There isn't a September 300 worder -- the 300s are quarterly, in April, July, October and January. So still 3 weeks to wait!
Improving our 300 Word Stories -- READ FIRST POST!
- Thread starter The Judge
- Start date
Okay shred it. Tell me why it was so awful as to garner but one vote?
Last Frame
Death came quickly. Dak had been expecting an assassin’s bullet for some time, but not here.
He had always considered the island to be safe, a retreat guarded by his own men. His killer was probably one of them.
His mistake? Employing family men, vulnerable to their children being taken hostage by the Kalinas. Men would do anything to save their kids, who wouldn't?
Being an atheist he had imagined death would be a simple switching off.
At first he thought he was still alive. Looking out over this bay on new Venus. But nothing moved, ripples solid like obscuring glass, the ropes on the mast of the boat holding a steady curve as if under a hard frost.
He had heard tales of last moments, frozen for eternity, but now here it was, proven.
It could have been worse. Most people’s probably were. A truck fender smashing through a windscreen or the reptilian face of a Kalina assassin, drooling as its claw pierced your rib cage.
At first the view was tolerable but as days passed into weeks even this serene scene became a torment. After a few years insanity would be almost assured. No handle on the world to change anything, ever, not even eyelids to close. Just turquoise-blue hell. A sterile, static eternity.
He began to wish he had suffered some awful traumatic death. At least, then, there would be texture, sensation, extreme emotion. Some paradoxically life affirming visceral experience, all sensory cylinders firing. But this anodyne vision? Forever? Unbearable.
Then one day it came, a voiced question.
“Swap?”
“Dear Lord yes, yes, yes, anything but this.”
He saw the airlock door spiralling away into space as his leg flew past his head and the cold vacuum ripped the air from his lungs.
-----------------
Last Frame
Death came quickly. Dak had been expecting an assassin’s bullet for some time, but not here.
He had always considered the island to be safe, a retreat guarded by his own men. His killer was probably one of them.
His mistake? Employing family men, vulnerable to their children being taken hostage by the Kalinas. Men would do anything to save their kids, who wouldn't?
Being an atheist he had imagined death would be a simple switching off.
At first he thought he was still alive. Looking out over this bay on new Venus. But nothing moved, ripples solid like obscuring glass, the ropes on the mast of the boat holding a steady curve as if under a hard frost.
He had heard tales of last moments, frozen for eternity, but now here it was, proven.
It could have been worse. Most people’s probably were. A truck fender smashing through a windscreen or the reptilian face of a Kalina assassin, drooling as its claw pierced your rib cage.
At first the view was tolerable but as days passed into weeks even this serene scene became a torment. After a few years insanity would be almost assured. No handle on the world to change anything, ever, not even eyelids to close. Just turquoise-blue hell. A sterile, static eternity.
He began to wish he had suffered some awful traumatic death. At least, then, there would be texture, sensation, extreme emotion. Some paradoxically life affirming visceral experience, all sensory cylinders firing. But this anodyne vision? Forever? Unbearable.
Then one day it came, a voiced question.
“Swap?”
“Dear Lord yes, yes, yes, anything but this.”
He saw the airlock door spiralling away into space as his leg flew past his head and the cold vacuum ripped the air from his lungs.
Actually I enjoyed it and had I managed to squeeze in time for a listing, it would have been on it.
If I have any criticism it is really just the ending. It is clear he is dead, though that takes a moment to sink in until he realises everything is frozen at the point of death. I'm good with that and think it is a very imaginative, albeit horrific interpretation of the picture.
Maybe make it more obvious by emphasising that for his change of scenery, he had to experience the others actual death - not just the 'toss of a coin' change of view for something less pleasant on the eye: "Dak died again. An airlock door spiralled into space, his scream dying on his lips as cold vacuum ripped the air from his lungs. There was just time to see his severed leg flash past his head before the scene froze..."
Really I am just scrabbling around to think of what I would change but these are just my thoughts and others will probably think my ending worse and worthy of no votes
Overall it was a very good entry in my opinion
Peter
If I have any criticism it is really just the ending. It is clear he is dead, though that takes a moment to sink in until he realises everything is frozen at the point of death. I'm good with that and think it is a very imaginative, albeit horrific interpretation of the picture.
