Whimsical Writing For NaBloPoMo

It’s taken some discipline, but I enjoyed my first week participating in National Blog Poasting Month! Needless to say, I found some cool bloggers and enjoyed reading their posts. This post is inspired by Tobia’s creativity with words themselves.

Whimsical Writing For NaBloPoMo

Tobia posted a list of English vocabulary words she’s learning, and as I was reading them I found myself trying to make up a story. It’s not nearly as creative as her black-out poetry (so cool!), but I had fun with it.

I entreat you to steer clear of my pugnacious neighbor. I don’t mean to make you dawdle, but I’m feeling pallid after a lewd encounter with the man—I thought he was a genteel gentile!

To think I nearly fell for someone so tawdry. He had the nerve to get uppity and acerbic when I rebuked him. I found it farcical he thought so highly of himself, a sedentary ne’er do well impervious to my polite rebufffs. How did I miss his prurience?

I’m so miffed at myself for being such a poor judge of character. I was fooled by his self-effacing comments and taciturn demeanor, but they were a front. I’m usually an adroit judge of character—oracular even—but my insight may be waning into a crepuscular stage. If I can no longer tell when someone is being duplicitous, how vapid my life will be! Maybe I should be put out to some bucolic pasture to spend my days translating ancient classics into the vernacular.

When your writing is whimsical, you can stretch the meaning of a few words. 😉

I asked ChatGPT to write a story using the same words in order. This is what it came up with:

The Incident at Bellweather Hall

Clara stood outside the locked library door, entreating her uncle to let her in before the guests arrived. Inside, Uncle Sebastian was arguing with a remarkably pugnacious parrot that had somehow escaped from its cage

“Don’t dawdle out there,” he finally called.

When Clara entered, she found him looking pallid. The bird had apparently learned a number of lewd expressions from a previous owner, which was especially unfortunate because Sebastian was hosting a genteel dinner for the village historical society. One guest, Mr. Rosen, happened to be gentile, a fact of no importance whatsoever except that Sebastian, in his nervousness, introduced him as “our distinguished gentleman,” then attempted to correct himself and only made matters worse. The dining room did not help. What had once seemed charming now looked tawdry, with artificial roses, tarnished silver, and a chandelier missing three crystals.

The first guest to arrive was Lady Fenwick, an uppity widow whose acerbic observations could reduce a grown man to silence. The evening quickly became farcical. Sebastian, normally so sedentary that he regarded climbing stairs as vigorous exercise, spent most of dinner chasing the parrot from room to room. The bird seemed impervious to discipline. Worse, it had somehow acquired several salacious stories about prominent villagers, which it repeated with such prurient enthusiasm that Lady Fenwick dropped her fork. Sebastian was plainly miffed, although he attempted a self-effacing joke about his shortcomings as a host. His brother Edmund, characteristically taciturn, said nothing. But Edmund was adroit with animals, and after studying the parrot for several minutes, he made the oracular pronouncement, “It wants something.”

Outside, the sky had become crepuscular, purple shadows gathering over the lawn. Then Clara noticed something odd. The parrot’s previous owner, the charming but duplicitous Mr. Vale, had told Sebastian that the bird knew nothing but a few vapid nursery rhymes. Yet now it kept shrieking the same sentence:

“UNDER THE BEECH! UNDER THE BEECH!”

They carried lanterns beyond the garden into the bucolic meadow and found an enormous beech tree beside the stream. Beneath its roots was a small iron box. Inside were twenty gold sovereigns, three love letters, and a handwritten confession from Mr. Vale. Edmund read it twice.

“Well?” asked Sebastian.

Edmund looked up. For once abandoning his formal manner, he answered in the local vernacular:

“Blimey. The bird weren’t lying.”

So random! But it did make me laugh. And it came up with a better usage for crepuscular. I asked which author’s style its story was inspired by. It said it wasn’t trying to imitate anyone, but admitted it echoed the writing styles of P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh, and Saki (H. H. Munro).

When’s the last time you wrote a story?