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This IS NOT a whine thread about those mean TD people who crit my work. This is a thread saying, "poo poo they're right, what could I have done to nail that landing instead of end up sprawled all over the floor? I'm seeking help/feedback/input on my writing. Help me communicate my ideas. I’ve earned a variety of dishonorable mentions in Thunderdome. The first handful were dead on the money - the idea was lame, the story went nowhere, the writing was bad. Fast forward four years and the latest DMs are bigger problems. I have ideas, I write the stories, and then when the crits drop, the most obvious issue is that I failed to communicate. (Or, at least, I’d like to think that’s the problem, instead of my ideas are still lame, stories still go nowhere and writing is still bad.) These people took the time to read the story, and to provide valuable feedback. The crits that matter the most, (at least to me) are the ones where my first response is, "no no you don't understand." And that's ALWAYS on the writer, not the critic. If they don't get it, it's because I didn't tell it well enough. How did I fail to sell it? My failure, at least in my mind, is the part where I edit the tale down, cut out all the unnecessary bits… to the point that, when I read the story, it all still makes sense (because I wrote it, I know why X does Y, I know how A affects B) but I omit those details, or fail to sell them. Exhibit A: The Prompt.  1. There’s a photo of the inside of an abandoned building, it’s flooded maybe two or three feet. In the distance, a light is on. It’s empty, it’s scary looking. Write a story about that. 2. Include “The yelp review was terrible.” Exhibit B: The idea, based on the photo. 1. There’s air pockets in underground caves, or marsh ponds, or abandoned buildings, that are deadly. It’s methane, or something else, and people exploring those things are poisoned, don’t realize it, pass out, and another person sees them, and THEY dash into the deadly area, THEY succumb, a third person sees them, and on and on. I read about it in the OSHA thread in GBS, and they even included a video where a dude was exploring an abandoned nuclear silo, filming himself. He realized it was deadly because his voice sounded funny and his head started swimming. Remember that - it comes up in the tale. (scroll to the bottom of this post to see the youtube vid) 2. In that same OSHA thread, there are hundreds of examples of over-confident fools who, despite the most obvious signs that this is a stupid idea, will continue down a path of failure. Typically, they’re motivated simply by just finishing the stupid task at hand. (link to the Osha thread of stupid workers doing stupid things. This is apparently widespread. How did I fail to convey this? https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3763899) SO then, my story would be that simple. Guy 1 goes with Guy 2 to do a simple job, aware of a threat but confident that the threat applies only to stupid people. Guy 1 sees Guy 2 go down, he manages to escape, only to see another person run in to save Guy 2, despite, (again) the obvious dangers. What about “The Yelp Review Was Terrible.” Here’s how I thought I got that into the story: the very first line. The yelp review was terrible. is the similar to A person warned us that a thing was not good. Which becomes the first line: “Julie said the air’s bad down here but I don’t smell anything at first.” In previous (lots) of Thunderdomes, a common crit is "'hell you didn't have to take the prompt literally, you didn't have to put those words verbatim in the story." So I ran with it. Too far. And lastly, the title, 1970-1984. What’s that? It’s the thing that lured them into their doom, the monolith of 2001, the temperature at which paper burns like Farenheit 451. Like, you’d see the title, go, “’what’s that?” you’d read the story, then you’d see the title and go, “oh drat that’s what pulled them in.” It was one of those deep meaning things that didn't work. So here’s my story. Please read, and if you would please, help me convey all that poo poo up there into this 1300 word story down below. I’ve added footnotes that pertain to specific crits. Again - let me be clear - I am NOT trying to prove the crit is wrong, but to say, “here’s the crit, and here’s where I missed my target, how could I have nailed this? 1970-1984. Julie said the air’s bad down here but I don’t smell anything at first. We wouldn’t even be here if she’d remembered to move 1970-1984 to the new records building. But she didn’t, and now it’s up to me and Eric to grab all these files before they finish up demolition tomorrow. [1] Julie said the records was in a storage room in the parking lot basement with some Halloween decorations. “Forget the other stuff,” she said, “just grab the boxes.” I didn’t see anything down there at first, I mean besides an empty parking lot. Everything echoed, and it smelled like wet magazines. Eric says, “The air ain’t bad,” and runs on ahead to check the metal doors - maybe one of them opens to a room instead of emergency stairs. [2] When he shouts that he found them, his voice sounds far away, and it’s off like he’s got a mouthful of cotton when he talks. And at first I figure it’s just the way his words echo around the dead parking lot, or maybe he’s already carrying some of the boxes. Because there’s water, a good two or three inches where I’m standing and I don’t realize the ground keeps on descending at first. I’m like ten steps across the parking lot and the water’s now up to my knees, and I’m wondering did Eric swim to find them boxes? I call out because Eric’s a joker. I know he’s hiding in the room waiting for me, that’s who he is. And I don’t want to get spooked, at least no more than I’m already spooked. He doesn’t respond. “Come on Eric stop fooling around,” I say, but he doesn’t answer. Okay if that’s how it’s gonna be, I’ll sneak up on him too. But it’s not easy - I’m still knee deep in old water, and there’s power down here, the light’s on in the room Eric’s in, and right then it dawns on me how screwed we are if the power gets in the water. I tell him, “Eric come on quit messing around there’s no time for this.” He still don’t respond but that’s when I hear the echoes getting whooshy — like there’s a giant fan next to my ears, running slow, and it’s bending the sound in waves. And my head hurts. And Eric still hasn’t answered me. I brace myself for his stupid jump scare and go on into the room. He’s not there. There’s the files on some shelves, at least four boxes on a desk: 1970 through 1974. Another box is upturned on the floor in the water. And that’s where I find Eric face down. If he’s trying to scare me he’s going all out on this one. “Come on Eric get up, quit playing. You’re all wet and smell like dog rear end.” That’s when I hear my voice is all cotton filled like his was. It’s not the echoes, it’s not the water. It’s the air. The air’s bad. The wet magazine smell’s still there, but there’s another thing under it, moldy. Old. I roll Eric over, he’s just floating there. Eyes open, he’s gone. The room tilts, and the walls, they’re flexing like muscles pulsing at me. I’ve got to get out. I pull Eric up to the desk, lay him across it, but that’ll play out bad I know it will, they’ll say I killed him down here so I pick his fat rear end up and carry him with me.