Improving our 75 Word Stories -- READ FIRST POST

[JonH]

Bin Laden never occurred to me as the genre was historical fiction, but it would make a kind of sense.

 

[The Judge]

MatterSack, if the others are right and this was a story about Osama bin Laden, and it's the burial at sea which is the deception, so the CIA are now free to torture him into making revelations, then that is a clever take on the incident, and it would only have taken a few words to make this clear -- eg using his name in the last line, eg removing the ambiguity of having him motionless on the floor and instead have him sit ready in an interrogation chair. I'd suggest another time if at all possible get other people to read your story before you post, to see if they understand what's going on, and if they don't then make changes until it is clearer. I have to say for me, it would probably still have failed the historical fiction test, as being too recent for "history" but I can well imagine with those few tweaks it would have tickled other people's fancies and accrued a lot of mentions and possibly votes. Anyway, good luck next time.

 

[Phyrebrat]

Hi Mattersack.

I'm going to be contrary here (been e-hanging around with Springs for too long, I suppose ) and say that I understood your tale on the first read. Also, I think the fragmentary, staccato style you used worked as it lent a sort of Top Secret or Official ambience to your tale.

I ruled it out of my short-listing on pure preference simply because I have a bit of a hangover regarding the War on Terror/etc. Like I said, though, that is purely my own prejudice and not a reflection on your story which I think was clean and snappy. Furthermore, as a first entry, it was a great submission.

Definitely take TJs advice, and run it past someone else (off-Chrons, of course). I usually write my entry and sit on it for a couple of weeks then re-read it as things often jump out after I've forgotten about it for a bit.

pH

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Hey! Cheeky.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

I got it, and I believe it was on my shortlist.

Obviously, given my own story, I didn't have any problem with the "historicalness" of it -- once something is past, it's history, as far as I'm concerned. I didn't think there was a particular cutoff that made something too recent to be "historical fiction".

Being a skeptic of the official versions of things, I thought your story was a perfectly plausible bit of deception that could easily be more truth than fiction.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Okay the 75er is not my forte, in general (roll on the 300...) which is partly my slightly wordy style but in this one I nailed, for once, the genre and the theme (it was historical, it had deception, it was a fictional character in the sense I don't know who went up the ramp) but it got way less mentions than I normally would. So what fell flat?

(For my own thoughts, the first two paragraphs were too similar in structure and I didn't nail a last line.)


Re: June 2014 -- SEVENTY-FIVE WORD WRITING CHALLENGE -- READ FIRST POST!!
RATS!

For three years I shivered in the shadow of the keep, holding the Bruce's siege. Those inside were worse, reduced to eating rats.

At last, they offered a parley. Safe under a flag of truce, I led our party to the gatehouse and waited, enclosed by grey walls, the murder hole dark above us.

A crash. The portcullis fell. Soldiers descended each tower, pikes raised.

I saw the cleaver; the rats were off the menu.

 

[Parson]

Matter Sach: I assumed it was about Bin Lauden, and that did make the Historical Fiction for me. (If it wasn't I hadn't a clue about it.) I thought it lacked in the story part. It seemed to lack an ending for me.

Springs: I assumed this was some obscure story about Scottish independence. "The Bruce" being my clue. For me it was just too gross! Trading rat flesh for human flesh!!?? Not a good reason I suppose, but it was mine.

 

[Parson]

Sorry for the Double Post, but I expected my somewhat dark tale to attract more attention than it did. Was the history just too obscure?

-----------

Stone Cold Revenge
​

Arent winked at Anna, Dominie Schaat’s teenaged daughter.

Coloring slightly, she nodded. She would meet him in the woods again. Arent might be New Netherland’s married Romeo, but he said he loved her. Tonight she would say “Yes.”

----

Anna meant nothing to Arent. Revenge was everything. Nailing her was the way to nail the sanctimonious Dominie who had publicly shamed him for his dalliances. Arent smiled. Shaat and his daughter would soon be shamed too.

 

[JonH]

Sorry for the Double Post, but I expected my somewhat dark tale to attract more attention than it did. Was the history just too obscure?

To me, Historical Fiction is fiction in a historical setting. It doesn't matter whether the surrounding events are obscure as long as I get a sense of the historical place. Here I got a sense it was pre-independence America.

Although the setting could have been stronger (but you only have 75 words, so that's a trade-off), the problem was I just didn't like the story. It felt like you wrote a short scene, which was okay, and then another full of exposition explaining what was really going on. That format didn't work for me. Sorry.

Edited to add: I thought the POV signalling in the first sentence could have been improved. I'm being picky, but in third person limited, it's best to name the POV character first, ideally as the subject of the sentence.

 

[The Judge]

Parson, although I'm interested in history and knew a bit about 16th and 17th century American settlers, this particular episode had completely passed me by, so yes I think it was probably a bit obscure, particularly for non-Americans (and searching for it now has taken some time to find any other information). That in itself wasn't a problem, though, and it passed the historical test for me with the New Netherlands line.

I agree that the second, expositionary, part of the story is the problem, as it all felt a wee bit flat. As I've said here in this thread before, I think, I like a twist in the tail/tale, and for me there was no twist as the whole plot was blown with "Anna meant nothing to Arent", with everything thereafter simply expanding on that line.

Had I been writing the story I think I would have started with something like "You are a degenerate fornicator," bellowed Dominie Schaat. [which gets the reader's attention!] and then Arent meekly bowed his head and said nothing. to disguise his feelings (having him seethe with anger makes any twist too obvious). Then a scene with Arent and an unnamed girl with him promising marriage and getting his wicked way with her and/or her revealing she is pregnant, and only in the last lines confirming her relationship to Schaat with something like The Dominie's daughter was sweet. Revenge on the Dominie was sweeter.

