Re: Improving our Challenge Stories -- READ FIRST POST
TDZ, re your alternative story.
I can't think of a better word for an internalised struggle, but I don't like "abounds" for war, and the use of "soldiers fall" doesn't sound at all inward. Though that actually is not a line which would have worried me as much as the others.
Having "Cry" on one line and "Havoc" on the next means anyone who knows the quote will see you are setting us up for the dogs of war -- which in turn means the "And justice fails all" as the third consequence falls absolutely flat. I actually read the piece three times and had started this post before I realised what you had done, which meant that lines I thought weren't worth their place now had to be re-read in the light of your plan. However, notwithstanding that cleverness, I don't think lines like "Dogs and cats abandoned" as a portrait of the apocalypse are helping the story at all. And, of course, anyone who doesn't know the quote won't see beyond that.
For what it's worth, I think if you worked on it to make every line fit then this could have been a real vote winner eg a variant of "And war comes" for the third line would keep the quote-knowers happy until we saw the full picture; eg "Dogs feasting on children's bones" would continue the horror.
I don't know that I understand the ending, where the screen goes black, and exactly what world it is s/he is reclaiming, but that could well be me.
NB Hobson's choice is, of course, no choice at all -- so if by that and the idea of war being an internal struggle you are implying his/her own fight to oppose the family, I don't know that it's particularly apposite, since such a struggle patently means s/he can choose.
Ahh, Judge, you're thinking me too deep!
Another reason that I just couldn't bring myself to post this story is that it was not entirely clear to two out of three people who read it -- however, the two did make a connection to something close.
What's going on is that the main character is clicking through channels on TV, and finding all the tragic and depressing and sad things that go on in the world. He struggles within himself, and against his family's complaints, he turns it off and reclaims his world. As my mother used to say, about turning off the TV when nothing is on, "what a revolutionary idea!" The revolution of silence. I did intentionally make it look like he's pushing the button and making things happen, at the start, but I hoped it would come clear at the end that he was just pushing the button and watching instead.
Two out of three of my original readers guessed computer, clicking the mouse, instead of the "clicker" or remote control. That wasn't a bad idea, either, so I didn't worry too much about that.
The "war" line I wanted to go toward that internal struggle, warring with himself over turning it off. I had worked all the other lines into a good scansion, syllable pattern and rhythm and a slight pattern of rhyme without being a poem (maybe could have been better, but it's hard working with that static first-word pattern), and I couldn't come up with anything that began with "war" and worked with "all" and "prevail" and had 6 syllables and also implied an internal struggle. Maybe I was just forcing too hard and should have replaced the "all" and "prevail" instead. Or I could have dropped the "cry havoc..." thing entirely. That came about from an accident in the beginning, when I found that I had ended a line with cry and another with destruction, and that led me to havoc, etc.
I didn't like the dogs line, either, but it came from a commercial (probably only American) that we get endlessly here, with Sarah MacLachlan singing some weepy angel song to pictures of dogs and cats in cages; I think it's for the Humane Society.
Hobson's choice got in there because it's really hard to start a sentence with "of", and I initially thought that Hobson's choice was a choice of bad things, only to look it up and discover it was "this or nothing", which worked even better!
Anyway, I think this one just tried too hard.
