Improving our 300 Word Stories -- READ FIRST POST!

I'm putting my entry to the last 300-worder up here. This'll be the third time I'm putting it up. First time it got pulled for being 301 words (damn you, "3.5million"!!). Second time I put it up here but the challenge was still up so it went down again. This time it's staying. Probably. Love to know what peeps think of it. Harebrain was humblingly complimentary about it, but maybe that was just to sweeten the bitter pill of disqualification (only joking, HB)... o_O


Flight YV1906 Istanbul to Berlin.

“Istanbul to Berlin?” asked Em. “But this is Barbados.”

Viv wiped a sweaty wrist across her brow. These apocalypses yielded explanation, but never made sense. Fragments of life – a hand here, a melted toy there – fused with the cold forensics of dead technology. Something glinted.

“What’s that?” Em pointed.

Viv squatted and collected the corkscrew. Point covered in dried blood.

Odd.


~


The man jerked round as the youngster slammed a fist into his shoulder. The aisle was too cramped to attack. The man toppled toward Ba’athal, scarlet blooming from the puncture.

Screams.

Ba’athal stood. The young human stared him down, corkscrew dripping red. I wasn’t sent here for this.

“Let me heal him.” Ba’athal raised his hands submissively.

“Only God heals!” the youngster laughed. Sweat glazed his wild face.

Just as scared as his captors.


~


The cockpit lock was smashed. A uniform smudged the ground.

Viv removed her Ray Bans for a better look. Different clothing stuck to the seat. “Pilot wasn’t flying when it crashed.”

“So who was?”

She prodded the flesh stuck to the still-dipped throttle.

This was deliberate. She stared at the Bajan sun.“Maybe not the guy who thought he was.”



~


Ba’athal impassively watched the hijacker dash to the cockpit. He inspected the passengers. An elderly couple stoically embracing; a mother and child weeping; teenagers vainly seeking mobile signal.

Such strange creatures.

The sound of a scuffle. The pilot’s lifeless face fell at the cockpit entrance. The youngster’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Next stop, Berlin. For God’s Glory!”

Berlin. Population 3.5million. Ba’athal sighed. They’d never appreciate him. Never even know he was here. He couldn’t save these ones, but the city…

He focused, felt the air outside twist, rend.

Open…

Blinding light engulfed the aircraft. Screams. Silence.

Beautiful blue Caribbean skies.

What a waste.

~
 
Very nicely done..
you have created a self contained mythos of hauntingly lyrical prose in a typified detective setting .
CS I Vatican?
 
I liked it DG, as jastius says, you have a whole world of details in such a small space. Sorry it was over the limit :(

I felt reluctant to enter this challenge because I had supplied the picture. I know that doesn't mean anything but I was dreading doing well - I know I sound crazy saying that, but if I had, I'd have felt bad somehow.

Anyway, the picture was ripe for horror which is my default of course, but I decided to try for something totally opposite. I was surprised to have managed four votes bearing in mind how florid the language was and how unstoryish my story.

pH
 
DG, I think that was a great story -- it would surely have been on my shortest list if it had survived. :(
 
DG, it was really good. The next challenge will be two-fold: the regular challenge, and then the added challenge of getting it in the word count!

I'm looking forward to your next attempt.
 
[QUOTE="DG Jones, post: 1914700, member: 37181".]Thanks for the kind words all, but praise just makes me more annoyed at my stupid self for not counting properly!

Seriously though, am more pleased that it all made sense and was enjoyable than I am upset about the extra word :)[/QUOTE]

I cant count .. I do it inventory style. I write it out by hand, then count the words per sentence. Then put those amounts in the margin and add them. Then i will recount by fives.. About fifteen times.(I count even hyphenated words that I Know are one word.. as two, I am so leery of going over the amount... ) Then i cheat And use an app..
This can help you get a base line Count..
you cut and paste your text into the window


http://www.wordcounttool.com/
 
I use MS Word first then I count by hand (doing each line backwards so I don't get distracted by the meaning ), then, if it's very close to the target, I count the individual lunes and add them up in the margin much like Jastius, counting all hyphenated words as 2.

I'll probably still get it wrong one of these days, just by over - thinking it!

Great story btw, DG.
 
Going to chuck my July effort in here not because I think it's one of my better ones, it isn't, but because I don't really seem to be making any progress with how palatable my 300 word efforts are. I know the objective is to hone skills on concise storytelling, but boy do I struggle to fit my ideas into that many words. I've been off doing my own thing for a year, and entering the July comp was done on a whim - but I intend to be a regular participant again. Seems my stories are very marmite, and I wonder if means my style (or lack of) makes what I'm trying to convey inaccessible to some, or if they simply just don't like it!

