Improving our 75 Word Stories -- READ FIRST POST

[emrosenagel]

@emrosenagel, I think you story would have benefitted from a longer length than the 75 word limit allows. It is well done, but it depends on the reader having a strong emotional connection with the boy and his mother and that is near impossible to create in a short, micro-sized piece.

Keeping writing. I think you have a wonderful style and look forward to other things you may create.

Thanks so much! I agree, it would have had a much better impact if the readers could get to know the pair better. Whenever I've written short fiction in the past, I've struggled because I just don't know how to create that kind of connection with such few words. Maybe it is impossible, but perhaps one day I can nail it down. Thanks again for the motivation!

 

[Parson]

@emrosenagel .... Obviously, I liked your story. It made my shortlist, and as I have dabbled in Greek and Hebrew I know of some words which can have very different and ambiguous meanings, so the flexible word thing didn't bother me much at all. And that's especially true, I'd imagine, if you are trying to cast a spell. What I really liked about your story was the depth of the reflection on life I saw in your story. That's not easy to do in 75 words.

I also want to remind you that even getting 1 vote is a superior outcome. A fair percentage of us will get no votes in any 75 word contest. My sense is that there will be somewhere between 30 to 60% of the entries in a contest which will get no votes. That's one of the reasons so many of us make a short listing. Knowing you were in the running for someone is a kindly salve to a chaffed ego. But, the very best thing about writing a 75 word story is that it helps you hone your skills as a writer, and it looks to me that you have some real skills that will only become better with practice. If you learn something or feel good about your story after you write it. I'm sure that's an important win aside from whatever votes might come your way.

 

[emrosenagel]

@emrosenagel .... Obviously, I liked your story. It made my shortlist, and as I have dabbled in Greek and Hebrew I know of some words which can have very different and ambiguous meanings, so the flexible word thing didn't bother me much at all. And that's especially true, I'd imagine, if you are trying to cast a spell. What I really liked about your story was the depth of the reflection on life I saw in your story. That's not easy to do in 75 words.

I also want to remind you that even getting 1 vote is a superior outcome. A fair percentage of us will get no votes in any 75 word contest. My sense is that there will be somewhere between 30 to 60% of the entries which will get no votes. That's one of the reasons so many of us make a short listing. Knowing you were in the running for someone is a kindly salve to a chaffed ego. But, the very best thing about writing a 75 word story is that it helps you hone your skills as a writer, and it looks to me that you have some real skills that will only become better with practice. If you learn something or feel good about your story after you write it. I'm sure that's an important win aside from whatever votes might come your way.

Oh thank you so much! I think life and death are very important topics to write about since they are both so present in everything we do. Even if they are overdone a bit, I always find different views and ideas on the matter good for human growth.
And I always tell myself if at least a single person likes my story, that is a huge win for me

Everyone here has really made my day! Thanks for all the motivation!

 

[paranoid marvin]

@emrosenagel .... Obviously, I liked your story. It made my shortlist, and as I have dabbled in Greek and Hebrew I know of some words which can have very different and ambiguous meanings, so the flexible word thing didn't bother me much at all. And that's especially true, I'd imagine, if you are trying to cast a spell. What I really liked about your story was the depth of the reflection on life I saw in your story. That's not easy to do in 75 words.

I also want to remind you that even getting 1 vote is a superior outcome. A fair percentage of us will get no votes in any 75 word contest. My sense is that there will be somewhere between 30 to 60% of the entries in a contest which will get no votes. That's one of the reasons so many of us make a short listing. Knowing you were in the running for someone is a kindly salve to a chaffed ego. But, the very best thing about writing a 75 word story is that it helps you hone your skills as a writer, and it looks to me that you have some real skills that will only become better with practice. If you learn something or feel good about your story after you write it. I'm sure that's an important win aside from whatever votes might come your way.

Yes, it's always comforting to see in shortlistings that you're on the right track.

 

[elle telle]

Hi all! This was my first time entering the challenges and I’d love some feedback/critique on the story I wrote if anyone has thoughts.

I tried to do a bit of self-critique and am curious if I’ve correctly interpreted what could have improved this story. After going back and reading high scoring entries and my own personal favorites, the biggest reflection I had was that what I wrote was pretty passive and lacked emotional punch (and possibly didn’t make sense??). I think if I were to do it again, rather than writing this sort of far-future reflection, I would focus on a disagreement between two characters trying to interpret the warning so it was more active and emotional, if that makes sense.

Also not sure if it made sense… It was directly inspired by the Ray Cat Solution, and the difficulties scientists have had figuring out how to mark nuclear waste sites so that they 1) will be understood as dangerous across language, time, and cultural difference and 2) the warning is interpreted as a warning, and not as something interesting to explore. But maybe that only made sense to me because I knew what I was trying to write about! Or maybe it made sense, but felt like too abstract an interpretation of the theme.

Anyway, thanks much for reading and I'd appreciate any critique folks have to share.

Afterwords

Every surviving Eorkowin had the tell, that gut-punch-sick-force of symbolic understanding. The etchings in the stone threshold were faded and indecipherable, but they saw the towering spikes guarded by luminescent fur creatures and walked the other way. “What a great mystery,” the dead ones said. “We must discover what caused such an anomaly!”

It was no anomaly, the survivors knew. It was a warning left behind of what lay beyond.

 

[Mr Orange]

@elle telle i liked your story but it think it was missing focus. a few things i would change (just my 2c):

I would get rid of the luminescent fur creatures as they take up valuable space without adding much. my opening would be:

The etchings in the stone threshold were faded and indecipherable, but every Eorkowin had the tell, that gut-punch of symbolic understanding. Crossing into the Unknown was wrong.

I would also switch out "the dead ones" for "some said" and then maybe add in the reveal in the last para: "They never returned; the survivors knew it was no anomaly..."

You might have some left over words to fill things out too.

Just my quick 2 cents, feel free to ignore!

 

[The Judge]

Hi elle!

I have to confess that your story was one of those I didn't fully understand. Having read your explanation of the Ray Cat solution -- which I'd never heard of before -- I can now see where you were coming from and it does make more sense. You're not by any means the first entrant to have that problem, both as to using knowledge or allusions that others might not share and in having potential voters click as to the meaning of a story only once its underpinnings have been explained afterwards. So don't beat yourself up about it, as you're in good company there!

A number of things caused me some confusion, the main one being the irruption into the piece of "the dead ones" as the "said" suggested to me that they were already dead when they were talking of the mystery, so I was thinking zombies or ghosts! Something as simple as "had said" would perhaps have made that clearer, or better yet instead of "dead ones" eg "those who didn't survive" as that offers a better counterpoint to what's gone before.

Your word use held me up, too. For me "the tell" was odd, as I associate "a tell" with eg poker players who aren't very good because they have a giveaway, which is almost the opposite of how you're using it here; I couldn't fathom what "symbolic understanding" meant as it seemed an odd way of saying "an understanding of symbols" and yet I couldn't think of anything else; and "anomaly" really threw me as I hadn't seen anything in the story that fitted the description, as to me it implies something more than just odd or strange, but rather something outrageously irregular in what's expected. Then its repetition in the mouth of the survivors not only doubled down on my confusion but added another since how would they know what the dead ones have said? As to which, if they know it's a warning "of what lay beyond" why do they have the "gut-punch-stick-force" at the beginning? To me, a visceral reaction to something is very different from a rational "this is what it means".

As for the piece itself, even now I know what you were aiming for, to my mind there's not quite enough of a story there in the way that you've told it. Partly that's because it feels all tell-not-show, and it's very distant in tone, and also the order in which you've told the story didn't work for me as a beginning, middle and end -- by going from making a statement about survivors, to the description, then what the survivors did, then what the dead ones said, then back to the survivors, it didn't flow evenly but rather jumped around in both setting and time. Getting closer to the people involved by having characters arguing about what the signs mean would certainly have created a more interesting dynamic and made it more of a story with an obvious beginning-to-end structure, and also it would have reduced the tell-not-show distance. I think you'd still have something of a problem though as to who is, in effect telling the story -- who knows that the ones who go through die? Using an omniscient narrator isn't a problem per se, but in itself distances us from the narrative, so I think you'd need to find some way of having the survivors see that the ones who made the wrong decision perished, which would also have given it a more dramatic/punchy ending than its present one.

But though I'm being pernickity about these things, for a first attempt it really wasn't bad. And you met the Challenge of writing the story, which in itself is a great success, so well done, you!

 

[mosaix]

Hi all! This was my first time entering the challenges and I’d love some feedback/critique on the story I wrote if anyone has thoughts.

I tried to do a bit of self-critique and am curious if I’ve correctly interpreted what could have improved this story. After going back and reading high scoring entries and my own personal favorites, the biggest reflection I had was that what I wrote was pretty passive and lacked emotional punch (and possibly didn’t make sense??). I think if I were to do it again, rather than writing this sort of far-future reflection, I would focus on a disagreement between two characters trying to interpret the warning so it was more active and emotional, if that makes sense.

Also not sure if it made sense… It was directly inspired by the Ray Cat Solution, and the difficulties scientists have had figuring out how to mark nuclear waste sites so that they 1) will be understood as dangerous across language, time, and cultural difference and 2) the warning is interpreted as a warning, and not as something interesting to explore. But maybe that only made sense to me because I knew what I was trying to write about! Or maybe it made sense, but felt like too abstract an interpretation of the theme.

Anyway, thanks much for reading and I'd appreciate any critique folks have to share.

Afterwords

Every surviving Eorkowin had the tell, that gut-punch-sick-force of symbolic understanding. The etchings in the stone threshold were faded and indecipherable, but they saw the towering spikes guarded by luminescent fur creatures and walked the other way. “What a great mystery,” the dead ones said. “We must discover what caused such an anomaly!”

It was no anomaly, the survivors knew. It was a warning left behind of what lay beyond.

Welcome to the challenges.

For me, @elle telle, the first thing I look for when reading the challenge entries is deciding if the entry is actually a story. I read yours through several times and, to be honest, I didn’t think it was, so it fell it the first hurdle.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Hi elle telle, welcome to the forum and thanks for entering the Challenge. Some good points already made, here is my opinion.

Consider that your entry may only be read once or twice, especially when there are 40+ posts in a month. In that couple of reads it has to be understood and also has to stand out from other stories. I must admit to not hearing of the Ray Cat Solution, and the danger with basing the understanding of your entry on someone knowing about this risks reducing the number of potential voters.

You can ask your reader to make some assumptions based on your tale, but ideally you want to give them some basis for coming to a logical conclusion. There is no clue as to who 'the dead ones' are. I assume they are a specific race/group of people (so ideally should be capitalised), but still your story gives no indications as to why they are dead or might be classed as such. And surely ones who had travelled beyond the boundary would be more likely to be dead or dying than those who hadn't?

It's important to have a good imagination when writing fiction, and it's also helpful to have a good knowledge base from which you can draw the inspiration for your stories. You seem to have both, and this is a great starting point.

Please do enter June's Challenge (starts again tomorrow!) and also try out the 100 word challenge over in the Workshop. Here you can enter several stories based on the same theme/genre; maybe try several styles of writing and see which ones get noticed the most.

 

[Mr Orange]

@elle telle i'll just add that, even though it could have possibly been made a bit clearer, i took the dead ones as being those that had gone beyond the threshold from the first reading.

 

[Parson]

@elle telle Thanks for being brave a putting this up to learn about your writing. I haven't anything of substance to add. I was like a lot of others, I didn't understand what was going on at all and I felt it was a bit short of being a story. --- But a very respectable first go at a hard thing.

 

[elle telle]

Wow, thank you so much everyone for the thoughtful feedback! Lots for me to chew on. I somehow messed up my ability to add multiple quotes to this post, so here's just my general thank you to be followed shortly by some more specific responses

 

[elle telle]

@elle telle i liked your story but it think it was missing focus. a few things i would change (just my 2c):

I would get rid of the luminescent fur creatures as they take up valuable space without adding much. my opening would be:

The etchings in the stone threshold were faded and indecipherable, but every Eorkowin had the tell, that gut-punch of symbolic understanding. Crossing into the Unknown was wrong.

