The point of these technical exercises is this: Most apprentice writers underestimate the difficulty of becoming artists; they do not understand or believe that great writers are usually those who, like concert pianists, know many ways of doing everything they do. Knowledge is no substitute for genius; but genius supported by vast technique makes a literary master. --John Gardner
04 October 2010
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.
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