Dressing Room Ghosts

Hey Ancifo,

There is something about your story that I can't quite grasp. I think it's that it's an experience without purpose? In a short story it is hard to develop affection for characters so it has to be the situation and the narration that collect a reader's attention and I'm not sure that this one necessarily keeps all my attention.

At the moment your characterisation is suitable but not stunning - what is Justin actually like because this gives us a little glance but not much. To begin with I thought they were much older than high school, it wasn't until she clarified the dress was from year 3 that I hooked into that. Justin acts his age, she acts older, a kind of faux mature perhaps?

Why isn't she singing a bit or humming or begging for music? I know everyone is different but this girl is meant to be a singer and she's looking through costumes she's familiar with. The songs from those shows would definitely be in her head and if she could remember the song from the year 3 show, she'd totally try and sing it, because that's the kind of thing any one of my singing friends would do. For that matter, people who are just trying to remember a theme song will sing it, and they're not necessarily ingrained in the musical culture. I just think that would add some more depth to the narrative and our sense of her.

There's not much pull to the story. You start off really well and I'm feeling the nostalgia and the heavy sense of actors of the past, but then it kind of tapers off? Or, if it doesn't taper off, it just stops being interesting. That might be because I was expecting literal ghosts but in addition to real ghosts, I just think the story doesn't necessarily go anywhere. The ending doesn't help, it's a final line but it doesn't feel like the end of the story, it feels tacked on and flimsy. I don't think you wrote it that way, in a tacked on way, but it's coming off that way.

"That boy and his breaks" means absolutely nothing to us. Like, she suggested the break and he just agreed? I know that's a weird thing to comment on, but if he had been whinging to have one then maybe it would make sense but as it is, it doesn't.

All my whinging isn't to say this isn't a good story, it is, but it also feels like it's missing something. You do the description well, I'm not sure we necessarily need any more than what you've given and you have the pacing down, there's no problem with that at all. If you do make changes, let me know, cause I'll be interested in seeing what you do.

Thanks for posting, it's nice to see some prose from you.
- Pen.

I have nothing helpful to say, but I wanted to let you know that I particularly liked this line:

The lipstick stared up at her like a waiting eye, a reminder of a point in time when she had to worry about people showing her too much love instead of too little, and her best competition was another eight-year-old.

I liked this.

There were certain places that read very poignantly to me; they carried a lot of feeling--sincere feeling, and I think that that's one thing that a lot of realistic fic tends to fail at capturing. Emotions are either too high-flying or so subtle that they barely exist, but I think you managed to capture them in a pretty balanced way.

Another thing I liked was how this captures a snapshot picture of a life. It's like all the memories flooding the dressing room kind of obfuscated the surroundings, so the reader was walking through a kind of fog--it's very reminiscent of reminiscing, actually, because everything in your head is distorted and warped, except certain memories which stand out more clearly than the rest.

That said, I think your character development isn't as strong as I've seen it to be. I know nailing a character's internal voice isn't as easy in short stories as it is in novels, mostly because you have less space to manoeuvre in, but it's something that could use a little bit of work. What I see now has tons of potential, although Justin exhibits mostly flat-card traits: He's there as a propeller of action. He gives the main character an excuse to interact. I liked Justin, don't get me wrong--he was mischievous, he made things interesting. But also, he was kind of just ... there.

I dunno, I felt like there was something lacking: I couldn't pin-point it, but I didn't develop a particular attachment to either of the characters. As they stand right now, they're developing in a one-sided way, in a way that is only limited to their presence in the dressing room and nothing more. Their over-arching lives, their dreams, their aspirations--there isn't much of that that I could see. You skim over the topic, but the majority of the focus appears to be on the object of Di's memory, linking us to Di's further reminisces as well. I've already mentioned how raw the emotion is when Di takes us for a trip down memory lane, and I'd really like it if none of that was changed--in fact, nothing really needs changing. You just need to twine the piece a little more firmly together.

I think you could do this by giving the reader an occasional kerwhollop of the present. A fist to the face--something that packs a punch and /grounds/ this. This is only my opinion, of course, and if your intention was to play with uncharted fiction and simply orbit this one scene, you've pulled it off excellently.

While I like how the voice is like vapour, it needs to condense a little bit, so the contrast between heavily grounded reality and the obfuscated memories is more distinguishable.

I feel like the internal 'conflict' (of Di deciding whether or not she wanted to keep the dress versus her actually needing it) was a little lacklustre. The reader is mostly vexed because here Di has been filled with so much nostalgia, yet her own character contradicts herself in that she is intent on throwing things away, ('I'm really turning into Miss G, aren't I?') but her decision to keep the dress against her--and what we see as her mother's--more sensible, less sentimental side, is a little too abrupt. Once again, I think you could solve this is snippets of firm, solid present-ness was incorporated into the mix.

Besides this, there are a few awkward phrasings, but no glaring grammatical errors that I could see. I'll just run through them real quick~

It looked like there was some sort of ghostly costume party, and all of them had dissipated the second she walked in.

I really liked this story! I liked how you described the costumes, I could really picture them in my end. For some reason, some part about the end didn't quite sit well with me though. Maybe it's that Di decides to take home the costume, yet she says its trash in the next paragraph. Maybe I am seeing it all wrong (I probably am), but that's just crazy me and my input. Besides that, I think you did a good job. I thought your sentences were smooth not choppy and it was a cool concept! Good job!