[3] The staircase is a hundred miles away, through knee deep water and the distance keeps growing. My eyes are watering and the echoes in my ears, coming through that giant fan, are going faster. Everything sounds like it’s going whumpwhumpwhump. I drop Eric less than half way across the parking lot or else I’m as good as dead with him. [4] My lungs and my throat, they’re burning and I can’t get enough air to catch my breath. I know there’s good air up the stairs, I just have to make it to the stair case, get some good air, and then call somebody to get Eric. But by the time I’m at the top of the stairs my throat’s all closed up, barely any air makes it through and nobody’s up there waiting for me. Any sounds I try to make are a squeak. I’d call Julie but they ain’t a sound coming out of my throat. That’s when Jeff drives by and seen me on the ground. He was over looking for Eric to go to lunch, I point to the stairs, Jeff said, "yeah I know he’s in the basement but I figured y’all’d be done by now." “What’s wrong with you?” he asks me. I can’t talk, and Jeff’s eyes do the math, something bad happened and Eric’s still down there. He run off to get Eric, I’m trying to tell him the air’s bad, but can’t. [5] —— [1] crit: I’ve introduced three people now with no real description/detail/backstory. But I thought in flash fiction, the goal is to get to the story and hit the ground running, there’s no time for backstory… the way the narrator is describing it, (I thought) told you exactly what you needed to know: Julie is somebody’s secretary or office manager, and Eric and the narrator are the saps who have to follow her instructions. Should I have put that in here? Again - going for as little back story as possible because of word limits. [2] Crits mentioned that I had no quotation marks in the story. I envisioned this entire story as the narrator’s statement in HR after the fact - like an audio recording of what happened. I’ve gone in and added quotation marks. I’d have preferred to leave them out, go all Cormac McCarthy but I realize that’s a high hurdle. I tried, and I just didn’t pull it off. I’m okay with that. [3] couple of crits said “the story was going into some lovecraft poo poo right here no? wtf.” I was trying to describe the sensation of the gas poisoning the narrator, from his perspective. Since he’s not the sharpest candle in the jungle, the way to describe it, (I figured) would be to describe it like this. The lovecraft edge was an unexpected bonus, to me, but not really what I was going for. I was trying to say, “this dumbass is about to pass out from poisoned gas and he doesn’t realize it.” How could I have done that better? [4] crit: well wouldn’t Jeff (later in the story) have seen Eric dead in the water and realized it was bad, and HE would have turned around and run? But no - going back to the tales of the poisoned pond where one person chases another, and another, without realizing it’s not the water, it’s the air. How could I sell that in my story? [5] crit: seriously why didn’t he call somebody, text somebody, or hold on to Jeff to make him wait? And this is DEFINITELY a problem I ran into. Again - with the person chasing another chasing another scenario - I needed to get the next person moving into the basement, and have the narrator realize the cycle could go on and on, but he can’t tell them to stop. This was the best I could come up with. How could I have done it better? Tell Jeff don’t go in there, but Jeff thinks HE knows better and runs in to get Eric? Lastly - here's the video of the guy exploring his nuclear missile silo, and he realized the air is bad. I swear I'm not making it up, but, obviously it's pretty drat obscure. EDIT: Don't watch too much of this guy's videos, it's a rabbit hole of wtf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXpYFtI0nqU&t=1072s magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Sep 1, 2017 |
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Sep 1, 2017 00:45
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 15:47 |
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I do like that you're taking this seriously, but, I really disagree with your conclusion. People are leaping to 'hey this is lovecraft stuff right' because people don't expect an anticlimax. They don't expect, as you take them on a spooky rollercoaster track through this aboned building, as the weird wobbly wrongness builds on the protagonist, for the answer to be 'bad gas.' poo poo you even say the air is bad at the start. Its not that its not signposted, that there isn't evidence lying around for people to get that, hey, the air is bad. Its that it defies storytelling logic for it to really be just that. Pause for praise. Solid prose. Well edited imo. The tools of communication are there. But people start reading expecting a story and I'm noooot sure I actually see one, even as you explain what you feel you failed at, what it should have been, even in that it's still just some dude going into a place he's been warned is full of bad gas, meeting some bad gas, nearly dying. And yet its written like a mystery, its building tension and weirdness with nowhere for them to go but the anticlimax of 'some gas.' There's not a ton of character here. The dude makes a pragmatic decision to haul his coworker's corpse out. There's not a ton of personal tension there. We don't know Jeff ourselves or know the protagonist and his relationship to Jeff so that we can feel bad about that last moment, when he can't stop Jeff from going in. So, either you cut a lot out of the middle where he's just descending and worrying, build some relationships, or you mythologize, build a payoff to that worry, that descent, to the suspense-mystery this story presents itself as. Maybe you do both and maybe you get a bloody golden star outta the dome. But like If your opening sentence is a guy not listening to a warning, and the end is that guy realizing the warning was precisely accurate, and I don't even feel like I know the guy in question any better than at the start, uh, that is your problem.
