Hemingway and fake O. Henry. I’ve donned the dark cloaks of twentieth-century horror masters H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch. I’ve borrowed Samuel Pepys’s parlance and Dr. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. And, it sometimes shames me to admit, I’ve made more money writing as (pseudo) Edgar Allan Poe than the tragic genius himself.
I’ve taken the concepts of these and other literati and added to them, extrapolated from them, or reshaped, revised, and reimagined them.
I’ve written pastiches.
So can you.
THE COPYCAT
The pastiche prose form openly mimes the content and mannerisms of another written work. It’s a respectful, if often jocular, homage to the work that inspired it. (Its literary cousin is the parody, but that imitation subtly or savagely satirizes its source material.) The pastiche implicitly says, “I appreciate this author, the characters, and the fictive world … and my imitation is sincere flattery.”
The affection for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his immortal Sherlock Holmes is evident in August Derleth’s stories about brilliant, deerstalker-wearing Solar Pons of 7B Praed Street.
Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Lin Carter, and many other fantasy and horror writers have provided us with their take on the “cosmic monstrosities” of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos universe, often liberally borrowing from Lovecraft’s pseudo-Gothic literary techniques. Philip José Farmer, a Tarzan devotee, has given us Lord Grandrith, a loin-clothed jungle Übermensch, as well as Doc Caliban, a pastiche clone of the pulp era’s crime-busting Doc Savage, a character who also motivated mystery novelist Michael A. Black to create his own Doc Atlas.
Right off the bat, your pastiche should proclaim what it is and invite the reader in on your literary joke. The title of my novella “A Secret of the Heart,” originally published in the anthology Lovecraft’s Legacy, is plainly an allusion to “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Early in the story, I let the reader know that we’re journeying into a Poe mindscape of madness by using the opening of “The Tell-Tale Heart” as my model:
True! Nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? … I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. … Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
This opening, with its combination of “Who you callin’ crazy?” “‘I’m no wacko,’ said the wacko,” and “doth protest waaaaay too much,” is associated with Poe by anyone who earned at least a C- in junior high English. Here’s my rendering of the original in “A Secret of the Heart”:
Regard me! Madmen sweat and shake; they mutter to themselves and shout at delusional wraiths only they can apprehend. … Madmen rage, they fume, one moment seeking to slyly cajole the listener to belief, then threatening him the next.
Look into my eye to find therein not a glimmer of inner turmoil. …
THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE
Authors’ styles grow from the basic elements of prose: vocabulary, sentence length, structure, rhythm, narrative point of view, imagery, figures of speech, and much more. Style reflects a writer’s line-by-line, moment-to-moment decisions about what to leave in or what to leave out, what tone to adopt and what mood to induce in the reader. Style is the summation of how a story is presented.
Naturally, you’ll find it easier to craft a pastiche if the writer you are honoring or aping is a strong stylist. Many popular writers aren’t considered stylists, and they seek what’s termed a transparent style that focuses exclusively on plot. But the styles of such diverse writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, and William Styron are unquestionably distinct; a paragraph from any of these writers lets you know who you’re reading, just as the opening notes of a pop song will quickly tell you if you’re listening to Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Barry Manilow, or Tom Waits.
And there are authors who have their own marked idiosyncrasies of style, which can easily be incorporated into your pastiche. Be ready to observe and use these little tricks.
For instance, in his National Book Award–winning novel Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier eschews the use of quotation marks instead employing en dashes to let us know we’re getting a direct quote, like so:
–That would be easy to toss into my story, Peter Pastiche said.
–Oh? said Carmela Clone.
Yes. It’s a device that promptly suggests the origin of my pastiche Tepid Hill.
When I wrote my Charles Bukowski pastiche (less-than-cleverly titled “Hank Crankowski”), published in 1976 in Samisdat, I tried for the author’s borderline psychotic-deadpan fatalistic tone—and made good use of Bukowski’s habit, in early works, of using only lowercase letters. Here, the protagonist of that story tells a would-be author the secret of crafting literature:
expose yourself to feel what wretches feel. get beat on the head by cops and get thrown in jail. get drunk and become a pacifist. ... crash an old chevrolet into a taco bell stand ... kick in a television set, howl at the moon, roar against the wind of being ... never use capital letters.
SAY WHAT?
No matter how renowned authors may be for stylistic skills and original mannerisms, it is what they say, the subject matter and theme, that we come to associate as their personal territory. We pick up an Agatha Christie novel expecting a murder mystery with the emphasis on mystery, the clues there for us to discover (if we have “little gray cells” equal to those of her detectives, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple). No rapacious extraterrestrial ever abducted Miss Crumbcake from the cozy village of Slothful-upon-Avon in a Christie novel, and we don’t expect to read the story of the “Monocoled Prussian Assistant” in a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic tales. The forest primeval and its Native American, French, and English settlers—and Hawkeye!—belong to James Fenimore Cooper, just as the faraway galaxies and distant futures belong to the man who created them in the Foundation novels, Isaac Asimov. Elsewhere, dreamy and deceitful 1930s Los Angeles, its grifters and shysters and the lone PI following his own moral compass, is owned by Raymond Chandler.
Ernest Hemingway is credited with transforming the American prose style, but he’s sometimes criticized for a “narrow” range of subject matter and theme: sports and war, machismo and violence. (In our politically correct times, I don’t want to push that bright red button marked “bullfighting!”)
I’m a card-carrying fan of Papa; I’ve read his collected short stories at least once a year for many years. When I was asked for a contribution to the anthology Still Dead, featuring stories set in the world of flesh-eating zombies inspired by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, I saw an opportunity to do my Hemingway story.
I called the novella “The Old Man and the Dead.” With that obvious allusion to The Old Man and the Sea, I told the reader what I was doing, and then I underscored it with these opening lines:
In our time there was a man who wrote as well and truly as anyone ever did. He wrote about courage and endurance and sadness and war and bullfighting and boxing and men in love and men without women. He wrote about scars and wounds that never heal.
Later in the tale, I introduce the characters Adam Nichols (a young man not unlike Hemingway’s Nick Adams); Jordan Roberts, who, like the American Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, is fighting for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War; and a tough female guerilla leader named … Pilar.
Here’s the final scene of the pastiche, my moment of memorial for a writer who has profoundly influenced me:
It was early and he was the only one up …
He went to the front foyer. He liked the way the light struck the oak-paneled walls and the floor. It was like being in a museum or in a church. It was a well-lighted place and it felt clean and airy.
Carefully, he lowered the butt of the Boss shotgun to the floor. He leaned forward. The twin barrels were cold circles in the scarred tissue just above his eyebrows.
He tripped both triggers.
I know there are writers who have come to live in your mind. Your pastiche will be your way to acknowledge, learn from, and pay tribute to them. The passage above summarizes why I write in the style: It’s my grateful tip of the hat to someone whose words mean so much to me.
Mort Castle has edited All American Horror of the 21st Century (Wicker Park Press) and the essential reference work On Writing Horror for the Horror Writers Association (Writer’s Digest Books). For Writer’s Digest Annotated Classics: Dracula, he provided the annotations. He is a three-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, as well as the Black Quill Award, and has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson and the International Horror Guild awards. Castle teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and at conferences throughout the country.