For those that don’t know, I joined a writers group a few months ago in hopes that I might improve my skills as a writer…. We have an exercise that we do each meeting. I have decided to post them here to share what I have done….
This is the one I chose: ( I have no idea if I did what I was supposed to..)
Write a simple sentence — for example, The man walked down the road. — then rewrite the sentence as many times as necessary each time adding modifiers to the different syntactic slots (meaning units 1. the man, 2. walked, 3. the road). So for the first one you might write something along the lines of, “The man, stooped, bent almost double under his load of tin pans, yet smiling with a sort of maniacal good cheer and chattering to himself in what seemed to be Slavonian, walked down the road.”
And here is what I wrote:
The mouse ate the cheese.
The mouse licked its whiskers, hungrily eyeing the trap and wondered when was the last time he ate the delectable cheese he so craved.
Scurrying closer the mouse tried to ignore the rumblings in his empty stomach, as it had been days since he had had any food and only in his little mouse dreams had he recently ate any of the lovely cheese.
The mouse knew it was a risk, but he just had to get closer, maybe just to sniff, maybe for a taste, maybe to finally find out why all the mice died that ate the cheese from the terrible things.
He was close enough to lick it now, but the mouse hesitated before he began to stick his neck out to get his teeth into it, thinking how jealous all the other mice would be when he told them he finally ate the cheese.
As the tightly wound spring swung the bar around to end its meager life, the mouse unknowingly ate its last meal of the cheese set out so cleverly on the trap.