Basically, I think your version had a bit too much telling and not enough showing.

Hope that helps a little.

 

[Parson]

JonH: That was helpful. I think the POV point is excellent. Not being much of a writer, I don't often think about the POV, only to the point of First person or not.

T.J.: Wow! Thanks for all the work that you put into answering my post. I am really impressed that you managed to find anything at all about the historical setting. I am on the Historical Commission for our denomination and one of the main things we do is review books for publication on our history. And the story came from one of those. I doubt the book has sole more than a 100 copies. Yet you discovered that Schaat's daughter produced an illegitimate child by Arent. (Wow again!)

I think you have hit the nail on the head when you talk about my telling rather than showing is where I fall down very often. In my job I try very hard to make things as plain as possible, there is enough indefinite about Scriptural understandings as there is.

I can definitely see what you are talking about, and making those kinds of changes would have definitely made the story much stronger.

Thanks again!!

 

[The Judge]

You're right that telling is to be preferred when you need to make things clear and unambiguous, and undoubtedly it's a good thing for sermons and the like. You'll have to switch more into showing mode when writing the Challenge stories, though!

I don't know if it's of interest generally to you, but this is one of the two sites I found which mentioned the affair. The other was in a genealogy website, where a descendant gave some details of poor Anna being shunned by the congregation.

 

[Parson]

You're right that telling is to be preferred when you need to make things clear and unambiguous, and undoubtedly it's a good thing for sermons and the like. You'll have to switch more into showing mode when writing the Challenge stories, though!

I don't know if it's of interest generally to you, but this is one of the two sites I found which mentioned the affair. The other was in a genealogy website, where a descendant gave some details of poor Anna being shunned by the congregation.

The link would not work at 10 pm (here in Iowa). I am somewhat interested and will try to click it again at another time. Dominie Schaat was a man who tolerated no "monkey business" but to his credit he did stand by Anna in spite of the cost to him personally. I thought quite a bit more highly of him because of that. (Of course standing by a "wayward" daughter is something I know a bit about, and even today there is a price for a Parson to pay for that.)

I will work at showing rather than telling in the next challenge.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Thanks, Parson. So, perhaps setting the era more firmly would have helped. The subject matter is gruesome, indeed, but much loved by squillions of schoolkids every year.

 

[Mr Orange]

Mattersack: yours was a bit unclear for me. i did think it could have been Osama, but for some reason was placing this at the point of capture, which threw that out the window. i think having him strapped into a chair like the judge suggested would have worked better as i was kind of reading that the tales he could tell would have been how he was killed and they were actually going to dump him in the sea. and so i also lost the deception part of it. as TJ also said, a few choice words wouild have made this all clear

Springs: a good story as expected from you, but it was not history that i knew, so didn't make the shortlist

Parson: i had no idea what part of history this was about, even less so than springs, so it didn't get a mention. the others have mentioned a fair bit about the actual story itself, so will leave that with them

 

[Mr Orange]

so here is my effort for discussion. it's based on the july the 20th plot to assasinate Hitler where a briefcase bomb was placed next to his chair in conference room in the Wolf's Lair. It's believed that Colonel Heinz Brandt unwittingly moved the briefcase so it was behind a chair leg which deflected enough of the blast from Hitler to save his life. my idea was that Brandt moved the briefcase with intent to avoid a possible worse future with Heinrich Himmler assuming control of the Nazi party. and i threw in some time travel for good measure. there were a couple of mentions of this being more alternative history than historical fiction, but i felt that as the events of (known) history had not been changed within the story, i was okay. so, a twist on the age old story of using time travel to kill Hitler.

i actually found this story quite fun to write, mostly because of the research i had to do to get everything in my head, and also because it ties in quite well to an idea i already had for a future novel.

Smoothing over a Wrinkle


The bathroom echoes with my heavy breathing; travelling is a surprising strain. I check the unfamiliar face in the mirror and smile.

In the conference room I push past uniformed men and black swastikas. A piercing stare greets me.

“Oberst Brandt.”

I nod, not trusting my German. The briefcase is there, under the table. I gently nudge it forward.

Just seventeen centimetres is needed to prevent his death and wipe Himmler’s Fourth Reich from history.

 

[MatterSack]

Thanks for all the replies!

Yep, it was supposed to be about Bin Laden (I assumed the 'sea burial' comment would give it away but evidently I wasn't clear enough). The splutter at the end was intended to reveal that he's actually alive; ready to be interrogated and officially dead to the world (hence the title) with no hope of rescue or representation.

 

[MatterSack]

@Mr Orange: Your story was clear enough (for me at least) to pinpoint the event to which it was referring. I understood that the assassin was facilitating Hitler's survival (him purportedly being the lesser of two evils), and that he'd travelled through space and/or time to do so.


I thought it was a clever concept that was explained very efficiently. The only problems I had with it:

• Time-travel (or possibly even more given the new face?) seemed way too science-fictiony for the historical theme.
  
  
• How would this assassin know that Hitler's reign would be preferable to Himmler's? How would he know exactly what the future would hold? If he was futuristic enough to utilise space/time manipulation, how could he even be sure that the civilisation to which he belonged would even develop, or that there wouldn't be time paradoxes involving lines of descent? He could theoretically be resetting the last few centuries or so!

 

[Parson]

Mr. Orange: I liked the idea and I thought it was well written, but as I said earlier alternate history did not receive consideration from me in the category of historical fiction.

 

[Mr Orange]

thanks for the comments

mattersack, i did wonder whether throwing the time travel thing in would put anyone off. of course he wouldn't truly know what he was doing was for the better, but then no one altering history can know that.

parson, i allowed myself this in the category of historical fiction as the events described happened exactly as they did in history (to an observer at least) and there was definitely fiction in it