Maybe make it more obvious by emphasising that for his change of scenery, he had to experience the others actual death - not just the 'toss of a coin' change of view for something less pleasant on the eye: "Dak died again. An airlock door spiralled into space, his scream dying on his lips as cold vacuum ripped the air from his lungs. There was just time to see his severed leg flash past his head before the scene froze..."
Really I am just scrabbling around to think of what I would change but these are just my thoughts and others will probably think my ending worse and worthy of no votes
Overall it was a very good entry in my opinion
Peter
I think streams of conciousness without much external action are hard - you really don’t have time for that in flash fiction. In this case, I guess I begin to feel a certain lack of immediacy and that led to it not hitting as hard and fast as other stories.
Elckerlyc
"Philosophy will clip an angel's wings."
I found your story confusing.
Death came quickly.
Did it? From the following lines I do not get the notion that a. it was quickly, but rather that b. he is not dead at all. The last line seems to conform this: "ripped the air from his lungs."
This 'alternative dying' happened when the airlock door opened. How did he get in the airlock? Earlier you tell us that Dak is on a island, looking across a bay and unable to move even something simple as an eyelid.
Consistency and, up to a point, logic are among the things I pay attention to when judging a story. Of course, it is always possible I am missing something obvious.
Last but not least, I didn't feel much connection with your protagonist nor felt enough the unbearable situation he found himself in (being dead or not.)
Death came quickly.
Did it? From the following lines I do not get the notion that a. it was quickly, but rather that b. he is not dead at all. The last line seems to conform this: "ripped the air from his lungs."
This 'alternative dying' happened when the airlock door opened. How did he get in the airlock? Earlier you tell us that Dak is on a island, looking across a bay and unable to move even something simple as an eyelid.
Consistency and, up to a point, logic are among the things I pay attention to when judging a story. Of course, it is always possible I am missing something obvious.
Last but not least, I didn't feel much connection with your protagonist nor felt enough the unbearable situation he found himself in (being dead or not.)
Wayne Mack
Well-Known Member
I did not feel that the set up matched the final twist. The hook seems to be that the main character is reliving the point of death, but in the lead in, the main character was frozen in time on a boat. Was he shot? That was not what he relived. Did he die painlessly while sailing? What did the first two paragraphs have to do with that?
Astro Pen, I liked the premise of your story, which I thought was an unusual take on hell/purgatory, and your piece hovered on the edge of my shortlist for some time. Though it didn't end up on my list that was also partly because there were a lot of very fine stories this quarter and I had to prune hard to keep the list to manageable proportions.
However, I did have a few reservations about the piece. On first read the ending was slightly confusing and I had to re-read the last lines just to check what was happening, namely that Dak has swapped into someone else's death. For me the confusion didn't last long, but if people don't understand or follow your train of thought on first read they might not bother re-reading, or they might get the wrong end of the stick and continue with it. Do you have anyone look at your pieces before you post them? I always get my husband to read my first drafts and if he doesn't get my story I know it needs to be revised to make things clearer. Here, for instance, you could have avoided any problems by something as simple as "Abruptly, Dak was in a different body, dying a different death."
On a second read when I knew what was happening, I was less happy with the beginning of the story. All the background information in the opening paragraphs seems to belong to another story entirely -- knowing who killed him and why is irrelevant to the plot, such as it is, and to my mind only adds word count without giving depth. If you want those lines in, they ought to affect the story in some way.
I'd also question how this purgatory works/how you've described it. If it's "last moments" why isn't there some movement of waves? Why isn't there any pain if he was shot? Why does he die looking at the sea, not falling to the ground? If he's dead, how is he conscious of days and weeks? How is he thinking about who killed him? How does he still have a mind if not eyelids? How can he go insane? How can someone speak to him to suggest the swap? How is it that in his first death everything is frozen, but when he dies at the airlock there are several things happening? Will that be repeated over and over, or will it be frozen at some point? I realise these questions are a bit daft as it's just a story, but they're the kind of thing I'd have worried over if I'd had the ingenuity and imagination to come up with the idea, and I would have made sure that I dealt with them in some way. So if the fact he died quickly is relevant -- though it would have to be instantaneous, surely, to freeze the waves -- then I'd bring that in more explicitly eg "If only he'd been shot in the heart, he'd have had a few seconds of movement before death" or something.
