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Review #4341731
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The Plan! (Full Short Story)  [13+]
A short-story about the future of Civilization. Fiction that could very soon be fact!
by Jon Kotchinsky
Review by edgework
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Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
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There's a good bit of imagination evident in this piece regarding the environment, the politics and the problems faced by, well... everyone. But, for all that, you haven't come up with a story. What you have is a situation that you've gone to great lengths to explain, complete with an historical timeline plotting the sequence of events that has led mankind to its present state. Tolkien, you may remember, provided us with something similar in the Appendices at the end of Volume III of Lord of the Rings, a timeline of the 3,000 year history of Middle Earth. This did much to explain some of the relationships and circumstances that we had already encountered, but I might point out that the history, laid out is it was, simply clarified elements that had already been dramatically portrayed in the previous three volumes. While it was a nice addition, it didn't alter the fact that what had held our attention was not back story, but the actual story. Precisely what you have yet to come up with.

You come close at one point, flirting with an actual conflict for Nathan. You know about conflict, I'm sure. That's what forces a character to confront the truth of their situation, make decisions and take actions in an attempt to restore balance to their universe. When St. Jude presents Nathan with his assignment, Nathan realizes that he cannot do what has been asked of him. This, and only this, constitutes the kernel of a story that might well have grown into an actual narrative arc. Unfortunately you bypassed all the decisions-leading-to-actions stuff (you know, the story part), and made a quantum leap to the solution, which succeeds brilliantly. And so, your arc, such as it is, consists of Problem identified > Solution Achieved > Success > End.

All the rest, the history, the explanation of current politics, the scene in the senate chamber, is pretty much busy work, none of which will prompt your reader to reach that most desired of conditions, when he muses to himself "Gosh, I wonder what's gonna happen next." There really is no next, just information. Here's the thing about such material: if you have a crackling story in the present, your reader won't worry too much about the backstory. If your characters are believably portrayed behaving according the parameters of whatever universe you've constructed for them, much will be intuited in the course of the story's unfolding. On the other hand, if you haven't provided a story in the present, all the backstory in the world won't serve as a satisfying stand-in.

What might that as yet untold story consist of? Ya got me. It's not my story. But somehow, you're going to have to create an imbalance in the status quo of Nathan's existence, something that forces him to actually do something, something that confronts the serious obstacle to his continued pleasant existence. Whether this imbalance represents something he seeks to attain, or something which he tries to avoid, it will get him off his butt and make him work. And as he struggles to deal with his situation, your reader will want to keep reading to find out what happens... wait for it... next. Engineer enough of those moments into your narrative, and before you know it, you'll have an actual plot. Upon such a framework, all the peripheral information will find a natural structure from which to make itself known. But it's the story itself that will keep the reader reading.
   *CheckG* You responded to this review 07/29/2017 @ 2:22am EDT
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