Let's Play A Game

In the post about Twain and Austen, Tex wrote:
If Twain were a character in an Austen novel, she'd like him grudgingly but put him through the wringer for being such a juvenile, then marry him off to a lesser heroine after he'd been shaped up a bit. If Austen were a character in one of Twain's novels, he'd never "get" her, so he'd completely fail to provide a believable characterization.
This sounds like a fun game to me. Take any two well-known authors, and describe how they would write each other if they attempted to include the other as a character in one of their stories.

If you would find a list of major authors helpful, here's a good one (though it has a strange date for the beginning of the Renaissance -- usually the English Renaissance is said to begin in the 16th century, but for some reason they locate it sometime after Chaucer's death in 1400 and before Malory in the mid-1400s).


Grim said...

Is it too hard, or not hard enough? Chaucer would write Malory like his knight, which may not be flattering if you follow the interpretation of Monty Python veteran Terry Jones. Malory would mention Chaucer in passing, as he does his heralds or the embassy from Rome.

Coleridge would write Melville almost like he wrote the Ancient Mariner; he would have written Ahab exactly that way. Melville would have written the Ancient Mariner as he portrays Ahab between the voyages, whereas he would have had a lot of fun with Coleridge himself -- as he does all the shore figures who never go to sea, but kind of linger on its edges and mythology.

MikeD said...

For me, it's too hard. But mostly because I am not a writer. I can surely imagine conversations, or put down in text what I imagine some literary figure would be like. But I lack the ability to do so in a manner that I imagine someone else would. I would need to be more familiar with one author's style in order to attempt to duplicate it, then I would also need to imagine what that author thought of another... and at that point my head is too muddled to make any sense.

I guess it's just not where my aptitudes lie.