How many kinds of innovation are there available to a writer? Quite a few, I think. Here’s something from the first pages of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman:

My mother I can recall perfectly. Her face was always red and sore-looking from bending at the fire; she spent her life making tea to pass the time and singing snatched of old songs to pass the meantime. I knew her well but my father and I were strangers and did not converse much; often indeed when I would be studying in the kitchen at night I could hear him through the thin door to the shop talking there from his seat under the oil lamp for hours on end to Mick the sheepdog. Always it was only the drone of his voice that I heard, never separate bits of words. He was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings. My mother owned a cat but it was a foreign outdoor animal and was rarely seen and my mother never took any notice of it.

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