He starts off with a short account of a bus journey in Paris .. a rather scruffy bloke gets into an argument with another passenger, then he finds a seat. Later , he meets up with a friend who points out that a button on his coat needs attention.
Nothing much in that .. but then he goes on to retell that same story in 100 different ways ...he makes various poems out of it, he tells it from different points of view, he writes it as a telegram, he does it in reverse chronological order, he writes it from the point of view of a rather unsure witness, he tells it in terms of what doesn't happen .....
While I was laid up with the lurgi for most of January I passed some of the hours by doing my own version of that in French and Spanish ...when you're ill, Welsh is too steep a climb! One of the neat things about it is that you can do it at almost any level ... you can choose a bit of writing to "alter", easy or hard, long or short, you can do very simple things to the story ...adding adjectives, making it a bit more exciting, or more boring, you can add little details of your own.... and if you are pretty fluent you can do much more. I did that, plus I wrote one of them as a film script with stage directions, I revamped one of them from the point of view of the book he was reading ....
Anyway, now I'm feeling a bit better, I'm going to have a go at it with Welsh.
But ..what am I going to choose as my "story?"
Well, what about the start of "Gwepsgodyn", a brilliant story by Martin Waddell?
Jac Mymryn oedd y plentyn lleiaf yn nosbarth 6 yn Ysgol Cae'r Ffynnon.
Un bore roedd e'n bwyta creision ar ei ffordd i'r ysgol pan ....gafodd
Dafydd Gwepsgodyn o ddosbarth 7 afael arno. Doedd Gwepsgodyn ddim ar ei ben ei hyn. Roedd ei giang o ddosbarth 7 gydag e.
How about that ? You've got a bit of dramatic tension there!
Here's some of the millions of things that could be done ....
Put it all into the future.. or another tense.
Tell the story backwards.
Turn it into sensational Sun-style article about urban gangland.
Write it as a telegram explaining what has happened.
Write it from the point of view of the gang.
Write it as a police report after Jac's mum had complained.
Write Jac's horoscope for that day.
Put loads of extra adjectives into it.
Write it as a psychiatric report.
Exaggerate everything wildly !
Replace each of the nouns with the noun seven places up from it in your dictionary.
Replace all the verbs with the verb seven places up in your dictionary.
Take it apart and just list all the bits under Nouns/Adjectives/Verbs/etc
Put it into google Translate, cycle it through 5 or 6 languages, turn it back into Welsh!
Explain each thing he that happens in two different ways.
Write it as though he fell asleep and it was all a terrible dream.
Add on what happened next... or what Jac imagines might happen next.
Write it as a witness who isn't too sure about what happened.
Write it as some sort of poem.
A is telling B what happened, but B keeps interrupting to ask more questions.
Get 5 random words from the dictionary ( or somewhere) and fit them into the story.
First off, we could simply calm everything down a bit with a couple of simple alterations!
Jac Mymryn oedd y plentyn lleiaf yn nosbarth 12 yn Ysgol Cae'r Ffynnon.
Un bore roedd e'n bwyta creision ar ei ffordd i'r ysgol pan ....gafodd Dafydd Gwepsgodyn o ddosbarth 3 afael arno. Oedd Gwepsgodyn ar ei ben ei hyn. Doedd ei giang o ddosbarth 3 dim gydag e.
Mind you, it rather ruins the next scene ... but that's not your problem really.
There's plenty of other ways we can make our own version ...
Jac " Lladdwr" Mymryn oedd y plentyn mwya drygionus yn nosbarth 6 yn Ysgol Cae'r Ffynnon.
Un bore roedd e'n bwyta hoelen ar ei ffordd i'r ysgol pan ....gafodd
Dafydd "Edlych" Gwepsgodyn o ddosbarth 7 afael arno. Doedd Gwepsgodyn ddim ar ei ben ei hyn. Roedd ei mam-gu gydag e.
There ! That's improved Jac's life-chances considerably. So .. you get the idea ... it doesn't need to be anything too virtuosic (?) ..... have a go! Send your efforts in.... or not, as the case usually is. Let's face it, Jac's got away with it lightly so far. But now it's time for music, and we're going to have Y Promatics ... hey, oddly, they're playing on a bloody bandstand ... eventually.