The Final

[The Drall]

Thank you very much Really, a week seems a lot longer than it actually is. It usually takes a day or two for me to come up with a story, then I begin writing, then I change an aspect of the story, then finish, then edit. By the time I actually have gotten halfway through my story, it's already Thursday.

And yeah. Like I said, it was hard because I knew I'd get something wrong, but I still wanted to try and capture what a war "hero" must feel at times. I don't know, did he seem to act like one?

[James]

Jul 8, 2010 16:45:07 GMT -5 ASGetty ((Zovo)) said:

The only problem I had with this story, was that I had absolutely NO sense of when this was set. At the beginning, the author mentions "muskets," which makes me think of an eighteenth century battlefield? Talk of going "West" - maybe nineteenth century? But then so much of the actual conversational parts seem so very modern - it was just jarring, trying to figure out the setting here.

I wanted to address this because I got this in a couple different submissions.

This was intentional. To me the background is the background; you should get a little bit of description to get an idea of what you're looking at and then focus on the foreground, the meat of the story.

I'd have told you more about the war, or the plague (in my second round submission) but what does that add to the story? Words, that's what, just words.

The story isn't about the war, nor was the other about the plague, those are background elements; the setting. Knowing more about them doesn't really add any more to the story than if I were to tell you what company Ryan worked for in "Cowboys and Indians" or what bank our character was in in "Hell is an Endless Bank Queue."

It just isn't important and only distracts the reader and, to me, interupts the flow of the story if I go off on a tangent describing the politics of the day and why the war is being fought and who's fighting and blah blah blah. . . who cares? The story is about a wounded soldier making good on a promise to the woman he loves rather than surrendering to injury. It's about the will to live and the reasons we press on through adversity. . . it has nothing to do with a war.

Can I just say on this, that I get where both points of view are coming from. As a writer you want to stick to the story, the main aspects, not get overburdened with the background details. However, the reader needs enough background details to be truly able to engross themselves in the story. I suspect that people might have found it hard to dive into the story and the characters, because they didn't know exactly where or when you were talking about.

Saying this though, I thought your detail of muskets was enough to really provide enough detail for the reader to get by with. But yeah, it's always a bit of a juggling act.

[tamwyn]

Damn I really wanted to be here, especially since it had to do with the military.

However, congratz to Zovo for winning the competition! Huzzah! Twas quite epic.