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Sep 1, 2017 02:16
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drat. Good point. poo poo. Thanks. Mythologize. I need to go find out what that means.
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Sep 1, 2017 04:14
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In this case it means something like just running with the horror / Lovecraftian vibes your piece picked up. It can still be a story about well-intentioned people trying to save one another and only succeeding in making a chain of bodies. The threat can even be suffocation, or a gas pocket specifically, whatever. But now its from space. Or from some summoning circle. A hideous experiment left behind. Something that both brings the genre vibes, but also, allows you to layer metaphor or characterization onto the threat.
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Sep 1, 2017 04:43
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This confuses me, kind of. I'm a plotter - I'll write most of the story in short phrases, figure out everything from start to finish, so I can maintain coherence, (A.D.D. like a MFER). Without mapping, my stories have been a clusterfart. Unfortunately, the challenge to plotting is there's little room for unexpected evolution. It DID cross my mind to go demonic, but shied away, opting instead to buck the tropes (abandoned building is a gateway to other dimensions) and keep it all grounded in reality... leaving the protagonist with the realization at the end that Julie was right and he wasn't as great as he thought. BUT - you're saying my choice STILL left the story too predictable, when there was enough of a hint to take it into better places. This might be a major flaw of plotting my story instead of just pantsing it? The thing that kept coming up in SittingHere's podcast on my story was that first line - broadcasting the twist, the ending, everything about the tale. If I'd have moved that line to the end, would the story have been any better, or am I just blindly hugging a dull idea for a story? Thanks for your thoughts. Next story, (the upcoming one) I'll try for more mythologizing.
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Sep 1, 2017 15:30
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I agree with ThirdEmperor on a lot of points, but I think there's a lot more you could be injecting into the story to give your reader to chew on while keeping it grounded. I think particularly by the end, you have this suspense build up and you're finally capping it off, but all the actions sort of happen one after the other. It's a very logical progression and the horror of the situation, not only in what the character is feeling but seeing, knowing this other person is going off to die and he can't stop him, isn't expanded upon. If you run past these details, which are the crux of your conclusion, then the reader isn't going to be hit emotionally or get that chill in their spine. So I think your ending needs something more visceral. And this is where you need to engage your creativity muscles as opposed to your structural storytelling muscles. I need to know in graphic detail not just that your character's throat is burning and he can't catch his breath. I need to know that he's choking, that the spittle is building in his mouth, that he feels the vomit coming up his throat, that his face is breaking out in sweat, his eyes maybe bulging or his tongue thickening. This also applies to the "air". The only description is good air and bad air, which doesn't give your reader's imagination much to work with. Is this an odor, a cloud? Is it a pocket of air or all the air in the building? We just need a better sense, and again a more visceral feeling, of what he's choking on. Maybe it smells like rotten eggs or stings his eyes or something. Remember to constantly be engaging your reader's own sense in the prose. And then yeah, the ending needs to be topped off with more than one line. This is a horrifying situation that he can't communicate, and the desperation needs to come across. He's trying to scream but can't. Maybe he's slamming the ground, scratching the dirt, trying to get the other character's attention. Your character has to be more than observer, he has to engage in action, even if it's fruitless in the end.
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Sep 8, 2017 18:04
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DAYAMN Great feedback - that's exactly what I was looking for. ThirdEmperor's input was great, but I also hoped to keep my story (no wall or water beasts, no ethereal cloud monsters), and figure out why the hell I couldn't deliver on just the horror that was there. OR, more likely, to figure out why the hell I thought any kind of horror existed but didn't come through in my writing, and you really shined a light on that. Thanks. I might go back and rework this thing, just because I want to get it where I envisioned in my head. One of those Twilight Zone endings where it's all a futile loop or something. But, then, half the time, I think about ThirdEmperor's suggestion of going all-out on the weird fiction side. Jesus indecision is my enemy.
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Sep 8, 2017 19:47
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 15:47 |
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This is a great thread and good on you for making it mag7; if anyone else wants to do the same go for it. It's good to help people grapple with their creative demons.
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Sep 10, 2017 11:31
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