The Bomb (Beginning)

Moderators, this is fantasy but it will not seem like it just now because it is only the beginning. I'm a new member and this is the first story that I posted on YWS. I wrote this two years ago and I'm not sure if I should continue the story. Please critique!!! Thanks a lot to all those that comment!!


The Bomb

“Mom, is it safe for us to go?” asked Ann. She was watching her brother and sister playing outside in the small pond.
“Oh, even if it isn’t safe, we have to go. I made up my mind. Now, don’t worry. What is there to worry about?” said Mom over at the old but clean stove, cooking something that smells really good.
Ann heard her stomach rumble. “Mom, when is----“ started Ann.
“You should be grateful that we could go. The war’s not going well. We are in huge danger here already. Going to Canada is safer,” interrupted Mom.
“Mom, Mom, is dinner ready yet?” called Ann’s brother and sister, John and Beatrice.
“You’re just in time,” said Mom cheerfully, giving a look to Ann that said, do not even-think-of-talking-about-it-in-front- of-them.
Ann ate dinner quickly and went up to her bedroom. She flopped onto her soft bed without bothering to change. Ann just lay there a minute, thinking about tomorrow’s journey to Canada. Ann didn’t know when she fell asleep, but it seemed that she just closed her eyes when the door of her bedroom flew open and hit the wall with a BANG!
“Get up! Get up!” Beatrice and John yelled, jumping onto Ann’s bed, “It’s time to go the airport. Come on, aren’t you excited?”
Ann mumbled, “Leave me alone,” and pulled her covers over her head. Beatrice pulled it back down. John cupped his hand to Ann’s ear and shouted as loud as he could, “GET UP!”
Ann bolted upward in her bed. John grinned. It worked every time.

“Are you trying to make me deaf?” said Ann furiously. “What is wrong with you guys?” added Ann, when Beatrice and John started laughing. Ann got out of bed and dragged her brother and sister out the door. She slammed the door and locked it.
Ann hollered, “Don’t do that again, or you will really regret it!” Ann quickly dressed up and jumped down the stairs.
“Ann, that bed habit of you jumping down the stars should stop,” Mom said.
The telephone rang. Ring, ring, ring!
“Get the phone, Ann!” called Mom from the kitchen.
Ann picked up the phone and said, “Ann here, who is this?”
“Emergency call, emergency call, war coming. War coming. Get your family and run as fast as you can to hiding,” said a man’s voice. Then there was click! and he hung up.
“Mom, somebody called to warn---,” Ann was interrupted by the loud war alarm.
“Ahhhh!” screamed Beatrice and John.
“Go!” yelled Mom, trying to save as much as she can.
“Where?” Ann shouted over the alarm and the screaming of her siblings. “We don’t have a hiding place!”
“Just run as fast as you can to the airport!” Mom yelled over to Ann. “But---,” Ann had stumbled over the rug, trying to get to her mom, and got up again. “That’s impossible! It’s miles from here! Anyway, what about you?”
“Just go! Do what I tell you, Ann! I’ll come later!” shouted Mom, sounding angry.
A bomb exploded nearby and John yelled, “Come on, we don’t have much time!”
Ann reluctantly turned toward the door. She pulled her siblings along with her. Ann had only turned the door knob when she heard another explosion, now nearer. They piled out the door and ran as fast as they could into the small woods. They ran until they were deep into the woods, when they couldn’t run anymore.
“Where’s---Mom?” Beatrice asked between gasps.
“Still-in-the house,” Ann gasped.
“What?! Will she come?” asked John, who recovered already.
“How will I know? Why do you have to ask me everything?” said Ann, “Let’s go over to that big rock over there.”
They sat down on the hot surface of the rock. Then another bomb was released and they could hear someone yelling and suddenly stopped. Then all was quiet.
“Is it safe here? Shouldn’t we run again?” asked John quietly.
Ann got up, beckoning the others to do it too. She was glad she could do something at least but also worried. What if Mom came looking for them and couldn’t find us, she thought.
“Where are we going anyway?” Ann asked John, feeling silly to be asking her little brother. Ann knew that John was going to tell her, “How will I know? You’re bigger.” That was exactly what he said.
Nobody dared to ask the question that kept circulating in their head: Is Mom OK?
Ann started to walk toward nowhere particularly, just to do something. They had no destination.
“Should we go see if our house is even there now?” Beatrice suggested.
“OK,” said Ann, “Let’s go.”
The children walked slowly back to the house. The house was practically- you could say- blasted apart. Some wooden beams were still on fire. Broken furniture were scattered everywhere.
They stood there quietly for a moment, taking in the scene. Beatrice started crying silently. Ann didn’t know what to think. “Let’s go back to find some shelter.”
The children found a small cave that looked warm enough. They lay down on the hard floor, and soon Beatrice and John were snoring. Ann lay awake, thinking. Tomorrow they would scavenge through the ruins and explore the cave. Tomorrow.....