I would also switch out "the dead ones" for "some said" and then maybe add in the reveal in the last para: "They never returned; the survivors knew it was no anomaly..."

This point about focus is very well taken! I think this is related to the point others brought up about it not being enough of a story - and I think that also plays into what you're getting at about moving the reveal to the end. I appreciate this example of how to make something more story-like without the narrator change, as that was my main thought about how to solve "the problem" of what I wrote, and I appreciate having examples of other possible solutions.

A number of things caused me some confusion, the main one being the irruption into the piece of "the dead ones" as the "said" suggested to me that they were already dead when they were talking of the mystery, so I was thinking zombies or ghosts! Something as simple as "had said" would perhaps have made that clearer, or better yet instead of "dead ones" eg "those who didn't survive" as that offers a better counterpoint to what's gone before.

Your word use held me up, too. For me "the tell" was odd, as I associate "a tell" with eg poker players who aren't very good because they have a giveaway, which is almost the opposite of how you're using it here; I couldn't fathom what "symbolic understanding" meant as it seemed an odd way of saying "an understanding of symbols" and yet I couldn't think of anything else; and "anomaly" really threw me as I hadn't seen anything in the story that fitted the description, as to me it implies something more than just odd or strange, but rather something outrageously irregular in what's expected. Then its repetition in the mouth of the survivors not only doubled down on my confusion but added another since how would they know what the dead ones have said? As to which, if they know it's a warning "of what lay beyond" why do they have the "gut-punch-stick-force" at the beginning? To me, a visceral reaction to something is very different from a rational "this is what it means".

Thank you for all this very specific feedback on word use - this is actually really helpful to me to have another perspective on how very specific words or word combinations I used didn't make sense to others, but made sense in my brain because I knew what i was trying to say. I didn't even think about the fact this could be interpreted as a ghost story! But now that you say it I totally see it.

As for the piece itself, even now I know what you were aiming for, to my mind there's not quite enough of a story there in the way that you've told it. Partly that's because it feels all tell-not-show, and it's very distant in tone, and also the order in which you've told the story didn't work for me as a beginning, middle and end -- by going from making a statement about survivors, to the description, then what the survivors did, then what the dead ones said, then back to the survivors, it didn't flow evenly but rather jumped around in both setting and time. Getting closer to the people involved by having characters arguing about what the signs mean would certainly have created a more interesting dynamic and made it more of a story with an obvious beginning-to-end structure, and also it would have reduced the tell-not-show distance. I think you'd still have something of a problem though as to who is, in effect telling the story -- who knows that the ones who go through die? Using an omniscient narrator isn't a problem per se, but in itself distances us from the narrative, so I think you'd need to find some way of having the survivors see that the ones who made the wrong decision perished, which would also have given it a more dramatic/punchy ending than its present one.

Your tell-not-show point is very well taken, and I think gives better words to what I was feeling after doing my little self-critique - I think I wrote kind of a little thought piece or reflection on a moment rather than actually telling a story. Also reflecting more, I think that in some ways I could have left the story more ambiguous. I know having read some other reviews that that isn't everyone's cup of tea, but one way to have written this could have just focused on the difficulties of interpreting language and meaning left by a completely different culture, and the argument of warning vs. interesting to explore, and potentially left it opened ended as to who was right. The ending there would perhaps be fear of a loss of someone close to you, without actually knowing for sure that loss would take place.

For me, @elle telle, the first thing I look for when reading the challenge entries is deciding if the entry is actually a story. I read yours through several times and, to be honest, I didn’t think it was, so it fell it the first hurdle.

This is definitely a reflection/critique I'll be taking forward with me! I've never really tried to write a very short story before (well, I think way back in high school we had to write "Brautigans" as an assignment once, but that was forever ago and a completely different genre) and kind of just went down the wrong track. But now having time to have read some great examples of stories that are actually stories and reflect on my own writing, I think I'll be able to move in the direction of an actual story in the future.

