RuneScape Forum Archive | Flash Fiction

Money Bobert

Posts: 91 Iron Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

I'm enjoying these prompts.

----

A plow churns across the field, and everywhere, the wind reeks of upset earth. The night is moonless. The candles are snuffed in turn, but Frank still works his field.

I rise from the bed and lift an inky curtain, to glimpse him outlined, specter-like against the dirt. His plow is an ancient, mule-driven joke. Can’t he hear the screaming engines overhead? He owes his life to men who don’t waste bombs on dirt.

Chuckling, exhausted, I sink into the chair by the window. Sky floods fully into view. Strange things, I note, lurk in that air, under stranger stars.

07-Mar-2014 03:52:50

Chuk

Posts: 14,177 Opal Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

My actual 100 word story:

Sitting in the grass beneath fading twilight, a young man held a young woman tight against his chest. He had carried her to this glade; she could not walk, had been unable to walk since sickness took her, before he set a ring upon her finger. It was worse lately. But she wanted to see the stars come out.

“There,” she said, voice tired. The evening star crested the horizon. “Do you remember, before, when we’d dance on nights like this?”

He nodded.

“Then let me go,” she whispered. “I go to dance again, dance beneath far stranger stars.”

---

And then the first attempt that's much too long. (Trying to be sneaky here and get thoughts on both. Mwuahhahaha)

A man sat, hunched in the fading twilight. Round him, the earth was torn and spoiled, wet with the blood and sweat. Shadows of trees, shapes of once great pines and firs, lay like splintered twigs, and any stalk less strong had long since been trampled into the mud. But he saw none of that. Instead he only saw the face held across his knees, the face of a friend -- cold, stiff, claimed by death’s cruel hand.

Long he sat, motionless, but on a sudden he raised his head to the sky, begging reason from the gods. There, searching in the heavens, his streaming eyes found the evening star floating in the gloaming. And he remembered how, on a time in the summer, Jas would have seen that dot shining in the east, and he would have called to his wife, sweet Meriya with her gorgeous smile, and they would have gone out into the grass and danced the dusk away to night.

He realized it would be his burden to tell her. She would want to hear it from him, Jas’s closest friend, hear that her husband would dance that song no more -- that he had gone to dance beneath far stranger stars.

07-Mar-2014 06:21:29

Dec

2023

Poller5

Posts: 11,421 Opal Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

The original is leaps and bounds better, Chuk. The abridgement works in its own way, but has lost the vivid poignancy that makes the longer version rather powerful. Your interpretation of the prompt is great, too, but I'll save that discussion for when I comment on all the stories (can't get ahead of myself and start with the last one!)

EDIT: Comments!

This is, I think, the weakest of your entries yet, Cyun. Pieces built around vivid imagery and description can be difficult, and from reading this I would guess that they're not something you write very often. I don't know if I can point to many particular issues (though the way you integrated the prompt does stand out as perhaps the most awkward point), but the whole piece feels... stilted, to me. It doesn't flow the way it should. The plot feels somewhat hollow, too; the most interesting part of a suicide story is the why of the matter, not the how (however pretty you try to make it).

Your piece is interesting, Worf, and quite enjoyable to read; its main problem is that it is far too much a synopsis of facts, and even the final revelation that it is Earth that is burning doesn't have much particular emotional impact. The writing is strong, though, and nicely stylistic; "lurking gluttonous black holes" is a magnificent phrase. You took the theme in perhaps the obvious direction, but sometimes obvious is best, and I do like the fact someone went down the sci-fi road.

As soon as I read your entry, Sam, I messaged Chuk saying that you'd absolutely killed the prompt, because you had. It never even occured to me that it could be taken that way, and so your piece blindsided me and sent me sprawling. I don't care particularly for Doctor Who, or the legions of fans who now insist that fezs are great (they're not! they're just things that poor people wear instead of Santa hats with their Zammy robes to kinda look cool!) but your entire entry works perfectly.

07-Mar-2014 22:48:48 - Last edited on 11-Mar-2014 06:21:02 by Poller5

Dec

2023

Poller5

Posts: 11,421 Opal Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

I'll spare everyone the suspense and just say right now that I've known it would be my favourite since I read it some time shortly after you posted it.

I'm not sure I entirely understand your story, Bob, both in a literal sense (wasting bombs on earth?) and from a thematic sense -- I get the sense that things aren't quite as they seem, but there's not much to substantiate this. It's fairly well written, technically, though with the one odd slip into present tense in the final pargraph ("sky floods...&quot

which stands out as weird. Your piece falls into that weird place where my main impression isn't that it's either good or bad, but that I can't figure out whether it's good or bad because my main impression is that I'm really not understanding what's going on. Of course, it's entirely possible that this is because I'm missing something obvious, but from where I sit now, I can't say much more than that.

