Experiments in style: The Christmas Letter

It's that time of year again

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.

The Christmas Letter

The Christmas letters we receive are either (it seems to me) nothing other than a huge bragfest, or an exercise in extended banality — such as the one I received some years ago in which I was solemnly informed that the writer’s mother had banged her elbow.

Therefore, in this ‘experiment’ I have attempted to combine these two approaches. I hope you enjoy them, if ‘enjoy’ is indeed the word I am looking for in this context.

Cartoon showing the Yerret Manfreed family, as drawn by Terry Freedman

Dear <insert name>

Oh my goodhness! Is it really a year since we last wrote? So much has happened that I hardly know where to start.

Tarquin won a scholarship to study in France for a month. It overran slightly and we were so worried that he might miss the start of the new term at St Cuthbert’s that we hired a helicopter to get him to the school on time.

Phoebe-Mirabelle attained Gold in her ballet lessons and was elected head of the hockey team.

I’ve been busy running my charities and keeping my mail order business ticking over.

The house sustained some storm damage recently, so we’re having the west wing renovated, and there’s a chappie coming up from Hampton Court to advise us on the maze.

We decided to treat ourselves to a world cruise, and the captain invited us to his table. Mind you, it was all wasted on Yerret because he spent most of the time in the cabin writing, and moaning about the fact that the rules of social distancing weren’t being enforced, and that nobody was wearing a mask or wearing it properly.

“We are being tossed and turned and carried hither and thither on a floating disease carrier”, he kept saying.

Anyway, he continued writing until we hit a bit of turbulance, causing him to bang his head on one of the cabin walls.

After that all he did was wander around, looking out to sea and muttering,

“So this is where it ends. My words, cast over the waters like so much flotsam and jetsam. My legacy drowned in a sea of sorrows, never again to see the light of day.”

After several days of this I said to him, “For heaven’s sake, Yerret, go and see the ship’s doctor.”

It took some persuading, including a threat to have him thrown overboard (!), but in the end he did. The doctor said he had mild concussion, gave him an aspirin, and told him to relax and enjoy the rest of the cruise.

He didn’t like the fact that he wasn’t able to get much writing done, but was very pleased to have the opportunity to read nearly twenty percent of his book.

Well, that’s it from me. You really must tell me all your news, which I await with baited breath.

Have a lovely Christmas (we’re hiring a private chef for our Christmas dinner) and New Year.

Love

Yvette xx

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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!

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