The winners of the rounds are determined by their ranking, and only the top X many contestants move on to the next round. In Round 1, I ranked 7 out of 15 (you had to make top 15 to move on). For Round 1, there were 63 writers per group, and there were 110 groups, and 6932 people total in the competition. Now we're down to 1650 people left.
My Assignment:
Genre: Historical Fiction
Action: Trying to make someone laugh
Word: date
My Entry:
The Best Medicine
Rows of beds inside and rows of small coffins outside. Diphtheria mercilessly tears through Nome. A nurse crosses another date on the calendar. Seven days since the last dose.
She sits in the children’s ward by candlelight. With hands on either side of her head, she crosses her eyes and wiggles her fingers, trying to make her young patient laugh. Comfort en lieu of cure. Her mask hides her absent smile.
Barking dogs wake the ward in the early morning. There’s no longer need to make faces or wiggle fingers to find laughter. The serum, and hope, has finally arrived.
My Feedback: Thanks for participating!
(the judges were numbered and anonymous )
Dear Salem Arh,
The feedback from the judges on your 2nd Round submission from the 100-word Microfiction Challenge 2021 is below. You should be proud of making it to the 2nd Round from an original field of nearly 7,000 writers and rising to both challenges along the way. Thank you for participating, stay safe, and we hope to see you in a future competition!
''The Best Medicine'' by Salem Arh -
WHAT THE JUDGES LIKED ABOUT YOUR STORY -
{2114} I liked your premise of focusing on the other side of the famous "Balto" tale. Your first line was chilling and immediately hooked me into your story.
{2116} This story's best lines come when we are completely in the moment. I loved the description of the faces the nurse makes to cheer up the children. It's a precise description.
{2104} Thank you for writing this story. I had no idea that there had been a diphtheria outbreak in Alaska. You have written about this terrible event with care and respect and your descriptions are wonderful. Your first sentence is actually a sentence fragment but it works so well as a hook. The image of the rows of beds inside is comforting, and then you hit us with the rows of small coffins outside. What a powerful image! Well done. I also think that it was a good choice, writing this story in the present tense. It adds urgency.
WHAT THE JUDGES FEEL NEEDS WORK -
{2114} I think for this tale to have a larger emotional impact, changing to the first person in the nurse's POV, would help that. Instead of just a generic nurse, who is this woman? Does she know these victims? Have her children died? What does she feel when the serum arrives? Giving the reader a human being to care about in your story will forge an even deeper emotional connection.
{2116} The last paragraph could use more of that precision that makes the previous descriptions so vivid. The first sentence in that paragraph, "Barking dogs wake the ward in the early morning," is fantastic because it gives us a clear image, but the last two draw us into a vague space, away from what's happening. Can you show us the moment when she sees or knows that the serum has arrived, and what she does?
{2104} I think this story would be even better had you written this in the 1st person POV. This must have been a terrible time for the nurse and trying to make the children laugh when she has no idea if they will be saved or not must have been excruciatingly painful. I wanted to see that pain in the nurse followed by hope. I also think that this story is one that could really benefit from being written, at least partly, in deep POV. It would help your readers settle right into the shoes of the nurse and it will carry them along to the conclusion. If you would like clarification on any of this, you could check out these websites (I have no affiliation):
Showing vs telling: https://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/showing-and-telling-the-basics.html
Deep POV: https://writersinthestormblog.com/2014/10/diving-deep-into-deep-point-of-view/
Writing in 1st Person: https://writersedit.com/fiction-writing/7-essential-guidelines-for-writing-in-first-person/