New Flash

[justin1023]

Hey guys, 

I finally have something new! A 500-word piece of flash that I don't know how I feel about. Tell me how to feel! Seriously, if it's shit, that's cool with me. I don't generally have a fence-sitting opinion on my stories, but with this one I do. I don't know what that means. 

Thanks!

Attachments:

Joy.pdf (61.5 KB)

[Charlie Allison]

Justin:

For bumping up against a five-hundred word limit, you do a lot of work. The contrasting images you use (a flaming truck at the end, the corpses of airplanes rusting in the desert, the frustration of a just-lost game. A few things jumped out at me though, including the sentence about the boneyard:

Flew all the way past the Boneyard—the old skeletons of planes that’d once been used to kill men and women cackling across the dust.

The cackling here made me re-read the sentence, pause, readjust. What's cackling? The desert wind? The corpses of the planes? This only really matters in flash, where literally every word has a force multiplier attached to it due to format, but I'd play around with a couple different iterations of this sentence, shifting focus. The idea of hollowed out planes is a powerful one, and it encapsulates this part of the story--something that was once so powerful, so useful, so mundane and worldly at once, is now just scrap. Detritus. Maybe rephrase to 'Flew all the way past the Boneyard--the wind fluting/screeching/roaring through the old skeletons of planes that had been used to kill men and women.' or something along those lines.

The rest of the story works because of your heavy use of inference, connected time-jumps, and letting the main character's emotional connection to people be expressed best through their interactions with mundane objects, in this case the truck. We don't NEED to know why they are burning the truck (although its implied that it has to do with their father--he's either dead or on the run). Its an effective, minimalistic tool that you use to great effect in your other works, but does double duty here. I'll send you the line notes as soon as I can--these were just my immediate thoughts.

[princessdiana92]

Nov 9, 2017 0:08:49 GMT Charlie Allison said:

Justin:

For bumping up against a five-hundred word limit, you do a lot of work. The contrasting images you use (a flaming truck at the end, the corpses of airplanes rusting in the desert, the frustration of a just-lost game. A few things jumped out at me though, including the sentence about the boneyard:

Flew all the way past the Boneyard—the old skeletons of planes that’d once been used to kill men and women cackling across the dust.

The cackling here made me re-read the sentence, pause, readjust. What's cackling? The desert wind? The corpses of the planes? This only really matters in flash, where literally every word has a force multiplier attached to it due to format, but I'd play around with a couple different iterations of this sentence, shifting focus. The idea of hollowed out planes is a powerful one, and it encapsulates this part of the story--something that was once so powerful, so useful, so mundane and worldly at once, is now just scrap. Detritus. Maybe rephrase to 'Flew all the way past the Boneyard--the wind fluting/screeching/roaring through the old skeletons of planes that had been used to kill men and women.' or something along those lines.

The rest of the story works because of your heavy use of inference, connected time-jumps, and letting the main character's emotional connection to people be expressed best through their interactions with mundane objects, in this case the truck. We don't NEED to know why they are burning the truck (although its implied that it has to do with their father--he's either dead or on the run). Its an effective, minimalistic tool that you use to great effect in your other works, but does double duty here. I'll send you the line notes as soon as I can--these were just my immediate thoughts.

I agree with Charlie - excellent work in only 500 words. You show a lot about the character and what she (he?) has been through, especially the difficult relationship with the father which seems to be held together with that truck. Burning it in the end is like setting fire to the hopes of having a healthy relationship with their father. I love the imagery here and the way it starts with the truck, ends with the truck in flames. 

Also with Charlie on the "cackling" description -- that did take me out of the story for a second. I first thought the plane corpses must be cackling. Maybe there's another word that can work more here, though. In flash, every word matters so much. 

I also wasn't sold on the second to last sentence: "The joy of the joyride falling away like the sun behind the mountains."  I like what you're trying to say here but I feel like saying "the joy of the joyride" takes away from the title (for one) and the emotion you're trying to evoke with this sentence. I love that emotion and don't want it to get lost - is there any way you can make this joy stand out? the idea of the joyride is great. Maybe I'm being too picky, and ignore me if I am. I just know you can make that sentence more impactful.

Great work, Justin. Really enjoying your flash, and it's inspiring me to write flash pieces. Hope this helps a little. 

The second to last paragraph is the only grammatical correction: "This time, the trucks sputters and spits black out its rear."  Should be truck not trucks. 

That's all I got sorry if it's not more helpful but you evoke the starkness of the desert so well again in this piece. Definitely a strength of yours.

I kinda want to challenge you to write something out of your comfort zone that's not set in the desert. just to see what you come up with. hehe

[Julia]

Hi Justin,
Great story, fast-paced and we're flying through this guy's all-too-short youth. As Charlie says, we don't need to know exactly why he is burning the truck, but I felt I could use more of a hint of something. To me, it read like a symbolic gesture of his rejection of his father. It didn't really pay off emotionally for me. I needed to have a hint of something really messed up between the two of them, or just something messed up inside the narrator that lets us know why he would go to such great lengths.