Fragile Memories[]
My eyes shot open with a gasp. Darting around, disoriented, they scanned the room. It took a moment to adjust to the pitch black, but eventually I was in a small stone room. Where… am I? Groaning as I sit myself upright, I get a better view of the room. To the left, I could see a small wooden table with a bottle on top. To my right, an empty rocking chair. Squinting, I could see the faint crack of light under a shadowy door. My head spinning, finding it strangely hard to walk, I moved to the door. Feeling the cold, hard, rough wood of the door, my hands rested on an eerily warm knob. Twisting it, the light flooded in through the expanding crack, the wind rushing through every crevice of my body as I’m blinded by the light.
Sprawling before me was a long, twisted, decayed corridor. Victorian-esque, the stone seemed ready to crumble any second now. The snowstorm rushing outside and in, the shattered glass of nearby windows on the ground. Looking back at the room, I see an unfamiliar person staring back at me through the mirror.
W-what? Touching my face, I couldn’t believe it. W-who is that… who is that in the mirror? My head throbs, a million thoughts rush through my mind, as frantic as a blizzard.
“My… my name is… is…” I struggled. Why… Why can’t I remember my name? The world quickly spiraled out of control, my head hurting like hell, until a voice pierced the veil. It was… humming. Someone was humming. My eyes drifting to the sound, I heard it coming from the end of the hallway. Looking back at the mirror, then back to the hallway, then once again to the room, I didn’t have much of a choice. Closing my eyes, I turned around and started towards the end of the hallway. The snowstorm raging outside, I trudged through the decayed hallway. As I follow the sound of the humming, I feel a pang in my head. The shadows of the armor-stands long since abandoned loomed over me as the headache grew and grew.
Turning into the next hallway, I could see a slender, delicate, brunette woman looking at me from the end of the hallway. She giggled, then ran away before I could respond.
“W-wai-” before I could even say anything, the pain slammed against my skull. My vision blurred, I started hearing a sharp, piercing ring coming from my left ear. Tumbling to the ground, I held my head.
It… it hurts… It hurts so much… The pain rose exponentially with every minute, and the hallway disappeared. The blizzard, little more than background noise. It… hurts… why… does it hurt… so much…? “H-help… help me…” I called out to someone, anyone.
Where was that woman? That… brunette… no, blonde? Wait, was she even a woman? I… I can’t remember… As my vision gave out, and I was released to blissful sleep, I could see the figure of someone approaching.
Pitch black. I was in a void of pitch black. It felt nice. I felt safe. No pain. No suffering. They all whispered the same thing. “Join us… join us and forever enjoy this feeling…” Yes, who needed memories, who needed life? From what I know, life is pain. Suffering. My thoughts slowly drifting into the void, the feelings of agony and torment vanishing into thin air. Yes, yes I would like to join you… As I let go, I thought I heard humming.
SaladTopping (talk) 06:16, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
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Squidmanescape (talk) 22:03, 6 January 2024 (UTC)[]
Hello. I'm sorry for not looking at this sooner.
I'll put the positives here first. The writing of this scene is very good in many different ways. You have a clear understanding of how to convey the ideas in your head, which is always a good thing when writing. It seems obvious that you thought about every single event in this scene and how to convey it.
There are some problems with the writing, but I don't think the actual writing of the scene makes it confusing.
The main source of confusion is that the significance of this scene isn't explained or readily apparent. If the odd things happening are explained, such as by the main character, we are thrust into a frightening world which doesn't work the way we're used to, where there are normal and abnormal dangers that are explained by the protagonist. If the odd things happening are very close to something that happens in the real world, the main character doesn't have to explain what's going on because the reader already knows what things are or aren't normal. Since the main character is familiar with the situation and understands how terrifying the situation is, the main character can even lose their memory, allowing the reader to slowly understand the situation they're reading.
Legitimate question: Which one do you want the story to be? Right now, the story seems to take place in a dream world of sorts, with a lot of odd things happening, but none of it is explained or connected to reality in the story. I don't understand what's actually happening, and apparently, neither do the admins who deleted it. If you try to write a story where neither the main character nor the reader understands what's going on, you end up with a very weird event which can form part of a story, but which doesn't have a narrative.
I'm not sure this is the best explanation of the problem. There isn't a base level of normalcy in the story. I'm not sure what aspects of the story - the blizzard, the mansion, the chair, the woman - are supposed to be scary. The ambiguity makes everything in the story seem not scary, even the main character's death. They died... because their head hurts? My head hurts sometimes, and it doesn't cause me to die, so there must be something else going on. If I knew what that thing was, it would probably be unsettling, but instead, I'm just confused. Anyways, did they even die?
I remember another "story" which also had this problem, where the entire "story" was a person's vein being cut in excruciating detail. Like your entry, it was well-written and explained things well but lacked any context for what was going on. Maybe in some other universe, stories like the two I mentioned would be kept on the site.
However, I think that would result in a bunch of articles with missed potential. I guess there is merit in writing scenes where nobody understands anything and then the story ends, but I feel unsatisfied after reading something like that. I don't understand anything that happened, and I feel like there was nothing to understand at all. I feel almost cheated out of something that I could have understood.
Now I'll get into the less important writing problems. You switch between past and present tense at some points in the story (It took a moment to adjust to the pitch black, but eventually I was in a small stone room. Groaning as I sit myself upright, I get a better view of the room). There are many other instances of this. You could avoid this by reading the story aloud or listening closely to the story through text-to-speech.
There are also quite a few sentence fragments. The weirdest one to me is, ". The blizzard, little more than background noise.", which I think should be ", the blizzard little more than background noise." or ". The blizzard was little more than background noise." I don't like having sentence fragments in stories, but I don't think it's an inherently bad thing. It's possible that the sentence fragments are contributing to the switching between present and past tense because they don't have verbs.
Another more specific problem is, in the series of sentences "It felt nice. I felt safe. No pain. No suffering. They all whispered the same thing," you don't specify who or what "they" are.
Overall, I really think that if you added more context to this, like having the main character actually understand what's going on, people would think it was very interesting. Even the title, "Fragile Memories", makes one wonder what the memories in question are. You don't have to explain everything in the story, but I feel like explaining a few things and leaving a few things vague would really help the reader understand what is supposed to be frightening and what isn't. I sincerely hope you work on this story, and if you do, I hope I can help if I didn't help this time.