The legend goes that Hunter S. Thompson, learning to write, typed out the whole of The Great Gatsby word for word. And then A Farewell to Arms. The idea being that he could feel great prose move through his own fingers.
Monkey see, monkey do.
Copywriters get the same advice: find a famous sales letter, copy it out by hand, and the mechanics will seep into you by osmosis.
I believed it enough to test it. I retyped All the Pretty Horses, start to finish.
But when I went back to my own writing, nothing had changed. I was no closer to McCarthy than before I started.
I'd walked in his footsteps, but I learned nothing of how he chose that path.
So I tried the opposite.
Instead of copying out great writing, like the proverbial monkey at a typewriter, I aped it out.
Reader, it worked!
Here's how: