Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26444017-20160818160039/@comment-28266772-20160824130646

Hey

It's hard for me to say. I guess I'd suggest that you decide a couple of things early on.

Thinking on what you said I have to ask, are they sentient physical objects? Are they humans who symbolically represent something? Are they angels? Or demons? Who's the 'everyone' who wants to be around them? Who will beat and abuse? Where's the 'here' she has to stay? Where did her lover go and why?

I guess there's just no meat to this story, and it would benefit a lot from an actual sequence of events. Micropastas work best when they pick a discrete story with a simple order of events that can be easily subverted, and which rely on a gimmick that wouldn't work as well if it was stretched out across a whole story. E.g. a pile of clothes that actually conceals a human being, someone realizing they're awake before the surgery has begun, a body in the backseat of a car etc. It's not just about squeezing a story into a small space, it's about picking a story that simply would not work as a longer piece.

Also, what is at the heart of this story? Is it sadness? Or fear? Is it grief? Or hope? Or despair? What do you want your audience to feel and why? Most of the emotions I just stated need a lot of groundwork. If you want someone to feel sad then you need to show them happiness first. If you want them to feel grief you need to attach them to a character you'll eventually kill off. For hope, they need the corresponding anguish and despair at the start. If it's despair you need to start with hope and joy instead. Micropastas work because fear only needs to conjure up an expectation that is then subverted in the story, and it's stupidly easy to conjure up expectations with almost no effort. See a dog? It'll bark. See a gun? It'll be fired. See a mirror? It'll reflect an image etc. This is why, more than any other genre, you see horror getting squeezed into less than 500 words.

I guess the point I'm making is, micropastas need to be expertly crafted if they hope to invoke anything other than raw shock and fear. (Consider Hemingway's infamous short story "For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never worn." PS that's not the title, that's the story.)

The next point I'm making is that the individual moving parts of this story, beyond the lock and key idea, are not clear and distinct. I would encourage you to pick a setting, and establish the moving parts of the story. The characters, the sequence of events, the mood/atmosphere/tone etc. At the moment it feels like you have a concept, but none of the other components necessary to construct a story.

Oh and I noticed this error while reading it over: inseperable -> inseparable

I know this has, so far, been vague advice but it's extremely hard for me to put down my ideas without being too overbearing. I hope it helps anyway.