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Young Writers Society


12+ Language Violence

Wall Street

by TinyJarStoredDreams


CONTEST GUIDELINES:(contest link: http://www.youngwriterssociety.com/viewtopic.php?f=404&t=100278&p=1198929#p1198929 )

There are five people stuck in a freezer:

- a buisness man

- a poet

- a child

- a scientist

- an athlete

Her long grey hair sat piled at the top of her head as she hunched over the blank typewriter. Her long boney fingers worn from years of sewing and typing, stretched across the keys waiting for some miracle to swoop into her head and take over her fingers leading them in a dance. Nothing. Stretching her pale arms above her old head, she stood, as if she was reaching for the clouds in hope of rain to water her dry plants. Closing her grass green eyes, she sat back down hunching her crooked back once again. Her tired eyes snapped open as she began to remember a simpler time, a time in which she began to die.

At 23 years old Miss. Carrie May Thomas was a waitress at a new diner right off of Wall Street. She passed out plates of burgers and milkshakes by the hour earning just enough to pay the cost of her college. Miss. Carrie was an attractive young lady with dark black hair and sparkling green eyes that made any desperate mister stare. At 8:00pm she would close the diner and return to her boring life and away from the busy rush of work. Every day was the same, with the same stock brokers, the same house wife’s, and the same coffee goers. Nothing was out of the ordinary on Wall Street.

But in a split second and a call of a name, Carrie’s so normal life, wouldn’t be so normal anymore.

“Jordan Ford!” A booming male announced silencing the diner, “My name is Jordan Ford, and if Alex Cesindo doesn’t bring his skinny ass up here in thirty seconds I will shoot.”

A shiny black gun sat in his giant hands as a man around twenty went as white as vanilla cake. No doubt that had to be Alex Cesindo. Mr. Cesindo was on a lunch break from his big broker corporation, his slicked back blond hair and oval glasses made that much obvious. Jordan Ford however, was counting down and was nearing zero causing Carrie into a panic.

“Zero”

Bang. Dead. The second the gun sounded a man with his white stained gloves and long lab coat stood. He took the gun from Jordan Ford’s hands and threw it across the room. Then he ran.

The Scientist ran straight past Miss. Carrie and Mr. Cesindo and straight into the kitchen freezer. As Jordan Ford went for his gun, Carrie managed to push Mr. Cesindo into the freezer along with grabbing a stunned young girl who had now dropped her milkshake into a million pieces. A large figure with a football body followed in and shut the freezer door behind his industrial sized body. Miss. Carrie analyzed the strange people and shook her pale head completely fazed by the strange occurrences. The young girl sat with her perfect blond hair and puberty covered cheeks staring at the large athlete in complete shock. Had the young girl who had signed her bill with Sydney Conrad ever seen such as large man. The athlete who had Terio Anders on the back of his Letterman jacket however, seemed to be fine with the situation. The scars on the front of his left wrist and the blank stare in his eyes indicated he was already begging at Hell's door.

“Why did he want you?” The nervous Sydney squeaked tilting her small head as she looked at Alex Cedindo.

“I am a very rich man, young lady. He may have been attempting to rob.” Lies.

Carrie could tell by the way the underneath of his nose was dotted with drugs and how he fiddled with his fingers, that was not the reason Jordan Ford was after the young Alex. It made the beautiful young lady to wonder on why this strange Jordan Ford was after Alex.

Terio appeared to be happy with his situation as he embraced the cold by taking off his bear sized jacket and wrapped it around the miniature Sydney Conrad.

Carrie however was scared out of her wits. Her long fingers twisted around each other instantly bored by the lack of a pen and paper between her elbow and thumb.

BANG! BANG! Two more are dead. BANG! There goes another. Creeeeak! The door is opened and out goes the athlete. BANG! Terio is gone. The young football quarterback had left this horrid word with a smile on his face.

The foursome went quiet as Alex went to close the door concealing them from the warmth once again. Sydney was now blue and Carrie and Alex had cuddled together. But Miss. Conrad had fallen asleep. Her crystal blue eyes stayed open though. Frozen to sleep.

The threesome huddled together in silence dreading the thought of Jordan Ford standing outside their door. BANG! A bullet hit against the metal door. BANG BANG! Two more. But still, they were safe inside. The Scientist stood, approached the door, and sat leaning against the cold metal lamely attempting to save the younger adults. BANG! A final bullet flew through the door hitting the old man in the back of his back.

“Good luck children.” And then he died.

