Exercise 2

Take a simple event: A man gets off a bus, trips, looks around in embarrassment. and sees a woman smiling. (Compare Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style.) Describe this event, using the same characters and elements of setting, in five completely different ways (changes of style, tone, sentence structure, voice, psychic distance, etc.). Make sure the styles are radically different; otherwise, the exercise is wasted.

Technique Exercise 1

Write the paragraph that would appear in a piece of fiction just before the discovery of a body. You might perhaps describe the character's approach to the body (s)he will find, or the location, or both. The purpose of this exercise is to develop the technique of at once attracting the reader toward the paragraph to follow, making her want to skip ahead, and holding her on this paragraph by virtue of its interest. Without the ability to write such foreplay paragraphs, one can never achieve real suspense.