Guilt

The way we tell it, is in the eyes of the many the Guilt arrived on a Thursday; for some the day got dark, for others it never got light. Governments knew well ahead, of course. Four hundred miles of hand wrought man-shaped black iron don’t just creep through the solar system without being spotted, and when it arrived they’d long since disappeared underground.

It took forty months to tear ourselves apart. Guilt sat in stationary orbit, perennially blocking out the sun; an eclipsing effigy of our own futility stamped deep into the sky. Crops died and order failed, cities crumbled and religion festered.

Somehow the Russians had been out of the loop, their leaders stuck above ground like us. Siberia bloomed under flickering payloads heaving toward Guilt; grains of crystallised futility winking their way into the endlessly black form. The long winter had sunk its roots deep; every man was for nothing, let alone himself.

Not many remember Guilt’s fall, nor its impact near old Chicago. Even less, whether one last guttering flame limped from the east causing it. Moments of sweet blindingly unfettered sun tormented the alert, before damp months of dust-born shade set in.

That real darkness is when the Sacrifices were chosen. Fifty men from god knows where; the last good boots, faltering courage, rations enough for one way. They’d visit the corpse and end it, somehow. No one questioned how.

Ten days from ankle to ear, through pipework hair, over rust-bubbled scabs. No one’s sure what drove them to the head, but hopelessness is sure. Of the Fifty who dropped into the ear canal, only one crawled out – wax smothered, broken, whispering in the voice of a thousand modems:

“HE IS GUILT. HE WILL DELIVER US, IF WE ASK.”

We asked.
 
For me, I tripped over some of the sentences' construction but, more importantly, that being a style thing, there was no character to engage me. It read as a 300 word info dump. Without a character to root for, I disengage quite quickly.
 
Hi team,
the voting has closed now and I didn't have the best of months, though willwallace gave a great show and made it a better month that it was looking for me. But not including said vote, it was by far and away the worst entry i've given to a challenge, at least in terms of reception by you kind people, with just two mentions overall i think.

I'm not really looking to improve the piece itself, more just wondering what went wrong in a general sense. What lacked about this piece that made it not stand out to so many. I myself said that i wasn't particularly happy with either 75 or 300 entry from that month, because i felt that the word count was for the first time limiting what i wanted to say. And i certainly chose my inspiration for this piece from a very daunting source, so did my take on the 'Honest Brutus' speech fall flat or go unnoticed?

Thanks for your time.



My Hero

Here lives the brother, just thirty weeks born;
span-length and fragile, a child of glass.
Machine-gun heartbeat pulsing his chest,
and I’ll never feel his softest first breaths.

Here lies my hero, this fighter ‘mong men.
Here lies my hero, he’ll fight till the end.



Here stands the shield, defender of the weak.
Stares down my bullies, though they’re twice his age.
A silhouette of freedom, against the clouded sky.
How I look up to him from the gravel.

Here stands my hero, a warrior for the just.
Here stands my hero, I follow as I must.



Here kneels the soldier, my golden brother in arms.
Slave to old despots, a child once again.
We gather the broken, the unheard and helpless.
Tyranny’s forever gone. The soldier takes his throne.

Here kneels my hero, pledging end to war.
Of everlasting peace he speaks and battle nevermore.



Here sits our leader; hand on heart,
his fingers drip with blood. No peace we’ve known,
for power breeds fear, and fear will devastate any vow.
So I can’t be afraid if I’m to step from the shadow.

Here sits my hero, the man I pledged to follow.
Here sits my hero, whose promises ring so hollow.



Here lies the tormentor; machine-gun stopped.
Now I’m the brother with blooded hands
and only I’ve the beating heart to stand for the weaker man.

Here lies my hero, what fools were we to believe
a dreaming madman, hell bent to watch us bleed
our humanity.
Here lies my hero, the brother who should never have lived
to breathe his airs of freedom at the cost of what this is.

Yet here lies my hero, born a baby brave.
A child forever, a brother, a memory,
or just another statistic at promised peace in his grave.
 
For me, LittleStar, the main problem here is the structure you've given the story. I'm a poetry snob, I'm afraid, so when something is set out in verse form, as here, I look for rhythm and rhyme first of all, then assonance, consonance and other poetical tricks, or simply some kind of a poetical feel in the use of language or tone. Not finding anything of the kind at once in that first stanza, I rather switched off. Which obviously says rather more about my faults than the story's. :( Unfortunately, the lack of those attributes in the main stanzas was for me aggravated by the two-line rhymes which followed, which to my mind felt forced and too much like doggerel. Sorry.

