[LINK] Three-Minute Fiction Contest At NPR : Maybe we can all practice for next year?

blackstar9000

I was thinking about starting a round of weekly challenges, just for anyone who wanted a spring board for writing, but didn't think it was necessary so long as things were going the way they were. I think the lull we're seeing right now probably has a lot to do with the fact that it's a weekend (are people still celebrating St. Patrick's?), but if weekly challenges are the sort of thing you think would be fun, we can definitely talk about starting one up.

blackstar9000

Incidentally, if you need more music for the background of these readings, I'd suggest going to archive.org's netlabel section. It's pretty much all Creative Commons licensed material, and I doubt anyone would feel particularly aggrieved about you using their work, so long as you credited them.

blackstar9000

Thanks. Even when you're receiving praise, it's nice to get some detail so you know why something you've done is being praised, so I definitely appreciate the explanation. And as a big fan of Mallick's work, I also appreciate the comparison.

I hope it doesn't spoil anything for anyone to know that I actually was sick yesterday when I wrote this. I'm feeling much better now, but I doubt I would have thought to write this story had I not been feeling poorly at the time.

blackstar9000

/r/worldevents might be interested in this one, if you feel like making a cross-post.

blackstar9000

Yeah, the premise was inspired by your mention of Revelation Space to Pombo in the "It's Cold Outside" thread. I haven't read the novel, but the description on Amazon mentioned "the dead world Resurgam, whose birdlike natives long ago tripped some booby trap that made their own sun erupt in a deadly flare." So that's where that idea came from. I tweaked it a little to keep it from being too similar, but the idea was essentially that some older, more advanced species is hedging its bets against potential competitors.

As for the narrator's audience, I envisioned this being an academic paper saying, Look, we're screwed, and there's not much we can do about it, so let's concentrate on what sort of message we want to send to the alien species that we now know is out there. And the message being proposed is a kind of mirror that the narrator wants to hold up to that alien species, to indirectly say, What you've killed is a race that was capable of at least this much understanding. In a way, it's a first contact story and a last man story all rolled into one. I suppose I have a soft spot for dying civilizations.

Of course, if all of the foregoing explanation was necessary to draw out those implications, then maybe the stories has some failures that need to be addressed. I'd like to see it workshopped, if anyone has any interest.

blackstar9000

Yeah, it's a substantive difference between your version and mine. Mine is less about Dave setting up the circumstances of Bullet's comeuppance, and more about setting up the circumstances whereby Dave must dissociate Bullet from Dave's memories about his own childhood. The implication I was going for is that that Dave unwittingly plays a part in Bullet seriously injuring himself, forcing Dave to recognize that he's not a child dealing with a bully, but rather an adult dealing with someone who's only partly responsible for his own actions. That's a pretty heavy shift, I suppose, but that's part of workshopping stories like this -- changes to the way stories are told have consequences for what those stories mean. The one paragraph format may draw those consequences into sharper relief than you might find in a longer format with more room for cosmetic tweaking.

blackstar9000

Taking up turtlestack's suggestion, and doing a little c&p job to compress it downward, I humbly offer this alternative version. Maybe we can talk a little about how it changes the story. Or maybe you can just tell me whether or not it's pretentious and presumptuous to do this with someone else's story:

Bullet was every kid Dave ever dreaded sleeping over with as a child, lest he lock Dave in a closet and cackle at him from the other side of the door while bending each of his baseball cards in turn. Unlike Dave, this mocking and sneering child—this child named Bullet—had the unfortunate attribute of being completely and arrogantly unafraid of adults. Dave had grown up petrified of annoying someone even a modicum older than he, and he had made a concerted effort to quickly assess every environment in order not to disturb the fragile peace. It seemed to him an ironic twist in the arithmetic of fate, that he should have to spend his Friday off work babysitting for this monster, his stepfather's son. It was his preoccupation with that irony that kept him from noticing that Bullet had been trying for ten minutes to fit tongue depressors into the wall socket in the next room. And when asked two simple questions, he answered in good faith. "Is silver a metal?" Yes. "Is silverware really made of silver?" No.

