Just F*#king Trace It!

Surprisingly, my career as a tattoo artist uniquely prepared me to become a writer in many ways. I didn’t see it working out that way, but over the years—as I’ve learned more about writing, it’s become increasingly clear.

In tattooing, you start out tracing the masters. The Sailor Jerry’s, the Bert Grimm’s, the Horitoshi’s, and Horiyoshi’s. You trace it all. Over and over, and fucking over again until you can’t see yourself in it anymore. And when you come out the other side of all this—the months or years of this, the tracing and retracing the same images over and over again—you have achieved some amount of muscle memory for these shapes, these colors, and where they go, these textural elements or openness, that somehow hid right in plain view to you before. Your brain subconsciously knows now, after all the tracing, what works and what doesn’t, even if logically you do not yet. This task bores every young tattooer—many never make it past a few sheets of this before giving up and becoming a line cook somewhere—but for those who persevere, it instills a set of fundamentals. And if they are willing to do it—to move beyond themselves and what they think they know about what a tattoo should be—what they’ve seen on TV or now on Instagram, maybe—then they really set themselves up for success for the rest of their career, whether they realize it or not. Those fundamentals now lie in their bones and muscle fibers, in their neurons—forever. A gift that keeps giving.

Joan Didion, when she was a young kid, famously hand-typed Ernest Hemingway’s sentences to teach herself how to write better. She knew those sentences knew something she did not—yet. She knew they held some magic in their stark beat, and flatness—a sleight of hand she could almost see.

If you’re trying to learn more about writing and something isn’t clicking just by reading it, if you don’t think you’re capable of breaking down sentence length, verb placement, or rhythmic voicing, my recommendation is just fucking trace it! Be like Didion or the tattoo artists I have taught. Just fucking trace it! Copy it, word for word. Comma for comma. Put your ego aside and just type your favorite writer’s sentences. Whole fucking chapters of it—until you hate it—until Faulkner or King or Nora Ephron—or who-fucking-ever’s sentences equally make you want to puke and give up—if you have to look at another one of their sentences, type another one of their well-placed commas—because you think you’ll never understand them—if you have to do one fucking more you might just die.

You can thank me later when your muscles and neurons instinctually tell you where to place that comma or verb or monster lurking in the dark.

Years from now, you’ll hopefully be telling someone younger or less experienced than you, “You know what someone once told me—just fucking trace it!”