“What it you want? “Bernard said”
The speech that I used for Bernard made him seem hostile and this may make the reader believe there is a mystery to be uncovered, because he is not forthcoming and friendly. I have also used dialogue to help find out more from the mystery for example,
“Where did you get that?”
This is very useful, but also I have included description to help emphasise important parts of the story shown by,
“I had a piece of material, it was brown, with white polka dot spots on it.”
The piece of material which, I wrote about had to be distinctive and visible to the reader so it could link in their mind that there was a mystery unfolding.
Also, I decided to have fairly short sentences that were easy and simple for my target age range to understand. Such as,
“I walked across the farmyard and knocked on the Farmer’s door.”
The shortness of the sentences makes the story more tense and interesting, this also links to the shorter paragraphs because if the sentences are shorter then my particular paragraphs may make the points go quicker and speed the story up. Therefore enabling me to produce a story that moves quickly and effectively. I looked at my style model, which was written by Ruth Rendell called, “Some Lie and Some Die”. I looked through at the sentences in her book and I found the sentences were quite long and descriptive shown by,
“When he had finished, he waited for the tide to roll over him again, and it came pounding from and through the crowd a river of acclaim”
The long sentences in Rendell’s book are like this because her story does not need to be a short story and is in fact a book involving a lot of description. I attempted however to involve certain things in my story that were important to it and described them.
I also looked at the way Rendell had set-up her paragraphs and also found that they were long and contained large amounts of description and long, punctuated sentences.
I tried to include limited punctuation, so that the reader could read a basic simple mystery an example of my basic simple sentences are,
“I got up, and went to the basin to wash my face.”
Finally, I decided to give my piece an eerie tone, for it was a mystery and needed to have a strange mysterious feel, so I made the weather bad and this might signify to the reader that something strange is going to happen in the story as shown by,
“They ceased, and came bounding toward me, their faces muddy and wet, and the rain was beginning to fall.”
As regards to the changes in my piece, I did not change very much of it. But in version one, I knew that I had to include more of a description to the material I found to emphasise its importance. It was not enough to put,
“It was just an old scrap of material”
Secondly, a change was that I needed to link back certain parts of the story and included things like,
“I remembered the events of the previous day.”
So I enjoyed writing this piece, the mystery is satisfactory and interesting and makes its targeted age range.
Word count: 716