[3383] Three Mini Stories from the Endless Desert

Allow me to preface my feedback by saying this will be my first time posting on Reddit, so I am basically Reddit-illiterate. And let me add to that that I have never read fantasy before, so I will have a bit of an outsider’s perspective on all of this. Meaning, I may get hung up on things others would breeze past. Perhaps not!

The first thing that stands out to me is the affinity you have for depicting settings. You really relish in the nooks and crannies of the desert world in all three of these snippets. It isn’t just wordpainting, either. It contributes to the story. I don’t know if WRS (white room syndrome) is still a thing, but you didn’t suffer from it, even in moments where not much was happening— so that’s great off the bat.

I was impressed in particular by the choreography of the fishing at the opening of your second story. You described this unrealistic activity practically enough that I, as a true outsider to this strange land, could follow along. This is the passage where I became convinced that you knew what you were doing in this department. The city depicted in the third story seems pretty fleshed-out with details that you obviously considered quite deeply when assembling the place. I’m mentioning all of this because in a genre that focuses heavily on setting, you’d want to make sure you have your ducks in a row. So you do— good!

Also jumping out at me are the presentations of conflicts in each story. We have the boy with a double identity, who may or may not reveal his less acceptable side to his community. Boom. Relatable. We have the girl who’s witnessing a once in a lifetime event that has moral implications. On one side, we see her father who isn’t so enthused about the whale. Then we have the other girl who represents the majority viewpoint: that the whale is theirs for the taking. The narrator is situated right between the two, a ripe position for questioning things. Boom. Relatable. Both stories ask: what’s the right thing to do? — which is a beautiful stalemate of a conflict we love to digest as readers.

Then in the third excerpt we see a girl experiencing homesickness in her new stomping grounds. Making a big move is difficult; it reveals and develops character, it is relatable. Boom. Each of the stories is a question posed, and what’s pulling us forward is the chance to see those questions developed and deepened. We want to see the repercussions.

The thoroughness of setting + promise of conflict is propelling these three tales forward. The goal here is obviously to keep the reader engaged, so great. What I personally am wanting to see is your unique stance on each of these questions. Killing animals is bad. Humans destroy. But is that the point you’ll try to convey? Forcing others to accept your unusual identity is good. Encouraging humanity to address our mistakes is good. But is that what you’ll be saying? Growth and change are good for youngsters — but is that what you plan on telling us? I’m curious to know what your answers will be to these questions.

Moving forward… a sense of isolation for the main characters — this is what I sense to be a commonality in these three tales. They all start off literally alone, but even in the company of others there’s a sort of isolation in the action. They are on the inside looking out. I personally like to see characters thrown in the mix straight away. I love reflection, but I think I’d be more engaged by scenarios that force these somewhat amorphous beings into action. Again, this is a personal preference — so definitely not a good/bad thing. Just something to be aware of. For the record, I am convinced that the isolation is intended.

Talking expectations, I expect to see Omar open up to the poor guy he just knocked unconscious. I don’t think you should have the guy forget what he saw. I think you can move forward without anything crazy arising from the encounter. As far as Alya goes— I’m expecting your next move to be an exploration of her relationship with her father. But maybe you’ll subvert my expectations and we’ll get to learn about Greta instead? As for the girl in #3, I’m expecting another encounter with the woman who’s just gotten fired. Or for her to perhaps try to scab the open position.

My only real grievance is with the dialogue. It’s not a grievance really, I’m just not adjusted to reading dialogue in this style. Characters seem fairly detached from each other, and perhaps it’s because of the polished nature of the dialogue. It has the feeling of “it’s our first time on set together and we’ll be gentle” — like actors who know who they’re playing, but don’t fully know each other. I really only felt this in the second passage. Probably contributed to the sort of isolated vibe. Not something to change, just something to keep in mind. I’m coming from a background of realistic fiction, if that helps to contextualize my viewpoint. Maybe: don’t have Tanai’s viewpoint expressed so neatly?

As far as what to change? Don’t change anything. I would say just keep moving forward and complete the stories but am guessing based on your post that you already have. Great!

And going back finally to the specific questions you asked, what all these stories say to me is that you enjoy this genre. You enjoy filtering our human experience through alternate settings. You like the nooks and crannies and you like painting worlds. This is obviously what’s most important to you, and what inspired your writing these stories to begin with— the characters and plots came second. I used to be that way but now myself working character first and setting second. Wishing I could have harnessed place in the way you do. Keep us posted!