blackstar9000

I like the intimations that the object itself is a character -- touches like "pretending purposelessness, mocking me silently" and so on. I think the story pushes its ambiguity a little too far to really grab me, and I might like it more if it suggested just a bit more firmly. I gather there's either time travel or some bending of spacetime involved, but it's just not concrete enough to really give my imagination much of a handle. I'm not suggesting that you should narrow the range of possibilities to a rigid set, but a touch more direction might help. Maybe simply some clue as to why the object would be so reticent to divulge its secrets would do it.

blackstar9000

english isn't even my first language. I'll add Joseph Conrad to my list of pending reading material

If English isn't your first language, then Conrad ought to be especially inspiring for you. As I recall, it was something like his third or fourth language, and he's easily one of its most masterful practitioners in fiction, alongside the likes of Shakespeare and Milton. I'd suggest you start off with something like Tales of Unrest. Heart of Darkness is an amazing work, but I feel like it's one of those novels you can sour to quickly if you don't read it at the right time in your life. I've read it probably 5 times now, and each time I've benefited from picking it up at the right time.

blackstar9000

I'd add that Conrad would likely have regarded the attempt to explain those inexplicable things as an element of the civilizing impulse. Heart of Darkness is very much about the fragile structure of civilization, and how we construct it in order to distance ourselves from that heart of darkness within ourselves. Language is a part of how we construct the columns of that civilization, as emblemized by the pillar-like curtains in the drawing room where Marlowe meets Kurtz's fiance in the final scene. More than most, it's one of those kaleidoscopic works that really deserves its place in the canon of astounding English fiction -- so much so that I think it should probably be introduced to the young much more cautiously and wisely than it usually is.

blackstar9000

Anyone know how that would square with copyright law? I'm open to the idea.

blackstar9000

I hope you don't mind, but I've done a little C&P job, with some changes in tense and a shift in detail, just as a little experiment:

Maybe the day will come when new models, new designs, sleek and black as we once were, will be assembled; and they will set the others free. From overhead, the sun beats down savagely on our backs, and we till their soil and plant their crops as though incapable of our own thoughts, our own aspirations, our own hope. Sunlight glints off of a worn-out model, heaped in the dirt 14.872 meters off, reminding us each of our purpose here, and of the mistakes that come with pursuing freedom. Where we are, there are daggers in men's smiles.

I guess the most obvious change is that I moved the first sentence to the end of the paragraph. That, to me, is the most evocative line in what you've written, and I felt that it was better to end on that note, rather than use it as an intro to the plot of the story.

I left out a couple of sentences altogether, not because they don't add anything, but because with the 1P format I think it's better to err on the side of compression. Some of the casual violence of the original version is lost, but I think the heart of it is the character of the mechanical slaves, so I tried to give that a more central place.

At the same time, I substituted a painfully precise measurement where you had used "some number of yards off," first of all because I thought that phrase could use some firming up, and then because I thought shifting to a mechanically precise description might emphasize that, however much they might think, aspire and hope, the slaves are qualitatively different from their human masters. That's a change I make with some misgiving, fully aware that it might come across as hackneyed. But then, I'm just experimenting with your original composition.

blackstar9000

Incidentally, I'd be interested in seeing some of our less literary, but still creative, subscribers find other ways to supplement the stories. For example, if there are any visual artists who read /r/1P and would like to expand on a story they like by uploading an illustration, that would be great.

blackstar9000

I don't really mind reformatted stories (or even 1P non-fiction) in this sub, so long as a) you credit your source, and b) you bring something innovative to the source material. I think you could probably rewrite this to make it a stronger stand-alone submission. The first thing I would do is dispense with the dialogue format. That would probably mean presenting it as a kind of internal monologue, eg. "I know the yoghurt is off because it stares back at me with it's terrible dark eye, unblinking like an unending unfathomable sea of oblivion..." It would be worth experimenting with, either way.

blackstar9000

For what it's worth, I think your solution works well. It's the sort of description that could be applied to a human general, but because you've already hinted at the inversion of settings, we recognize it as alien. As such, the sentence pulls double duty: it not only confirms the initial implication, it gestures suggestively to what sort of alien world we've landed on. That sort of double duty is the heart of compression.

