Recent comments in /f/WritingPrompts

cheltsie t1_jd7idvn wrote

3

AutoModerator t1_jd78cvd wrote

Welcome to the Prompt! All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments.

Reminders:

>* No AI-generated reponses 🤖 >* Stories 100 words+. Poems 30+ but include "[Poem]" >* Responses don't have to fulfill every detail >* [RF] and [SP] for stricter titles >* Be civil in any feedback and follow the rules

🆕 New Here? ✏ Writing Help? 📢 News 💬 Discord

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

librarian-faust t1_jd74f05 wrote

It's a good one, but I feel like it needs more.

What's the protagonist going to do? Issue orders and go back to Cryo? Interrogate the AI and learn that... he's the second to last one to awaken, and he needs to patch up systems and then report to Recycling for disassembly?

It's a great "oh god, everything went wrong", but there's no motion to the story. Just a cold, still, scene. Which is GREAT. And fitting. And a perfect end, if that's what you intended.

I just always feel like there should be something of "what do I do now?", and "were samples kept? Will the colonists be revived? Are they all uploaded to the biocomputer matrix?"

I always want a protagonist, a character, to have an action or motion to them. Something to look forward to. So that you have an idea what they're doing, five minutes after the story ends.

I have no idea what your protagonist is doing five minutes post-story, besides going back to the now cold dregs of his abandoned coffee, feeling a slowly dawning horror, then suiting up like the guy from Dead Space in case of "ship's haunted".

3
2

librarian-faust t1_jd73psz wrote

Wow. I feel like my entry had the same idea as yours, I just did talking heads with an optimistic AI, whilst yours leaned HARD into the horror.

I love it.

((I'm halfway tempted to repost mine as a comment answer to yours, now. Mine's up in the "non story comments" area because it's 99.5% talking heads and that's lazy writing.))

2

librarian-faust t1_jd73f83 wrote

Thank you. I appreciate the compliment. I just don't like pure talking-heads like this as fiction... it'd want world-building, set-dressing, and prose that isn't just two characters in dialogue, to be something I'd like reading, you know?

I feel like talking-heads is lazy writing like script-fics (... excuse me whilst I have trauma flashbacks to 20 years ago on ffn.) - or its modern equivalent the Whatsapp Group Chat fic.

Probably a fault of my personal taste more so than anything else. Feel like someone with my tastes would downvote what I wrote for it being lazy writing, and missing the meat of the writing.

But regardless, I'm glad you enjoyed it and I'll consider putting it in the main post if I do another like this.

2

NicomacheanOrc OP t1_jd6t5j5 wrote

That's a great last line. First I thought about the feather, contrasting against the mountain. Cool, cool. And then I thought about the "home" part, and it really hit me. And then I thought about the "we" part and it blew my mind.

3

NicomacheanOrc OP t1_jd6sphi wrote

>"The sword must never be brandished with a clouded mind or ill intent. It is polished and thus a mirror; our actions are reflected back at us, and we will always look back in time and see the ones we have killed in its surface.

Badass. Quote saved for reference at my next cocktail party.

3