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Sporadic writing exercise #3 - Building tension (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Taking a bit of a breather, here's the next exercise!

Random Prompt: Frying pan

Here is your task:

#Write a piece as to be unsatisfying as possible.

Some tips:

The goal of this is to practice build tension, even if there's no way to satisfying release it.
Focus more on the how/now than the payoff later.

You don’t have to post your piece, but if you do, I’m happy to provide some basic feedback. I encourage others to do the same, so we can all learn from each other.

Bonus: If there’s a particular thing you want to work on, let me know in the comments, & I’ll see if I can tailor future tasks to accommodate our needs.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ok, took a while, but I finally got a chance to read this fully.

My main critique is that this piece feels like a series events rather than a whole - the unsatisfying let down could've hit harder if there was more build up - e.g a notification when you wake up that you need to buy something, etc.

My other critique is pacing, which is still decent, but slightly...off. I'm not sure if that was what you're going for, but with a quick re-write, I reckon you could really push the piece up a tier.

Overall, you've just described most of my mornings ;P

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Thanks for the feedback! Pretty new to fiction, so this is useful.

Yeah, I didn't do an edit of this, posted more or less straight after writing. I am definitely starting to get the value of an edit/re-write to add some telegraphing of what's coming and to clean up the pacing and remove or do more to tie in loose pieces (like the knee hole). Will do that more in the future.

I might come back to this one, see how I'm feeling in a few weeks.