Hiya! Welcome to YWS. Why don't you head over to the Welcome forum and introduce yourself? Some of the greeters - their names are in light blue - will tell you about the rules and give you an introduction to the site. They'll explain that we have a review/work ratio of 2:1, meaning that you have to do two reviews for every one work you post. I see that you've commented on a few pieces, but when you review you should try and be as much help to the author as you can, so a one-sentence review is never as helpful as a longer, more in-depth critique. Anyway, like I said, the greeters will help you out with this.

First, please let me just tell you that I'm not trying to rip apart your story. You've got a good start here, and definitely a hook. There's an incentive for me to read on. I'm just going to show you how you can hopfully improve on that and make it even more likely for me to say, hey, this looks like a good story.

Okay, so, to start. The whole of this beginning seems to suffer from telling rather than showing. There's an awful lot of dialogue in proportion to ordinary sentences. Dialogue can be used as well as the usual prose is for characterisation and setting, but that's very hard to do whilst still maintaining a realistic conversation, so why don't you just give us a bit more description? I can't really get a gist of the setting from this. Is it a futuristic war, or a historical one? With a bit more description, you could get this across. As it is, the dialogue is a bit stilted. Go out and stand in a few bus stations or shops and try to not-very-obviously eavesdrop, or just listen to your family talking. Try to make that dialogue more realistic.

Take the voice on the phone.

“Emergency call, emergency call, war coming. War coming. Get your family and run as fast as you can to hiding,” said a man’s voice.

I think this would be a lot more powerful if you cut it. Certainly we don't need "war coming, war coming". It ruins the effect, because you can't just announce a war like that. I'd rewrite it like this: Emergency call. Emergency call. A slight pause. Run. Short sentences increase the adrenaline. Also, you might want to change that "said", or at least mention that it's said in an automated tone, which your dialogue implies it is. You get my point, though. Dialogue can be used just as prose can, but you need to think about it in much the same way.

Moving on. The storyline doesn't seem real. I think this is to do with your telling and not showing, as well. We don't know enough of what's going on to make it seem plausible. You think about a real war, in history, and how much cause and consequence plays a part. Little events trigger big ones. This story could be summarised in a newspaper headline. "Bomb goes off. Mother dead. Children escape." There needs to be enough adrenaline in you story to bring us away from that and into the reality, because nobody's life should be summarised in a newspaper headline, because everybody's life is more than just "Lived, died". Think how much we'd be missing if we just wrote that.

I'm not saying go into detail about how this war started, because it's obvious your main character doesn't know too much, but there will be signs of it, e.g. the sandbags that were used in WW2 Britain to shield buildings, or the blackout curtains. Your characters would be able to see more than you describe, so go into it a bit more, even if it's just in passing.

Lastly, a nitpick. John and Beatrice seem to be one character. Separate their actions a little bit, so they aren't always saying things together and doing things together. Even twins don't talk in unison the whole time, if at all.

Good luck with this. If I were you, I think I'd use this as a base and maybe rewrite, and see what you come up with. You don't have to insert big lengthy descriptions, but some short sentences to increase the pace when the siren goes would be much appreciated. Go for the basic sensory description: what she sees, what she hears, what she feels, what she tastes and what she smells. Obviously not all of them will apply at once, but this can help you ground your story in some reality. I hope this helps and I hope you continue, because I'm interested to see how you turn this into fantasy. Again, good luck, and again, please don't feel that's I've ripped this. Anything reviewers suggest is always just that. A suggestion.

Hi WritingWords,

I was able to follow this piece from beginning to end, but at this point, I'm not sure that I would read on.

