An Exercise in Style

The Purpose

Exercises in style? Huh?

Hey, a lot of you out there may have written a short story or two, only to wonder about whether or not you told it 'correctly.' You may have agonized over whether or not it should have been in a first-person perspective or third. Maybe your main character is all wrong. Maybe you didn't quite like the setting. But, hey, what could you do?

This project is a way to investigate how much a simple story can change when only one detail is altered. The original short story just revolves around two boys having a sleepover when they hear a scary noise. That's it.

Nothing to write home about, right?

What if they were Goths? Or twenty years old? Or girls? What if I couldn't use more than fifty words to tell the story? What if I was drunk when I wrote it? What if Chuck Palahniuk or Stephen King wrote it? What if it was a videogame? The possibilities are endless.

This is an ongoing archive of all the different ways to tell this story. As with my other side project Rap Intellectualized, if you have a possible way to tell it, feel free to suggest it and I'll see just how it affects the tale.

Here's to imagination!