How I wrote the Mastermind version

plus a few general notes

Revealed at last! The secret of my genius creativity. Read on to marvel and learn.

One of the nice things about writing my experiments in style is I often receive a comment like, “I don’t know how you come up with all these different versions and still remain true to the original story.” The most recent one to elicit such a comment was the Mastermind version.

In case you’re not familiar with this project, I’m rewriting a very simple story — not much more than an anecdote really — and rewriting it in different styles. For example, there’s the Mastermind (quiz show) version just mentioned, a Sherlock Holmes version and a hardboiled detective version, not to mention a badly-written science fiction version.

A cartoon of Terry working on an experiment in style, by Terry Freedman

So how do I manage to write the story in all these different ways? In this post I’m looking at the three elements that I’ve found to be essential.