And I agree with Elckerlyc that the situation ought to make us sympathise with Dak, even if he is someone who deserves to be shot, yet there's too much of a distance here so I really didn't care about him and his predicament. It might have worked better if you'd written it in first person to make us suffer with him. Present tense instead of past might have helped, too, since he now is, eternally, always in the present.
So for me it was a very clever idea, but it needed a bit more work to make the most of it -- its internal logic needed to be thought through and made clearer and it needed to be both sharper in focus and more approachable in tone to allow us to sympathise with the character.
I hope that helps a little, showing where I was coming from when I was voting. And, as I say, you were up against some formidable opposition this quarter. I hope you do continue to enter the Challenges, though, so we can continue to share your imagination and ideas.
However, I did have a few reservations about the piece. On first read the ending was slightly confusing and I had to re-read the last lines just to check what was happening, namely that Dak has swapped into someone else's death. For me the confusion didn't last long, but if people don't understand or follow your train of thought on first read they might not bother re-reading, or they might get the wrong end of the stick and continue with it. Do you have anyone look at your pieces before you post them? I always get my husband to read my first drafts and if he doesn't get my story I know it needs to be revised to make things clearer. Here, for instance, you could have avoided any problems by something as simple as "Abruptly, Dak was in a different body, dying a different death."
On a second read when I knew what was happening, I was less happy with the beginning of the story. All the background information in the opening paragraphs seems to belong to another story entirely -- knowing who killed him and why is irrelevant to the plot, such as it is, and to my mind only adds word count without giving depth. If you want those lines in, they ought to affect the story in some way.
I'd also question how this purgatory works/how you've described it. If it's "last moments" why isn't there some movement of waves? Why isn't there any pain if he was shot? Why does he die looking at the sea, not falling to the ground? If he's dead, how is he conscious of days and weeks? How is he thinking about who killed him? How does he still have a mind if not eyelids? How can he go insane? How can someone speak to him to suggest the swap? How is it that in his first death everything is frozen, but when he dies at the airlock there are several things happening? Will that be repeated over and over, or will it be frozen at some point? I realise these questions are a bit daft as it's just a story, but they're the kind of thing I'd have worried over if I'd had the ingenuity and imagination to come up with the idea, and I would have made sure that I dealt with them in some way. So if the fact he died quickly is relevant -- though it would have to be instantaneous, surely, to freeze the waves -- then I'd bring that in more explicitly eg "If only he'd been shot in the heart, he'd have had a few seconds of movement before death" or something.
And I agree with Elckerlyc that the situation ought to make us sympathise with Dak, even if he is someone who deserves to be shot, yet there's too much of a distance here so I really didn't care about him and his predicament. It might have worked better if you'd written it in first person to make us suffer with him. Present tense instead of past might have helped, too, since he now is, eternally, always in the present.
So for me it was a very clever idea, but it needed a bit more work to make the most of it -- its internal logic needed to be thought through and made clearer and it needed to be both sharper in focus and more approachable in tone to allow us to sympathise with the character.
I hope that helps a little, showing where I was coming from when I was voting. And, as I say, you were up against some formidable opposition this quarter. I hope you do continue to enter the Challenges, though, so we can continue to share your imagination and ideas.
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This would make for a great 'Twilight Zone' episode. You can imagine Rod Serling smiling towards the camera at the end of the episode and saying "be careful what you wish for".
I agree that the first two paragraphs are unnecessary. In fact
Being an atheist he had imagined death would be a simple switching off.
would have been a great first line and a hook to pull the reader in. Then (with the extra words) you could maybe have expanded on the end of your story to explain the sudden jump from the boat into space.
