Experiments in Style: Another point of view

A third party narrative

Greetings!

If you’re new here then you can find out all about this project of mine here:

Experimenting with styles

But in a nutshell it’s this: I’ve been taking a short and very bland story and rewriting it in different styles. This time I’ve chosen to write it from the standpoint of a different person. Let’s see how it goes.

A bang on the head (template)

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.

Another viewpoint

When I went down to the hospital the other day, I bumped into some man who didn’t seem that unwell to me. He did seem a bit annoyed though. Well, you know me. I always try and be friendly to people if I can. So I said to him, “You alright, mate? Don’t worry, it might never happen.”

He told me he’d banged his head, and his mrs had told him to get himself checked out because he was getting headaches and stuff. “Is that why you look a bit cheesed off?” I said. “No”, he said. “It’s all these people. Don’t they know there’s a pandemic on? They’re all sitting virtually on top of each other. And they’re not even wearing their masks properly. They’re meant to cover your nose and mouth, not your chin.”

I asked him how it happened, and he said he got out of bed on the wrong side in the dark, and hit his head on the way to the bathroom. Sounded a bit weird to me. You’d think he’d know what direction he was facing in, but his excuse was that he was half asleep.

Turns out he’s a writer, but he hadn’t been able to do any writing because of the headaches, and he couldn’t work in the hospital.

Anyway, the conversation petered out, and he just buried his head in his book. Antisocial is what I call that behaviour, but we’re all different I suppose.

After about an hour he was called in by a nurse, and came out around 20 minutes later looking as happy as Larry.

“You’ll live then?, I said.

“Oh yeah, thanks. Apparently it’s a bit of mild concussion. What a waste of a day. Still, at least I managed to read a bit of my book.”

And then he was off. Didn’t even bother to say bye bye. I don’t know why I bother sometimes.

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Well, what do you think?

See the index of these posts here: Experiments in Style Index. I’ve started a new section called Experiments in Style Extra. This is for paid subscribers, and will feature posts explaining how I went about doing some of these styles.