My Self-Critique of My Writing Battle Entry (Part Deux)

This is a breakdown of my most recent entry into the Writing Battle that didn’t make it out of the peer judging round. I recommend reading it before you dive into my self-critique of why it doesn’t work because nothing says, “Hey go read this!” quite like leading off with, "Hey this didn’t actually place so it might not be very good!” 

C’est la vie. 

Peaking behind the curtain, this piece marks a really important point of my writing journey. I think, though I’ve conducted zero controlled studies of this to prove my thesis, that most writers start by…writing. High school, grade school, mid-life crisis, the timing of that start is irrelevant but it starts as a word dump on a blank page. From there, you learn about plot, and arc, and syntax, and all the little bits and bobs that you strive to fit into every single paragraph because that’s what's supposed to make compelling writing. 

Then you take a step back and question your own sanity.  

I’ve joked before about the four voices inside the author. There’s a push and a pull, the artist vs. the critic, constant, unceasing, maddening. 

And if you embrace the madness fully, you will reach a point where it all kinda, sorta makes something that resembles sense! A point where it's not just spaghetti at the wall and hoping it works, but deliberate choices, choices without "technically correct" answers.

This was one of those points.

I received my prompts while trapped at JFK Airport in NYC (another story for another time) in an absolutely miserable state, but the prompts fell into place across the board. When in doubt, I default to either history or fantasy to set the scene and the prompts I received fit the Chernobyl disaster perfectly. It’s a topic I have an absurdly morbid fascination with and came on the coattails of reading Midnight at Chernobyl. The details were fresh, the characters predeveloped, and the climax explosive. 

Despite having my drafting time interrupted, the story popped into my mind 90% formed. 

Sweet. 

I hammered through the rest of it by Saturday evening (it's only 250 words after all), giving myself a nice rest before Sunday edits. 

Come Sunday, I sat down in front of my laptop, gave it a read, and decided there were two decisions I needed to make to make before hitting publish. 

But the reason this is an important point in my writing journey wasn’t just because I sat down and understood that changes needed to be made, even if that is another critical point of development as a writer. It was because of the nature of the changes. 

The structure of the story didn’t change at all, not really. The beats were there. The characters were where I wanted them. The ending landed how I wanted it to. 

The decisions I needed to make weren’t making reductions, adding in arcs, or identifying plot omissions, they were decisions without correct answers. Decisions of the artist, not the academic. Decisions that made me feel like the guitar aficionado mid-solo, knowing exactly what note is supposed to come next and deciding instead to sustain the current one.

Let me explain.

Given the genre of Primal Fear I thought it was important to not name radiation as our primal predator. Show don’t tell right? And I fought the urge to be direct and name it outright, possibly to my peril.

The other decision was to never name the setting. I decided that this was a historical fiction piece and therefore needed to abide by my own rules for writing historical fiction. It was important to stick as close as I could to the facts, clouded as many of them are. In no reasonable world would our protagonist say, "golly-gee it sucks being inside Chernobyl!"

I personally think both of these two decisions were the correct decisions. 

I still got a 5/10 (a decent score but not enough to advance). 

The clearest throughline I got on my feedback was on clarity of setting. Some didn’t understand it all. Some thought it was a reactor but didn’t understand the rest. And some said:

Beauty is, as they say, in the eye of the beholder. So why didn’t this story do better? Why wasn’t the rest of my feedback the same as the above? I can point to a few other changes that might have made a big difference. Changes that wouldn't have compromised my artistic decisions outlined above.

The first was in the second paragraph, and it was, if you’ll pardon my French, a Fuckinggggg stupid mistake.

“waist-deep waste,” was supposed to be “waist-deep wastewater.”

I can't turn down an alluring opportunity for alliteration when it's floating in front of my face in radioactive water.

A super simple change, but one that might have clarified things just a bit. As it reads, I’m confusing the reader as to what exactly are our characters standing in already in only the second paragraph. That's going to cloud the rest of their comprehension while they struggle to parse the first confusing bit.

The next was down in this later paragraph:

“Though officially the reactor was still in perfect condition, blame fell on Leonid; it was his first time at the command console under Aleksandr’s tutelage. They dismissed Leonid, Their goat for some later Holocaust, and yet now he struggled to rotate valves that would unleash life-saving water into the ruined reactor. Why hadn’t he left?”

That first italicized “they” should have been a named enemy. Admittedly, I was up on word count and time, but come on Matt, you could have found a word to change that to The Politburo. That would have hit the same beat, and added just a touch more of grounding to help clear up where we are. 

Finally, in this paragraph, “But Leonid’s friend Aleksandr didn’t deserve to face this alone.”

I should have rewritten it to, “But Leonid’s friend Aleksandr didn’t have to turn the valves alone.” 

Again, another bit of clarity to their location within the disaster, a little bit more clarity on their physical and emotional connection. 

I have a feeling if I made those three simple changes, everything else would have fallen into place. 

Onto the next challenge. No use crying over spilt milk. 

As I said, C’est la vie. 

A/N:
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