PROMPT:

Do a pastiche of a text you love. Go to your bookshelf and take down a book you admire to the point of envy. Flip through it till you find a page, paragraph or sentence that rivets you. Read it ten times over, out loud if possible. Then close the book and put it away. Write a paragraph in which you try to channel the voice and approach of your model but make it yours by using only details that belong to your story. Next, you might try doing an open-book version, where you closely study each sentence and try to match yours more exactly to the model. The third option is to find a sentence, or a couple of them, that you can sneak into your text whole.