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Dead Men Do Tell Tales · Original Minific ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 400–750
Show rules for this event
Tell Me About Your Character
"Hello."

"Yes, yes you died and I am here to collect your Eternal Soul and show you to way to your afterlife."

"No, no I am not a skeleton in a robe or a pale skined goth girl. Really, you humans always think so small."

"Sadly you currently have no proper words in your language for what I am. I am hoping that in a few more centuries your language will evolve enough to have the basic concepts needed, to borrow another phrase, 'to build the tools to build the tools'."

"I am here to guide you, part of that involves answering your questions. I will not be able to answer all of them, because I am not all knowing."

"Yes, there are things even Death does not know."

"No, I have never been past this place. I show you the way and you move on. I stay behind."

"Limbo is a good enough name, yes."

"As I said I do not know what lies beyond. Heaven, Hell, Nirvana, Valhalla, Oblivion, something more esoteric? All I know is that there is an Afterlife, and I guide people to it."

"Panic is mostly a physical response. You do not have the 'Body' part of 'Mind, Body, and Soul' at the moment."

"We can take all the time you need."

"Oh, no, sorry, but you are just not that important. I am not the only guide."

"Do all humans look like you?"

"Yes, that was rude of you. But I accept your apology."

"As for time, it does pass here and I do not know if it will have an impact on the other side or not."

"No Body, remember? The Mind can tire, yes, as can the Soul, but you do not have any physical needs."

"Yes, take the time you needed. I will be here."

"Ready to move on?"

"Ah, more questions then?"

"Well, ask and I shall answer as best I can."

"That is something I don't know. Not having been to the other side and all."

"Don't worry, you are not the first to have forgotten that."

"Well, you can move on anytime. Whenever you feel that you are ready to do so."

"It is not a gate or a door, as we are beyond the physical now. It is more your state of mind and putting your soul at ease."

"Well, I have found that a lot of people are more at ease if they talk over their life. So, tell me about yourself. I'll listen."

"That was a great story, you lived a very happy life."

"Oh, yes, I suppose you are. Right here."

"Goodbye, it was nice to have talked with you."

"... ."

"Hello."
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#1 ·
· · >>vladspellbinder
An interesting premise! I like the ending, and the format worked surprisingly well for how sparse it is. The only thing that really tripped me up was:

"Well, I have found that a lot of people are more at ease if they talk over their life. So, tell me about yourself. I'll listen."

"That was a great story, you lived a very happy life."


That's such a curt reply for someone telling the story of their life. What happens in-between these two lines could have been an entire fic inof itself.
#2 ·
· · >>No_Raisin >>vladspellbinder
Another grim reaper story, huh? Not too surprising, I guess.

It took me several paragraphs to realize this wasn't a dialogue, but that every quote is being spoken by the reaper in response to "your" unspoken lines. I think it'd really help avoid confusion of that if you didn't use quotation marks. Those aren't necessary for most second-person stories, and you don't need them for this one.

A number of editing mistakes in this one, too, also of the kind a spell checker would have caught.

There's a trick to writing stories like this, and you're mostly on the better side of it. You want to make it obvious what questions "you" have asked, and the bad end is to have the narrator blatantly state them. "Oh, you want to know my name? It is Death." That kind of thing. You mostly avoid that, but I think you could stand to be more subtle about it in places. You still lean heavily on restating the questions at times.

Look how often Death starts his quotes with "Well." Try to avoid that repetition.

It's not a bad interaction, but the problem is that there's not really a point to it. Minifics can rely on just creating a powerful image and not necessarily having a strong plot, but there's not any imagery here. Just that this is a routine interaction for Death, and a dead man literally tells a tale that we don't hear any of. And as for plot, we never learn enough about Death, or anything about his guest, to have any rooting interest in either of them. There's no tension resolved, and none of the characters show any growth.

As an example of second-person narration holding a one-sided conversation, it succeeds better than most examples I've seen, but it could use either a really striking image or a plot that comes to some sort of a conclusion.
#3 ·
· · >>vladspellbinder
Honorable Mention:
"Yes, there are things even Death does not know."


Much like >>Pascoite I was confused at first by the nature of the whole 100% dialogue thing, and the snag for me was that it's not formatted like a chain of dialogue lines from a single speaker. When writing, if you break up a character's dialogue into paragraphs you would not add quotation marks to the end of each paragraph, with the exception of the last one of course. The method used here makes sense in a way, though, since it's meant to be read as a two-sided dialogue but with one of the parties being omitted. I do think that if you want to make this feel like a second-person narrative, like the title seems to indicate, you would remove the quotation marks altogether.

