Project Brief 1 contained, for me, an ugly little second-person whinge. Obviously I’m not exactly thrilled with it — I guess it has its moments — but it was a very deliberate exercise. My exegesis is below.
Straight off the bat, I know that this story’s pretty subpar. It’s just that Matthews’ specifications for a successful short story annoyed me to the point of wanting to do them in as thoroughly as possible (the irony being that in doing that, I proved him right). Rather than pin down the reader to a very specific sense of time, place and character, I wanted to experiment with letting it float in the air, as ambiguously as possible. If it were presented a play, as Matthews suggests a good short story would be, I’d like it in a pitch-dark theatre with voices run through scramblers.
Time and audience are two other narrative elements that I wanted to play around with, seeing that we’ve covered them so thoroughly so far in the Story Lab. I chose the structure of a week because I thought it would be easier to play around with; relying on my audience to know Thursday comes before Friday seems a fairly safe bet. I wanted to leave little clues in that would only really make sense as the story’s read, like the saga of the $7 Harper’s Bazaar. As for the audience, writing in second person made it harder to pin down the narrator and therefore easier to identify with them, broadening it as far as possible.
The detached narrative and “floating events” did give the piece a sense of looseness and in coherency. If you were to continue with this style I would suggest using more interconnected events such as the $7 Harpers magazine event. It is rewarding for and audience when something isn’t clear and becomes clear later on.
In regards to the Matthews reading, I think it was a clear experiment with structure and style. I don’t necessarily disagree with everything in the reading, I don’t believe that all short stories must follow one action, one place on one day, but I do believe that a good story is, for the most part coherent, or at least provokes thought around the events described. The structure of your piece was purposefully negating any association with his theory, therefore maybe this story was lost in the fray.
I am not sure if this was the desired effect however, the use of second person disconnected the narrator from the action and therefore made it more difficult to identify with the events described.
The voice of the narrator was rather interesting, I liked the part about how the narrator believed that they wouldn’t fit in their own boat party fantasy – this was a real insight into the character.
I really like the simile about the uncooked turkey and the first line of the second paragraph. Great work!