Experiments in Style Extra: Anaphora and Holmes

***Plus*** <FANFARE> A glimpse into my writing process

Greetings!

In this post Terry discusses anaphora and the difficulties he had with applying it, and  the processes he went through when developing his parody of a Sherlock Holmes story

The most recent two versions of my ‘Bang on the head’ story (which surely, in a just world, would have attracted the attention of film rights buyers by now?) were anaphora and a Sherlock Holmes story.

Some notes on the anaphora version

As readers quickly worked out, anaphora is the technique whereby each sentence begins in the same way. I suppose the most famous example of this is For Want of a Nail¹:

Illustration of For Want of a Nail, from Ideogram.ai

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For want of a horse the rider was lost,
For want of a rider the battle was lost,
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

That looks easy enough, doesn’t it? Indeed, when I published the epistrophe version of the story,

Jim Cummings

commented: “Next version anaphora?” And yes, that had been my original intention. That was back in January, and it’s taken me five months — FIVE MONTHS! — to come up with something. And what did I come up with? A whole load of sentences beginning with “Because” — hardly the stuff Booker Prizewinning entries are made of.

So what were the factors that made this particular style so difficult?