Hey! It looks like you're new here. You might want to check out the introduction.
Show rules for this event
Letting On and Letting Go
We walk down the crowded street on two legs. No one else knows, they see the usual flesh but not the reality, and tag us as one more person. Our face shows no expression, but if thoughts could be displayed radiating from the brain like magnetic field lines, there’d be several sparkling, dancing, scintillating coronae around our head, turning red and jagged at the intersections. Our shoes snap briskly down as we stride over the concrete sidewalk, footsteps striking and punctuating our discussion.
“Look, I’m only trying to help you,” he says. “You’ve really been carrying too much on your shoulders.”
“Exactly. See, I want to take control.”
“But think about this a bit further,” he says. “I want to take control, and I like to have control.”
“Then stop,” he says dryly.
“What happens if I take control, that’s so bad?”
“Truthfully? All together? We aren’t. But I think that you secretly are.”
We step over a steaming manhole cover in the crosswalk and stride on. All around us are the faces of the hurrying crowd, every one a mask over an inner world of light.
“Well, what do you say? Just try letting go for a moment…”
“Yes, there. See how that feels, isn’t it nice…?”
“And how about this? And this? Don’t they feel better too?”
Outside, we are a person in a crowd of people, and nothing has changed, our body strides down the sidewalk at the same pace, and no expression has changed on our face. Inside…
I’ve mastered myself, and everything’s fine.
“I’m sick of discussing this,” I say. “No more!”
“Look, I’m only trying to help you,” he says. “You’ve really been carrying too much on your shoulders.”
“You should listen to him,” she says. “A change would be good for you!”
“You’re just saying that so the two of you can take more control!”
“Exactly. See, I want to take control.”
“I have to admit it, he’s right.”
“Aha, you brazen assholes! You make me want to jump out of my own skull!”
“But think about this a bit further,” he says. “I want to take control, and I like to have control.”
“Contrariwise,” she says to me, “you have control right now, and you’re just hating it, aren’t you?”
“Well, I… It’s not that I hate it! I’m just so tired at having to defend and justify myself against the two of you all the time!”
“Then stop,” he says dryly.
“Sure, you’d love that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, we would,” she says. “And you would love to stop. So what’s the problem?”
“What happens if I take control, that’s so bad?”
“I… wouldn’t be able to protect myself from you.”
“Are we really that bad? Is it that hard for you to submit once in a while?”
“But I’m not a submissive!”
“Truthfully? All together? We aren’t. But I think that you secretly are.”
We step over a steaming manhole cover in the crosswalk and stride on. All around us are the faces of the hurrying crowd, every one a mask over an inner world of light.
“Come on, just try embracing that part of you,” she says. “It’ll be fun.”
“Fun? You want me to surrender just because it’s fun?”
“Well, what do you say? Just try letting go for a moment…”
“There… Just right there. Take it easy and try it.”
“Yes, there. See how that feels, isn’t it nice…?”
It does feel nice, but I’m too upset to say so. I stay quiet.
“And how about this? And this? Don’t they feel better too?”
They do. I feel happier, and closer to them. And the more he takes and the more I give, the nicer it becomes.
“It’s okay,” she says. “You don’t have to be on the spot all the time. I’ll make sure he doesn’t go too far. You can relax now. Let go.”
I surrender. I let go of responsibility, set down the strain of guarding against all possible harms, relinquish my fear, and sink into snug comfort. I am clear as water, black as a jewel on velvet.
Outside, we are a person in a crowd of people, and nothing has changed, our body strides down the sidewalk at the same pace, and no expression has changed on our face. Inside…
I am pleased and amused as I wrap myself around my new charge and think of the fun we will have.
I am enveloped, warm and protected. My back is secure, my mind is open, my heart is at peace.
I’ve mastered myself, and everything’s fine.
Pics
Huh, the first one on my ballot is the one without any comments yet, so I can't gauge my reaction to it.
