|
I've posted critiques in the past Fiction Farm threads, but this is the first time I've submitted a short. Any feedback is appreciated. The Place I Was Before (504 words) On the stove, White Cheddar Kraft Dinner bubbles next to a plate of sliced wieners. Priscilla’s cheek pushes into the embroidered Vancouver Giants patch while Derek forces a smile. His mother lets go, rubs her thumb along the logo stitching, asks him when he got this top, and he thinks back to shotgunning Kokanees with Mark in an East Hastings park before that game against Kamloops that had eight fighting majors and one half-remembered bout of concourse shoplifting. And he says, Long time ago. Priscilla starts saying sorry, I’m so sorry, and it sounds like a general sentiment at first. Then he realizes she’s spotted an unwrapped box of Anthon Berg chocolate liqueur bottles on the counter – a forgotten Christmas gift from the Dutch couple next door – and he tells her it’s okay, but she starts biting the heads off the foil-wrapped bottle necks and drips them down the sink one by one. Your father’s in the playhouse with Benny, she says. Got a surprise. Grass has gotten long while he’s been gone; the dew drops fall like beehives. He knocks on the small door built moons ago, which feels stupid, but Rick says come in. The playhouse is Benny’s now – old boy’s huddled in the corner, more folded laundry than basset hound at his age. Felt eyebrows lift like pinball flippers when he sees Derek, which finally feels like home. Rick’s in his bath robe, knees at his ears, doing Derek doesn’t know what. Metal plates, screws, batteries. The Gipsy Kings escape all tinny from a baby monitor on the table corner, the other monitor surely in Rick’s den next to the record player. Somewhere else: an unused iPod with the click wheel; another Christmas present, this time from a son. Hey boy. Rick slides over printed pages of a Wiki how-to website. Building a robot: not the expected welcome home. Page 1 of 12 has a monochrome picture of C-3P0, but instead they’re putting together a door wedge with wheels. Priscilla starts vacuuming over Hotel California, so Rick clicks it off and says, Remember that race car we made for Cub Scouts? The one with the Lego man on top? The men puzzle over servo motors and NiCad batteries until the thing’s built. Rick whips his son’s wrist with the remote control antenna as a joke, tells him to give it a test. It hits Derek that this is the only thing he’s allowed to drive now. The doorstop whirs past snoozing Benny, then jerks left, chips the wall. I pressed right, Derek says. Easy fix, Rick says. Rick turns the baby monitor back on. Bambeleo is quiet behind Priscilla’s phone call with her sister where she’s saying, I don’t know what we’re going to do, over and over until Derek switches it off, and that’s when his father tosses him an O’Doul’s and says, Tastes like piss, then, You’ll get used to it. Rick leaves barefoot. Derek turns to Benny, because someone’s got to ask the question: How’re you feeling, boy?
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2013 21:20
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 11:41 |
|
|
Struggled to get through that first paragraph purely because of the jumping in time. Let's analyze it sentence by sentence.Tonsured posted:Frank Thatcher stood before the forge. present
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2013 07:24
|
|
|
sebmojo posted:This is horrible in more ways than the English language has to describe it. And you can't write for poo poo. Please go away and never come back.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2013 21:03
|
|
|
Ha, I just assumed there was a Kelowna in Ontario too. How do you get that wrong?!
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2013 21:26
|
|
|
I'm in a 4th year university fiction workshop, and God I am so loving tired at the moment so I'm going to type this really fast to get it done: one piece of advice the prof laid out on our first day (and hasn't fully delved into yet) is that most great short fiction stories have "an occasion". An occasion being something like a wedding, or a date between two characters, or a birthday party, or a job interview, etc. There's something in each story that's set up fairly early (this can tie into the hook) that readers can anticipate. A simple example off the top of my head: Jurassic Park(excluding the opening scene with the raptor from the movie). Dr. Grant and Ellie are informed of this island park with dinosaurs while on a digging expedition. There's the hook and the occasion right there: there's an ISLAND with DINOSAURS (don't you want to keep reading/watching?), which is the hook, and also the occasion (they're eventually going to go to this island dino park). Another great thing with setting up the occasion early on in the story: you give the reader a sense of the story's scale. If your story starts the day before a big wedding, and you give the reader the impression in the first few paragraphs that the wedding is going to be the big event where the drama/climax unfolds, then the reader is going to know that any jumps in time between then and now are most likely going to be minimal. Perhaps minutes, hours. Maybe overnight. But nothing more. In contrast to that, you might have something like the Foundation series, which spans centuries. It's been a while since I've read those books, but I remember early on that the original protagonist openly predicts how long (centuries) it's going to take for mankind to evolve to certain parts of their evolution. And it's later set up that he's devised a way to speak to our future civilizations at very specific intervals (every few hundred or thousand years), regardless of where their technology is at. So while you're invested in this protagonist, the story has already prepared you for the fact that he's probably going to die, and the reason why the book isn't getting bogged down in "real world" details is because you're probably going to get zipped forward seven hundred years in the next chapter. If you were to take that wedding story, make the first act the day before the wedding, the second act the day of the wedding, and the third act five thousand millenia in the future where the protohumans are attempting to enslave the cat people of planet yarn, your brain might just have trouble accepting that jump, since it wasn't set up in the hook nor occasion. Something to keep in mind when setting up either your short story or novel. Give us some stakes, an occasion, a reason to keep reading. Mike Works fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Sep 6, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Sep 6, 2013 05:48
|
|