Okay, so we've talked briefly about your two pieces, Chuk (or, rather, I've refused to say much more than I did here

) so here's what you've been waiting for. I've said I like the second one better, so I'll focus mostly on what makes it better, to my mind. Firstly, I'm not a fan of the whole "let me go" narrative around the death of a loved one because, well, I suppose I have some reason, but I don't know if I could define it. At any rate, the scenario in the second strikes me as much more poignant. That's the crux of it, I think; the first one is a strong theme built around a weak plot, while the second one works that same theme around a much stronger narrative core. The imagery of battle is very well done, too. Dancing beneath the moonlight has some of the Tale of Tinuviel to it, which I suspect is intentional, but any rate always works for me, even if it's not (to my mind) normal people do all that much.

11-Mar-2014 06:21:17

Dec

2023

Poller5

Posts: 11,421 Opal Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

At any rate, you incorporate the theme in very nicely, and are the only one to really get at where my thoughts take that prompt, which is to different worlds and planes of existence.

(And of course I needed the third post for one entire sentence.)

11-Mar-2014 06:21:55

Sep

2023

Enheduanna

Posts: 16,566 Opal Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

"As soon as I read your entry, Sam, I messaged Chuk saying that you'd absolutely killed the prompt, because you had. It never even occured to me that it could be taken that way, and so your piece blindsided me and sent me sprawling. I don't care particularly for Doctor Who, or the legions of fans who now insist that fezs are great (they're not! they're just things that poor people wear instead of Santa hats with their Zammy robes to kinda look cool!) but your entire entry works perfectly.

I'll spare everyone the suspense and just say right now that I've known it would be my favourite since I read it some time shortly after you posted it."

Thank you

The first time I read the prompt, I thought of a fantasy/sci-fi perspective, but then I was just wandering from one class to another at uni (interestingly enough, two of my courses this semester are Creative Writing: Narrative, and Creative Writing: Genre Fiction. Shaping up to be the best semester ever ), and the first one-and-a-half sentences randomly sprung into my head

11-Mar-2014 08:13:22

Money Bobert

Posts: 91 Iron Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

Thanks for the critique! I rewrote my last entry to cut down on unnecessary ambiguity and to see if I could make Frank more interesting. Hopefully, this will escape the weird zone.

---

A plow churns across the field, and everywhere, wind reeks of upset earth. The night is moonless. The candles are snuffed in turn, but Frank still works his field.

I rise from bed and lift an inky curtain, to glimpse him outlined, pale against the dirt. His plow, an ancient joke is trembling. The mule quivers, wild-eyed, at the shriek of warplanes overhead. Frank stands straight, hands extended, eyes grim.

But death never comes. He wavers and falls, as if pierced by shrapnel. The plow is on its side, and the mule is screaming. Strange things lurk here, under stranger stars.

---

My goal in both versions was to develop contrast between the old, agrarian lifestyle and the strange, modernized world. I tried to achieve this by contrasting a self-important, earthbound farmer with the warplanes that choose to ignore him. Especially in my rewrite, the farmer’s attempt to stand up to the warplanes, expecting to finally be destroyed by the modern world, is supposed to generate Irony. (his failure is the reason he falls over in the end.) On a literal level, the snuffed candles and inky curtains are supposed to indicate a blackout. In my first version, dirt was supposed to be closely associated with the old way of life hence the "bombs on dirt," line. The reason I chose a first person watcher for my narrator was because I felt it enhanced the mood of strangeness and unrest that I tried to initiate in the first paragraph.

When I was writing this, I was thinking about how armies now prioritize attacks on military and industrial infrastructure, over the traditional burning of farms. The idea of a vestigial farmer lost in a modern war, whose great, great grandfather might have been attacked by Roman invaders but who is now ignored, struck me as interesting.

11-Mar-2014 20:07:35

Dec

2023

Poller5

Posts: 11,421 Opal Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

Forgot to put it up last night, so here's this week's prompt: "Why have you turned around?"

12-Mar-2014 07:00:32

Nov

2007

Dyrnwyn

Posts: 1,396 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

We have lost the light. I remember how you used to look so alive; how your eyes sparkled while pale smoke escaped your lips. In the darkest hours before dawn, I still sleepwalk into the hope that we might see such days again. But don’t you mind.

How fervently have I not fought off the tempests of your emotions; how often have I not found myself ready to jump off the edge and let the abyss consume me?

At last, I persuade the question to fall off my lips, though I already know the answer.

”Why have you turned around?” // Wordsmith ~ The Novelists' Guild // Viking //

12-Mar-2014 21:12:33

Chosen Worf

Posts: 929 Gold Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

You twisted my arm. You grabbed my heart, and squeezed it until it burst. Now the target of your ferocity, the source of all of our problems, lies gasping like a fish in a pond of its own blood. Is this what you wanted?

Of course it is. Why do you think I did it? You agreed with me. You said yourself that nothing would change if we did*’t do it. Isn’t she the one that started this whole god-forsaken conversation? And now that the deed is done, why have you turned around?

The blood is pooling on our shoes.

---

For those that are likely confused about what is going on in this piece, consider how many active characters there are.

13-Mar-2014 00:35:47

Forums

Flash Fiction