On the face of it, experimenting with reworking a piece of writing is pointless. I mean, why bother? To be honest, before I started on my experiments in style (EiS) project, I didn’t know if it was worth doing: I just thought it might be an interesting thing to do. Here’s what I’ve gained from it so far.

The Experiments in Style project

To recap what the project is all about, here is part of the explanatory text I insert at the start of each "‘experiment’:

Experiments in Style is my version of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (Amazon affiliate link), in which the author takes a very mundane incident and reworks it in various ways. A graphic version of the same thing is Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to tell a story (ditto). I think it’s quite interesting to see how a change in style can dramatically alter the feel of a piece. My ‘experiments’ are based on the article I wrote called A bang on the head.

The “story” A Bang on the Head is devoid of literary device, characterisation or even much of a plot. In other words, it’s an ideal canvas on which to try out different treatments.

What I’ve learnt

Style influences the reader’s feelings

The style or treatment of a piece affects the frame of mind in which the reader “receives” it. I knew this already, but it’s useful to be reminded.

For example, in December 2019 I wrote an article called Inspection Of A Computing Department In The Form Of A Really Bad TV Documentary. The article was (I hope) humorous, but also had a serious point to make. Many TV documentaries are superficial, descriptive. Sometimes my lady wife will turn to me after 15 minutes and ask: “Have you learnt anything yet?”, to which I will reply something like, “Yes, I’ve learnt that this plant only flowers once a year, and that it’s possible to say that over and over again in different ways in order ton use up 15 minutes. But I have no idea why it flowers only once a year, or why that’s important, or even why I should want to know that.”

I finished the inspection article with the comment “Fortunately, such an inability to explore interesting and sensible questions would not be found in a real inspection.” That was, to anyone in the know, a completely sarcastic comment, because many inspectors don’t know enough about Computing to be able to ask incisive questions. I could have written the article as a diatribe against inspections and inspectors, but I wanted to describe a completely fictitious and silly inspection scenario in order to highlight how pointless (in my opinion) such inspections are.

In the EiS project, portraying the bang on the head incident as a blues song gives it a completely different feel to, say, putting it in the form of a badly written science fiction story.

Another aspect of this is to experiment with changing the tense. Rewriting A Bang on the Head in the present tense would give it a completely different mood, as would writing it in the future tense (I’ve seen this done, and although it sounds weird it is very effective in conveying a completely different atmosphere than the past or present tense).

Different styles highlight interesting aspects of writing

For example, when I grappled with writing the story using definitions rather than the original nouns, it suddenly became apparent to me how often I’d used “I”. That was highlighted when I kept having to insert “the subject of this article”. So that was a useful warning to myself. I do try to avoid using “I” too much, because it comes across as self-absorbed in my opinion. In fairness to myself, if I’m writing about something that happened to me there isn’t much scope to avoid using “I” — but I can watch out for that in future. Certainly, I think perhaps a good final check on a piece of writing might be to substitute every “I” with “the subject of this article” — taking care to select the options of whole words only and case sensitive, or you will get some peculiar results.

Click the cover to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)

It can really stretch you as a writer

I haven’t done this yet in the EiS project, but try writing an article without using the letter “e” (for example). It would mean coming up with synonyms for every word that uses that letter. Given that it’s the most commonly used letter in English, that’s hard. (George Perec wrote a whole novel, called A Void, without the letter “e”. Hats off to him!)

Another approach might be to write the article in the form of an acrostic. I did this in A Literature Course I'd Like To Take If It Were Available: the title of the course on my wish list is spelled out by taking the first letter of each sentence.

Yet another approach, which I’ve been thinking about for the EiS project, is to rewrite A Bang on the Head such that each sentence begins with the next letter in the alphabet. Thus instead of this:

“In the middle of the night, I woke up (if you can call being semi-conscious being awake), walked purposefully towards the door to go to the bathroom — and almost knocked myself out.”

I might write this:

“At some point in the middle of the night…”

The value in this, as I see it, is that it forces you to consider other constructions, and really push yourself in terms of vocabulary and grammar. You could even use it to illustrate why passive sentences tend to be frowned upon:

Somehow, “I was nearly knocked out by walking into the wall” doesn’t sound right — unless I wish to present myself as having no agency or responsibility in this matter.

It highlights an important question

This is the question that comes up on every writing course I’ve been on: how factual does a nonfiction article have to be, in order to be truthful? For example, does the dialogue have to be absolutely exactly as it was at the time, or is conveying the gist of the idea good enough?

For me, the answer is partly “Well it depends” — if you’re reporting what somebody said which may be used in a court case, for example, I’d prefer you to be absolutely true to the actual words used. But for more general writing, doesn’t the mood matter more?

If, for example, you take my comic strip version, it’s minimalistic in terms of description, and it’s not accurate: I did walk out of the hospital, but not covered in bandages like a mummy! But in my opinion it still conveys the general idea of what happened, and how I felt about it. Or am I merely justifying taking some poetic licence?

Conclusion

I’m finding this project quite enjoyable, not least because it’s so challenging. I don’t know whether I’ll even be able to do some of the tasks I’ve set myself. For example, I should like to try writing A Bang on the Head using a constraint known as the reverse lipogram. This is the opposite of not using a particular letter at all: it’s making sure every word contains that letter. For example, rather than avoid using the letter “e”, it might be that I try to ensure that every word contains an “e”. Now that is going to take some thought!