The key problem for me is that it's so bare-bones, it reads like the cliff notes version you're planning to expand later. A good story needs visual images, setting description, emotional content, characterisation, tension and a whole ton of other stuff. All we have here is dialogue and action. I think these bones need a lot of fleshing out. Really think about how the protagonist is feeling at every stage:

(1) what she feels emotionally. Is she scared? Stressed? Unhappy?
(2) what she feels physically. Remember your five senses - think about the things she sees, smells, tastes, touches, hears.

Also, think about how (1) and (2) combine. Emotion causes physical reactions. For example, when you get scared, your adrenalin pumps, your hands get shaky, you have butterflies in your stomach, your mouth gets dry. These details will help the reader to really feel the story and identify with the protagonist.

You might also think about using more interesting vocabulary. You're using pretty drab, boring words here - describing things as "small" or "old" or "soft", which are about the blandest possible words you could use. The reader wants visual images which jump off the page, and you're not going to do that by describing things as "small".

I also had logistical questions:

Why is there both a telephone call warning of war and an audible war alarm? They seem redundant. If this is about reaching the greatest number of people, presumably the other method of alerting people would target people who can't hear the first one - such as non-audible warnings to alert deaf people, etc.
Why are these alarms giving them only minutes, perhaps seconds of warning? If they're organised enough to have alarms, surely they have more warning.
If the main characters are regularly getting only minutes of warning, why don't they have pre-packed emergency bags, bunkers, escape routes, etc? They seem terribly unprepared.

Also, you might want to proofread again. There are tense changes: the cooking "smells really good" - present instead of past. And spelling errors: "that bed habit of you jumping down the stars" has an impressive 2 words out of 9 misspelled, to the point where I struggled to understand.

I like the fact that you had something dramatic happen in the opening piece. I found the mother's death somewhat predictable, but I'm looking forward to seeing how you depict the children's emotional reaction to losing their mother, and their struggles to survive given that they now have absolutely nothing.

Ultimately, I think this needs to be seriously expanded. Less focus on the action (and less minor, juvenile fighting between the siblings), and more emotion, characterisation, pacing, tension, description, images, etc.

Hope this helped.

Cheers,
Karsten

edit: Jetpack gave a lot of excellent tips. I particularly like his suggestion to think about the other effects of war, like sandbags. Nice work.

Thanks for the advice, guys!! I will work on it and repost it later on. THe comments really helped me!

Okay, just to get right into it, I think that my major problem with this piece is the atmosphere you've created. Everything and everyone is so... chipper. Even the way the phone rang made everything seem happy and we-live-in-a-rose-garden kind of way:

Ring, ring, ring!

And this. I thought about going back to the forum after reading this:

“Oh, even if it isn’t safe, we have to go...

She just sounds so flippant in my mind. It's like someone saying, Oh, yeah, there are cannibals on taht island, but who cares, they probably won't eat us.

When I read through this chapter, I was thinking, Hello, we're the typical family and we hate and love each other! We're going to act the same even if there is a war. All we're missing is the family dog. This might sound mean, but true. For me, at least.

You'd think there would be an air of gravity surrounding them. There's danger in a war, and they're about to take a risk traveling, and no one seems the least bit scared or worried. Even the Mom is fine - maybe she's faking it for the children, but for the sake of the reader, I'd like to see a flicker of anxiety from her.

On the positive side, I did like it more towards the ending. The emotion intensified and you finally got around to making yoru characters seem more real. No need for change in that area, but more description is always nice. Is it dark out? Is there a hint of smoke in the air? Details, details. We need mental images.

Good job, and keep writing. If you have any questions feel free to PM me.

KJ

Hi, WritingWords (love your name, by the way). This is maegardens. First I'll just get over with the nitpicks.

WritingWords wrote: “Ann, that bad habit of you jumping down the stairs should stop,” Mom said.
The telephone rang. Ring, ring, ring!

I highlighted the corrections and at the end when you say ring, ring, ring!I think you should italicize it so people can tell it's a sound.

WritingWords wrote:Tomorrow they would scavenge through the ruins and explore the cave. Tomorrow.....

This would be a better ending if you said something after the "Tomorrow....." Maybe something like "Tomorrow.....What a long time to wait what has happened." I don't know, something that would leave it at a good cliffhanger. Anyway... This is really good. It definantly pulled me in and I think you should continue.

Oh boy this was a long one. But it was good I really liked reading it. You just have to work on making them shorter is all. I really liked your title it really caught my attention. That's good. I only say to make them shorter because some don't like to read long pieces and that draws them away from your writing you really don't want that. Other than that it was good keep up the work.