Improving our 75 Word Stories -- READ FIRST POST

+1 on the coughing and gasping. I like what you did with it as the coughing grew shorter, but it was distracting. Not sure how it could be improved though, I did like this quite a lot.
 
Luiglin said:
I liked the core idea but it was the italicised coughing lines that caught me on this one. I can understand why you used them but they seemed to jerk me away from the tale rather than keep me on track.
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Makes sense. I wrestled with how to depict the coughing for a good couple days, and I am not convinced I chose the best way in the end. I was trying to work a balance of being ambiguous about who was coughing until the end and not wasting a huge quantity of words on it.

Any suggestions on how to improve this?
 
So, I don't think your story is awful, @Joshua Jones, but I've got a significant number of reservations.
  1. I agree with @Luiglin - the italicised coughing doesn't work for me. It feels extraneous to the scene, rather than part of it.
  2. Sick/dying child is a pushbutton - incorporate in story, get immediate pathos. As a result, it's something you need to handle really well to be novel and interesting, and I don't think you get there.
  3. "waivered" is an error. (wavered)
  4. There's a bunch of distancing going on, for example: "The child". It's her daughter. You reveal this pretty much immediately, so the only thing this is doing is implying that Emma doesn't really care about her. Also, I don't care about the machine having an engine and that engine chugging, I want to know about Emma and her feelings and thoughts (if you'd have swapped the two sentences, it might have worked as an intro, though you could still have lost the "engine" and gained a word).
  5. I think you're trying, with the title, to set up a bait-and-switch (or a reversal, if you like) where the reader thinks that Emma is sacrificing her daughter to make the machine work, or something like that, and then revealing it's sacrificing her humanity to keep her "alive"? If that's the case, (a) the title is too vanilla to stick in my head past actually reading it and (b) I don't think you committed hard enough to the baiting, and so the switch feels weak and soft. If that wasn't what you were aiming for, I don't know what the sacrifice of the title is. (*1)
In summary: I didn't like the italics, I didn't think the story had enough elan to carry the dying child trope, and I didn't think the structure worked.

(*1) I'm never sure whether people read the titles before they read the story. I have a feeling they don't, or at least not in such a way that it registers, and they tend to go back and look after.
 
Joshua Jones said:
Makes sense. I wrestled with how to depict the coughing for a good couple days, and I am not convinced I chose the best way in the end. I was trying to work a balance of being ambiguous about who was coughing until the end and not wasting a huge quantity of words on it.

Any suggestions on how to improve this?
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I would have liked more description on the child's struggles for life. Not in a morbid way but maybe as seen from the Mother's eyes? Sort of show me that final point that tilted her to take such a dramatic step. Was it grief or madness or both?

Hope that helps.
 
Robert Mackay said:
So, I don't think your story is awful, @Joshua Jones, but I've got a significant number of reservations.
  1. I agree with @Luiglin - the italicised coughing doesn't work for me. It feels extraneous to the scene, rather than part of it.
  2. Sick/dying child is a pushbutton - incorporate in story, get immediate pathos. As a result, it's something you need to handle really well to be novel and interesting, and I don't think you get there.
  3. "waivered" is an error. (wavered)
  4. There's a bunch of distancing going on, for example: "The child". It's her daughter. You reveal this pretty much immediately, so the only thing this is doing is implying that Emma doesn't really care about her. Also, I don't care about the machine having an engine and that engine chugging, I want to know about Emma and her feelings and thoughts (if you'd have swapped the two sentences, it might have worked as an intro, though you could still have lost the "engine" and gained a word).
  5. I think you're trying, with the title, to set up a bait-and-switch (or a reversal, if you like) where the reader thinks that Emma is sacrificing her daughter to make the machine work, or something like that, and then revealing it's sacrificing her humanity to keep her "alive"? If that's the case, (a) the title is too vanilla to stick in my head past actually reading it and (b) I don't think you committed hard enough to the baiting, and so the switch feels weak and soft. If that wasn't what you were aiming for, I don't know what the sacrifice of the title is. (*1)
In summary: I didn't like the italics, I didn't think the story had enough elan to carry the dying child trope, and I didn't think the structure worked.

(*1) I'm never sure whether people read the titles before they read the story. I have a feeling they don't, or at least not in such a way that it registers, and they tend to go back and look after.
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Fair enough. 3 was just carelessness on my part, and I never really liked the coughing interruptions in the first place (I just couldn't come up with a better idea). I pretty well agree with 2 and 5 as well; I thought it was a bit of a typical storyline for Steampunk, and I freely confess I am terrible with titles (you pretty well hit it with what I was trying to do, though). 4, though, was actually deliberate. I was trying to hint that, in order to go through with the ritual, she had to suppress her emotions and distance herself from her daughter, though she was unable to do so completely. Hence, she was focusing on the engine, anonymizing her daughter, etc. Maybe a narrative switch to first person, rather than a third person which is based on her perspective, would make this more clear?

Thanks again for your review!
 
Luiglin said:
I would have liked more description on the child's struggles for life. Not in a morbid way but maybe as seen from the Mother's eyes? Sort of show me that final point that tilted her to take such a dramatic step. Was it grief or madness or both?

