The Word Cloud

10 Comments

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  by stephenterry 8 months ago

  "Wake" was outstanding. Well deserved winner.
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  by Caducean Whisks 8 months ago

  All good reads; 'Wake' was V good.
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  by EmmaD 8 months ago

  Yes, Wake was so wonderful! It was very noticeable that in most of the stories I was very conscious - and often admiring - of what they were doing technically. But with the very best stories I had lost that consciousness by the end of the first page, and was just reading like a reader. It was only at the second read, when I went through my yes-no-maybe piles all over again, that I realised just how technically accomplished those very best stories were.
  
  Interestingly, the organisers told me after I'd decided the winners that one of them put Wake first, and the other Mr Plumb. And one of the stories was HIghly Commended by me, and a winner in the local comp which Jonathan Lee judged. In other words, the more I'm involved with competitions and people who judge them, the clearer it is to me that there IS, actually, some kind of standard you could sort-of call objective. Yes, the edges are fuzzy, yes any given story we might differ about. But it simply isn't true that one story is as good as another, or that it all depends on the reader. Across a lot of experienced readers, looking for the same sort of qualities in a story, there will be some measure of agreement about which have the most of those qualities in the greatest abundance.
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  by Skylark 8 months ago

  I've just read 'Wake' - what a fantastic piece of writing - loved it! And I think that's the best first line I've ever come across:
  
  "Lying on your back under a coffin is not the ideal place to eat a chocolate biscuit."
  
  Brilliant :-D
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  by Amarantha 8 months ago

  Yes, 'Wake' is very impressive on all levels. I love it too and Skylark is right: that first line is a real hook.
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  by Gerilyn 8 months ago

  Totally agree with Skylark and Amarantha.
  
  I think I need to practice my opening first lines...
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  by EmmaD 8 months ago

  Although I see an awful lot of few stories with cracking first lines, but where the tail was wagging the dog, rather - the rest didn't fit with, or didn't live up to, that opening. Particularly where a zingy first line was followed by a stodgy first couple of paragraphs of explaining.
  
  The best first lines of all are the ones where the zing is the product of starting the story in the right place, in the right voice, and with the whole project - plot, theme, character, structure - so completely integrated that the first line feels like the natural and inevitable place and way to start. Everything about that first sentence in Wake is built into the whole story, IYSWIM.
  
  Not easy.
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  by stephenterry 8 months ago

  I think what I liked best about Wake, apart from the 'surprise' beginning was the gradual expansion out of a micro-situation into a macro-situation, and with a voice that was full of juvenile exploration.
  
  I sped read others and non captured me to that extent.
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  by Caoimh 8 months ago

  The three stories were really excellent, that may be the first time ever I've started reading online and carried on until I got to the end without clicking away to facebook or my emails! All 3 have left me wishing I could write like that...
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  by EmmaD 8 months ago

  Stephen, I absolutely agree, the way Wake opened out was beautifully controlled. And yet the micro situation and the macro situation were always in the right relation to each other... especially because I see a lot of historical fiction, I'm always alert to the story where the individual humans are just puppets (like a child's Stories From History book), or the ones where the 'real' history is just set-dressing...