"...send to potential team members, employers, and critique partners."

What do you mean by the bolded part? What sort of "team" are you talking about? And employers for what sort of job?

Hi, so these stories all had great specificity when it came to the worldbuilding and I think can show enough of your writing style. I have separated reviews for all the stories below, but since I think the first one is your best, I’ve given you a more thorough analysis on how to polish that. However, I think a lot of the suggestions I made for that story could definitely apply to the other two if you prefer to work with those.

Fig and Beet Jam:

GENERAL REMARKS This has a great hook, introducing the question of why Mischa pretends to be blind right away. The way you mix the five senses in your descriptions gives your metaphors life. Especially in the beginning, before we know anything about the setting, “cloudy feeling” and “sticky darkness” have an ominous tone that hint at the grittiness of Mischa’s world. Through this short story we get a crack in the door to a world that isn’t welcoming to seers and a boy seer trying to stay safe. The clan is somewhat considerate of Mischa’s alternative identity, Omar, out of pity and he survives in this way. The story plays with ideas of loneliness and concealing a truth for survival, especially when your kind are oppressed. We get a glimpse at a boy trying to preserve his culture in an environment that doesn’t want him to.

MECHANICS The title is pretty accurate tonally and setup exactly what to expect with this story. The first sentence was a great hook, establishing the mundanity of “pretending to be blind” for Mischa. The sentences were pretty easy to read, but— the term is slipping my brain right now and I couldn’t think of what to type in Google— you have a few awkward sentence starts such as “hands shaking” and “scabs dissolving away” that could do with rephrasing. I have this problem as well, so it’s easy for me to catch in other people’s writing when they’re doing it for sentence variety. You have enough variety that I wouldn’t worry about having to start with those kinds of clauses to change things up. Also, I do think there are moments that could do with less adjectives or adverbs and/or use the specific words. Particularly, the moment that said “tainted respect, stained with pity” felt excessive to me to use both. Otherwise, this story does a great job at using the right words to set the mood. None of the language took me out of the environment you’d created.

SETTING It was clear this was a fantasy setting from the beginning, just with the title alone, but the first few paragraphs establish differences from our world. Having this story take place in a tent with cots and “leather quilt flooring” builds the atmosphere fairly well. Of course, finally revealing Mischa is a seer cements we are in a completely different universe. I would say though you don’t need too many specifics about the setting, you could color in the world a bit more. I imagined a desert setting from this just based off the implications from the glass-tailed lizard metaphor, sand kestrel, etc. (even though you say this in your post) You could add a bit more to the atmosphere as he’s entering the tent/at the beginning as I feel like it’s a very specific view on what he is doing only, without any insight on the world around him. The recollection of how the clan treats him could also be a good part of the story to invoke more imagery of the setting. Where does the clan normally stay? What kind of things do the children do for fun? Where does the clan hold meetings? Subtle additions here and there could help ground it, I think.

STAGING For the most part, Mischa’s interaction with his environment I think is one of the bigger strengths of this piece. The way he tears through the tent desperate to take off the scabs is easy to visualize and I had no trouble orienting myself as to where he was through that entire scene. The only issue I had was with his recollection of memories. I understand it was all vision and in his head, but it made me confused that his face was in the pillow, but he also saw the visions swirling around the tent? Can he see through the pillow?

CHARACTER Mischa comes across as tough and able to do what he needs to survive in a world that isn’t welcoming to his kind. He seems like he’d be normally timid, but pushed to his limit, attacks one of the members of the clan who breaches his privacy. A revision I’d suggest is to make it clearer that he has a renewed fervor for something new at the end. We get the hint that he’s tired of pretending to be blind, but I think you can push the envelope further imbue the story with more anger, frustration, and determination after he attacks the villager. It needs a looser ending that tells us the story ends there, but Mischa’s does not.

PACING The pacing overall felt fine for the brevity of the story. If anything, I think you could have slowed down places such as when he’s taking off the scabs to really build up the frustration of how suffocating it is to have the scabs on all day and the part with the memories. I would have liked to see the memories explored a bit more, maybe even have Mischa linger in one sentimental one for a bit longer. The end seemed to give us a bit of sentimentality, but I think it would have worked best with the other memories and would’ve hit harder if that was when Mischa was interrupted.

DESCRIPTION Your description is your strong suit when it comes to your writing. The word choice is never off-key, but I think there are a few instances where they can be trimmed. “A gush of bright golden light” for example gives a beautiful image, but by this point we know the light is bright and golden. Is there a more succinct way to say this? Also, I would have liked a bit more description about how Mischa looked. In my head he was 10-13 years old, but he could easily be younger or older.

