Young Writers Society

Thanks for your review Dudette and sargsauce. (What competition is the review for?)

Yeah, I understand, but unlike cC's, you twos wasn't as ... nasty really. Thanks again, and I appreciate you gave both good and bad points. Thanks! xD

"Principessa" <<<< !

Buongiorno, Principessa! I have somehow become one of the judges for said contest, and here is my review of your piece.

I mostly have to echo everything carbon has said. I read this piece last Friday before any reviews were up, but didn't have time to critique until after the weekend. And at the time, I was planning on comparing it to poetry, as well. What you have captured here is an emotion, not a story. A snapshot, not a tale. You have a scenario, but there's no beginning and no end.

So on the note of poetry, I was thinking about resources you could use for guidance. cC has provided some solid examples and I second such inspiration. Because your piece reminded me so much of poetry, I suggest looking through some narrative poetry. Poetry, by nature, is more condensed than one may expect out of a story, so I'm not necessarily saying to follow this kind of format to a T, but just take note of how, in a short space, the characters are introduced, the feeling established, a conflict, and then a resolution.

An example (I hope one swear word is okay by you):
http://benjaminjacobballard.wordpress.c ... y-old-man/
Granted, his is 267 words. So Bukowski is disqualified.

Anyway. Yes, a rewrite is in order, with reference to flash fiction as a genre and with reference to the contest itself.

However, I'll also critique this writing as a standalone piece. The opening is nice, it gets right into the nitty gritty of it. I'm not much a fan of the middle, though, because it keeps hitting that same button over and over again.
"It was a stain" and "sobs and screams" and "torn apart" and "nothing seemed worth it" and "happiness eluded me" and "tears surged down my cheeks" and "scars" and "scars" and "scars" and "sorrow" and "darkness."
You said it with the first sentence...and then you said it over and over again. We never learn anything new and, after the first couple examples, we lose interest in just how sad the narrator is. You've ignored the complexity of the emotion and how it affects everything--every facet, every thought, every action, every whim--and stuck with "IT IS SAD." The reader begins to go, "Yes, I know you're sad, what about it?"

You have good vocabulary and good imagery, but having the tools is only half the battle. You have to know when to use the right tool to get the job done well. Otherwise, you only have a brand new hammer and everything looks like a nail.

Also, proofread. "Happiness eluded me, as if it had bee snatched from the world."

The others might be more lenient, but I get quite turned off by obvious typos.

This is really good. So much emotion... I don't have anything negative to say about it. The writing was clean, I didn't see any grammatical errors or any punctuation errors either really. Which I'm really not one to talk on that, haha. But this is a really solid piece. Your imagery was fantastic =]

Hey PrincessOfDarkness!

I read this the other day and was going to review but didn't have the time. I came back, all ready with my points, but it looks like cC has already said everything that I wanted to, but with much more of a way with words than I was going to say it.

You really should listen to everything that cC has pointed out. With such a small word limit, every word should count, but the amount of times that you use the words 'death', 'world' and 'scars' is just too repetitive in a story of this size. It was almost like you were just walking in circles, describing the loss in a number of different ways but with them all boiling down to the same outcome. We get it. The Mc is sad. They've lost their best friend and I want to be sorry for their loss but with hardly any plot, I found it a little hard.

Some of your descriptins worked, like this one -

and part of me died.

It was like a stain had been smeared over my world, stifling the sobs and screams that I desperately wanted to share.

A cleverly constructed piece. You have really put a lot of emotion and though into this.
The one thing I got a tad confused about was the gender of your character. At first starting to read it, I thought you(r character) was a girl morning the loss of her main companion, but then I reread the ending again and saw it was vice-versa. So that would be my only comment.

The picture does help with the delivery of the type of emotions in this piece, so it’s good you have some visual aids there to help us along.

Nothing more really I can say about this, except for well done. Keep it up. You’ve done a great job.

I was always under the impression that the beauty of such ultra-short stories is that, despite their length, a plot may be seen (or extrapolated) from the bare start that the author has provided you with. For example, Ernest Hemingway's six-word short story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Right off the bat we start asking questions: why did the sellers buy these shoes? --surely they had a baby. Why are they selling the shoes now? --something must've happened to the baby. What happened? --and so on.

For a better example, might I direct you to Holly Howitt's site. Look at the last story on the page, titled "Water". I didn't count the number of words, but it seems right about a hundred and fifty. Take a moment to read it-- it is a good short story. Go on, I'll wait.

Hopefully you're back and hopefully you've read the story. Do you see how the six-word Hemingway one and that one are alike? Not a single thing is repeated, every word weighs a ton, says something either about the characters or the world or something. And look at how many things are happening in each. Now then-- as this is, by all reasonable statistics, a review of a piece by you, from me, I think it's about time for a segue to talk about your piece itself.

How many things are happening in that short story? Does every word carry the plot forward (as it should, when you have such a scarce amount of space to write your story in)? Well, we know that a certain Sam died and the narrator is rather inconvenienced by this fact. Everything up until the last sentence is the repetition of the same idea in different words. --So you're sad about the fact? Oh I see you're not just SAD sad you're so SAD your TEARS are SCARRING your FACE, I'm so sorry, I didn't reali---- no, really, we get it. As the piece is right now, it can be boiled down to "Best friend Sam died. Darn." That's how the piece should have started, and the other 145 words should have been used to weave at least something resembling a plot (hey, it can even be a plot about how terrible this loss is for the narrator! But it has to be a PLOT, as in things have to happen). What you wrote is not a short story, it's prose poetry - and while most prose poetry can get away with wordplay and imagery that sweep you off your feet, yours doesn't even have this to fall back on. Sadness like a knife in the stomach? Take any modern book, stab it with a dagger, and chances are that somewhere the blade will cut a sentence describing sadness in that exact way.

So my suggestion: re-write. This is not much of anything, sadly. There's talent-- I can see you've an interesting way to turn words-- but use it for something other than melancholic tripe like this. There is a way to write sad and depressing pieces effectively and leave even coal-hearted jerks like myself a sobbing wreck, but they always require one thing -- plot -- that your piece is missing.

Your word of happiness,
cC