Improving our 300 Word Stories -- READ FIRST POST!

[Swank]

I really enjoyed it Swank but couldn’t understand the last line

His father's young body is a gift to the now old, once abused boy. They trade places and the old body dies. The "mirror" is the moment he sees his old self from the now sighted eyes of the young man.

Thank you.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

His father's young body is a gift to the now old, once abused boy. They trade places and the old body dies. The "mirror" is the moment he sees his old self from the now sighted eyes of the young man.

Thank you.

Ah that’s lovely - I’d have needed that to be clearer. But that might just be me

 

[Swank]

Ah that’s lovely - I’d have needed that to be clearer. But that might just be me

As I constantly get feedback that my stories are too hard to understand and rarely get votes - I doubt it is just you. Thanks again.

 

[Parson]

@AltLifeAStory .... I'm not sure I see anything that is actually wrong or poorly done. (I'm not a punctuation wonk.) As I think about the story it seems to me that it should have been one that really appealed to me. I love stories about sacrifice for someone you love, and it certainly had that. What I can say is that I found it hard to identify with the mouse characters. They seem just a bit detached from the very present and real threat. I think that there was too much dialogue involved for the situation. (But be advised that I just hate those overwrought death scenes where the two main characters are having this philosophical discussion while the bullets are flying over their head. Since this kind of scene is so ubiquitous it is probably my problem.)

On the plus side, it felt like an old and much loved fairy tale for children.

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@Swank I agree with @Jo Zebedee about this. The final line makes me shake my head and go. "What?" "Who?"

Also I couldn't follow the action. The first paragraph makes it sound as if the main character is looking at the diorama. The second finds him/her headed to a French airport. Then the third finds us back at the diorama? Did s/he take it along? Was it his/her parent's house? A hospital room? Were the mice now seen as people? Was there a copy diorama involved? Was someone a clone? All in all there were just too many strings dangling for me to really get a handle on the story.

On the plus side, I think you have a wonderful idea going here. It either needed more words or more work.

 

[Phyrebrat]

As I constantly get feedback that my stories are too hard to understand and rarely get votes - I doubt it is just you. Thanks again.

Hi.

I often vote or shortlist your work because it lets the idea breathe in the reader’s mind. Irrespective of what we intend, I’m a firm believer that it’s up to the reader to decide what the story ‘means’ (and this obsession with what it ‘means’ over what one experiences reading it has always befuddled me).

I think part of the problem here is that there are non-short story readers/fans amongst our cohort and so are applying novel rules to flash or micro fiction. I’ve been a short story and flash reader for decades and often they are there to give the reader a sense of something as opposed to the answers. Esp in genre fiction.

Anyway. I liked it. I voted for it.

 

[Astro Pen]

Hi Team
I don't usually do this, but I really felt good about my story in this challenge. However it garnered precisely zero votes in a contest where nearly all other stories picked up at least one or two valentine cards.
So I'm putting it up to try and find out why it was so unpopular
Thanks in advance. AP


Symbiosis

The house plants stood next to a million stereo systems, perched on loudspeakers and windowsills. Their seeds, all the while, resonating and absorbing the sounds of the music, classical, trance, and folk. And, when the mother plants released them, they drifted, leisurely and alive, on the air and out through open windows.

High on the summer breeze they flew across fair Albion. Their tiny bodies still ringing with music. Long sweeps of ascending larks and ambient textures undulating with the rolling hills and vales. Cyclamen, begonia and primrose nestled by folky, babbling woodland streams Until each found its unique place in perfect harmony with the landscape. For each had its own realm.

The music never stopped, now the land sang more with each germinating seed. Their root tendrils spread out through the soil feeling the vibration of their nearby brothers and sisters.

Soon the grasses began to sing, a soft whistle. Grass was everywhere, it carried the message across the land as, through water, the reeds on the lake sang Debussy in the moonlight.

