A little snippet from the course I went on today, which was about writing in the style of Milligan, Lear, Lewis Carroll, etc. It’s probably not a type of writing I think I’ll focus on in my own work, but it was a really useful lesson in not taking my writing seriously – just having fun with it. One of the final (ten minute) activities was to write a nonsensical obituary. Here’s mine:

Lucien Bell, inventor of the Time-splitting device that took his name, passed into the night on February the second after a short illness that had not yet taken hold. Born before his elder brother, Frederic, Lucien was always a child of which no one could say anything, although his mother often did. 

Bell was educated at an Inner London Academy in the 1830s and graduated from Cambridge at the age of eight, in 1945. He spent the war years in Ancient Rome where he met his first wife, Claudia. Their marriage was short-lived, however, as Lucien was forced to return to the 1920s, and there he met his eighth wife, Millie. Though Claudia and Mille never met, they were said to spit at each other whenever they did. 

It wasn’t until 2012, when Bell created his time-splitting device, that his life really began, and only shortly before that, he was dead. Lucien is survived by his grandparents and his fourth wife, Maud. His fifth wife is expected to be born on the day of the funeral, so will be unable to attend.