Round 1: The Show Went Too Long

Originally Posted by Dekoa

What does this phrase make you think of? Does it make you feel ill? or perhaps it makes you feel like a friend has betrayed you.

Well one of the things about this paper is that it is up to you. Yeah it's up to you. Basically you just need to stick to this theme.

Do I have to include this as my title? Only if you want to.

Do I have to use these words at one point during the paper? I don't know.

If I haven't said anything about it, then you can assume that it's up to you.

The paper will be due on Sunday March 5th at 11:59 PM EST. You need to send it at the E-mail at the bottom. May you write like a God (or maybe like Poe!).

WHEEE, TWO THIS TIME!!!! LEt's Give a round of applause to the last bit eh??

orion_mk 3 (A) = Frames of Mind
starslight (B) = Helpless Hands

Originally Posted by Zergrinch

A hearty applause to orion_mk3*! Here's hoping you don't step all over me in round 2!

While the vote may be lopsided, the opponent, starslight shouldn't be discouraged. Your piece wasn't bad at all, and I would've loved to read you in future rounds.

* I did get it right, right?

Yes, yes you did.

Well, thanks to these two excellent stories this first round really went out with a bang. These were definitely two of my favorites out of all these, and this is probably the toughest decision I’ve had to make thus far. Both stories were obviously written by intelligent, articulate people who didn’t feel they had to prove themselves via excessive verbiage. You both kept it simple, yet descriptive, and I really enjoyed that aspect of these two stories.

Author A – “Frames of Mind”
The way you describe everything from the theatre to the bubble-popping girl in hotpants (Victoria’s Secret <3) is chock full of beautiful, vivid imagery. Small details like the one below added so much in the way of imagery to this story.

Quote:

The student popped her gum loudly, and jammed the ticket into a sequined purse.

Reading this story, it occurred to me that either you work or otherwise have a great interest in old films and filmmaking, or you did extensive research for this story (which would be extremely impressive). Which is it?

This isn’t so much a critique as something I just wanted to share, but this was my very favorite line:

Quote:

It is like the man who tears out the pages of a book as he finishes them and lights them on fire for a reading light.

I don’t know if you came up with that yourself or whether some famous person actually did say that and you used it in this story, but if it’s the former, you’re going to be a tough one to beat in this competition! I really don’t have a single negative thing to say about this story. Far be it from me to critique someone who writes like you do.

_____________________________________________

Author B – “Helpless Hands”

Another story with great dialogue. This is definitely your strength. It’s comfortable and believable, and that is so hard to accomplish, at least for me (and judging by some of the other stories in this competition, I’m not the only one =p).

Somehow you managed to make me find a story about an old boxer interesting. That’s quite a feat. You have excellent grammar and that always pulls major brownie points out of me.

I totally did not see that ending coming. Wow. Great job on that.

This is just a formatting thing, but you might consider adding a line or some dashes or something to help the segue from one scene to another. At times the scenes changed very abruptly and I’d have to go back and re-read to make sure I hadn’t missed something.

Both authors deserve to go on to the next round, and it really sucks that one of you isn’t going to make it past Round One of this competition, because you’re both very talented writers, but I have to go with the story that had the biggest impact on me, and that was Author A’s “Frames of Mind.”

Congratulations to both writers for writing very strong stories! I'm looking forward to the next round even more now.

Author A:

Very nice. I really like the nostalgia you imbued into the end of the story, and the hope at the end. I started to wonder if Frames Of Mind was a good movie -- good job!

Only quibble I had was this:

Quote:

"The show went too long," the girl said to her friends as they passed him. "And there wasn't any sound. Boring. And that ending? What a downer." There was a chorus of agreement. "Let's go home and watch Monster in Law, wash that bad taste out of our mouths with something good,"

This was a little pat -- a very convenient, timely irony to have come out from the girl's mouth, as it were. Given the strength of the story, little missteps like this stand out.

I have to say, though, the last two lines were luminous!


Author B:

I think you did a really good job with this. You share a trait with Author A -- both your stories feel really authentic and well thought out. And there were little things that I liked -- for example, the name "Clay".

My criticism for you is this -- your story succeeds as a very well-done character piece. However, even though I realize that you alluded to Clay's habit earlier in the story, the last part of the story feels like a random event to me, in the context of the first part of the story.

In other words, I feel that your well-defined characters are wasted on a seemingly random event, when they could have been placed into a dilemma that would have gotten some more character development out of them, given your obvious skill. Instead, I felt sorry to see them erased in that way -- a testament to your characters, to be sure, but a waste nonetheless.

I loved this line, though:

Quote:

Dust particles drifted down from the ceiling like a thousand angels falling from heaven in the sunlight that poured in from the gym’s high windows.

Lovely writing!

VOTE: Frames Of Mind, for the reasons explained above.

Kyle's piece was rather short, though riveting. The ending was quite unexpected, and as mentioned by Stop Sign, is a random occurence completely nontangential to your initial build-up (but who am I to criticize ) I'm afraid I don't see much of the prompt in the piece, though I completely understand if you were trying to avoid the Million Dollar Baby ending. I'm not sure if the 1,234 word count was intentional, but it DID made me smile. A bit.