And the people slept, they slept a deep sleep such as they never had before. The gentle, caressing, sound outside taking them deeper and deeper, until they sank below consciousness, below dreams and into a state of simple being. Toes began to probe and push looking for, - for nutrients. Hair, once dull, spreading violet and yellow and blue across pillows as the sleepers crept back down the evolutionary tree to a place of settled comfort, freed from all fear and ambition . As the plants sang, “Come with us, be with us, we are one.”

 

[Swank]

Hi @Astro Pen,

It is a nicely written story with well crafted prose.

I think that the form of your story - something like a parable - rarely gets a lot of love. The way it is told feels like it is preaching, which may turn people off even though it is not. Or just that this kind of language that is somewhat... mystical?

Personally, what was missing for me was an underlying rationale for what happens: Who is playing the music, where is Albion, why did the people succumb to what they appeared to have set up?

But I liked the story, just not my top five.

 

[Swank]

The Lonely Sky

I hated Isabel, she felt likewise. So we had breakfast monthly, or we’d never cross paths inside the cavernous Ship.
“Blintz?”

Her eyes slid from me to the platter as I watched for which one was alien. Both were blue.

“A’Leph says we could boost Drive by a percent.”

The alien was full of suggestions. But it was only along to navigate: “We’ll be there soon enough.”

We left Daioken a year ago after Isabel’s translatux whispered that other humans could be found in a darkness between stars. After several days of excited haggling, Isabel had the autodoc remove her left(?) eye, and the disguised A’Leph bonded to her optic nerve. It wasn’t the weirdest thing I’d seen, but our navigator gave me vivisection nightmares. Still, to find humanity I would have done it, too.

Isabel’s fork gestured toward heaven, “I’m so excited to meet other people.” Got that right, lady.



ALeph let it be known that we’re close. I folded the ship into approach configuration, compartments sliding to an optimal arrangement. I assigned Isabel/A’Leph to Bridge 4 and settled into Bridge 2, to watch…

…the INCREDIBLE.

Wisps of something lighter than black swam into view. Lines and patterns emerged - twisting and overlapping, near and deep. “My God!” - Isabel. Closer still, the lines became fine spirals. Twisting, turning spirals.

“Those helixes are rotating space stations! Like thousands of rings strung together!” The spirals had depth and breadth that went well off the screen. The scale was becoming obvious, and those green tinted filaments would hold trillions of souls. Trillions of people, after all this time.

The Weapons board lit up. “...Isabel?!”

Hearing her straining against an impossible weight, you could admire how viciously she fought A’Leph for control. I keyed a different preset configuration, crushing everything in Bridge 4.


I did very well this contest, but I'm putting this up for whatever improvements I can glean. Appreciate any advice. I know that I write somewhat opaque and "hard" SF that is both hard to parse at times and just not to everyone's taste - which should never be an excuse for uninteresting writing.

This story is about two people who might be the last human beings, traveling a well populated galaxy looking for clues to where other humans might be. The aliens are very alien, and one offers to guide them to a human area in exchange for being surgically implanted as an eye, due to its symbiotic nature. As it turns out, the alien is on a mission to kill all the humans, and takes over its host to fire the ships weapons.

The narrator reacts instantly, killing the crewmate and alien. Was it planned due to the alien, or hate for Isabell?

The seed photo was a visual that made me think of delicate megastructures, but also humanity being a seed in the wind. So I devoted a large portion to what I hoped would read as wonder in this enormous space station.

Thanks!

 

[The Judge]

@Astro Pen Your entry was very poetical and save for some horticultural niggles (and a feeling that it was really a tad too slow and self-indulgent) I was enjoying it right up until the final paragraph, but then it seemed to switch to a different story altogether and I was left confused about what was happening and why and where it had come from. There's no apparent reason for the plants to do what they've done, or for humans to come under their spell, or for the message the plants are sending.

