Plot Development
The Struggle of a Couple New to Recovery
Not Quite There challenge - The Prompt: Share a story that never fully came together, along with what’s holding it back. Not every piece reaches a finished form. This challenge makes space for work that is still unresolved. Share a story that never quite came together, along with what’s holding it back. The gap might come from structure, clarity, scope, or something harder to define. Be specific about where it falters. What feels incomplete, and why has it stayed that way. The focus is as much on the friction as the draft itself.
By Denise E Lindquist3 months ago in Critique
Braxton Hicks and Bridget Fitch
“That witch come up right outta that creek there. I seen it with my own eyes. It like to spooked me something fierce, the way she come walking up that riverbank, with all that fog slipping off her shoulders all slow-like. She had weird eyes, not even a color exactly. They just looked straight through me on up the path, like I wasn’t there atall.” Braxton Hicks looped his arm over a branch of the chinaberry tree he perched in. “God’s honest truth.”
By Harper Lewis 4 months ago in Critique
The Redacted Void
The mountain vibrated. A low, subterranean tremor emanated from the bedrock beneath my cabin. I sat before the screen, a singular, luminous rectangle piercing the velvet night. My limbs, numb, hovered over the keys, paralyzed by a peculiar intellectual paralysis.
By Tim Carmichael4 months ago in Critique
The Woman Inside the Machine
Writers often talk about unfinished stories as if they were abandoned houses. The foundation is poured, a few walls are framed, and then construction halts. The wind moves through empty windows. We visit occasionally, imagining what might have been.
By Anthony Chan4 months ago in Critique
The Series That Might Have Been
I have a lot of unfinished pieces. I even made a joke about it in my entry into the Posthumous Author Challenge, “The Writer I Could Have Been”. From my well-received Elon the Alien drabbles to my lesser-known “The Soul Dragon” from the Fantasy Prologue Challenge, I have had several promising starts that have made their way onto this platform. The one that I feel deserves the spotlight—and the most explanation—however, is a two-parter: “La Belle Fatale, Parts One and Two”.
By Stephanie Hoogstad4 months ago in Critique
The Manuscript Beneath the Clock
For seventeen years I have kept a packet of pages within a narrow drawer beneath an ancient clock whose pendulum marks each passing hour with solemn authority. The packet bears no title. Its first page carries a date crossed out so many times that the numerals resemble wounds cut into paper, while its final page ends in the middle of a sentence.
By Tim Carmichael4 months ago in Critique
Unfinished
I started dreaming of stories from a very young age. For truth I can not tell you what the first story was that started to come together. I do know that i have story notebooks that look like some lost ancient Tomes now. And a memory of a detective that waits to be finished. A lot of the stories I go back to and rework even now. I find that these are the ones people seem to be drawn to. These are also the ones that have marinated and been worked on and reworked on. Out of all of them the one that has been done and redone and relooked at over and over is Heroes? A story where heroes start to appear in a modern world and what happens because of it.
By WrittenWritRalf4 months ago in Critique
Dead Air
It's just sitting there. A million ones and zeroes on a screen. Taunting me. Vocal asks that I share a story that never came together and do what I can to explain what I'm missing to make it work. I've read some of my fellow Vocalians' entries, trying to find a way to help me choose both what story and how to explain what's lacking.
By Alexander McEvoy4 months ago in Critique