I agree that the first two paragraphs are unnecessary. In fact
Being an atheist he had imagined death would be a simple switching off.
would have been a great first line and a hook to pull the reader in. Then (with the extra words) you could maybe have expanded on the end of your story to explain the sudden jump from the boat into space.
Seconded, that would have been a cracking opening line and already shows a good intro into your character.
I agree about the beginning. For me the story really started with the "not being an atheist" line. But for me (and perhaps only for me) the whole thought of being able to trade positions in Hell was a hard hill to climb. And if you were alluding to Purgatory it really loses it's punch because traditionally purgatory is seen as a place/time to purge your sins so that you can proceed to your reward, then trading with someone feels the height of folly because it's an absolute gamble or there's something horrible you don't know. If you are going to go for a change in the "normal" understanding of something as commonly understood as Hell or Purgatory I would think that you need to at least express the rules they are operating under.
For me the story had two problems: I didn’t care about the protagonist, so it had no emotional power, and I felt that his reaction to his position was unrealistic, so I didn’t believe in it. Of course that’s just my personal reaction. I imagine that the main reason for it not getting any votes was just that lack of an emotional connection, so any story which got that bit right would be ahead of yours in the queue for attention.
I would have found it much more interesting if you’d analysed the nature of the experience more, and explained something of the nature of the speaker at the end who gives him the choice of a change. I suspect that would put me in a minority of one, though!
I would have found it much more interesting if you’d analysed the nature of the experience more, and explained something of the nature of the speaker at the end who gives him the choice of a change. I suspect that would put me in a minority of one, though!
Just a reminder to everyone that this thread can only be used when voting has finished in the Challenge to which the story belongs -- so stories for the January 2021 Challenge can't go up until mid-Feb at the very earliest, depending on whether the story is involved in a tie-break.
I've therefore temporarily removed the posts relating to the Jan story that was put up last night. I will re-instate those posts as and when appropriate.
I've therefore temporarily removed the posts relating to the Jan story that was put up last night. I will re-instate those posts as and when appropriate.
Edoc'sil
One day I'll find the words.
@JS Wiig I liked your story, it was a cool premise. There were a couple times where my mind wandered, but that could be just me or the fact that I haven't mainlined my coffee yet. The title was a little meh for me.
"A cart of aluminum canopic jars overturned in the decampment" this line caused me to double back and read again, I realise thats my fault but I was expecting the word decamping or something I don't know why.
"Her favorite factotum" I had to google what a factotum was, it's definitely the right word to use there, it fits the setting and thankyou for teaching me a new word. However it was another time I was taken out of the story.
Both "Tekkotentkahamum" and "Automatonoumous" made me stop to re-read, I get why you used them and they're clever but in this story I found myself doing this a fair bit and so it was another area. I think out of the things that made me do this I like these the most, or maybe factotum because I learnt a new word.
I didn't really like the last line, it left me with questions but not good ones (i.e. something that could be debated about) seeing as it's supposed to be a 300 word story I would like that it either ended there or gave us questions that provoked emotion. In a longer story this is a good line to end the scene on but I think that in the 300 worder it doesn't really work.
Anyway that's my 2 cents, I'd like to reiterate that I liked your story and it missed out on a vote very closely.
"A cart of aluminum canopic jars overturned in the decampment" this line caused me to double back and read again, I realise thats my fault but I was expecting the word decamping or something I don't know why.
"Her favorite factotum" I had to google what a factotum was, it's definitely the right word to use there, it fits the setting and thankyou for teaching me a new word. However it was another time I was taken out of the story.
Both "Tekkotentkahamum" and "Automatonoumous" made me stop to re-read, I get why you used them and they're clever but in this story I found myself doing this a fair bit and so it was another area. I think out of the things that made me do this I like these the most, or maybe factotum because I learnt a new word.
I didn't really like the last line, it left me with questions but not good ones (i.e. something that could be debated about) seeing as it's supposed to be a 300 word story I would like that it either ended there or gave us questions that provoked emotion. In a longer story this is a good line to end the scene on but I think that in the 300 worder it doesn't really work.
Anyway that's my 2 cents, I'd like to reiterate that I liked your story and it missed out on a vote very closely.