I'm a firm believer that the beginning and end of stories ought to marry up in some way -- at post #635 here Wayne talks about promise and payoff which sums it up better than I can -- and for me this was missing. There's no hint as to where it's going at the beginning, no reference back to the beginning at the end.

It was also very distanced, with the omniscient POV and the worldwide overview, and people respond more to individual stories, ie stories of individuals, rather than to abstract ideas and overall images. I suspect you'd have done better if you'd centred the story on one person -- or one plant or one supernatural being -- so we had someone to follow in the story, and even better if that person started the story and figured largely in the ending.

The niggles, for what they're worth. Some houseplants do have seeds, but I suspect that not the most common which propagate in other ways (eg budding on aloe veras, 'babies' on spider plants) so the whole premise of the story from the first para failed for me; such houseplants aren't going to take kindly to growing outside if Albion = Britain as is usual; cyclamen, begonia and primrose aren't houseplants in the usual accepted term, even if they're occasionally kept inside (though I boggle at begonias ever getting house room); and plants don't have their 'own realm' and can be vicious in crowding out others to secure their own survival.

 

[The Judge]

@Swank As you'll have seen, I greatly enjoyed your entry, and I got most of the backstory -- that they're searching for other humans and the strange alien intends to kill them when they're found. I particularly loved the concepts of the folding-capable ship and the helix rotating space stations, and your description of them was just right -- evocative without being bogged down in detail.

However, I had a few niggles which meant that in a very close contest when I was looking for reasons not to vote for a story, you just lost out to Phyrebrat.

• some odd things which were like fingernails down a blackboard for me -- capitals for 'Ship' (which isn't repeated so is presumably a mistake), 'Drive' and 'Weapons'; 'a percent' where I'd expect 'one percent'; the hyphen instead of a dialogue tag in “My God!” - Isabel.
• some mistypes/errors eg the "Blintz?" coming on a new line without a clear line's space for a new paragraph; the wrong tense in 'We left Daioken' (should have been 'We'd')
• punctuation errors eg the comma in 'I hated Isabel, she felt likewise' (semi-colon needed) ; the colon after 'navigate' and later after 'heaven' (full stops/periods required)
• I didn't know what 'Blintz' was (undoubtedly a US-UK divide, which can't be helped), but more importantly I had no idea who said it or in what kind of voice -- asking if s/he wanted some, or in a 'You're having that?" or even "That again!" kind of voice -- which meant it was wasted, giving no clue as to characterisation
• 'translatux' defeated me and the dictionary, and though I guessed it was this A'Leph, it meant I was thinking of 'translator' rather than 'navigator' which was unsettling
• the 'disguised A’Leph' meant I was wondering why it was in disguise -- fleeing from someone?? -- distracting me from the story a little
• '…the INCREDIBLE.' -- I'm not a fan of all caps like this, it rarely adds anything and just screams 'LOOK AT ME!' which here isn't justified; his feelings could have been conveyed in much better, more subtle, ways
• “...Isabel?!” -- neither the ellipses nor the interrobang attempt work
• 'Hearing her straining against an impossible weight' -- he hears the struggle, but doesn't see it? What kind of noise is made then? Why doesn't he see anything? And what is this 'impossible weight'? Where has it come from?
• 'you could admire' -- the use of 'you' for 'one' is useful at times, but here feels very wrong, and this really needed his specific reaction to her struggles eg reluctant admiration
• 'how viciously she fought' -- 'viciously' is surely the wrong adverb, since it's not physical fighting when the creature is inside her, and something like 'tenaciously' would have been better
• 'I keyed a different preset configuration' -- since he's not mentioned a previous preset configuration the 'different' is wrong

By the way, I liked the ambiguity of that 'preset configuration' and whether he'd always suspected A'Leph's designs, or he'd intended all along to kill Isabel under some pretext since he hated her so much. (I say 'he' for the narrator because of the 'Got that right, lady.' which is more likely to be a man's comment than a woman's, so if the narrator is meant to be female, perhaps think again about such expressions.)

