Round II: RE: Shakespeare

Originally Posted by me

"And Shakespeare was always a preferred author of mine" Make one of your characters say this.

Ok, here's this pairing. Get to voting

Author A: The central idea in this story is tantalizing--a person with a personality so fractured that they create an entire mental world, complete with a cast of thousands, each unaware. Telepathic contact between several such schizoworlds is less compelling but still very interesting.

The problem with your tale isn't the ideas behind it but rather the execution. Essentially, you've given readers pages and pages of relatively uninteresting conversation followed by an enormous plot dump. It might be that the story and its ideas are just too big for the format; in any case, neither main character is sufficiently interesting (even as a cipher) to make the reading anything less than a slog.

That, combined with relatively unimportant details (I'm not sure anyone in the northern hemisphere will get the "Dunny" joke) and some factual flubs (a practicing psychiatrist probably wouldn't be performing psychoanalysis at a hospital), lead me to suggest that you start over in the next draft. The idea's too good to throw away--you just need to find a way to coax it out.

Author B: Interesting how both this and the other story veered considerably from what one might expect give the prompt; this one takes the post-apocalyptic sci-fi route. As I've noted before, creating an alternate world in 2500 words or less is very difficult, and such stories tend to focus on plot and exposition to the exclusion of character.

Though that problem isn't as pronounced here as other tales of the same kind, I do feel that the main characters aren't as well developed as they might be; there's a lot of ink spilled explaining their world though it doesn't sink to the level of plot dump per se.

The ending, while abrupt, does at least give some sense of closure, though I have to admit that while the prompt line is totally tangential to the plot, it is cleverly placed. I think a few more details about Richard are in order for the next draft, and definitely some editing, since there are some mechanical errors.

I have to give it to B, who succeeded better with a less lofty goal than A.

At least I only lost by one.

Good game, whoever you are! You deserve it!

Originally Posted by orion_mk3

The ending, while abrupt, does at least give some sense of closure, though I have to admit that while the prompt line is totally tangential to the plot, it is cleverly placed. I think a few more details about Richard are in order for the next draft, and definitely some editing, since there are some mechanical errors.

I am the culprit.

Actually, I planned to make this a story about the younger PA (post-apocalypse) crowd using older people for treasure-hunting. Only old folks would know the value of such things as a work of Shakespeare in a world where the youngest three generations didn't have any formal schooling. I wasn't able to flesh this idea out as much as I would have liked to in 2,500 words or less, and still have a bit of action mixed in. Actually, I abruptly summarized the action at the end but it ended up working to my liking. I plan to revise this later and maybe I'll post it in CC later this year.