POV The POV was third person limited and stayed consistent throughout the story. However, one pitfall with using this POV is that sometimes the camera can go too wide. If you want to stay third person limited, I’d consider reassessing each sentence (not that each sentence needs this, just for the sake of doing a thorough job) through the specific lens of Mischa’s POV. Would he refer to himself as the boy seer? Or would he just called himself Mischa? Epithets are usually used for people who don’t know another’s name. A good way to check this is to also see how you’re giving exposition and if it’s something Mischa would naturally think about in this moment, or you as the author are just telling the reader.

GRAMMAR AND SPELLING The grammar is pretty solid, I would just advise that you decide on the capitalization of clan and seer throughout the piece because there is inconsistency there.

The Parting Gift:

First off, this story does such a good job being specific about seaside life. The details with the fishing were well done and really saturated the story with how the people of this world feel about their way of life. This is one of those moments where author research and passion shine through the story enough to make the reader care about the topic, even if they’re not knowledgeable. It also had a good hook with the horns, but you didn’t give us the chance to hold onto the tension before we could come back to them and let us forget that thread while Alya worked. This also made me feel detached from Alya and she kind of felt generic at the beginning, though I could feel YOUR passion, I had trouble recognizing Alya’s passion as it felt like she was going through the motions of her duty, even with some shoehorned admirations of beauty. There’s some attempt to remedy throughout the rest of the story, but I feel as though I’d lost interest in her by there. The dialogue in this feels a bit heavy. With how short this story is, I think you could do with a reassessment of what is necessary and what is simply exposition. There’s a lot of weight being carried by the words that can be put in description or cut altogether. To give an example, there’s a line where Tanai says she isn’t sure if she’s ready. All of the dialogue in the line could be succinct as “I’m too old for this” and the rest of the emotions shown through body language. Short stories generally can’t operate the same way book excerpts do, and this feels more like an excerpt of a larger story than one of its own. I think this story especially could benefit if you think of it as slice of life rather than a whole narrative arc with so many characters. Really narrowing the lens to one to three characters and fleshing them out would work best with this.

Welcome to Astrid:

This story benefits from your skill of description the most to set up the emotional atmosphere. However, I think you could do some shifting with the imagery. The descriptions at the beginning could really punch down on the absence and the loneliness of the environment so it can have a stark contrast with the POV character’s warm memories of home. The story should sell Astrid as a bustling place where it’s hard to set a foot. This could also help with your characterization. I want to empathize with their feelings of being out of place, but only because the exposition tells me to. What if someone says something hostile to the POV character directly? When first meeting characters, we tend to be more understanding if they face something unkind and stomach it because it tends to be easy to relate to (as shitty as that is). The dialogue in this piece is better than the second and probably a better model of what you should follow if you want to work on dialogue for stories of this length. I felt like the ending was rushed— they tend to be your weakest point because you try to tie together everything in a poetic way. It’s okay to leave things loose and undone! I would advise less exposition overall and more trust in your ability to let things stay unraveled.

Good evening, I read your work and made notes. I'll try to answer your questions first.

What are moments that feel unpolished/unprofessional?

The first story looks like it could be the beginning of a top-notch narrative. I don't think the language is ready for primetime though. The second story needs an overhaul, and the third piece isn't even a story. Hopefully my notes will help explain this.

Which stories show my strengths as a writer? Which ones show my weaknesses?

I'm nonplussed by this question. Three thousand words doesn't define anyone as a writer. If you want to make great stories, you're going to have to abandon thinking about how your writing will lead others to perceive you as a writer. When you write something, decide what you want that work to do, then go about achieveing that goal as effectively as possible, by hook or by crook. Concern with how others will percieve you is the primrose path to meh writing. You like Stephen King? Carrie, The Stand, Pet Cemetary, It, The Shining...he wrote some amazing iconic works that have almost transcended literary fiction and achieved folk legend status like the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But something weird happened sometime in the early 21st century. Stephen King the writer was suddenly elevated to widespread acclaim as The Greatest American Author Drawing Breath. The New Stephen King novel was always a bestseller as soon as it hit the shelves...but something changed. The imaginative spark that created those 70's, 80's, and 90's masterpieces somehow became something else, and while King is without a doubt a literary craftsman par excellence, his later stories lost that iconic quality his early ones had. (I could totally be wrong here, if anyone cites Joyland or Elevation in a r/destructivereaders critique in 40 years, I'll be sure to include an apology in my will)

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Are any of these good options for a sample that I can send people interested in working with me?

