Experiments in style: A merry dance

A terpsichorean-inspired version + *another prize competition*

Greetings!

One of the things I’ve been trying out is reworking a piece of text into a completely different style. A full exposition and explanation are given here:

Experimenting with styles

The aim of these experiments is to explore how different styles and approaches can affect the tone of a story.

For today’s experiment I wrote the story from a third person point of view, and incorporating several kinds of dance.

But enough of this persiflage! Here is the original text on which these experiments or transformations are based:

The original (template) text

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.

The reason was that in the twin states of entire darkness and semi-somnambulance I was facing in a different direction from the one I thought I was facing. As a result, instead of walking through the door, I tried to walk through the wall.

The next few days brought nausea and headaches. After much prevarication I went to Accident and Emergency, where I waited petrified among people for whom “social distancing” means not quite touching you, and who wore their masks as a chin-warmer.

An hour and a half later I emerged into the twilight, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing more serious than mild concussion. I failed to do much writing, but I was pleased to have read a further 17% of my book.

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Prize competition

Last week I set a competition that was so difficult that nobody entered! It involved looking at a mangled version of a previous ‘experiment’ and identifying which one it was. The answer was…

…

the disco version. I thought someone might twig because of the number of instances of the letter ‘o’, derived from such deep and meaningful lyrics as:

Oooh, ooh-ooh

Oooh, ooh-ooh

Oh yeah

Oooh, ooh-ooh

Anyway, as people found it too hard I thought I’d set an easier challenge, which I’ll describe below.

You can enter this competition to win a one year paid subscription. You have to already be a subscriber to enter. If you already have a paid subscription, I’ll give you a complimentary subscription for a year, at the end of which you’ll carry on being billed unless you cancel it. If you already have a complimentary subscription, then I could give a year’s subscription to a friend of yours, assuming you have any friends.

If you haven’t fallen asleep yet, here’s the deal. In the following version of the story, I’ve included the names of twenty three dances. All you have to do is:

1. Identify all 23 dances.

2. Let me know what they are via this form by Midnight GMT Sunday 15th December 2024.

3. Once I’ve identified the correct entries, I’ll select the winner by a random process¹.

Even if you can’t identify them or can’t be bothered (and who would blame you?), I hope you enjoy this version in its own right.

A merry dance

Picture poor Terrence. In November 2021, when Covid, lockdown and panic were in full swing, he suddenly realised he was hungry. Nothing wrong with that, you might think, except that it was in the middle of the night, which isn’t a great time to eat. In any case, Terrence was half-asleep when he decided it was a time for popping to the kitchen to grab a big apple, or maybe a bag of popcorn (the bigger the better) or (pushing the boat out a bit) a salsa sandwich.

Well, our unlikely hero did not get as far as the kitchen. Indeed, he didn’t get far at all. What with it being the middle of the night (as I have already said), it being pitch black (Terrence didn’t believe in wasting electricity), his being half-asleep (again, as I’ve already mentioned), with the half that was awake thinking only of food, Terrence crashed into a wall, head first.

As you can imagine, he bounced like a boomerang and ended up on the floor, which he hadn’t swept recently, thereby gaining a black bottom as well as a headache.

For several days Terrence wandered around the house, trying to get some writing done, and feeling, as an American night put it, like a real jerk. To say he had the blues would be putting it mildly. And from what I’ve been told by his long-suffering wife, he wasn’t a barrel of laughs to live with. She kept telling him to go and get checked out at the hospital, but the more she implored him the more stubborn he became. Like a mule on steroids. In the end she said that if he didn’t stop tutting all the time and actually do something about it, she was going to go on strike. No more burgers and mashed potato, his favourite dish. No more TV cops series. No more hushed silence while he worked his magic with a pen. Horrified, Terrence leapt up, muttered something about being hitched to a harridan, grabbed his coat, and set off to hitchhike to the hospital.

“Don’t jaywalk”, called out his wife as the door slammed, causing the walls to shudder and shake.

Down at the accident and emergency department, hardly anyone was wearing a mask, or wearing it properly. And social distancing? As Gandhi almost said when asked what he thought of Western civilisation, that would have been a good idea. It took some fancy footwork on Terrence’s part to manoeuvre himself into a spot that, while not perfect, was by no means as unsafe as elsewhere in the room.

Eventually, a nurse came and took him to a side room. The way Terrence tells it, she was some kind of psycho. She started to spank him on his thighs, and then made him move his arms around like a monkey. After waving a finger to and fro about an inch from his eyes, she said he was suffering from mild concussion and that it would be advisable to take it easy for a week.

Obviously, being a bit of a hypochondriac – ok, a lot of a hypochondriac – Terrence thought she was withholding vital information.

“Look”, he said as she started to throw him out. “Tell me the truth. How long have I got to live? Don’t jive me.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake!” was her only answer as she called out “Next!”.

While waiting at bus stop, Terrence saw a seedy-looking creature slouching towards him. “This guy’s going to try and hustle me”, thought Terrence. “We’ll soon see about that.”

Once a teacher, always a teacher, and Terrence, a former teacher, was still able to wield the ultimate weapon, the Medusa-like stare that could turn hardened criminals to stone. The poor fellow turned white, and then turned on his heels.

“Chicken!”, said Terrence under his breath as he shambled home.

So there you are. He didn’t get any writing done but, he confided to me, waiting in the hospital was a welcome opportunity to catch up on his reading. He positively beamed as he informed me that he’d got through nearly a fifth of his book.

Or perhaps that had more to do with the fact that his lady wife made him bangers and mash as a welcome home gift.

Or was it more in the way of a peace offering? I’m afraid I didn’t probe that deeply.

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Just in case that version didn’t grab you, so to speak, here are a couple of short Fred Astaire clips, one with Ginger Rogers, the other with Rita Hayworth. Enjoy!

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I hope you have enjoyed this version of the story. Comments are welcomed, as always. If you’d like to dig deeper, I often write an ‘Experiments in style extra’ post to explain how a version came about, or how I did it. That’s for paid subscribers.

If you’re new to the series, you can see the index of my experiments here: Index.

Thank you for reading!

And remember:

1. Identify all 23 dances in this version.

2. Let me know what they are via this form by Midnight GMT Sunday 15th December 2024 in order to be in with a chance of winning the prize.

1. Either the Classroom tool or with a spreadsheet.