Weekly Wattpad Contests

Contest #58

Before we go completely cray-cray:

I apologise for the delay in this contest. I've been unavailable this weekend and I haven't had a proper opportunity to draft this.

The results for the Whodunit are a work in progress, and will most likely appear at the end of this week with the results for the previous contest.

I try my very best these days to be clear about the instructions for the contest, but I still find it a very difficult thing to do, so, for the time being, if something is unclear, consider that an opportunity to take artistic liberty in the contest's interpretation. I'm fairly lenient on following the prompt, and exploration and rule-breaking is generally encouraged anyway.

The complete cray-cray:

The idea has been floating around the clouds in my brain for a while now. I wonder, what is the power of words?

It's a general and consistent truth that I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about things. Words fall from my lips without a second consideration – I love them, and I use them. I use them freely, and I suspect that many of them have lost their meaning to me.

I was reading when one of the final passages to Lovecraft's 'The Haunter of the Dark' struck me with a peculiar revelation:

"The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when the intruders saw the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark, convulsive fright on the twisted features, they turned away in sickened dismay. Shortly afterward the coroner's physician made an examination, and despite the unbroken window reported electrical shock, or nervous tension induced by electrical discharge, as the cause of death. The hideous expression he ignored altogether, deeming it a not improbable result of the profound shock as experienced by a person of such abnormal imagination and unbalanced emotions."

It's always a beautiful experience when we can read a book without thinking about the writing itself. To be so absorbed that the suspension of belief holds you in a world separate from the craft itself is the goal of most, if not all, storytellers. But this one, that paragraph right there, came at me like a brick wall.

I was so taken by the almost poetic flow of it, the sharp, clear images that my brain conjured up through a combination of descriptive work and implied images. We all understand what a "rigid body sat bolt upright" might look like, but "the profound shock as experience by a person of such abnormal imagination" is a wild guess at best.

So I began to wonder, to ponder, to twist and turn the phrases in my mind. I experimented with contorting them – what's the difference between "turned away in sickened dismay" as Lovecraft writes it and "recoiled, fighting the rising bile" as I might have written it. On the surface, they imply they same thing, but they give such very distinct tones which lends a lot to the atmosphere of the narrative.

And that is where your task comes in. A challenge, of sorts, I suppose.

I want you to imagine a scene, and then narrate it using your natural writing style. It doesn't need to be very long or decidedly meaningful or anything like that. The challenge is rewriting the exact same scene, using different words to see if you can change the overall mood, or the give a different impression on the same events.

I encourage you to explore as much as possible. Think about the possibilities your scene might take, and what you can do to vary that as much as possible in the rewrite.

Using tone and atmosphere in our writing is a very useful skill which helps readers readily connect to the visuals of it. Often, we find they cater to the specific goal a scene has, such as in the example above. Lovecraft is preparing us for the very end of the story by making the dead body seem almost pitiable and in some way alien to the people who have seen plenty of dead bodies before.

How might you have rewritten the paragraph to portray a superstitious fear? Or perhaps a nervous expectation?

I hope you enjoy this exploration. It's, quite frankly, been driving me mad for a couple of days. 

Due Date: Sunday 22 September