Creative Inheritance as Craft: The Art of Pastiche
Explore how influence, admiration, and experimentation can become tools for writing fiction.
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Hello writers!
Starting June 15 at Literary Liberation, Savannah Balmir Bowen is teaching a four-week workshop, That’s All She Wrote: Short Stories by Black Women. This week only, we’re doing a flash sale on this class—enter the code FLASH to take 25% off.
Today we’re going to learn about the creative technique known as pastiche and offer a few practical steps for you to make your own pastiches with short fiction.
Part One: What is Pastiche?
The Poetry Foundation defines pastiche as “an original composition that deliberately mimics the style of another author, usually in a spirit of respect rather than mockery or satire.”
I like to think of pastiche in terms of what I already know about Black art and culture. Pastiche as a technique is compatible with Black creativity; it’s what we do and do well. It is our collage-remix-Sankofa-chop-and-screw aesthetic that is totally original, yet always a callback to the creative inheritances we’ve been blessed with.
Pastiche is a great starting point for writing short fiction, whether you’ve got ideas for a story of your own that you’re struggling to get down, or you’re obsessed with a story written by someone else that you’d like to use for target practice. Either way, pastiche can perhaps be the key to unlocking the narrative you have within yourself.
Part Two: Choose Your Inspiration
Choose a text that inspires, excites, or frustrates you. Then, identify the things about the story’s style and structure that are particularly striking. Is there a narrative conceit that you’d like to imitate? A particular point of view that you’ve never tried writing from before? Perhaps there is an intriguing setting or dilemma that you’d like to place your own characters into. Whatever it is that you admire about the text, make a list of those things. Once you’ve narrowed it down, select one or two things you will imitate in your own work.
You may also choose more than one story to imitate. Remixing craft and style elements from more than one inspiration text can yield interesting and unexpected results.
Part Three: Challenge Your Next Story
Once you’ve identified the stylistic elements that you’d like to imitate, challenge yourself to write your next piece with them in mind. This exercise will require you to study the construction of whichever story you are imitating and seek to understand WHY the author makes the narrative choices that they make.
You might notice your story take on the qualities that you originally admired (Amazing!) You may even refer to the inspiration text as you write. However, your pastiche should be a departure point, not a strict imitation. It should feel like YOUR story, and should engage the ideas, subjects, and questions that YOU are invested in exploring.
Part Four: Review
After completing a draft, you should evaluate whether the constraints you’ve placed on your story (writing in a particular voice, POV, tense, setting, etc.) actually serve the story and its overall meaning. If, for example, you’ve imitated the first-person perspective of your inspiration text, consider whether this stylistic choice achieves the outcome you were hoping for. Could a different POV make your story stronger or more complex? It may or may not, but the reflection will be worthwhile.
Register now for That’s All She Wrote: Short Stories by Black Women, a four-week workshop led by Savannah Balmir Bowen. This week only, we’re doing a flash sale on this class—enter the code FLASH to take 25% off.
More from Savannah:
Savannah Balmir Bowen is a Caribbean-American writer, educator, and artist. She studied English and French at Howard University and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky. Her story “Running from Rain” published in Michigan Quarterly Review, received the 2025 Lawrence Prize in Fiction. Savannah is a 2023 Kimbilio Fiction fellow, and a 2024 Oxbelly Fiction fellow. She was named an Emerging Scholar by the Haitian Studies Association in 2023. Her work has been published in Callaloo, PREE, Torch, and elsewhere. Savannah teaches writing and literature at a community college in North Texas. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories.
I love the idea of writing in a pastiche, because our ideas almost never come from nothing!