The piece I’ve chosen to review for this entry is my ‘written adaption’ of our week 2 group work, where we were tasked with creating a narrative through a series of photos. I tried to make the story funny, in the same vein as the original work. It’s difficult to evaluate whether any of it is truly funny, but I’ll look at the strengths and weaknesses of my writing. Firstly for the positives, I wrote in the present tense and apparently that’s what we were supposed to do. I suppose that’s how it’s done in screenwriting, and it’s what I’m generally used to at this point. I felt as if I didn’t go into too much detail describing little things, which (especially in a short story) can drag the pace of the narrative down a significant amount, depending on the tale being told. Another part of the story that I think worked was the description of the road as a chaotic and terrifying place, establishing the world a little bit while putting a different spin on how we portrayed the setting with the original pictures.
I think I could have improved upon several aspects of the story in retrospect. One of the parts I felt to be a strength – a small amount of detail – I also think was a weakness. When I read through the story again I observed that I was just reciting the events that were happening, and didn’t take enough time or effort to make anything particularly interesting. It feels like an order of events in a way and while I don’t perceive this as an issue that sticks out like a sore thumb, there isn’t much flair involved in the work. Take for example this line: “A Ford was accelerating towards her with no signs of slowing”. There’s room for more creativity in lines such as these and they don’t necessarily have to fall into the pit of over describing either. There’s a healthy middle area between these two potential issues and I sometimes find myself struggling to land in there.
Another problem I found with the piece was how I initially established the world in the first paragraph. I used it as an opportunity to try and make a joke about the dryness of RMIT as a setting visually, rather than to actually give the reader an idea of how it looked and its relation to the narrative and characters. I probably wouldn’t change this looking back as I didn’t want the story to be serious, but from certain perspectives this may not have had a place in the writing. Another issue worth pointing out was that I didn’t include the shot of the city morgue at the end. If I remember correctly I didn’t add it because it wasn’t directly related to the rest of the story and would’ve been quiet a time jump. I’ve had difficulty with time jumps when writing stories that aren’t for the screen as I find it hard to tell the audience how far we’ve jumped without going about it too obviously; I can try working on this in the future. As a whole I didn’t mind the piece, for something written in class it was fine (especially considering I didn’t think anybody was going to read it, but here we are), though there were definitely some fundamental issues that could have been ironed out.