Blog Entry Five: Experimental Revision

For the fifth blog entry were gonna fiddle around with what you might call "experimental revision." Sometimes these experimental revisions work and sometimes they don't, but it's an approach a lot of writers use when trying to see what craft elements will suit their story best. Sometimes, you don't know until you try it and even if your experiment fails, you'll be all the more sure that your craft decisions were the right ones.

Here's what I want you to do: pick a chunk of your nonfiction essay; it can be a paragraph or the whole essay, if you like, whatever works best for you and your experiment. I then want you to do ONE of the following:

1. Change the tense. If your essay is in past tense see what it will work in present tense or vice versa. OR you could try to only change the tense of specific sections if you like.
2. Change the perspective. If you are writing in 1st person, see what it would sound like in 2nd person direct address.
3. Play with dialogue formatting. The formatting of dialogue has a profound effect on reading. You can eliminate your quotation marks a la Cormac McCarthy, or you could try putting dialogue into free, indirect discourse. You could try writing dialogue in order to mimic an accent (like Jonathan Safran Foer does in Everything Is Illuminated). Think of how the dialogue of one your favorite books is used and try to mimic that style, if you like. There are an infinite number of ways to format and manipulate dialogue. Try one!
4. Play with the order of events or ideas. If your piece is told chronologically, try mixing it up to jump around in time, or vice versa. Try rearranging the order of your ideas in a single paragraph so the logic flows better. Include section breaks and add in transitions to improve pacing.

Again, choose only ONE of these elements to experiment with to see if such a change would improve your essay. In your blog entry, please include BOTH the original excerpt as well as the changed excerpt.
Then, at the end, briefly state whether you will stick with the change or not. Why? How did this experiment affect your essay? Did it make the action awkward, confusing? Did it help further develop character or improve pacing?

Due by Thursday, February 9