Something I find strange but also curious is that the speaker claims that the word to describe its occupation has yet to be created, but it's clearly meant to be like an angel or the Grim Reaper. Or maybe one of the Grim Reaper's interns. It's one of those things that, like much of the story, seems to take pride in not being wholly shown to the reader. We're being kept in the dark about most of what happens here, and there's a great deal of potential in that. Some very dry humor, a sense of emptiness, and so on. It does, however, feel incomplete, not least because it's so short that it barely makes the minimum word count. Ultimately it feels kind of rudderless. Nothing happens, except for the not-Grim Reaper sending "you" off to Limbo. It's clearly meant to be open-ended, like second-person narratives tend to be, but it's so abstract that I'm not sure I can say it bears any significance. With stories like this where there's little plot or character I expect a strong thematic point, but I'm not sure it has that either.

It is, at the very least, an experiment whose style would not have occurred to most people. There's clearly imagination put into this, although we could've also used another editing pass.
#4 ·
· · >>vladspellbinder
Lot better than I thought it would be due to the reading the title first. Bit cranky the story makes me do more figuring it than usual. This is like reading 30 stories all at once. I approve the level of detail with the word count as well. Neat.
#5 ·
·
>>GaPJaxie
>>Pascoite
>>No_Raisin
>>Griseus

So now that the authors have been revealed I can reply to comments made.

First though; thank you all for reading and commenting on my story.

Some backstory to the story; I lose track of when prompts are going up, I've often missed prompt submission by a few hours or a day. This time I missed it by nearly the whole writing time! I checked on "when are prompt submissions due" and found that there was a little more than three hours left to submit the story and not the prompt!
At first I wasn't going to do anything, the prompt itself hadn't initially caught my attention. So I went off to go do some other things but them I had An Idea (tm). Said Idea was the title I picked, which is a somewhat common phrase for use in tabletop RPG circles. From there my first idea was to go "the character of a person", as in a sort of "weighing of the feather" type of scene, where a recently dead man had to tell an Anubis like figure about why they deserved to go to the good afterlife and not the bad one. I didn't really go anywhere with that and instead just latched onto the "talk with the Reaper" bit of it and from there settled on doing a "pure dialogue" fic. It wasn't until I started writing that I decided on doing just one half of the conversation. Oh, and I only had a bit less than two hours to write it all.
On my phone.
So, yeah.

I actually finished the "first draft" with about forty-five minutes left to spare and then did a few read throughs for major flaws and autocorrect errors, which of course I didn't get them all (again, on my phone). Then I started to trim down my word count and changed some phrases as I got a handle on the Reaper's voice (not sure why it uses the contractions it does and not others but it 'felt right'). My first daft had been 520 words, and I really wanted to cut it down to 400 but this was a case of "If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter" and when there was less than ten minutes left I said "Good enough", submitted it and went to bed. So, sorry Griseus, the word count being a number associated with closure was completely happenstance.


Now, for replies to comments.

GaPJaxie:
That's such a curt reply for someone telling the story of their life. What happens in-between these two lines could have been an entire fic inof itself.

One of the "points" of the story was that the readers don't get to hear any of it, and that to this Reaper it is just another life story it has been told by a soul not willing to pass on just yet. The curt reply was meant to imply a certain level of apathy on the Reaper's part while also not being overly blunt. The departed is too caught up in their own thoughts, now being ready to move on, to really notice just how apathetic the Reaper was top hearing their life story.
I also felt a needed something of a direct tie in with the title so this part was put in. It also gave me a way of having the departed 'resolve' their death and be ready to move on.

Pascoite, No_Raisin: I did not intend for this to be a second person story, more third person limited. The Reaper is not talking to the reader, there is an actual in-story person they are talking with that gives actually in-story responses it is just that the readers do not get to 'hear' what this other character is saying. I'm not sure how I could have made that clearer without detracting from the story though, as I tend to work in either first person limited or third person omniscient and never in second person anything.
One idea I had after reading your two comments was having a "partial transcript" line at the start but that would imply all sorts of things I hadn't wanted to imply in the first place, mainly there being some sort of oversight bureaucracy on Death.
I'm not sure how to really take into account Pascoite's advice since it was all hinged on the fact the story was intended to be second person narrative when it was not.
But Death of the Author and all... .

No_Raisin:
Something I find strange but also curious is that the speaker claims that the word to describe its occupation has yet to be created, but it's clearly meant to be like an angel or the Grim Reaper.

The "Sadly you currently have no proper words in your language for what I am." line is referring to species not occupation. I was saying here that, as of this person's death, the human language can't describe what a Reaper is. They are literally Indescribable because the language lacks the words needed. This implies a lot of things about what the Reaper looks like.