Authors should feel free to “model” their favorite authors writing style. Modeling is not plagiarism; modeling is learning from other authors and–where appropriate–letting them know how much you’ve learned from them.

Modeling involves taking the time to identify the characteristics you like best in your favorite author’s writing. These characteristics can include chapter and paragraph length, the author’s use of story, or or the way the author adds exercises and questions to each chapter.

Modeling was succinctly described on pages 14 and 15 of William Zinsser’s Writing to Learn: How to Write–and Think–Clearly About Any Subject at All. Zinsser wrote:

We all need models, whatever art or craft we’re trying to learn. Bach needed a model; Picasso needed a model; they didn’t spring full-blown as Bach and Picasso. This is especially true of writers. Writing is learned by imitation.

He continues:  “I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it.”

What a wonderful paragraph!

I encountered it while rereading Writing to Learn in the ICU waiting room while Betsy was having her surgery, and I pass it along to you with gratitude for the successful outcome of her operation.