The story idea is a good one, and I think if it had been written straight, as a piece of prose -- or perhaps if I'd been sensible enough to read it without worrying about broken lines -- I'd have paid a lot more attention to it. However, it would then have run up against the issue of theme and genre. Of course, there is no theme in the 300 Worders and it's simply a matter of inspiration, but personally (and I know I'm pretty much alone in this) I like to see some kind of link, no matter how tenuous. When I can't see one at all, a story has to be superlatively good to register on a shortlist from me. More importantly there's nothing here in your story that says SF or fantasy to me, and that is a prerequisite.

There are some nice touches, but overall even without my pernickitiness, there's not enough here for the plain story to get onto my shortlist against such strong opposition (not that I had time to create a shortlist as it turned out). And no, I didn't get any connection with Brutus's "as he was ambitious I slew him" speech if that's the one you mean. Sorry again.


Fitzchiv -- I missed your post from last time. I'm ashamed to say I just didn't understand what happened in your piece. I got that this object arrived in orbit, but I couldn't understand what it was there for, what the Russians were doing, why it fell, and what happened then. And the ending confused me even more. Sorry to you, too.
 
Thanks TJ.
Nothing wrong with being a poetry snob. And though i have had decent conversations with published poets about the 'music' of the lines, i cant find myself agreeing with them totally, i feel a line of poetry shouldnt be taken as a stand alone, and should be in relation to the rest of the stanza, taking full effect of the enjambament and line endings, (and that wasnt a problem for the few i've had published myself, but maybe i just got lucky and wrote 'music' in them accidentally (n)) In this instance i aree with you, you're right about the rhythm in the piece, it was something that I came up against with when writing it, but the word count thing kept cropping up, and some of ht ewords had to stay. I don't particularly like rhyming poetry myself, but when writing it in my head the rhyme just popped out, so I guess I felt like it should keep it, but again your right, it was forced.

I hadn't thought about the genre being a problem though, obviously in my head I know it all is SFF, but getting that across in the words was something that didn't come up when thinking.
Thanks for the clarification, rest assured I shall strive to take more care when forming my next poetic entry;)
 
Littlestar, whilst i wouldn't call myself a poetry snob (i don't know enough to be!), if something is written in verse, for me it has to have a rhythm that flows. there were parts of yours that did and parts that didn't. unfortunately, the parts that didn't threw me out of the story and left me wondering what was going on. you said above that word count was a reason for this but actually, i think removing words could have helped the rhythm in places and left you more words for where you needed them elsewhere. again, take that all with a pinch of salt as i don't really know anything. i feel there is a good story in there, it just didn't quite work. oh, and i had no problem with the theme or genre for your piece. the genre is so wide that i think this could fit within it.

i was going to post my story up, but i'll wait until tomorrow so i don't crowd your space :)
 
I think it could do without the first stanza.
It pushed me back and out of the emotional territory the rest of the piece covered. The imagery in it didn't seem to really fit. Are these brothers planets? People? Figurines? The rest of the piece deals with them from an emotional stance, which works a bit better, but I am never sure if the blood is figurative or real, physical or emotional.

What I pulled out was that it was a little brother's eulogy for someone who didn't live up to his projected image, a slightly bitter mourning of something lost.

I understand the choice of poetry to easily span the lifetime coverage, but as a vocalist poetry has to sing to me. The eb and flow of syllables dance with meaning to create a lingual ballet.

Hope that helps.
 
All I can do is echo TJ and Mr O about the need for rhythm and, if there are any at all, rhyme schemes. Obviously not all poetry rhymes, but if some of it does and some of it doesn't, or if it switches seemingly randomly, it's jarring -- same with the rhythm and the flow. I'm a poetry snob, too, I'm afraid. :)

@Fitzchiv Sorry, I missed yours previously as well, and all I can say is that I couldn't quite figure out what was going on. There are some nice phrasings (...and religion festered...) and good imagery, but I was lost as to the story.
 
Thanks all, I'm getting a better picture now. Rhythm and clarity, check! My editing skills have a lot missing from them, so I often need people to hit me over the head with my mistakes before I see them (even if they've been pointed out to me previously - though I'm getting better at it I hope).

I didn't know so many here were peeking over at the poetic side of things. I've only recently started writing it (the last year, really), and cant really get myself into reading it for enjoyment yet, but i will make my next one sing and dance for you all... :whistle:

Now ive said that, I bet I make it tone deaf with three left feet:confused:
 
@Fitzchiv i see i am also guilty of not responding to your post. basically, what TDZ said. well written, good imagery, but i couldn't figure out what was going on.
 
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