Imitating a style

A year and a half ago Ray Bradbury died. I grew up with his wonderful stories, though I lost track of his newer work about 20 years ago. He could conjure deeply memorable scenes, and his style was clear and easy. Easy to read, that is. About a month after he died I thought I should try to write something in his style, as a kind of private homage. I had a setting and characters that seemed in keeping with his style, and an offbeat ghost problem that I think he'd have enjoyed playing with. I immersed myself in his stories for a while, and then ... getting the balance right is hard.

He varied his style depending on the mood, so maybe that was OK. But I couldn't make the prose go the direction I wanted--as though the style had a mind of its own. Which is probably another way of saying my handwriting looks much the same in small and on the blackboard, even though the muscles are different. Better not to push it too hard.

I don't know how many years of practice it would take to imitate his style well--probably far more than just to get my own to be good. "Imitate the best" was the advice, but it was for learning the details of the craft, not for turning into an imitation Hemingway.

It's better for a story to gather electronic dust than turn out like this Wodehouse imitation, which sounds so obviously bad I wonder how it found a publisher.