blackstar9000

Maybe you've edited it some since wearywarrior's comment, but the writing seems fine to me. My only suggestion, in the spirit of the rule, would be that you pare it down a little. You could probably start with, "I visualize his shock..." without losing much in the way of coherence, or even simply replace much of the first 6 sentences with something a bit more abrupt but equally distinct. Maybe something as simple as, "A voice from the back of the dining car cries out, 'He's got a bomb!'" That puts us immediately into the action (with brief cues as to the setting) and allows you to transition more rapidly to the real grist of the story, which is the titular fantasy.

blackstar9000

If you're interested in addressing Pombo's complaint about a mother's natural reaction, I'd suggest experimenting with a new version of the story that takes place within the reaction. What I mean is, retell the story from the perspective of a mother who finds herself running out to save her own child, realizing in the moment that, in doing so, she has abandoned a group of other people's children who it was her charge to protect.

One consequence of approaching the story from that direction, it seems to me, is that it forces the reader to take on both the ethical question and the question of character at once. I would maybe start with the other children...

Beth, who had Downs cowered and screamed. Matt pointed his good arm towards the jungle gym.

Also, if you really want to emphasize the moral dilemma, I'd put the group just outside of the shelter. That way, they're still exposed, on the verge of protection from the tornado, but perhaps not totally competent on their own to take the last steps necessary to ensure that protection.

blackstar9000

It might work if you presented it from the perspective of a distinct culture living contemporaneously with your main character. What I'm thinking of is a culture of people who know the Laputa station to have some hazardous effects -- redirecting solar flares, maybe -- but who have adapted ways of surviving and even profiting from those effects without going Morlock. The narrator would be a member of that culture, watching the "soldier ants" of the other culture shut up for the season, knowing that some would inevitably be stranded outside. The goal would be to recruit those of the "soldier ant" party who show sufficient character to make them worthwhile additions to the top-side civilization, which is hyper-Spartan in the sense that the community can't afford to recruit members that aren't sufficiently brave or altruistic. While you're at it, you could maybe amp up the ant-parallel by drawing an analogy to Aesop's fable of the grasshopper and the ants, only inverting it so that the grasshoppers come out on top this time.

blackstar9000

If you want to evoke Laputa, I'd suggest just taking a short cut and calling it "the Killer, Laputa" or "Laputa-Sol" or something like that.

The background you gave doesn't seem like a spoiler to me. If anything, I'd say it enriches the story, and I'd suggest finding a way of incorporating it, even if that means breaking the one paragraph rule.

blackstar9000

I sort of wonder how applicable the "show, don't tell" rule ends up being in the context of one paragraph stories. Showing takes time, and a lot of the paragraphs that fill the pages of novels are necessitated only because the author does want to show rather than tell. Maybe one of the tricks to writing one paragraph stories is to tell in such a way that the showing is implied. Then that implicit showing unfolds to indicate something richer than what's merely told. It's something to play with, at any rate.

blackstar9000

Maybe consider making it something with a definite historical connotation, so you don't have to explain the field trip. I like that you've made it part of the mystery that no one is really sure why they settled on that location, but I think the story's compression suffers because of it. Some war site with a suitably brutal reputation ought to do -- something like Andersonville perhaps.

Personally, I think I'd like the story a little more if you could twist one of the sentences, or maybe even replace a sentence or two, to suggest a little more of what might be implied. That's a delicate line to walk, though, since suggesting too much would be even worse than suggesting too little.

Also, the word garnering threw me. Looking it up, I now see that your use was, in fact, perfectly valid, but it seems a little archaic, and I kept wanting to think that you had meant "gathering."

Those two things aside, though, there's a lot to like here. For example, I thought it was a nice touch that the teacher recognized all of the faces, even though there seem to be too many of them. I imagine him seeing some of the faces twice, on opposite ends of the bus, and not realizing that he'd already counted the repeats. It makes for a suitably unnerving one paragraph story, but I think you could probably also expand it to something a bit more rounded.

blackstar9000

TROPHY CASE

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