Writing Battle 2023 Autumn Short Story Contest

The Writing Battle 2023 Autumn Short Story contest is underway.

We had five days to write a 2,000-word story based on three random prompts.

Writing Battle is always lot of fun!

Finally, December 2, 2023. The end of peer reviews and we may share our story.

Read the story first before you read my deconstruction.

Storyboarding

We had five days to write a 2,000-word story based on three randomly generated prompts. The cards I drew for the story were great.

When I started, I wanted to do something different from what I figured other folks would write. I deliberately wanted to avoid the traditional tropes of Halloween (candy, kids, costumes, graveyards, etc.) and write about how Halloween was celebrated in an earlier era.

Halloween, as we understand it, is a relatively modern invention, and wasn’t roundly practiced in the United States until the 1920s.

The 1930s was the Depression and the era of Midwest refugees due to the Dust Bowl, and I picture kids in tattered costumes going door to door asking for handouts.

However, in the 1930’s, the wealthy, thriving elite wasn’t taking their kids around house to house, or answering doors to gift free candy. Rather, they would gather for Halloween seances to audaciously call upon passed family or deceased celebrities like Harry Houdini. These guys thought they were so entitled to demand the attention of the dead.

Now we were getting somewhere.

I had my setting: early 1930s, Halloween (Samhain), a seance (a gathering) sponsored by an entitled wealthy couple in a private estate in Newport, Rhode Island. Now, I still needed my medium when I came across these images on the Internet. Perfect!

2013. The Guardian. The Science of Seances.

2023. Unknown Photographer.

Now that I had the major elements of my story lined up, I needed to involve a relatable protagonist, someone we could sympathize with in a room of rich, entitled monsters. I chose a little girl.

Story Composition and Main Character

I wanted to write a Quiet Horror that would be unsettling and spooky but not outright bloody and terrifying.

I intentionally wanted to omit the details of Charlotte’s gruesome death; it seemed inappropriate to revisit a horror cast on a small child. I don’t explicitly mention it, but it’s implied in the story.

I felt the story needed to be told in 1st Person Present to create suspense, and the reader needed to be faked out with a bait and switch. I would make them think they were inside the head of Charlotte’s mother, but I also wanted to take the time to comment on being a ghost.

In my opinion, a ghost’s inner thoughts — their perception — wouldn’t be the same as they’re an incorporeal being straddling a space between mortality and death. They’re not limited by the bounds of senses or time.

I wanted the ghost’s narration to be an otherworldly intelligence capable of knowing the fears and demise of mortals, and Charlotte would experience this uncanny perception for the first time. My ghost doesn’t “talk” until Madame Petrescu channels her, and when she does “talk”, I wrote her cadence as an eight-year-old girl.

She’s experiencing actual sensation for the first time and is drawn to it, curious, but also held in place by the medium’s circle. Inasmuch, I wanted to “M. Night Shyamalan” the reader and scare them subtly, like when Charlotte whispers into Margaret’s ear or considers how Margaret will die. I wanted to suggest that ghosts know the fates of mortals but opt not to share them, as Madame Petrescu suggests.

I liked that, something lurking, waiting for us in the dark, that knows our greatest fears and how we will die, yet has the will to act on it as a perceived vulnerability or keep it hidden from us.

I distracted the reader to believe the ghost of Charlotte is monstrous with a hideous mouth, but that turns out to be something else in the end.

Child Concealment/Infantcide Theme

Child concealment, infanticide, and child abandonment were (are) a real thing. Parents taking extreme measures to conceal the birth of a child gave rise to laws and protective services for children in the US around the turn of the 20th century. Charlotte’s dad selfishly attempts to conceal the child to avoid embarrassment and protect his family's fortune.

Mother/Daughter Theme

When the twist arrives, and the reader figures out we’re really in Charlotte’s head and not Eleanor’s, I get to pile on the descriptive language and set the gist of the story into motion: the seance becomes a neutral ground where two ghosts — silenced by death — can communicate and reconcile.

Voices are given to both characters so Eleanor can finally apologize to Charlotte and relieve the burden and anguish that traps her soul.

“I imagine the ghost of a mother, recently slain by a murderous husband, her soul trapped on Earth where she must listen to her living daughter gasp and scrape under the floorboards for days, the child’s life ebbing, her scratching and pleas for rescue becoming less frequent, powerless to intervene, or say anything to comfort the child’s passing.”

Meanwhile, Charlotte’s trauma is what binds her to the house, and I imagined the bitterness the child must feel for thinking her mom betrayed or punished her, but she doesn’t have the full story. The seance reveals the story.

Reconciliation and Redemption

The end tries to take a horror story and make it about mother/daughter reconciliation and redemption. Given a voice, both can reconcile.

Honestly, I wanted to include a lot more dialogue between them but I bumped up against the word limit.

Charlotte, freed by the knowledge her mother didn’t betray her or punish her, is released, and I imply she goes to a better place in a brazen attempt to wrap the story up with a feel-good ending.

Where It Can All Go Wrong

Critically, the story is slow-paced and doesn't directly address Halloween. I think that’s the biggest issue judges might have if they split hairs.

Someone might say I’m doing much more telling than showing, a stylistic choice of my own.

The pacing is problematic and I wrap too soon on their conversation at the end.

Charlotte, as a supernatural intelligence, is a tough sell. It would be easy for someone to say, “Nah, I don’t buy this narrator is an eight-year-old girl.”

Scoring reveals are on Dec 8th and 10th. Fingers crossed!

Okay, it’s December 8, 2023, and the results are in … but I’m out!

My story scored 6/10 in my cohort.

I feel my story underperformed in the peer judging by two points — I had hoped to land around 8 or 7, accepting its problems — but apparently, I couldn’t convince that extra soul to click YES on it! Things looked pretty good for me until round four when I suffered a catastrophic loss.

The story would have had a fighting chance if I had won against any of these two stories, and it should have beaten What Lonely Men Do In Space which ended up with a final score of 5.

I also find it interesting that I won against Winnie (Not the Pooh) and the Demon, Too, in round three, although that story got past me into the finals.

Well, thems the breaks! In the meantime, I’ll clean this story up and see if I can’t find a market for it.

Congrats to the winners!