Experiments in style: New Journalism

Can you spot any particular influences?

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 in the form of an article in, broadly speaking, the style of what was called “the new journalism”. This was characterised by the use of fictional techniques in nonfiction articles.

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.

New Journalism version

The first thing that hits you when you leave Freedman Towers and emerge onto the highway is the heat. Over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, rendered even more stifling by the contrast between the cool air in the building and the unremitting onslaught of the wind under the cloudless sky.

Imagine this road. It seems like any other urban roadway, bland, characterless, although after twilight the shapes of houses and the gaping alleyways take on a more sinister mien.

The road at night, by Terry Freedman

Walk past the newly-painted house whose garden is strewn with building detritus. Gone are the beautifully laid-out flower beds. Gone are the miniature trees dispensing their perfume in response to the gentle breeze.

Keep walking past the forlorn pillar box standing sentry-like outside the dark complex that only the locals know to be a psychiatric hospital.

And then, after twenty minutes in which you avoid eye contact with the one person you pass by who is shuffling along with her head down, turn left into the grounds of the general hospital, past the mortuary that, perhaps as the architect’s private joke, sits cheek by jowl with a children’s nursery.

Enter the brightly-lit but atmospherically cold Accident and Emergency department, where people have gathered partly to escape the relentless heat, and partly in the almost-forlorn hope of being treated for whatever mishap has befallen them this evening.

A department in which social distancing is clearly an unknown concept, a place where only a scattered few have even bothered to don a mask, much less wear it properly.

You pause for a moment as you reflect upon the fact that this, many years ago, was the place to which the writer Yerret Manfreed slouched, on a night much like this, complaining of headaches and nausea.

Manfreed has never spoken publicly about his ordeal, but we can piece together some of what happened both from his notes and from conversations with his friends and family. It appears that one night he awoke, and rushed headlong towards the bathroom, but in his haste and tiredness took a wrong turn and crashed into the wall instead.

As it happens, a nurse told him he was suffering only from a mild concussion, and, in her words, to “take it easy”. He had failed to write anything for several days, but while waiting to be seen in the hospital managed to read seventeen percent of his book.

Some say that his novel, A Bang on the Head, was in fact autobiographical, and based on this very episode in his life. However, Manfreed has never said whether or not this is the case, and has maintained his silence on the subject to this day.

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!