I like the character voices here, but I'm a little confused as to what's happened. It helps to take it with the art, but I wonder how good an idea it is to need the art for the reader to understand the story. Given that most of us come from the MLP fandom, this could easily smack of a changeling story, but I'm feeling more of an id/ego/superego battle going on. If not that, then at least some kind of internal struggle.
Giving each a distinct personality is a nice touch, but what it also does is confuse me as to whether the person they inhabit is consciously aware of this conflict. It's like Inside Out, I guess, where I can take it as these voices influencing the person without them being aware of it.
There are two things that hold this back for me. One is the formatting. Several have been done in this style before, and after you've seen enough of these, they lose their novelty. I can take that or leave it, as it does save you some word count on dialogue tags, though in your case, you didn't need to, since you're well under the limit. But the format isn't done that well. It's not enough to just right-justify all dialogue by the third voice, because sometimes it's hard to tell it is. Take your last 3 lines. It may look quite a bit different if you're reading on a mobile device, but on my PC, it's a very subtle difference between the right-justified line and the centered line. That's not the only place in the story where it's hard to tell which one is speaking. You might have made it clearer by making more judicious use of line breaks so that, for example, the right-justified text never ends up crossing the middle of the page. It takes a lot of trial and error to get that right, it might look significantly different based on device, and it might look significantly different between your word processing program and the site. But with a couple of iterations, you can get something that's at least a lot clearer.
Second is that this is vague. Someone's being told that he can relax and not always be in charge, but the stakes are never established, so I don't have a reason to care when he gives in. What consequences could there have been? He is enjoying it, but it's kind of bland language, so I can't tell how much. So it all comes across as a pretty low-level conflict without a way to judge how well it was resolved. It's got good atmosphere and character work, but I can't find a plot to follow, or even something to anchor an emotional investment to, if you were just going for a scene.
I like the character voices here, but I'm a little confused as to what's happened. It helps to take it with the art, but I wonder how good an idea it is to need the art for the reader to understand the story. Given that most of us come from the MLP fandom, this could easily smack of a changeling story, but I'm feeling more of an id/ego/superego battle going on. If not that, then at least some kind of internal struggle.
Giving each a distinct personality is a nice touch, but what it also does is confuse me as to whether the person they inhabit is consciously aware of this conflict. It's like Inside Out, I guess, where I can take it as these voices influencing the person without them being aware of it.
There are two things that hold this back for me. One is the formatting. Several have been done in this style before, and after you've seen enough of these, they lose their novelty. I can take that or leave it, as it does save you some word count on dialogue tags, though in your case, you didn't need to, since you're well under the limit. But the format isn't done that well. It's not enough to just right-justify all dialogue by the third voice, because sometimes it's hard to tell it is. Take your last 3 lines. It may look quite a bit different if you're reading on a mobile device, but on my PC, it's a very subtle difference between the right-justified line and the centered line. That's not the only place in the story where it's hard to tell which one is speaking. You might have made it clearer by making more judicious use of line breaks so that, for example, the right-justified text never ends up crossing the middle of the page. It takes a lot of trial and error to get that right, it might look significantly different based on device, and it might look significantly different between your word processing program and the site. But with a couple of iterations, you can get something that's at least a lot clearer.
Second is that this is vague. Someone's being told that he can relax and not always be in charge, but the stakes are never established, so I don't have a reason to care when he gives in. What consequences could there have been? He is enjoying it, but it's kind of bland language, so I can't tell how much. So it all comes across as a pretty low-level conflict without a way to judge how well it was resolved. It's got good atmosphere and character work, but I can't find a plot to follow, or even something to anchor an emotional investment to, if you were just going for a scene.
Alternate Title: Three's a Crowd
Something I liked:
The attention to formatting. This is one of the more creatively written entries, in how it shows the three personas on different sides of the page (this is less apparent if you're reading this on your phone, which was my mistake the first go-around), and how they're sort of opposing each other but also have to share the same head space. I like how within 600 words we have a clear idea as to what role each persona plays, how the male seems to be the devil and the female seems to be the angel, and by the end they're all reconciled with each other.