Hope that helps.
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Not a bad idea, though it would make it clear what she was doing from the outset. Alternatively, I wonder if being seen from the daughter's eyes would be an interesting perspective? The mystery of the story would come from the daughter not knowing what her mother is doing, rather than my trying to make it more opaque artificially.
 
Joshua Jones said:
Maybe a narrative switch to first person, rather than a third person which is based on her perspective, would make this more clear?
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Um, not sure. I think the primary problem is probably too many (quite good) ideas for 75 words, which is always a bit of a curse.
 
Robert Mackay said:
(*1) I'm never sure whether people read the titles before they read the story. I have a feeling they don't, or at least not in such a way that it registers, and they tend to go back and look after.
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Can only say that I most certainly do read titles before anything else. I was almost shocked to hear that you feel that people don't. For me so many of the clues for a story, particularly a 75 come from the title. ---- FREE WORDS ---- make them count!
 
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I read each title, but I don't always take it in the first time as I'm too eager to find out the story, so I'm probably in Robert's non-registering camp. I do however read the title properly when I look at the story a second and subsequent time, though, when either I know the plot and I'm looking at nuance/how well it's told etc -- of which the title is indeed a part -- or I'm still trying to work out what the story is about and I'm hoping the title gives me a clue!


Joshua, I didn't mind the italicised coughing, save there was too much of it for my taste which felt a waste of words, and I agree the title wasn't helpful or memorable. However, the story wasn't a bad one, and it hovered at the edges of my shortlist for a while, but it didn't seem quite original or special enough to warrant it, plus on reflection I felt there wasn't sufficient tenderness in evidence for it to meet the theme. In nit-picky mode, I also also caught the "waivered" which lost you a mark, I raised an eyebrow over the word "ritual" which to me took the piece away from the steam-punk vibe and into the realm of ordinary fantasy which didn't help, and I objected to the comma and therefore pause after "but" in the last line -- little things on their own, but cumulatively they were enough to push it further away from being shortlisted.
 
The title can decide for me if I'll read a book or not (that is, if I'm still undecided by the blurb).
 
Yep, it's best if you copy and paste, so that there's no confusion as to which we're all talking about. I'd suggest doing one at a time, or no more than two at a time, so that you get the most feedback for each.
 
Feedback welcomed;

Make me numb or else I die.

"I demand you remove it." Hated emotion warps my verbal processing.

"Impossible."

"I cannot function without its removal. the trial has failed!"

"Care unit 7258, you've proven its effectiveness so completely we will be placing Tender in all our care units."

My abdomen spasms uncontrollably. Twin rows of emotive fluid run down my copper face.

Later

Almost done.

the infant whimpers.

I pause.

She wails.

Without thought I turn from self destruction to embrace her.

(That was my last entry for August)
Anything you can teach me is welcome.
 
Well, I liked it, as evidenced by the fact I shortlisted it and it was a joint runner-up for my vote.

You've got a few typos -- missing capital letters for "The trial" and "The infant", a missing full stop after "Later", "self-destruction" should carry a hyphen, and possibly a comma is needed after "thought" -- all of which can make a difference when it comes to shortlisting or vote-casting. I think I'd have put "Tender" in inverted commas, to set if off a little, and despite its presence I wondered if the theme of tenderness was sufficiently apparent in the story, though concluded it was (I had problems with seeing it in my own piece, so added "tenderly" to make it clearer!) -- looking at it now, I'm not sure if "tender" is the correct term for the supervisor to have used, since it's ambiguous as an alternative to the noun, ie carer, but that's in retrospect. The only thing I actively didn't like when reading it for voting was the "Later" since it removes us from the care unit's POV, and I'd have preferred something from its viewpoint even if it was more long-winded, though I appreciate story-telling preferences are often over-ruled by word count imperatives.

Anyhow, the story worked for me, it was a good deal more original than some, you handled it well with a degree of restraint in the narrative proper for the characterisation and I liked your word choice which also fitted character, eg warps, spasms, emotive fluid, and particularly whimpers followed by wails and that final embrace, and not least, "infant" not "baby". So, all very good as far as I was concerned.
 
I'm with T.J. here. I liked your story very much. I also shortlisted it. There was nothing that I noted that I could point to that said to me, I can't vote for that story. For me it was more a matter of taste. I had no trouble seeing the theme and the genre, in fact I would say that they were there at least as well as they were for any story in the contest. The only really picky thing that I could think of which might give your story a bit more of the grab you might be to do a little more table setting. Why are the steamies taking care of humans? Probably couldn't do that without slicing something else critical.

Having read T.J.'s comment I have to agree that having the Care Unit tell the whole story might have been better.
 
@WordWarrior it is a neat idea but for me the story was too cold. I can see why you wrote it that way considering the context. However when the twist point came I thought it needed more of an emotional wrench/switch. The problem is, like many if the 75s, mine included, getting that in under the limit is very difficult.
 
Thank you for the feedback, T.J., Parson and Luiglin. It sure is a challenge to write a meaningful story with such a small word count.
@Luiglin I felt my ending was too abrupt, but had no idea how to change it given the space. I appreciate you taking the time to comment.
 
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