You can ask your reader to make some assumptions based on your tale, but ideally you want to give them some basis for coming to a logical conclusion. There is no clue as to who 'the dead ones' are. I assume they are a specific race/group of people (so ideally should be capitalised), but still your story gives no indications as to why they are dead or might be classed as such. And surely ones who had travelled beyond the boundary would be more likely to be dead or dying than those who hadn't?

I also think I made too many assumptions! I'd read some article about writing very short/flash fiction before embarking on this, and one of the points it made that I think I leaned too heavily on was using references and allusions - but in this case I built the whole story around something that was pretty obscure and didn't show enough within the story to allow folks to get what was going on.

Thanks for being brave a putting this up to learn about your writing.

Thanks to you and everyone else to take the time to read this! Despite clearly having a lot to learn, I can't tell y'all how meaningful it feels just to have someone read what I wrote, and then on top of that to take the time to share all this wonderful feedback. There's something very special about that even if what I wrote wasn't the greatest, and I'm really looking forward to participating in more challenges going forward!

 

[JS Wiig]

I appreciate any and all feedback on my May entry, reproduced here in its entirety for your convenience. Thanks!

Unanswerable Questions

Rosetta pored over instrumentation, equations, and computer simulations. Thirty years she dedicated to deciphering the languages of the universe. Interpretation was illusive.

Then her peers found an alien craft deep in the Mariana Trench. Its inhabitants did understand and translated into scientific terms, but it was beyond human comprehension. Rosetta grew disillusioned.

Long wandering, she came to a Japanese monastery. Songs and chants in voices she could not understand brought her great solace.

 

[The Judge]

Overall, I found the piece interesting but for me it wasn't quite enough of a story, and since I like endings which have an impact, for my taste the low-key almost throwaway feel of your last sentence as written didn't provide a satisfactory conclusion.

I was also confused as to what she was actually trying to do -- "deciphering the languages of the universe" suggests she's trying to gather every known language and have some kind of universal translator. But in that case even if she couldn't get every single one dealt with, she could surely get some of them, so that would be a success, and since she'd start with Earth languages, why would Japanese be a mystery to her? If you mean something like "the underlying language of the universe" ie a kind of Ur-language, then I think that needed more of an explanation as well as eliminating the plural. Though I'm not sure how either of those ideas links in with what she's doing in the first sentence, nor with the aliens translating into scientific terms. If you had explained things a little more, that may well have required more words but you had a couple spare and could have found more by suitable pruning eg "Visiting aliens translated [something] in scientific terms" would cut 21 words down to 7 without losing anything of great importance.

Your tense use also caused me a few problems. The "pored" in the first sentence is clearly past tense, but the "Thirty years she dedicated" left me unsure whether the past tense there was deliberate as an effective continuation of the first line or an error -- "For thirty years she dedicated" would be fine, as would "Thirty years she had dedicated" but the way you've phrased it I'm not sure where in the time spectrum this is meant to be. That tense use cropped up again with "Long wandering, she came" as to me it should be "After long wandering" since the wandering must be ended before the past tense of "came".

Word use also made me twitch. Unless you really do mean the interpretation in the first para was illusory (in which case that would be the better word) the "illusive" should be "elusive" ie it eluded her, and to my mind the "it" of "it was beyond" is wrong as there is no noun in the previous clause to which it must attach -- it should be eg "Their translation was". There are also odd choices eg "Inhabitants" isn't usually a word to use for aliens in a craft, and "disillusioned" doesn't seem right as it suggests she had illusions to begin with, whereas surely she's feeling disappointment. The "did understand" felt wrong since there's no reference to understanding beforehand, only to deciphering, and in the last line the "voices she could not understand" is poetic, but one surely doesn't understand voices, it's the words and meaning one struggles with. Even the use of Rosetta as a name left me in two minds, as it's obviously a reference to the Rosetta stone, but it's so obvious it was a little counterproductive for me.

So, while there was a certain poetic, melancholy feel to the writing which I liked, to my mind the idea behind the story needed to be clearer and I'd have preferred tense and word use to have been a little better controlled.