Something I didn't like:
With that said, there is such a thing as being too vague. I have no idea as to the context behind these personas being meshed together; I don't know if it's one person with split personality disorder, or if three people are sharing a body, or what. This also means that, aside from the main persona not wanting to be submissive toward the male persona, I'm not sure as to what the stakes are here. How are we to know if anyone's in danger? Stuff like that.
Verdict: A borderline avant-garde piece that is also, dare I say it, underrated.
Something I liked:
The attention to formatting. This is one of the more creatively written entries, in how it shows the three personas on different sides of the page (this is less apparent if you're reading this on your phone, which was my mistake the first go-around), and how they're sort of opposing each other but also have to share the same head space. I like how within 600 words we have a clear idea as to what role each persona plays, how the male seems to be the devil and the female seems to be the angel, and by the end they're all reconciled with each other.
Something I didn't like:
With that said, there is such a thing as being too vague. I have no idea as to the context behind these personas being meshed together; I don't know if it's one person with split personality disorder, or if three people are sharing a body, or what. This also means that, aside from the main persona not wanting to be submissive toward the male persona, I'm not sure as to what the stakes are here. How are we to know if anyone's in danger? Stuff like that.
Verdict: A borderline avant-garde piece that is also, dare I say it, underrated.
For one, it's quite abstract. While describing things like the setting and what not is at least somewhat risky in a minific, you described too little for that. The only thing I'm imagining here in terms of setting is a generic grayscale city. Then again, maybe that's the point or perhaps a ploy to buy yourself more dialogue words to use.
Another downer here is Lefty (which is an endearing nickname for the left-aligned voice, in contrast to Middy and Righty). Middy and Righty are characterized well from beginning to end: Middy is somewhat paranoid and spiteful, but then they end up satisfied by not controlling so much and taking peace in that; Righty is the optimistic fun one who manages to get more control and is looking forward to all the fun stuff she has planned.
But Lefty? His last line threw me off. Throughout most of the story, he's depicted as the guy who wants control but also has some kind of problem (I'm assuming it's self-control, judging by Righty's words). Righty even says that she'll watch out for him, so it's prbobaly going to be a lengthy process of Lefty improving as a character. However, the last line makes it so that it's as if everything's just fine with him and he's fully self-controlled now, which seems like a great leap of logic. However, it can be amended easily if the line went something like, "I'll be better in controlling myself" or something like that.
Other than that, it's clear the driver of this story is the dialogue, and you've hit it out of the ballpark with it! I can easily tell who's who not just because of alignment but also because of how distinctly different the voices are, especially since you're dealing with three of them all taking at the same time. The pause at the middle with the manhole also makes for a nice break between the dialogue, giving readers some breathing room before continuing on.
Overall, while it does have some edges to rub off, this is a fine and dandy story about split-personalities (literal or metaphorical)! Nicely done!
Another downer here is Lefty (which is an endearing nickname for the left-aligned voice, in contrast to Middy and Righty). Middy and Righty are characterized well from beginning to end: Middy is somewhat paranoid and spiteful, but then they end up satisfied by not controlling so much and taking peace in that; Righty is the optimistic fun one who manages to get more control and is looking forward to all the fun stuff she has planned.
But Lefty? His last line threw me off. Throughout most of the story, he's depicted as the guy who wants control but also has some kind of problem (I'm assuming it's self-control, judging by Righty's words). Righty even says that she'll watch out for him, so it's prbobaly going to be a lengthy process of Lefty improving as a character. However, the last line makes it so that it's as if everything's just fine with him and he's fully self-controlled now, which seems like a great leap of logic. However, it can be amended easily if the line went something like, "I'll be better in controlling myself" or something like that.
Other than that, it's clear the driver of this story is the dialogue, and you've hit it out of the ballpark with it! I can easily tell who's who not just because of alignment but also because of how distinctly different the voices are, especially since you're dealing with three of them all taking at the same time. The pause at the middle with the manhole also makes for a nice break between the dialogue, giving readers some breathing room before continuing on.
