|
Despite not having written for TD in like a year, hey I'm also judging Make em good. Or, failing that, interesting.
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2023 14:56
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 17:01 |
|
|
Crits for this week: Pushing Paper, Counting Beans Structure: -If a paragraph is written from one character’s perspective and it’s followed by a quote, the reader assumes that the speaker is the character whose perspective we were following. -Dialogue tags (he said, she said) can be passe, depending on who’s critiquing, but clarity is king. -You have an arc! The story has a beginning, middle, and end. -Your characters mostly have motivations (The auditor audits, the ship rebels), which is a surprisingly major hurdle for a lot of flash fiction. The great thing here is that if you look hard into those motivations and see if they have a throughline that can be followed in the plot from beginning to end, you can also see where your plot and story are weak. In this case, it’s the motivation and action of the ship, which is a combination of too little too late and thin in general. Story: -Murderous spaceship gets audited -There’s a good amount of backstory here, but thankfully it’s fairly pat so I didn’t have to do a whole lot of guesswork. Still, your story doesn’t start until a good chunk through your piece. -If you read this story after writing it and thought that something felt off, here’s a guess: the protagonist is the ship, but the driver of the action is the auditor. This dynamic isn’t bad, exactly, but it requires some very strong writing to make sure that the ending doesn’t come too abruptly. -Biggest problem I have: if the ship already knows that they’re going to kill the auditor, why the back-and-forth that makes up the bulk of the story? Why does the ship protest and evade when its solution to being audited is so apparent (and evidently simple) from the start? Why do people in the future only sometimes use contractions? Chainsaw Hollow: Structure: -You have an arc! There’s a beginning, middle, and end. -Your protagonist has a motivation and undergoes a change in perspective from beginning to end! -If you did the above intentionally, well done. If you didn’t, seek to. -You use too many words. This is in an attempt to communicate your style, but the sentence structure gets tiresome the longer I read. Story: -Virginity, except it’s birds -There’s an audience for this style of story, probably, but it’s definitely not me. -It’s difficult to do a stream-of-consciousness story in the flash fiction format, because you end up spending so many words to communicate your style that you don’t have very many left for your substance. -You took a formative childhood experience, contrived a metaphor for it, then stretched that metaphor until it wailed to be taken out back and put down. If you swapped your metaphor for the experience that you were trying to depict, you’d have a very, very basic story. This means that your piece has to be compelling solely on the virtue of its style, which I don’t think it is. frustum occlusion Structure: -I read through this two and a half times looking for a couple things that are essential to a story: a protagonist whose motivations I can understand and an arc for that protagonist that carries that arc while being changed by it. I did not find these things. -I believe that a good flash fiction story (or heck, any good short story) should be able to be summarized in a hundred words or so. The hundred words should carry all the substance of your story, mostly (mostly) devoid of style. If you can’t do that, then you don’t have a story, but a pile of words. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not a story. Story: -Person fails college, dad bets. -You have a tremendous amount of set-dressing here. I get asides, I get some entertaining and colorful language, but I don’t get a story. As far as I can tell, your protagonist maybe failed their first semester, or got close, but no one really cares. Also, their father has a gambling debt, which is apparently consequential, or maybe it isn’t. -On the subject of the gambling debt: I think this is supposed to be the axis your story revolves around. Problem is, without more meat on the bone, it’s lost among other similarly colorful details. I was banned from… Structure: -This is entertaining and it’s kinda a story, in that I have a clear picture of the protagonist and the events which occur, but it could have gone for another page or three or been cut in half without changing its impact. -I don’t mind the block of text, because it’s consistent with the headspace of your protagonist. Story: -Man with psychiatric condition destroys art exhibit -Due