Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26277607-20160710015306/@comment-28266772-20160710184137

Formatting issues: “Anyways, like I was saying, the war is affecting you and we can’t do anything about it. So we are going to give you these.”          The teacher pulled what looked like some sort of mint out of his

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Apparently the suicide aspect of it isn’t too uncommon, either. I read that there were Muslim extremist groups that would convince young people to commit suicide attacks and that they would be rewarded in the afterlife if they did so. Similar things were also seen in Japan during the same time as Hitler. In ancient times, people were also sacrificed.



I never returned to the city. Even after all of the research I did,

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Other issues:  '' It was filled with the candies. I took a few of them. I started yelling for help. -> This makes it sound like he swallowed the pills, which later leads to some confusion. ''

 He was very skeptical about this and did some tests to it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about with this new science stuff,” he said. “These candies are poisonous. You should get rid of them so no one gets hurt.” -> New speaker, new line.

I like the idea at the core of this story but I feel like it lacks a little in the execution. I think the main problem is that the voice of the character is very dry. I think the paragraph below is a good example of what I mean when I say the character in this story has a very dry style of description.

'' 'Apparently the suicide aspect of it isn’t too uncommon, either. I read that there were Muslim extremist groups that would convince young people to commit suicide attacks and that they would be rewarded in the afterlife if they did so. Similar things were also seen in Japan during the same time as Hitler. In ancient times, people were also sacrificed.'  ''

This tone becomes awkward when you use it to describe events that should, really, incite a more emotive tone. For example,

' There, lying on the floor, were all of the students. Mice scurried around them, along with various insects. They weren’t asleep. They were dead.' ->  This doesn't feel how someone who has lived through a genocide would describe their experiences. In comparison is a quote from real life holocaust survivor Helga Weiss,

“I hugged Mum and started to pray, ‘God, if I must die, let Mum and me die together. Don’t leave me alone here.

"Although I don’t want to die – let Mum and me survive’.”



<p class="MsoNormal">Notice that while this is also quite dry, and not necessarily pouring out emotion, it still frames things in terms of her emotional state. As memories fade over time, especially from childhood, it is often the most powerful emotions that remain and continue to shape how people view those experiences. In contrast, this character's retelling of their trauma seems to lack this emotive detail and instead focuses on the events. Similarly these events aren't told in a particularly compelling way. The scene where the character finds their dead classmates should have been a horrifying experience. Even if they had thought their classmates were still sleeping, the image of a hallway filled with collapsed bodies is a great potential source of terror and fear. We only get some superfluous details regarding mice and insects.

<p class="MsoNormal">Furthermore the writing is filled with redundancies that bog down the flow, and make the distant narrative seem almost childish. For example,

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(212,212,213);font-size:14px;font-weight:normal;line-height:22px;">I wanted to wake them up. They looked dead, but they should’ve been alive. They were supposed to be sleeping. None of them answered back. ->This section contains quite a few redundancies that all converge on the same idea - they looked dead but I thought they might be sleeping.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(212,212,213);font-size:14px;font-weight:normal;line-height:22px;">Other aspects of the story feel overly artificial, e.g.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(212,212,213);font-size:14px;font-weight:normal;line-height:22px;">One boy yelled, “This doesn’t make any sense. Scientifically, we would need food and water to live. How does this work?” -> this is inserted exclusively to answer an audience's question. It feels awkwardly shoved in.

<p class="MsoNormal"> Other story issues:

<p class="MsoNormal"> So overall I think you would benefit from reading the real life survivor accounts of genocide survivors. I appreciate that what you're trying to convey is a particular type of character who seems, at least to me, intentionally simple and unwitting, but the fundamental lack of emotional resonance keeps any plot points from having any weight. It also feels like a device that was created to explain a plot that you're clearly not confident is being conveyed with sufficient clarity. This is problematic because the superfluous details, awkward flow, and frequent redundancies draw too much attention so that the plot never feels cohesive - even though all the necessary clues are in the story.

<p class="MsoNormal"> It's a gread idea, and the story is written to a good degree barring a few mechanical/formatting issues that won't require a lot of fixes. But ultimately it feels a bit laborious, and intentionally obfuscating.