Carrie started to cry as Alex wrapped his thin arms around her beautiful body. She stood holding the young brokers hand and walked towards the door. Her hand dropped along with the handle. The door was open to reveal a dead Jordan Ford and the police. It was not Jordan who had killed The old scientist, but it was the police trying to save the hostages. Carrie held onto Alex’s hand once again as they were surrounded by the police in a blur of black.

She opened her eyes and smiled. Stretching her wire thin fingers across the keyboard, she wrote of a time where she began to die.

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16 Reviews

Points: 2149
Reviews: 16

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Sun Mar 16, 2014 9:43 pm
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lace182 wrote a review...



I like several things about your story but it isn't a contest winner at this point. I suggest you read BlueAfrica's review well and consider her points. She provided you with excellent observations. I will try not to repeat them beyond agreeing with her comments about your character's motives.

I would like to focus on your plot.
Carrie needs a story idea. She seems to fall to sleep and then writes what she dreams. If you pay attention to beginning writers you will find it is common that new writers find ideas in dreams and they often tell the reader they got the story from a dream. They are so excited by the dream they want to share it. That is fine. The problem lies in writing the dream and not telling a story. Dreams have no cohesiveness. They only have meaning to the dreamer. A story needs to convey feelings, thoughts, meaning, and show those things with the characters.

Maybe since it starts as the woman's dream, the beginning seems like a joke. I expected to read some comedy: A businessman, a poet, a child, a scientist, an athlete get stuck in a freezer...
By the way, where is the actress? Is the waitress the actress?

Anyway, given this has no comedy in it, you might want to reconsider the beginning. If the dream opens that way then say so, 'the dream began with...', and go from there until things devolve from comic to tragic. Reveal the shooter is the reason for the entrapment via conversation or narration perhaps.

If this is not the woman's dream then I advise you reconsider the beginning for its comic sense. It is not in line with the sense of the story unless you begin with a lighthearted girl rather than one bored out of her mind. In other words, lighten up the beginning of the story then descend into a tragedy and forget about the woman writing at her desk.

So, your characters go in to a freezer to live but instead they die. There lies a story but your characters barely talk. They don't even get very upset. You tell us how some of them die. They are shot, frozen, but your characters do nothing to help beyond pushing each other into the freezer and the athlete giving a coat. Your story would interest me more if you explained what made Terio, the athlete, so content and how the rest of those trapped react to his attitude. He has the most interesting attitude of all. Why is he so damn content? Who is that content?

Where is their panic or will to live? Their actions make no sense. If someone is dying they will attempt an escape or at least help others. People do such things all the time. You can read about them in the news. Consider what your characters would do as real people.

You can write. You have good control of your vocabulary and punctuation. What isn't perfect isn't glaring. I suggest you rewrite considering the motives of your characters and have them react to each other rather than just a gunman who can't shoot them as long as they stay put and don't get too close to the door.

Good luck and thank you for your submission.






Okay so there is no actress first off and I have made a few changes if you would like to look at them.



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Sun Mar 16, 2014 4:17 pm
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BluesClues wrote a review...



Hi there!

So, first off I just wanted to let you know how to link things (since I see that for the contest you're supposed to provide the link to your story anyway).

You can just copy-paste this:

Code: Select all
[url=http://www.youngwriterssociety.com/viewtopic.php?f=404&t=100278&p=1198929#p1198929]Wall Street[/url]


As you can see from the code, all you have to do is write [url]and put the URL of whatever you're trying to link between the = and the end bracket. Then you put the title of whatever you're trying to link (I used your story name here), and then end with[/url]

And now, on to the actual review!

I don't know how old your contest judge/judges is or are, but as a college student, let me tell you:

"earning just enough to pay the cost of her high standard college"--this line is so unbelievable. Waitresses make less than minimum wage--they make tip wage because their pay is "supplemented" by tips, but then you have to remember that a lot of jerks don't tip at all because "it's not my job to pay the waitress" and even the people who do tip often tip less than 15% (which if the bill is small doesn't come out to much anyway). Now, yes: In a five-star restaurant a waiter or waitress can make quite a lot of money, and the customers are likely to tip often and well. But if Carrie's working at a place that sells hamburgers and milkshakes, that sounds more like a diner, in which case: good luck working enough hours to pay for college yourself.

(Not to scare you out of going to university in the future, but college in the U.S. is EXPENSIVE. Take it from someone who knows.)

Unless, of course, your story is meant to take place in the past, say the 1980s--my mom was able to pay her own way through undergraduate school back then by working a typical college-kid job. But nowadays nobody really leaves college without a buttload of debt. Alas.

Okay, sorry. That detail probably isn't even important to the story, but it bugged me. Sorry.

