MONDAY CREATIVE WRITING EXERCISE because it’s a good way to start the week: finding your own words

 Edna O’ Brien writes prose as if she were a poet. It seems as though each word is carefully selected, chosen not just for its meaning but also for its texture, how it feels on the tongue and the way it connects with the other words around it .

This week’s task is to translate the following paragraph from Girl with Green Eyes. Put it into your own words. You can’t use any of the original  (except those small useful words we can’t live without – and, in, the, he etc).

You can make it longer but don’t lose the sense of the paragraph. At the end you will have made it your own and perhaps created two new characters in the process that have nothing to do with the great Edna.

In the evening he listened to music and sat very still.  Gloom spread over the house as the mountain mist spread over the fields in the wet evenings, and I felt that I had never known him.  He was a stranger, a mad martyr nailed to his chair, thinking and sighing and smoking.