QcCowboy

The goal of these variations isn't to fill up with lots of decorative notes, but rather to find the very characteristic motifs that are inherant in your melodic fragment.

There are too many notes in your variations. What you have done are "classical era" style variations, where the underlying theme remains, however decorated with much fioritura.

What we're actually looking for here is to force your understanding of the actual melodic elements of the theme you've written, and to pull from it as many of its purely characteristic motifs as possible.

Without changing the rythmic nature of your theme, create 3 variations that will extend the range, the intensity, possibly the dissonance, of the original material. The guidelines I gave you were good ones to start with.

Look for two or three note patterns that can be repeated.
Look for brief patterns that can be transposed and repeated into a form of short sequence.

Ths is not the sort of exercise that can be through-composed (ie: composed in one shot). You must agonize over every note decision.

You need to train yourself to put careful thought into each note. I don't mean that every note needs to be justified by some technical rule, but that each note should be there for a reason.

Is this note a semi-tone higher than the previous because of the tension it creates?
Is that tension resolved?
Is that tension increased by the subsequant note?

Does this melodic leap come out of nowhere?
Does repeating and augmenting the leap create a new sense of destination?

Am I reaching the high-point of my theme too soon in the phrase?

These are all creative questions that you should be going over when you are creating a theme and developing it.