Another writing challenge

[TheFifthElement]

Take a sentence from a book then write 15 sentences using only the words in your original sentence (it helps if it's a long one). Try and make it into a story.

Here's my effort:

Original sentence:
If I strung that old fiddle with your hair, we could waltz together to the music as the exhausted daylight founders among the trees; we should have better music than the shrill prothalamions of the larks stacked in their pretty cages as the roof creaks with the freight of birds you’ve lured to it while we engage in your profane mysteries under the leaves.
Angela Carter – The Erl King (The Bloody Chamber)


Waltz

Daylight creaks with shrill music. Together we waltz, exhausted, among the trees. I fiddle with your pretty hair, strung with leaves. We waltz. The music founders.

We should have stacked cages in the trees, lured a freight of birds with their music to it. I should have strung birds to your hair, pretty cages. Better that the daylight founders than the music. We waltz. The trees, with their shrill leaves, engage the music.

Mysteries.

Lured to the music in the trees. Birds, profane and pretty. Daylight founders. Under the leaves, we waltz.

[TheBearJew]

Cool. I think we can all write with an improved flow when we limit our lazy word usage.

[hillwalker]

Uh, well, having found a long sentence (!) I thought I would take the challenge a stage further and use each word in the sentence only the once!


Original sentence from Faulkner's 'The Sound And The Fury' :

Father will be dead in a year they say if he doesn’t stop drinking and he won’t stop he can’t stop since I since last summer and then they’ll send Benjy to Jackson I can’t cry I can’t even cry one minute she was standing in the door the next minute he was pulling at her dress and bellowing his voice hammered back and forth between the walls in waves and she shrinking against the wall getting smaller and smaller with her white face her eyes like thumbs dug into it until he pushed her out of the room his voice hammering back and forth as though its own momentum would not let it stop as though there were no place for it in silence bellowing.

Cut and pasted in the style of the original -

And then father dug his thumbs into his face. Her white summer dress shrinking against her. Getting smaller and smaller. As though she was standing in back-and-forth waves with no momentum. Eyes drinking in the silence of her cry. As though she were Benjy.

He will not stop pulling at the walls to the room. He can’t. If he doesn’t stop it they’ll say let it be. The minute wall; a minute hammered door. Its voice, like her cry.

In the dead place, back and forth between in and out they would own one voice.

He won’t stop hammering and bellowing. And I can’t even send Jackson until next year. Since I was last there, since I pushed for it he can’t stop bellowing.

I admit neither make much sense on a cursory reading, but it was fun (in the broadest definition of the word)

H

[MANICHAEAN]

From "Visions And Revisions" by John Cowper Powys.

My own object in these sketchs is not to convert the reader to whatever "opinions" I may have formulated in the course of my spiritual adventures; it is to divest myself of such "opinions," and in pure, passionate humility to give myself up, absolutely and completely, to the various visions and temperaments of these great dead artists.


I have "opinions."
Sketches formulated in the course of my spiritual adventures.
And various of,
Up to it.
Whatever is vision?
To give "opinions."
Of such may,
My own object is to divest myself,
Not in these,
Myself and these.
Great dead artists convert the reader,
In pure, passionate humility,
Temperaments, absolutely and completely.
To, to the.

Interesting & wierd mental exercise.
It came out not as a story, but as some sort of obtuse parody of a 16th Century poetry format

And damm. Could not get the 15th sentence. (Not that "To, to the" is within the boundary of conventional acceptance!)

[breathtest]

my head is going to explode with this challenge. Nice idea