to its lack of arc, this sort of story lives and dies by the entertainment value of the events within. From two or three sentences in, I understood that this piece would not move me or make me think, but existed solely to entertain sentence-by-sentence. This is a tall order. You did ok, but I am basically exactly the target audience for this story so who knows. Expectations Structure: -WHAM Priestess Ottavia of the Gilded Branches with a loving folding chair out of nowhere. You’ve gotta foreshadow a drop like that somehow. It’s such a wild tonal shift. -You have a cool idea for a world, a world with baskets and magic and bears and fishing. This is fine, but this isn’t worldbuilding dome, it’s thunderdome. That doesn’t exactly work, but you get me. You get to worldbuild as a treat for telling a good story, not the other way around. Story: -Girl can’t do magic, then does. -”Running now. Bee and Sandy were a flail of limbs and panic. Something was wrong with this bear, it was starving in the summertime when it should be getting fat on berries. More importantly, it was faster by far than a pair of teen girls.” This is where your story should start. There’s an old piece of TD wisdom that says you should cut the first 500 words of your story. In this case, absolutely correct. -Try rewriting this story from the quote I suggested and I’ll re-crit it. You can include absolutely everything about your worldbuilding, but you may find that if you start with action, it will flow much more naturally. Flash Fry Structure: -You have an arc! This story has a beginning, middle, and end. -The story seems thin, doesn’t it? It’s because your stakes are weak. If Gail doesn’t get bok choy, so what? She can use cabbage, or broccoli, or pitch the thing and order a pizza. The two tension points (the kids want it and she’ll look bad for not buying it) aren’t powerful enough to sustain any dramatic tension. Story: -Woman purchases produce, is extorted. -Okay, I think you’re going for a Shirley Jackson-style ‘this is an everyday occurrence but something is just a li-i-i-ittle off’. Problem is that I need more context. I see that you were leaning very heavily on your prompts, but I need that content in the story itself. Ricochet Vector Structure: -I waited and waited and waited for the actual story to start. They’re gonna meet Grievance NOW. No, NOW. Then it happened, in the second-to-last sentence. So what was all that stuff before it? -The story is written like a conversation, or an interview, but there’s no arc and there’s nothing driving the words forward. You ask a question, then you answer it. The protagonist doesn’t actually do anything, but talks about having done a bunch of stuff. Story: -A superhero memoir -The ‘story’, as it is, is a description of other occasions where things have actually happened. Overall, this reads to me like the opening to a much longer piece. Italian Ice Structure: -Your story has an arc! It has a beginning, middle, and end. -Your story has stakes! I care about your protagonist succeeding. -Your story isn’t bloated! It gets right down to business from sentence one. Story: -Man versus machine for ice cream stakes -This is a great example of a story’s stakes not needing to be world-ending to be compelling. I wanted that man to get his god-damned frozen treat. -A good story travels on ‘incremental perturbations’, sequential challenges that your protagonist faces in order to fulfill their arc. Your perturbations are a little one-note and a bit predictable in that they all go about where you expect. Not a bad thing, if done well, but the story didn’t surprise me. -I called the ending about ¼ of the way through the story. There’s probably something else you could have done there. -Overall, nice little thing. -BRAKES.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2023 07:20
|
|
|
I'm in
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2023 22:42
|
|
|
Ride 995 words The bullet entered Ham’s skull just high of middle. It carved a steaming, spitting canyon of cauterized brain, and Gus fell to catch him. The body hit heavy on the big man’s shoulders, not even twitching, stone cold dead. Gus stooped, lifted, and took a shuddering breath. Fat loving Oliver had run Broadway Pawn since they’d been kids, been in a wheelchair when Gus had brought in his daddy’s watch last week, but he’d still be out the door in a second, right after slapping the silent alarm. Still, Gus kept his eyes shut tight as he waited for the jingle-jangle of the shop door, the insides of his lids blue-white from the solar flare of the muzzle. If he opened them, he’d see what he’d done, what he in no way meant to do. “I need a car,” he said, to Ham’s slackening corpse. “I need to get out of