“The Perfect Couple” – Creative Clinic Oct 22
This month’s excerpts are from a fictional book entitled:
“The Perfect Couple” by Jackie Kabler (2020); a psychological thriller published by One More Chapter.
Let’s rewrite each one 5 different ways…
It’ll be fun to see how other students create different work!
Created using images from: Pixabay.com – Pexels; Anatoly777; mohamed_hassan; Geralt.
In the "Creative Clinic" exercises, we take short excerpts and re-write them in 5 different ways. We use text from real-world examples: books, articles or websites etc.
1) Restructure: this is the same as the restructure exercise. Staying very close to expressing the original meaning, but with different words, phrases and sentence structure.
2) Change/Add Adverbs: keeping the same basic meaning but adding adverbs to make it more expressive, or changing the adverbs that are already there.
3) Change/Add Adjectives: keeping the same basic meaning but adding adjectives to make it more expressive, or changing the adjectives that are already there.
4) Opposite: using antonyms, express an opposite meaning.
5) Flowery/Poetic/Figurative speech: keep the same very basic meaning, but make it more imaginative and creative by using idioms and other figurative speech. Perhaps even making it poetic.
You can submit your work to the comments sections. Every exercise has its own forum: please click on the link buttons at the top of the page.
The teacher chooses certain pieces to correct, re-write or make comments. Students can too.
Over the coming days and weeks, the teacher will post a variety of corrected examples of student work, along with some extra comments. These examples will be posted at the end of the main lesson.
Created using images from: Pexels.com - RODNAE Productions.
Excerpt 1
It was the silence I noticed first. When Danny was around there was always noise, singing or humming, the tap-tapping of a lap-top keyboard, the prolonged clatter of spoon against ceramic mug as he stirred his black coffee vigorously for far too long, in my view, for a man who didn't even take sugar in it - what was he stirring?
Excerpt 2
No sign of any fresh food. He hadn't even gone shopping? What was going on? Had something happened at work, delaying him? He'd told me he'd be finishing at lunchtime that day, for once, that he'd have plenty of time to do the supermarket run for a change, save me doing it on Saturday morning as I usually did, while he stayed at home to run the vacuum round and flick a duster over the shelves.
Excerpt 3
'Holy cow. It's like looking at brothers. Coincidence, or not? What do you make of that, guy?' Detective Sergeant Devon Clarke glanced over his shoulder. Behind him, Detective Chief Inspector Helena Dickens nodded slowly, indigo eyes fixed on the two photos on the board. 'I dunno. Not yet, anyway. But yes, they do look spookily similar. Weird, eh?'
Created using images from: Pexels.com - ColiN00B.
In the coming days and weeks, the teacher will add corrections and suggestions based on a variety of student work taken from the comments sections.
This work will be added to the end of the lesson.
In due time, the lesson will be "closed" and no more comments will be possible.
So please contribute and keep coming back to see updates!