Hope that helps!

 

[JS Wiig]

@The Judge I’m learning to appreciate sitting on the story for a while before posting.

 

[The Judge]

If you can do that, it is a good idea. I'm not disciplined enough to get my Challenge stories written well ahead of the deadline so I don't have much time to reflect on them, but even in the hour or so I manage to scrape by with I'll have had several changes of mind about odd words or phrases and in my other writing I'm always going back after a day or two and changing a lot of stuff.

What I think is most helpful, though, is running the story past someone else before posting. As I've often said here, I always get the Judicial Helpmeet to read the first draft of my stories, and his reaction invariably tells me if something isn't clear and I need to revise it to make it intelligible -- that's particularly a problem with the 75s as we've so few words to play with and it's so easy to prune hard and find you've (ie one has) pruned out the line that allows everyone to understand what you're getting at!

 

[Parson]

I always hesitate to comment after @The Judge because she is so complete and clinical, so as to make me feel almost childish. I am more of a novice at this literary criticism stuff. Anyway....

What I liked .... I thought you had a good idea. I could easily resonate with frustration of translation and I think it's much less than universally understood how vast the problems of translating an alien language would be. I also liked the solace that was gained from religious experience which very difficult to quantify but is real nonetheless. I thought the name Rosetta, was brilliant.

What needed work .... I am more confused about her mission after reading more carefully than I was before. I assumed it was to translate one alien language but on further re-read, I'm not at all sure that was intended. This sentence left me very puzzled. Its inhabitants did understand and translated into scientific terms, but it was beyond human comprehension. When read with the one alien language assumption and the Rosetta hint, I assumed that she had found a "Rosetta stone" but because the translation was a scientific "notation?" this translation also was unhelpful. --- My re-read throws all of this into doubt, but that too might indicate a weakness in the story. Finally, while I liked the idea of the ending, your story ended less "with a bang than with a whimper."*

*A few months ago it was suggested to me that I needed to punch up my endings. I had been trying to make my endings realistic, by which I mean that I didn't go outside of a normal reality which is almost always muddled, unclear, and temporary. Since then I've tried for a stronger clearer ending and I believe my stories have benefited from them. I believe they have made my stories more memorable.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Hi JS Wiig. Some good points made already.

I agree that before posting, make sure you have perfected and polished your story. Then when you are ready to post don't. Leave it 24/48 hours or even a week , then go back and re-read. Any gaps in your story that you may have been subconsciously filling in should become more apparent , as will any punctuation or spelling errors (we all make them!)

As for your entry, I agree with The Judge that your writing has a pleasant poetic style to it, however the story lacked some clarity. I think the main issue was in the first two paragraphs, which really don't sit well together. It feels as if you've either had to substantially trim down a larger story, or you've tried to cover too much ground with too few words.

My understanding of your story is that Rosetta has grown tired and frustrated with studying and deciphering language, but ends up appreciating the beauty of it for what it is; something that many English Lit students will understand!

My advice would be to forget the paragraph regarding 'deciphering the languages of the universe' (which without further description doesn't make sense) and start with the spacecraft being found on the sea floor and her trying to understand the aliens' attempt at communications. She becomes disillusioned at her failure, goes off on her own, hears the enchanting songs and chants and learns to appreciate the beauty of language. It's still a tough ask for 75 words though!

 

[Astro Pen]

Not looking for a critique here. As an 'always experimenting' writer I tried to find a balance and it apparently didn't work - at all

Just curious whether people 'got it' or didn't 'get it'.
Was it too in your face obvious or did no one get the reference? :-

Outbound

I knew Valenkoff was a crook, living well beyond his apparent means.
Each morning I searched his landed shuttle for contraband. Upholstery, frame, engine bay. I even used a magnet to check for gold components painted to look like steel. Nothing.

I got a call from personnel.

"Could you work the customs night shift? Rymann is sick today."

"Okay."

22:00 hours. Schmitt's shuttle rolls up for departure formalities.
There, in the passenger seat, was Valenkoff.