I can't fault Alex's piece, on the other hand. It has beautiful imagery, and tons of research. It didn't preach, it wasn't too short, it wasn't too long. The ending is slightly glurge in nature, but is a welcome change from the wanton murder and tragedies that underline most of the stories thus far (including my own.) It touched upon the prompt really well, and I felt the title was quite apropos.

In view of the foregoing, I'm casting my vote for Author A.

If I'm not mistaken, and I DON'T think I am, I'm about to go up against you in Round 2. I'm seriously thinking of surrendering now

Excuse me, but who are Kyle and Alex?

Those are the names I grabbed from the .DOC files Dekoa attached. It seems the authors (Author A: Alex, Author B: Kyle) left their names embedded in the metadata there

My fault, I thought I got the Metatags.

Author A: Frames of Mind

I am a film student and I currently have Film History so everything you talk about technically and artistically I understand in the story. From the tone that seemed like it was almost a personal rant I'd have to guess you were enrolled in some sort of film program as well.

The example Alice cited about the burning the books to read was a cool one, like she said. I don't share the same sort of enthusiasm of older films that Mark does but I can certainly sympathize with his plight. I don't have a lot to say about the story. I liked it (I didn't love it though) and it was enjoyable and well written, free of error for the most part. I agree with Stop Sign about the quote he listed.


Author B: Helpless Hands


You were certainly running on unstable ground writing the "old boxer gives it one last shot" story. However this may have affected my perception of the story, it was sort of nullified by your writing skills. Everything about the writing itself is enjoyable, I just didn't care all that much for the story. The ending came at really random to me (suddenly he was in the cab and I was quite confused). The drug death angle was interesting but certainly could have been beefed up by another alloted 1,200 words or so making the ending more tragic. When I read it, it sort of just "happened" and I wasn't connected all that much to Desmond. (And Desmond Clay? Clay, like Cassius Clay? Odd considering he makes a reference to Ali earlier. Desmond sounds convincing but I just know that's got to be a reference to something)


Overall, both had really good writing. Author A had a better story that was fleshed out between the two. Yet I feel Author B's story had more potential if finished. Author B had a bit better skills in dialogue and word choice though by no means was Author A's bad. I was sure I was going to vote for A before but I feel without all the informational talk about film the story would be lessened, so I will actually vote for Author B, because I'd like to see what he could do with next rounds story.

Well, Stop Sign basically said everything I was going to, so if you want my opinion on the two stories, look at his post.

My vote goes to Author A.

A hearty applause to orion_mk3*! Here's hoping you don't step all over me in round 2!

While the vote may be lopsided, the opponent, starslight shouldn't be discouraged. Your piece wasn't bad at all, and I would've loved to read you in future rounds.

* I did get it right, right?

OMG ZERGRINCH HAS MYSTICAL POWERS OF DIVINATION!!!!!

Not really, Anyone could get it

Wasn't that hard a guess. Document got his name all over it, and his profile leads to a Deviant Art site, which led to a LiveJournal account, which had an entry talking about his prompt and what he's going to write.

Again, my congratulations

Curiosity killed the Zergrinch.... Looks like I was too late.

Zergrinch has obviously taken my comment about researching your opponent very seriously, seeing as he tracked my identity down across three websites. I'll make my next submission more anonymous if he promises to be less devious

That aside, thanks for your support everyone. I really appriciated the comments, and the entire exercise has been a real confidence booster for me.

With regards to Alice's comment, I'm not actually a film student. I'm a library student who happened to see a short movie on film preservation. That gave me the idea, and I did research to fill it out.

Many of the character names are drawn from black-and-white pictures; the professor is named after a member of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari crew; the theater is named after its director; and the director of Frame of Mind is a portmanteau of Caligari's director and the Warner studio. The main character, Max Steiner, is named after a Golden Age Hollywood composer best known for King Kong.

Admittedly, part of the story was a rant about the nature of modern filmgoers, but I tried to incorporate some other concepts. The title, "Frames of Mind," is a pun, but also a description of Max and the freshman. Max sees the film as a piece of art, worthy of hanging in a gallery; it's very difficult to convince modern theatergoers to accept this perception. It takes a student who is probably Max's antithesis in many ways to approach the film in a new frame of mind, re-interpreting it for a new generation.

I'd also like to say that I really enjoyed my opponent's writing; I'm really sorry that I couldn't provide detailed comments, since I think the piece has tons of potential.

Yeah, I knew from reading some of the stuff on your deviantart page that I was gonna get walloped, and you definitely hit this one out of the park. Your writing is outstanding and I can't wait to read what you come up with in the future rounds. Good luck!

The reason my story is so short is simply that I had a really hard time writing it. I wanted to write something out of my comfort zone, and really went too far out. I'm not 55, I've never boxed, and I'm not religious, so it was very difficult to flesh anything out with any authority. By the time I realized it, though, it was too late to start over with a fresh concept because I'm such slow writer. Lesson learned.

Originally Posted by orion_mk3

I'll make my next submission more anonymous if he promises to be less devious

You forget I'll be going up against you. Therefore, I will know your next submission no matter how anonymous you make it!

(Good luck, by the way! )

Zergrinch, you're starting to scare me a little bit.