That is totally up to you. Take the work that you believe in, improve it until you no longer can, and let that be your calling card. You're the author and if you are bold enough to subject yourself to this subreddit then I trust you are bold enough to know which story you like the best.

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What does each story (pretending you read it on its own) tell about you about my writing style?

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I truly and sincerly from the bottom of my heart hope that someone would publically drag me for being a pompus ass for saying that I could discern someone's style based on a 1k word flash piece. Don't worry about reader's perceptions of your style as a writer, worry about making a story that meets your expetations of yourself. If you base your completely and totally on the expetations of others, you will produce r/writingprompts-tier swill that will age like week old raw meat in the Mississippi summer.

Anyhoo, here's my notes:

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Fig and Beet Jam

This work presents a promising and interesting narrative with language that does its level best to choke that narrative to death and defile its corpse. The descriptive choices weigh things down to the point that it's difficult to even appreciate the imaginative potential of the story. Two sentences in and the reader is treated to a cloudy, sticky, dark, feeling that attacthes to the main character's joints and somehow makes it hard to breathe. Oh, it also engulfs him. Luckily we're told in the previous sentence that engulfing cloud dark sticky suffocation is only a "minor inconvenince" for our hero. None of this description serves the narrative and it would be more politic to just say something like "pretending to be blind made Misha uncomfortable", but sticky dark cumulus arthritic strangulation is original to say the least. It is very hard to grasp the exposition in this passage when dealing with superfluous description like "drowning in syrup" and "viscuous air." None of this kind of description is beautiful of profound and it really detracts from the beginnings of a story that doesn't need it.

Misha is a seer who is feigning blindness, living with a clan that calls him Omar. If the clan finds out, he could be in danger. The explanation for this situation is what makes this story interesting, not the contrived language. Even the title of the story comes from descriptivness overkill that doesn't seem to be intergral to the plot. The narrative has potential, it just needs to be presented more effectively.

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The Parting Gift

This second piece has almost the complete opposite problem of the first. The language and description if fine, it's just that the narrative is presented in such a way that you might as well have named the work Sandfishn'.

If you divided the three parts of this pice and only looked at them on their own, the flaw here wouldn't be evident. But when look at them as a whole, the setting/worldbuilding gets weight that is desparately needed for your characters. I count six named characters: Alya, Rand, Mama Tortoise, Tanai, Ohn, and Greta. The only characterization that we get is that Tanai has anxiety about whaling and that Greta needles him about it. ( Just because Mama Tortoise has a job and Uncle Rand is an expository device doesn't mean that these characters have personalities.) It's not super necessary to completely define Alya's character at the beginning, because sometimes main characters can serve as audience surrogates, but there is nothing here to really guide a reader to have an empathetic (or antagonistic) relationship with any of these characters. I think probably Alya needs to interact with the characters, and they need to interact with each other more, before we're shown the importance of humpbacks. As it's written, you've established they're important to these characters, we just don't know enough about them to care.

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Welcome to Astrid

You alluded that all your works have suffered to a degree due to word constraints. This one suffers the worst. There is far too much going on here for the amount of space you've given it. The narrator's Uncle only being present in the house while the narrator sleeps is very interesting, and it would be so much better if you could actually show that instead of telling it at the very beginning, but oh heaven's me look at the time. Why did the narrator come to Astrid? Was it tragedy or to escape danger? Clean cup move down! I assume we're in a world of scroll-based magic? No time to explain it beyond some contextual dialoge. We know there's a conflict between the woman and the shopkeeper who just fired her, but we don't know the stakes. One interesting problem in this work has to do with a phrase you used and the genre you're using. Check it:

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There were invisible marks all over her, writing in a language I didn’t know I understood.

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Because we're in a fantasy world that contains scroll-based magic, there is no way to tell if this sentence is meant to be taken literally or figuratively. Sans the world, we could say this is a metaphor where the narrator sees the despair radiating from this downtrodden woman, resolving to leave Astrid before she succumbs to the same fate. Or given the world, the reader could also arguably conclude that there are literal invisible runs drawn on this woman, perhaps even dark magic ones that makes the narrator want to get out of town. Having the narrator explain more about it would clarify the matter, but you guessed it, no time.

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This piece has elements that may make a good story, or a bad story there is just not enough space for it to be any kind of story at all. Glimpse at a cool world though.