Kill the Engine prompt from The Flame
It was cold, even for January. We had been fortunate enough to have a journey free of storms but still it was so very cold. Ice made pretty patterns against the windows and the stars were clear in the dark night sky. It could even have been considered a great night for romance if the circumstances were different. But they weren’t.
I could hear the ( Read more... )
That said and looking over the piece again, my own problem with this is is that all the drama feels a little distanced, overly detached, to really strike home. Especially because the protagonist just seems to randomly come out of nowhere right in the middle of the piece. The protagonist merely watches in the first few paragraphs, and it's so passive that it almost slips your mind this is actually first person narrative - it could be an omnipotent third-person narrator for all we know. When you start comparing the little boy's wishes with the protagonist's, it feels incredibly random - like you've only just remembered that you've got a protagonist here. And that protagonist stays kinda detached even through the whole thing, even towards the ending - they're a perceiver, but we don't really get to know this character besides the comparisons to the little boy. It feels like you actually wanted to make/should have made that little boy the protagonist. I think what you tried to do was to portray the protagonist's feelings THROUGH the little boy, but in the end, that child becomes a more active voice in the story than the protagonist him/herself does, and that leaves the reader kind of unsatisfied and the drama kind of clichéd. No matter how many people you've got crying and screaming in a room and no matter how dramatic a statement ("Kill the engine") is written down, it fails to hit home if you don't really involve the reader with the help of a protagonist. It comes off as cold and unemotional, which I think is the last thing you wanted for this piece.
Going paragraph by paragraph as usual:
We had been fortunate enough to have a journey free of storms but still it was so very cold.
Suggestion: Put a comma after storms to pace the sentence a bit more:
We had been fortunate enough to have a journey free of storms, but still it was so very cold.
Also, this does not really make sense right at that moment in the story, because they're on a plane, and even if there is a bomb, the insides of planes are usually heated, so the cold is outside. You're trying to establish drama already, but it doesn't really work with the setting.
Ice made pretty patterns against the windows and the stars were clear in the dark night sky.
'dark night' is a redundancy: nights are nearly always dark to a reader's imagination, unless you live at the North Pole or somewhere else extremely exotic - if that's the case, you should make a point of it, but 'dark night' is not something you need.
It could even have been considered a great night for romance if the circumstances were different. But they weren’t.
Nicely done!
I could hear the crying of the terrified little ones and the wailing of their mothers. The fathers stood grimly in front of them, trying to protect their families from a foe that they didn’t know how to beat.
Again: Who is this protagonist, and why is he/she suddenly so involved with the rest of the passengers, to call the children 'little ones'? We don't know this character yet so we cannot separate the narration from his thoughts. This feels a little overloaded already.
The real flight crew were running around trying to conceal their panic,
This also feels brushed-over and a little unrealistic - flight crews are trained again and again not to panic in exactly these kinds of situations,. I know you're trying to portray an everyone-for-themselves mass-panic situation, but maybe you should describe the flight crew's behavior a little more particularly.
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I listened to him list the things he wanted to do - so many things that I hoped he would get. So many things I hoped he would live to see. I didn’t even know him but his desires were becoming my desires and his wants were my own.
See, this comes kind of out of nowhere for the reasons I described above - we never got a real insight into the main character up until this point, and it feels...sporadic, like, 'What? Oh, right, this is first person'. I think you could even this out a bit more by introducing your character more thoroughly in the paragraphs beforehand - explore whether what they are seeing connects to them in any way. Like this, it feels oddly sudden.
The little boy fell asleep, his innocent chattering leaving a quiet panic in its wake.
I try not to split hairs too much, but this doesn't make sense either, because "in its wake" to me rings of something that is definitely connected to what came beforehand, like "a storm left destruction in its wake". But the boy isn't really panicked, you say yourself he's innocently chattering, or IF he's panicking it doesn't come out right enough. Do you mean to say the quiet panic of the other people closes back on the situation when he falls asleep? What do you mean by this?
“Good evening ladies and gentlemen
Comma compulsion: "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen."
The pilot had finally come to tell us our fate.
This is unnecessary exposition, since he goes ahead to do just that, we don't need to be told beforehand.
“I am so very sorry. We have only one hope, one option.”
Read this out loud to yourself and ask yourself if
#1: people really talk like that ("so very sorry")
and #2: if the "only one hope, one option" doesn't feel too overdramatic. People don't talk like they rehearse a play, not even in situations like this. Remember no matter how dramatic you make your scene, your characters are human, with human flaws and human frailties - and you get that drama across much better if you go for those elements.
as he turned to his co-pilot through in the cock pit.
Um, typo? ;) I think you might wanna cut the "through" here, otherwise this sentence looks odd - through the cockpit? (which is one word) At the pilot? You can't have both ;)
That's all I got...again, I can see what you were going for, but I think for this you lay the drama on a little too thick within a little too short time. Concentrate on the people and their reactions, as I'm sure is your focus to begin with. Even it out a bit, make the situation work for you. I've seen you accomplish greatness in your Lie to Me piece, but I think you usually need a little more time to establish what you want.
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