here. I need a car.” Still no Oliver, still no jangle, just the soft patter of rain on asphalt. Then, as Gus squinted one eye open, the car, the gift, appeared. It hadn’t been there when he and Ham had hopped off the bus, hadn’t been idling fumes in the vacant lot as they argued, Gus knew that. But now he had it, keys in the ignition: the car he’d begged for as a teen, though at that precise moment he cursed his younger self for not aiming higher. Gus dragged Ham into the passenger seat, hefting his boney hundred-fifty-odd pounds like they were nothing. A trunk would’ve been ideal, but the ‘89 Forswith Dakota had only ever come as a two-seater compact, power windows optional, cassette deck stock. Just before he threw the thing into drive, Gus whipped off his bucket hat and snugged it over Ham’s head, tilting it over the blood-slicked face, trying and failing to reapproximate the halves of his skull. He drove. A quarter mile later, Gus heard him. “Didn’t go right, huh.” Ham’s voice was scratchy and clipped, as if his brain were taking a trial-and-error approach to the synapses of speech. Gus let out a choked, involuntary sound, half chuckle and half yelp. He moved to scoot the hat from Ham’s face, but froze when the body let out a pained groan. “Sure about that, brother?” it asked. Gus took a left, still a good dozen miles from the highway. “You’re dead,” said Gus, not pulling his eyes from the road. “Probably so,” said Ham. “Always told ya, guns ain’t toys. Not meant to be twirled. And say, where’d ya get this ol’ bucket? Electric blue, half-stroke lawnmower engine under the hood.” “All I could think of,” said Gus, as he checked the rearview. “Whenever I think of cars.” “No imagination,” said Ham. “No trunk, neither.” “You’re dead,” repeated Gus. “Gonna rub it in, huh?” asked Ham. “Still, probably so.” The pair drove, Ham’s head lolling at every stop sign and Gus’s eyes roving, looking for a sign that they’d been found running. “Hey,” said Ham. “Gus, buddy, something’s drippin’ into my…and I can’t move my…oh. Oh, that’s a taste. That’s a fla-vor.” Gus’s stomach roiled. LeHigh Street would take them straight to the highway, then the interstate to Doc Steffey’s, and no one would be the wiser. “Like I’m lickin’ a nine volt,” continued Ham. “And every time I swallow, if what I’m doin’ is swallowin’, I can hear this fuzz. Ten-Two, Ten-Two, car eleven responding to a One-Ten. It’s a bust, Gussy, big mister ‘lectric blue One-Ten.” “It was an accident,” said Gus. His hand flew to the radio and he began spinning the dial, hitting the presets, jamming his pinkie into the tape deck. “That hurts,” said Ham. “C’mon, quit it.” Gus obliged. “I’m not guilty of anything,” he said. “Just a disagreement between friends, bad accident. Nothin’ intended, you know?” Ham made a sound like a cassette rewinding at high speed. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Two pals squabblin with a loaded pistol in a pawn shop parking lot. Me with Edie’s stocking in my back pocket, you with one already on your hubba-bubba face. But yeah, Officer Car Eleven on the One-Ten, nothin’ intended.” Gus slowed as he watched a blue light reflect off a building a few blocks back. The cop car cruised across the rearview, and was gone. “Although,” continued Ham, “if I’m still alive under this hat, maybe you and me can explain this away. I’d do that for you, Gussy. But hey, if you shot me dead and I’m just in your head, comin’ born from the same place as this car, you’re gonna fry. So whaddya say, gonna take a peek?” There, up ahead, Gus saw the sign. The 45 onramp laid just a few turns away, a mile at most. “Why’re you being that way?” asked Gus, taking a turn hard enough to make Ham pitch in his seat. “This morning it was ‘easy score’, ‘we’re in this together’, ‘fuckin fat Oliver’s never gonna miss it’. Shut up, goddamn, lemme concentrate.” “You shot me,” said Ham, after a pause. “And I can taste the police hopper inside my own juices, and you’re too much of a chickenshit to look under the hat. I mean, I wanna know ‘least as bad as you do. Besides, I haven’t said a word.” Gus took the last quarter mile with a lead foot, winding the onramp and threading onto the highway. As he crested that last rise to wide road, his heart leapt, fluttered, and cratered. Gus saw the blockade, the reds and blues flashing in the rain, the men in uniform half-in and half-out of their squad cars. He pulled the Dakota to a stop. With a last glance at the line of law, he pushed the hat to the floormat and beheld the dead man, his face a mess of gore and eyes already going chalky, but reflecting just the barest hint of light. “So?” asked Ham. “Whaddya think?”
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2023 01:45
|
|