Creativity Hacker

Today we see that you can deviate from any rule of usage if you give the reader a reason to trust your change of course.

What I gleaned about the stories: Even lawyers can feel a visceral sense of satisfaction at the worst of criminals being murdered.

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Note: This is a short story collection, so the rules are slightly different from standard Immerse or Die: instead of reading on every time I lose immersion, I stop reading that story and move on to the next one. As usual, I stop reading after the third WTF.

Analysis: The book has a brief Hemingway quotation as an epigraph. Unfortunately, there is a space in the middle of one of the words. These issues niggle at me under the best of circumstances, but on a page that contained only three lines it leapt out so clearly I couldn’t conceive of anyone missing it on even a casual glance. Thus, my faith that the book had been proof read was shattered.

Hoping it was an aberration, I moved on.

Analysis: A couple of sentences into the first story, the protagonist attempts to come up with: workable plans we could execute. Workable means practical or feasible, i.e. one that can be executed with the people and resources available. So, when I hit the qualifier that it had to be one that they could execute, my unconscious yanked me sideways into a consideration of what a plan that was practical with what the protagonist had available but still couldn’t be done would look like.

At which point, I realised the qualifier might actually be broader than its subject. For example, when I practised archery frequently, I could place an arrow into the centre of a target at ten yards with reasonable likelihood, so could execute a plan that involved me hitting a series of small areas with arrows; however, I wouldn’t have said it was practical to base a plan on me being able to hit six in a row.

Realising I was well into philosophy rather than the protagonist’s story, I moved on.

Analysis: The second story plays out in a series of emails. The second correspondent’s emails feature obvious errors of spelling, punctuation, and so forth, which I noticed immediately. However, because the story opened with an email-style header and the non-standard usage was consistent with itself, I parsed it as a trait of the character rather than an issue with the author’s prose, and thus was lead deeper rather than being distracted.

Analysis: The third story is in first person PoV. The events had a hint of an interesting story, but the number of sentences commencing with “I” was high enough that halfway down the first page I found myself trying to guess whether the next sentence would be I [verbed] or not.

The echo having drowned out the story, I pulled the plug.

Take the Pepsi Challenge: Want to know if my own writing measures up? Download one of these free short stories, in the format of your choice, and decide for yourself.