My Self-Critique of My Writing Battle Entry

Now that this season’s Writing Battle is over, I felt it was appropriate to do a bit of self-reflection and critiquing on my entry. Key finding: it was fine…but...

Record Scratch

Before we get to that part, let's talk about Writing Battle. For the uninitiated, Writing Battle is a peer-powered writing competition. They run four contests a year with varying word counts and time lengths, with this spring’s being a 500-word story in a weekend.

On the night before the timer starts, you are provided with 3 cards: genre, setting, and character. You are allowed one redraw of the genre and then 3 redraws of the setting and character. Then, you write.

My entry is here:

This is where the fun begins.

Your entry gets sorted into a house with ~63 other entries of the same genre, where it will face off one vs. one against other random stories from within your house, judged by your peers.

While that’s going on, you serve as a judge for ten stories in the other houses and genres, so you’re never judging your direct competition. You provide feedback to each story you judge, positive and constructive, and then select a winner. In each house, the 8 stories with the most wins advance to a showdown bracket against members of the other houses judged by a selection of "super judges," both peer and celebrity.

To build even more anticipation, on the results day, how you fared in each duel round is revealed one by one.

I ended up with 4/10 wins.

And I’m honestly thrilled about that.

On the bell curve, that puts me right in the middle (I’m not a math major–I’ll let smarter people discuss the advantages and distribution of Swiss system results. For now, take my word on that).

One of the things I really like about this competition is it pulls back the judging veil. As you'll see below, the feedback Writing Battle provides is fantastic in its depth and directness, one of the many things I've really found valuable in this contest compared to others.

I’m sure we all have entries into Vocal contests that we feel really good about, yet don’t win/place/get reads/etc., with no real analysis as to why provided.

I’ve got plenty of those.

I felt similarly about this story. I thought it was effective, did what I wanted it to do, and had enough intrigue to engage the reader.

And it, in many ways, did have all those things! It was a fine story.

And therein lies the problem…it was fine.

In a contest where the best of the best out there are staking money on their creative ability to write to a prompt, they don’t even know, fine ain’t going to cut it.

As I look back, this entry had 2 fatal flaws: 1. It was too complex for the word count, and 2. It didn’t focus enough on the most important aspect of any story--the characters.

Even better, my peer feedback agreed! Let’s take a look at some select feedback below:

I enjoyed that you were able to make both a disaster and a medical story. I thought your use of the skyscraper as a representation of the capitalist nature of Corbin was a clever use of a prompt. You used the prompt in an creative way without forcing your story around it.

I thought your use of dialogue was effective at creating a caricature of Corbin and we all know that guy at work.

What I felt might need work with the story:

The story was possibly too complicated to do it justice in 500 words. Which is probably partially because the disaster genre is complicated. But there was too many characters, details and facts that's have to be pushed out that nothing gets fully developed and unfortunately it didn't have the effect I think you intended. I think this would be a fantastic long story. But might be too much for the short writing.

And,

I have to say, I love the first line. The day being so important, but he is thinking about clearing out his desk, something that seems so mundane. It instantly get me wanting to understand more about this character and how he thinks.

I really love the progression of the story. The feigned concern turned to revelation of manipulation. We go from despising Corbin, and seeing him as the enemy, to the revelation that Alfreda played him like a song. It definitely makes you want to read more, to see if Alfred is doing it for the right reasons, or if he is the true enemy all along.

What I felt might need work with the story:

I felt like we were given just enough information to understand everything important about the story. I know you did not have more words, but I think part of me would love to hear a little bit more about the history of this “medical advancement”, and how it correlates to this company. Were they good at first? Were they always corrupt? Something to get me to dive in and born even more with one side or the other. I’m not sure how you could’ve done it with the amount of words we had, but if you had more words, a little bit more to make me despise Corbin, and a little bit more to help me to understand Alfred, would go a long way!

And,

Wow this is great and such a creative take on the disaster genre. The build up/creation of the disaster is such a great way to do it as the reader gets this building sense of dread! I thought the line "pompous fool who played god despite the scientist's objections" - painted a great image!

This worked particularly well when he kept getting interrupted:

“Sir, I–”

“You’re certain our results are accurate.”

“Yes, but–”

“Then we proceed–”

This is also a great commentary on pharmaceutical companies! I did wonder why they would not be more careful about it given they likely want to avoid lawsuits!

I was definitely skeptical about the "trained ones will simply go dormant before dying harmlessly.” and was hoping you would give more information - but the end explained that well!

The voice was great! I particularly liked the line: "Alfred thought it was another phallic monstrosity assaulting Mother Earth".

Your dialogue is masterful - it reads incredibly naturally.

This is incredibly creative!

What I felt might need work with the story:

I really think you should consider expanding this! It is a really interested premised and felt just a tiny bit rushed in the word count (but this might just be me!).

This may also just be me being stupid but I got a bit confused as to how many people were in the room - 3? Maybe just another line of description would have solved this - again this might have just been me!

There are seven other bits of feedback echoing the same sentiment. The premise of the story was too complex to effectively get the point across in 500 words. Looking at some of the stories that advanced, they used simple settings to effectively explore their characters. There are things to work with here, and if it had been for a 2000-word story, it may have worked fantastically, but not for 500.

Ironically, my first genre was Medical Mystery. I redrew that setting, only to write a medical mystery…who does that…

All that complexity took focus away from my characters. When I wrote the first draft of this, it was about 800 words. I edited that down to 500 and in doing so, cut out 2 key elements. Upon review, I shouldn’t have removed a small section about how Albert and Mr. Maxwell had been founders of the company, and I shouldn’t have taken out a small section of Albert’s internal dialogue explaining some of his actions. These would have heightened the conflict and provided more rounding to all the characters than what the final product provided.

There are some cool plot elements, but they don’t serve to deepen the conflict between our characters.

For this summer's competition, I need to stick to this mantra: your setting is only as good as your prose, which is only as good as your plot, which is only as good as your characters.

Finally, as the winners were unveiled, they all had a clear emotional punch–a concise response the story was crafted to elicit. I needed to sharpen up my prose around the character conflict to draw out a stronger response from the audience. In retrospect, the ending felt a little flat.

To sum it up:

Things I think worked in this story

• A cool and unique twist of the prompt
• Good dialogue (I'm proud of this; I would never have guessed my prose would be a strength)
• The core has something going for it. Had this been a 1000-2000 word prompt, I think this scene could have been a much stronger entry–there were plenty of areas to expand on (maybe I’ll rework it)
• Well formatted. I respect that there are different formatting standards and none that are more correct than others, but in the 10 stories I reviewed, there were several with no coherent or consistent formatting. If you enter, I implore you to spend the time to do a consistent formatting method.

Things that didn’t work or needed to be improved

• Not enough runway to explore the conflicts between our cast of characters
• I made a few edits with dialogue tags to reduce word count. The dialogue still works, but it makes it harder for the reader to track
• Focused too much on explaining plot devices.
• Lacked a visceral emotional response

Things I’m focusing on for the Summer Nanofiction battle (yes, I signed up. 250 words is a nice number)

1. Practice to the word count. Examples HERE, HERE, HERE
2. Remember, the characters are paramount.

Finally, shout out to this great piece by a great author who made it much farther than I did in the battle!

If there are any others who took part, I would love to read your entry. Please drop it here in the comments.

More information on Writing Battle below:

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A/N:

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