Nursery Rhymes Redux

Group writing exercise:

Think of a popular nursery rhyme of children’s story. Most stories will have a couple of main characters and some secondary characters. Humpty Dumpty had a king, a whole army of men AND their horses involved in a failed attempt to rebuild him. Take one of these secondary characters.

With 10 minutes on the clock, write out the story in first person from the perspective of this secondary character, but don’t mention the characters’ names. After the timer has sounded, read out your stories one at a time. See how long it takes for the group to realise what story each person has chosen. Here’s what I conjured:

So he rolls in, me young lad, tears in his eyes and all. Once he’s stopped all his blubbering, it turns out it’s all over some girl- not the accident. He’s in a bad shape, mind. Summat wrong wi’ ‘is ‘ed. Can’t remember where his bucket is, so that’s us wi’ no water for stew tonight. I tries to comfort ‘im, but he’s not ‘avin’ it. I do what I can wi’ him, well, he’s me son an’ all. So I starts rummaging through the cupboards for bandages an’ antiseptic.

We ran out o’ all that ages ago, though, so I grabs what I can. Bit o’ vinegar should disinfect the wounds. Well, you’d think I were murderin’ him, the way he were squealing.

His cuts are ‘orrible deep, like, so I wrapped ‘em up tight around his head. We ‘ad no bandages, like I said, so I pulled the brown paper wrappin’ from the kitchen over the wounds, and said “keep that pressed on, lad.”

Teach him to go playin’ wit’ local harlots.

I take it you figured it out pretty quick. The group told me I’d made my vignette too easy. Interestingly, two other members of the group used Jack and Jill for their story. They pointed out, though, that in the original rhyme, Jack bandaged his own head. There’s no mother figure in this rhyme.

The purpose of this exercise was to think about stories from another perspective than the norm. This technique could be applied equally to popular nursery rhymes or historical occurrences.

James Ellroy's American Tabloid, for instance, describes a group of FBI agents whose dirty dealings result in the planning and executing of JFK’s assassination.

Forrest Gump weaves American history, pinning the events to the wanderings of a learning-disabled bloke from the Deep South.

Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy revealed that Earth’s evolution was nothing more than the development of a supercomputer intent on figuring out the meaning of life.

With that in mind, however, it’s clear that I completely messed up the original story. The popular version has no mention of the mother. Other versions do include her though- and she’s a big, mean woman. Well, I guessed that about right! 

Pic courtesy dacotahsgirl, Flickr