Overall, while it does have some edges to rub off, this is a fine and dandy story about split-personalities (literal or metaphorical)! Nicely done!
So, this is something that's undeniably different from the usual minific fare, and I'm always on board to give bold experimental pieces the kudos they deserve. So good on you for taking that risk and going with something bold!
Now, I want to make sure that it doesn't sound like I'm backtracking on my praise, but I need to be honest and say that I'm not sure the piece as a whole worked for me the way you intended. But I actually don't think it's because of the gimmick—I would say that the biggest issue that I had was with information reveal and payoff.
This story felt really short to me, and not just because you're about two hundred words away from the word cap. When you take a look at this piece on a whole, not very much actually happens. Our primary narrator has an internal dispute with two other personalities, and relents to their cajoling, and that's pretty much everything. I think you might want to ask yourself, "what is the reader getting out of this?" From my perspective, the most intriguing part of the story was to learn about the other voices' motivations and intentions, but that never really gets explored. In fact, as soon as the reader figures out what the general situation is, there's virtually nothing left for us to learn.
This piece seems to try to set its conflict around the actual decision of the primary narrator to let go, but that just doesn't come across as satisfying to me. I know essentially nothing about any of these three entities, so I find it hard to be invested in the fact that one of them is giving power to the other. If you want this to be the crux of your story, then you really need to expand on something to make the reader care a little more about which personality is in the driver's seat. Show us what the stakes of this decision are.
If this is just supposed to be more of a concept piece rather than an emotional one, then I think there needs to be more information. Because for idea pieces, information is the payoff, so the fact that we're getting so little of it makes it hard to feel satisfied with the story as a whole.
So essentially, my advice would be to ask yourself what you'd want the reader to gain from reading this. What do you want the reader to feel? Then, I think it'd be a good idea to start from there and work on developing the payoff a little more, either by giving the reader more food for thought to chew on, or by providing more tangible emotional stakes. As things are right now, it just kind of feels like the story isn't really trying very hard to do anything with its premise and gimmick, and I'm left wondering how I was supposed to react.
Now, I want to make sure that it doesn't sound like I'm backtracking on my praise, but I need to be honest and say that I'm not sure the piece as a whole worked for me the way you intended. But I actually don't think it's because of the gimmick—I would say that the biggest issue that I had was with information reveal and payoff.
This story felt really short to me, and not just because you're about two hundred words away from the word cap. When you take a look at this piece on a whole, not very much actually happens. Our primary narrator has an internal dispute with two other personalities, and relents to their cajoling, and that's pretty much everything. I think you might want to ask yourself, "what is the reader getting out of this?" From my perspective, the most intriguing part of the story was to learn about the other voices' motivations and intentions, but that never really gets explored. In fact, as soon as the reader figures out what the general situation is, there's virtually nothing left for us to learn.
This piece seems to try to set its conflict around the actual decision of the primary narrator to let go, but that just doesn't come across as satisfying to me. I know essentially nothing about any of these three entities, so I find it hard to be invested in the fact that one of them is giving power to the other. If you want this to be the crux of your story, then you really need to expand on something to make the reader care a little more about which personality is in the driver's seat. Show us what the stakes of this decision are.
If this is just supposed to be more of a concept piece rather than an emotional one, then I think there needs to be more information. Because for idea pieces, information is the payoff, so the fact that we're getting so little of it makes it hard to feel satisfied with the story as a whole.
So essentially, my advice would be to ask yourself what you'd want the reader to gain from reading this. What do you want the reader to feel? Then, I think it'd be a good idea to start from there and work on developing the payoff a little more, either by giving the reader more food for thought to chew on, or by providing more tangible emotional stakes. As things are right now, it just kind of feels like the story isn't really trying very hard to do anything with its premise and gimmick, and I'm left wondering how I was supposed to react.
I liked the concept, but I feel there needs to be more context. Do the three represent the Ego, Super Ego and Id? Or are they different personality? Or-etc.
Other than that, the story is told real well.
I look forward to seeing your future endeavors.
Other than that, the story is told real well.
I look forward to seeing your future endeavors.