June 02, 2017, 02:06:35 PM by kailhofer
Finally, I've had enough spare moments to finish reading all these stories. Excellent effort by a lot of you.
My personal favorites were "The Pettiness Device" by Jean-Paul Garnier and "Ivy and Justin" by K. Vesi. I felt that these two were the two strongest, character-driven stories in the bunch. There are a lot of ways to frame a story and character-driven is the one I prefer by far. That, however, is only my personal opinion.
It's fairly horrible of me to lump 17 mores stories into one short statement, but one sometimes only has so much time. Life gets in the way. Anyhow, I would encourage the rest of the entrants this month to bolster your efforts toward showing over telling in a story. Showing more engages the reader, brings them into a story. A good way to do that is to focus on creating a very strong character--one with one ore more flaws to them--who has a real, serious problem to overcome in life. That character may or may not resolve that problem in the story, especially in that this is flash, but his, her, or its actions should be governed by the overarching need to resolve the bigger issue. There is much more to showing vs. telling than can be explained in a short paragraph, of course.
As a conversation starter, I would ask, and no offense meant to Daniel by doing so, but what did you learn while trying to write your story? Aphelion is all about helping writers grow and learn. It's why this site is here.
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