Edoc'sil
One day I'll find the words.
The Scribbling Man
Tenant of the Tower of Flints
I enjoyed your story, Edoc, and I think I gave it a mention. The main thing that would prevent a vote from me is the grammar. There are odd moments where punctuation is incorrect or absent, and that gives me an impression of reading a first draft, or like the author has rushed things. It also distracts me from the flow of the story.
To give some specifics. You start the story with "As HE placed the final tooth..." - not incorrect necessarily, but I'm not sure why you chose to keep the name "Trig" back from the reader until a couple of lines later.
“Uh…” Trig stammered
^^ this is missing a full stop at the end of the sentence.
“Uh… Uh… Uh…” Mocked the mask “I was...
"Mocked" shouldn't be capitalised and there should be a full stop after "mask".
Possibly subjective, but I feel like the following sentence would flow better with dashes rather than commas:
“I was having an amazing time in the hereafter - with several nubile young maidens I might add - before you unceremoniously yanked me here.”
^^ I feel like a comma should go after "maidens" as well.
There are other similar examples. In essence, don't capitalise dialogue tags when they come after the dialogue, and be sure to double check you haven't missed out any punctuation.
On a subjective level, I found the humour to be a little OTT. The concept and scenario was amusing, but the execution of the dialogue felt a bit overblown for my taste.
To give some specifics. You start the story with "As HE placed the final tooth..." - not incorrect necessarily, but I'm not sure why you chose to keep the name "Trig" back from the reader until a couple of lines later.
“Uh…” Trig stammered
^^ this is missing a full stop at the end of the sentence.
“Uh… Uh… Uh…” Mocked the mask “I was...
"Mocked" shouldn't be capitalised and there should be a full stop after "mask".
Possibly subjective, but I feel like the following sentence would flow better with dashes rather than commas:
“I was having an amazing time in the hereafter - with several nubile young maidens I might add - before you unceremoniously yanked me here.”
^^ I feel like a comma should go after "maidens" as well.
There are other similar examples. In essence, don't capitalise dialogue tags when they come after the dialogue, and be sure to double check you haven't missed out any punctuation.
On a subjective level, I found the humour to be a little OTT. The concept and scenario was amusing, but the execution of the dialogue felt a bit overblown for my taste.
Edoc'sil
One day I'll find the words.
@The Scribbling Man - Thanks for the feedback. Grammar is a real issue for me, I lack the patience to learn it properly. I think I'm going to have to read up on it, and soon.
As for your view of the dialogue, on reflection I can see what you mean, it could have been dialed back a bit.
As for your view of the dialogue, on reflection I can see what you mean, it could have been dialed back a bit.
@Edoc'sil
I thought the story was good, and the twist at the end worked for me. I can definitely relate with wondering if someone I like, likes me back and not being able to ask for myself.
But like The Scribbling Man, the grammar issues are what did it in for me. For example, right at the beginning:
...it gave small shudder...
I think if you get these small details cleaned up it will definitely move your writing to the next level. Keep at it!
I thought the story was good, and the twist at the end worked for me. I can definitely relate with wondering if someone I like, likes me back and not being able to ask for myself.
But like The Scribbling Man, the grammar issues are what did it in for me. For example, right at the beginning:
...it gave small shudder...
I think if you get these small details cleaned up it will definitely move your writing to the next level. Keep at it!
Wayne Mack
Well-Known Member
@JS Wiig , for me, the story felt over invested in description and under invested in plot. I find that when writing these types of micro-stories that my descriptive text is the first to be trimmed to get to word count.
This seemed like it would be a 'ticking time bomb' situation, but I never really felt any tension in getting the ship to lift off in time nor any insight into the underlying conflict between Cassandra and Alex. I feel that without the tight word count constraint that you could have developed a fuller tale. That is one of the difficulties in writing these really short stories.
This seemed like it would be a 'ticking time bomb' situation, but I never really felt any tension in getting the ship to lift off in time nor any insight into the underlying conflict between Cassandra and Alex. I feel that without the tight word count constraint that you could have developed a fuller tale. That is one of the difficulties in writing these really short stories.
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