Final Round: A Race to the Finish

Originally Posted by Dekoa

OK guys Here is the last prompt via one of our contestants that was recently taken down by their competition so lets see what happens!

Well as you can see, this round is given to us by good olde Vivi. So I guess we shall get this final voting round done huh?

Author A = The Great Space Race
Author B = I Run
Author C = Flyer

Let the voting commence!

Zerg has spoken. Let Flyer.doc win. Seeing as how it's the only one among the bunch with a coherent story pieced together with carefully chosen words. (What happened to your title?)

And it had better be yours, orion_mk3

The Great Space Race, written from the perspective of an announcer, was rather jarring. Try reading it aloud. Some parts are cringe-worthy, in my opinion. Apologies if I don't "get" the genre, but the work looks more like a hack job though. Were you pressed for time?

I Run, on the other hand, was more of an essay rather than a story. Fail. This is not an essay contest.

More in-depth comments if there is more commentary on this thread, and if I feel like it. Right now I'm feeling sort of vicious

Great Space Race hardly reads like a commentary. I gave up trying to make sense of the action halfway through. The grammatical and spelling mistakes didn't help.

I Run reads like some college application essay. Not too bad, but it's just not interesting.

As for Flyer, I actually enjoyed reading it. Here's my vote.

I cannot keep my mind on Great Space Race, because of the amount of tense changes as well as unorganized shifts to different parts of the race throughout the story.

I Run seems to have taken up a lot of effort and is slightly intriguing. I thought that the connections between different types of races was ingenious.

Flyer has a few grammatical errors, and at least for me, the amount of tension inside the story between the kid and the bullies was too over-exaggerated and blatant. I don't think that continuously using swear words to form a story deserves special attention.

Flyer is very poetic in a nostalgic way and the story flows well. It's an interesting story that's both immersive and poignant. It could have been predictable, but it's not - instead it's quite refreshing to read.

I have not read the stories, but since the poll is public, I will arbitrarily vote for B.

I LIKE DEMOCRACY

Tsk. So much for good taste ;____;

Author A: The Great Space Race As others have mentioned, having the story be essentially a play-by-play description--as if from an announcer--is an unusual format. On the one hand, it allows for a tremendous amount of action to be crammed into the piece, probably more than 2500 words could hold if done conventionally.

The problem is, of course, that the reader is also distanced from the racers. The format doesn't let us see into any of their heads, nor does the announcer provide any private insights into their characters. They're just there, which makes it difficult to care when one dies or is wronged or triumphs.

My suggestion would be to refocus the story on the announcer. Who are they? What are they thinking? What is the contrast between the official version that's spoken into the microphone (essentially the story as is now) and what they really feel? By keeping some of what you've got as dialogue, introducing the announcer as a character, and giving them opinions and feeling regarding the race, readers will be let in a little and hopefully feel that too, even though the length doesn't allow for us to meet each racer individually. It needs a good editing at some stage, as well, but there's a lot of promise there.

Author B: I Run A very interesting approach here; as others have said, more of an essay (or, perhaps, a prose poem) than a story. Since I've submitted essays to WoTW before (and lost with them) and been entertained by the poetry I've seen appear in the contest, I don't immidiately disqualify the forms.

It's a short piece, but it's evident some work went into it, especially at the beginning and end where the greatest weight of the description lies. And it's great description, too! Mechanically, it's pretty sound, with only a few oddities ("Arms Race" and "Human Race" ought not be capitalized, for example).

I would say, though, that the brief length precludes lengthier development of the ideas--especially racing as metaphor--which I feel would have added to the piece as an essay. Additional space could also have been used for description, action, motion; for a piece about racing (particularly if it was intended as prose poetry) there's surprisingly little motion. There's plenty of room for development in whatever direction you choose to take it, and I'd love to see another draft or iteration.

Author C: Flyer By the process of elimination, this is my piece. I chalk it up as one that was much better in my mind than on paper, partly due to some real-life time constraints that precluded my usual careful revision and editing. It's a function of the subject matter too, I suppose.

The story was supposed to be a paean to the youthful exuberance of riding downhill--that sort of innocent thrill that people often seem to lose when they graduate to internal combustion engines. I don't feel that it came even close, personally, and there were a few sequences that got the axe due to space concerns (including one that justifies the bullies' animosity a bit more) that probably would have improved things.

The Contest as a Whole
I think that, despite the delays and dropouts, that this was a worthwhile pursuit. I loved some of the stories I read, and I'm anxious to see some of the same authors return next time, when hopefully things will run a little smoother. I'd especially like to see more from Alice, as her stories were easily my favorites.

I'd also be happy to volunteer my time to help--what good is two years' worth of teaching writing if it can't be put to a more fun use, anyway?

This year, I did something I shouldn't have. I tried to write in areas I don't excel in or in ways that haven't really been tried before. The Great Space Race is an example of the latter. I can write good space stuff. I know that. Clearly, though, the idea of simply providing something akin to a radio broadcast of a race wasn't the best idea.

I did at one time try to incorporate the drivers and their motivations, but the word count stopped me. There was going to be a part of the story, as the drivers were warming up their engines, where their thoughts were broadcast thanks to secret psychic probes located in their vehicles. I even had a little bit of humor mixed into that scene. But I scrapped it for a few reasons I don't really want to get into now.

Perhaps if I had kept it, the story itself would have lent itself to what I really wanted: a story where the protagonist and antagonist is determined by the reader, not the tale. I think I succeeded in that regard, but since few to none could have enthusiasm for the characters, it didn't work out that way.


I commend my fellow competitors. You both submitted interesting and, I suppose, better entries. I can't say for certain whether orion deserves to win, as I haven't really been reading most of the stories for the competition, but I still wish him congrats.

I've been out of town for over a week, but I've been keeping up with this thread.

I can't say my defeat this round was unexpected; I wasn't a big fan of the final prompt, and I spent most of the deadline convinced that I wouldn't be able to make anything out of it. But despite that, I didn't want to forfeit, and instead tried to think up something.

So I turned to my sister for inspiration, who happens to be a celebrated runner. I created my short story with her passion for running and the thoughts that I feel when I see her give it her all out there. Naturally, she loved the story, but I suppose in the end its more of a poetic essay than an actual short story.

Well, even though I didn't win, and two of my rounds were won by default, I gained a great prize from this contest; it sparked my passion to write again after years of brainstorming but never following through on it. I want to thank everyone who took the time to read my stories, and the kind words you had toward them. I hope to continue putting my work out there, whether short or novel length, and I'll be distributing them to the public in an as of yet undetermined way (I'm thinking a personal blog, but I would really like to make money off of these stories, whether in a short story magazine or contest, or best of all book publication).

So now that the contest is over, my current ties to this forum are gone as well. I'm not going to say farewell, because I doubt I'll stop posting altogether, but with a new job and other responsibilities and interests running my life, I won't be spending as much time here as I used to. Regardless, I had a lot of fun, and hopefully we can do this again next year.

orion_MK3 Is the WINNAR! I'll get to you later about the prize. Until next time folks!