A rather bigger problem, is that A'Leph presumably knows where the human colonies are since it is the navigator, so why get involved with these two, instead of going there alone? You'd just need a line or two to clear that up eg about how the ship is bigger/faster than any its people possess, or how its people are envious of the ship's weapons, and that would have given both us and the narrator clues as to its designs.

Hope some of that helps.

 

[Swank]

Thank you so much for the feedback, Judge. Certainly some of the smaller errors could be ascribed to writing and editing in an hour, but "no excuses" and good things to consider.

Stuff:

capitals for 'Ship' (which isn't repeated so is presumably a mistake), 'Drive' and 'Weapons';

These are, to the characters, formal names. It is a trick to eliminate word count wasters like "the", but I am using capitalization like one would use "King" vs "the king" to refer to specific places/systems that there are only one of.

'translatux' defeated me and the dictionary, and though I guessed it was this A'Leph, it meant I was thinking of 'translator' rather than 'navigator' which was unsettling

Translatux is a made up word that is supposed to be technology Isabell has. It is "whispering" imperfect approximations of 'overheard' communication of the aliens around them.

the 'disguised A’Leph' meant I was wondering why it was in disguise -- fleeing from someone??

The disguise as an ordinary eye is supposed to be for Isabell's comfort with her appearance, but the ending suggests that it was also to get closer to the target without detection.

• “...Isabel?!” -- neither the ellipses nor the interrobang attempt work

I was trying to make the sound of someone struggling to understand what they are seeing and then erupting with alarm as the realization hits them. I don't imagine there is a punctuation configuration that will do that - description was needed.

The narrator may just be a brusque female - I decided not to decide. But the "got that right, lady" was intended as something like a humorous imitation of how the narrator thinks of an indelicate person's reaction to Isabell's statement, in light of their strong antipathy. Like "Damn straight!". But I can see how that is a lot to assume.

I really appreciate the granular detail of your review. Congrats on your well deserved victory!

 

[Parson]

@Astro Pen .... I can't say that there was anything holding me back from voting for your story. You were on my short list. In the end it just seemed to me that it was too bland. I also didn't feel that the ending quite fit with the rest of the story. So no big info from me, it just didn't quite rise to the level of a vote in this challenge.

@Swank .... I liked your story. I thought it both interesting and unique. Not only were you on my short list, you were likely the fourth vote if I'd have four. I didn't catch the total nuance of the story. I had taken the idea that the human race was sparse, but I didn't get the idea that these people might feel as though they were the last. I did wonder why the two humans go to different parts of the ship. The idea that the alien was not to be trusted didn't cross my radar. I'm sorry to say that I have to say the same thing I said to Astro Pen above: "it just didn't quite rise to the level of a vote in this challenge. I don't see any change that's necessary."

*Needless to say I'm not able to pick up the little things that the Judge did.

 

[Swank]

. I did wonder why the two humans go to different parts of the ship.

They live in different parts of the ship because of antipathy, but are one different bridges for redundancy.

Really appreciate your comments!

 

[Yozh]

Both of your stories were on my short list this month, so I did like these stories

@Astro Pen , I think what made the month's effort not quite vote-worthy was the same dissonance that others mentioned between the first 2/3 or so and the end. This profusion of music from plants is presented as something marvelous at first, and then it turns into something unexpected and horrifying. I had to think about why the twist does not sit quite right with me. It may be due to the omniscient POV. Twists, IMO work better from a limited POV like 1st or close 3rd, because then as a reader it feels like you are just learning new information along with the POV character. But with an omniscient POV, it is unsettling b/c narrator is expected to know all so it feels like narrator was deliberately misleading. That could be ameliorated with some kind of foreshadowing or foreboding (though not east in 300 words!)

@Swank I like the plot of this, and the imagery of all these humans (bodies? souls?) drifting in deep space. I felt like maybe it would have been a better story at, say, 350 words though. The plot was not easy to grasp in the spare prose.