Writing Exercise: Develop Your Craft by Alternating Perspectives

If you want to improve your writing technique then—just like building physical strength and endurance—exercise. One of the books I read for school, The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, offers many writing exercises. One is to take a simple event and describe it using the same characters and setting in five radically different ways (changes of style, tone, sentence structure, voice, psychic distance, etc.).The event: A man gets off a bus, trips, looks around in embarrassment, and sees a woman smiling. Below are my five radically different attempts to describe this event. How would you write this scene? Email it to me!The man, draped in purple velvet—who wears velvet in the summer in Los Angeles?—large enough to play offensive line for the Raiders, and maybe he does play for the Raiders, stood when the bus stopped but the bus didn’t stop completely—it inched closer to the sign in fits and starts—and now the purple man, holding a mobile in one hand and Infinite Jest in the other and no hands on a railing or seat, caught his right foot behind his left and I saw it in slow motion, the world just kind of paused, as he fell forward just tumbling down the bus aisle and I saw him choose—yes, I swear he chose—to drop the mobile and protect the book and not vice versa and he crashed—you’d think it was another earthquake—right on his right shoulder with the novel tucked in his other arm like a football and suddenly I recalled my mother, night after night, reading m...
Source: cancerslayerblog - Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: imaginative MFA Source Type: blogs