Talk:The Lighthouse in Munish/@comment-1186783-20141205213027

Decided I want to read through the other winners, and I definitely enjoyed this story. However, I think it does need a bit of work, and as the judge said it does need to be longer.

The first problem I have is that I need a bit more elaboration on how the white people planned to use the Light House to get back. When that was first said, I assumed that it was understood that the white people didn't intend the light to shine with no one there to tend it, and were just going to look for the large structure on (presumably) otherwise flat land. But, the story makes it clear that the actual light was the concern.

Secondly, the story seems incomplete. I think a good way to explain this would be to view the story like a magic trick, and run through the steps from the movie The Prestige.

The Pledge - You show us something ordinary - White people go to a foreign land, and are driven off. They build a Light House to find their way back.

The Turn - You make that ordinary thing do something extraordinary - The mysterious lights, and the "sacrifices" disappearing.

The Prestige - The part where lives are put on the line - We need to know what the narrator encounters. We can't just end on vague dread, we need to see the tangible threat here.

Now, the obvious Prestige for your story is, obviously, that he comes out crazy, and tells us about the bizarre things that happened to him. "Narrator almost died and is crazy" is a cliche, but it's a cliche because it works.

However, I can think of an alternative: He describes to us what happened to him, and then says he never came back...and then it's revealed that he's been speaking to one of the sacrifices from the year after him, who's been forced to enter the Lighthouse, and thus he's telling the next in line what horrible things he's in for.