Experiments in style: mystery algorithm
What's the underlying set of rules?
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:
For today’s experiment I’ve written the story in accordance with the rules of a particular algorithm. If you think you know what the algorithm is, you can either message me or leave a comment.
First, though, 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.
The mystery algorithm version
Ouch! Oof! That hurt! That was silly. Where’s my sense of direction? Fancy bumping into a wall in my house. I should have turned the light on instead of groping in the dark. I shouldn’t have had a cup of tea so late, then I would not have needed the bathroom during the night. I think that, rather than writing, I should go to Accident and Emergency and get myself checked out for concussion because a bang on the head could, in fact, lead to a fractured skull.
So, it is now a little while later, and I am sitting in Accident and Emergency worrying about whether I am going to catch Covid here because nobody is following the social distancing guidelines or wearing their mask properly, if at all, and nobody here is bothering to even try to enforce these reasonable rules.
It is now a short while later, and i can report to you that i have seen a nurse and she pushed, prodded and poked and waved a pencil backwards and forwards and banged my elbows and knees with a hammer and then told me go home and take it easy, which is going to be hard to do because I have some writing to do which didn’t get done because of all this business, though at least I managed to read seventeen percent of my book – thank goodness!
I hope you enjoyed this version. 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.
As always, I’d love to hear your comments.
Well done. Very clever. That was easily solved. I’ll send you a message shortly. As you can see, I have used the same algorithm.
I don't know anything about algorithms. This one sounded chatty, like a teen-aged blog writer to me.