"a man around twenty went as white as vanilla cake"--I love this description. It made me giggle.

"rom his big broker cooperation"--I think you meant "corporation," not "cooperation." "Corporation" would be a large business.

"Alex had been fortunate enough to escape as he drove off in his million dollar convertible"--plus he's rich, so any drug charge would almost certainly be dropped.

"a fraction of my riches"--how would Ford hope to get a fraction of Cesindo's riches by openly shooting him in a public place filled with witnesses? I mean, I realize this is a lie anyway, but it's a pretty weak one. However, the obscenely wealthy almost always have enemies for various reasons, so a better lie might be that Ford is just another "nutjob" who hates what Cesindo's company does or blames the economy on it or whatever.

"How could anyone sleep when you’re sitting in the arctic?"--hypothermia. The doctor has an extremely low tolerance for cold and is dying already.

"The young football quarterback had achieved his dream."--what, dying in a fire fight? Odd dream, but whatever floats your boat, I guess.

"some sort of a bomb."--why does the good doctor want to make a bomb? If it's to escape the freezer by blasting it open, unnecessary--restaurant and store freezers these days always have a safety mechanism such that if you're in the freezer and someone closes the door on you, you won't be locked in. If it's to kill the gunman, great, but 1) everyone else in the diner would die in the blast too and 2) who does the doctor think he is, MacGyver?

"“Good luck children.” And then he died."--Ii cannot express the love I have for this line.

"open to reveal a dead Jordan Ford and the police."--okay, it's been HOURS, right? Because the doctor had time to fall asleep and wake up again and someone else was shot and someone else died from hypothermia...and the police JUST NOW arrived on the scene? That is a shoddy police department. I mean, I realize it's NYC and NYC faces a lot of crime daily, but if there's a gunman and a hostage situation at a diner, the police are going to get there pretty quick. At least, I'd hope they would. And because the hours pass so--like, because we're unaware of them passing except that you tell us "hours passed," you could really condense the events down so they happen more quickly. Even if you want Sydney to die--maybe she has a very low tolerance for cold. Maybe she was grazed by a bullet, goes into shock, and dies quickly. Maybe a frozen ham from the restaurant freezer shelf falls on her head and crushes her. There are plenty of options here.

I think the best parts of your story are the very beginning, and the very end, where Carrie (presumably it's Carrie) is an old woman, writing about "the time she began to die." The writing there is simpler but descriptive and not as confusing as the middle parts of the story. The main thing I don't get about the opening and ending is the "began to die" bit, because...like, do you mean "the time she had a near death experience" or was this episode literally the beginning of her dying...except she's old, so...how did the experience with the gunman start her long march toward death? Or, is it not that it actually, literally started her long march toward death, but rather made her aware of her own mortality?

Personally, I like the last idea best, but if that's the case then you just need to clarify that that's so. Your story right now (according to Microsoft Word) is only 988 words, and the contest max is 3000, so if you want to expand the opening and/or closing a bit to clarify this idea, you've got just over 2000 words to work with.

I find the middle parts of the story somewhat confusing. I think partly it's because you start off with Carrie's third-person perspective (which makes sense, since she's the old woman at the beginning and end), but then you name-drop all these other characters and tell us that this one is a doctor, this one a businessman, and so on even though Carrie doesn't have any previous knowledge of any of these people. This could be fixed in a couple ways:

1) Have Carrie notice things about the people that would lead her to believe they are doctors, businessmen, etc. I.e., the doctor could be wearing a labcoat. The football player could be beefy and have a nose that looks like it's been broken while playing some sort of sport. Things like that.

2) This one might be a better idea, because it'll give us a little more to work with by establishing the doomed-to-be-stuck-in-a-freezer characters before the shooting, which is the point where things get confusing. What you could do is decide: which of these characters is a regular customer at the diner? Rather than just saying "Carrie handed hamburgers and milkshakes all day," you could actually draw that out into a scene by showing her giving the football player his hamburger, the businessman his salad (he's watching his figure because he's got a promotion coming up, I dunno), the little girl her milkshake, and so on. This way, we've already seen that these characters are in the diner at the time of the shooting, so that their appearance when it gets to the freezer part is less random.

I know that's a lot I just gave you, but you've got just over a week until the contest deadline. And if you do any revising and need an updated review, just let me know and I'll be happy to take another look.

Good luck on the contest!

Blue






Thanks! I'm gonna maybe apply a couple of these changes later when I'm not so busy. :)




Education is education. We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow. Education is neither Eastern or Western; it is human.
— Malala