Hi all, I’m new here. I’ve been writing fiction for a while but only just starting to send things out for publication. I have however had quite a few non-fiction articles published, mostly personal accounts about my mental health (I suffer from mental illness). I wrote a short story about a teenager in a contemporary fantasy world (I write YA) who has OCD. I wrote it for an anthology seeking stories about characters in fantasy settings with mental illness. It got shortlisted but then rejected. I’ve since sent it out to three more publications and today I got a rejection from one. They gave me the following feedback: ‘While I thought the central concept was very strong, and some of the conversations discussing the character's OCD were well framed, I needed more grounding of the character in her world. While I'm not a huge fan of reams of world building in short stories, I felt the lack of detail here made it harder to relate to the story.’ The feedback I feel is totally valid. I’ve never been great at describing settings. I think this may be because I am so used to writing about my mental illness, which is all about my feelings and it wouldn’t make sense to start describing settings! But I really want to get better at writing fiction so I wondered if anyone has any tips about how to improve my world building without it sounding unnatural? Thanks in advance!
One of the best advice that I was given is using more than one of the five basic senses. Most people just describe what things look like, which is fine. But try using other senses. Is there a distinct smell? What are some of the ambient sounds? Is it cold? Is it hot? And I feel like this works because we do perceive things with more than just sight.
I think that you're treating this as a bigger problem than it is. You say that you're more comfortable writing about your/your character's mental illness, so that's your answer. One way to build your world, that will only serve to enhance the type of story you're writing, is to build your world from your character's eyes. When she looks at the world, what does she see? What does she feel? Does she understand that her world view might not be entirely accurate, or does she think/know that everything she sees is the real deal. What about the world frustrates her, what makes her happy? Have the audience see the world through her eyes. Let them empathize with her by showing them what the world is through her eyes. Show the audience how she perceives the world, and the audience will see it that way as well. Hope this helps!
Is it a short story? Post it in the Short Stories forum and let us have a look at it. I'm intrigued to read it. You'll have to give some feedback in the Workshop before you have permissions to create a post, but it doesn't take long, and the exercise will give you a good idea of what to expect here. Welcome aboard, by the way.
Thanks I don’t meet the criteria yet and I’m really bad at giving feedback as I lack confidence and just think everyone else’s writing is much better and can’t think of any improvements. But I can try! It’s a short story but a long short story! It’s about 5,500 words. Is there a word limit for the Workshop? I am yet to have any fiction published. I’ve had non-fiction published so I know I can write that but sometimes I worry I’m just not good enough at fiction. I know descriptions are something I am not great at. Having said that, this story was written for an anthology and was shortlisted before being rejected. It’s been rejected now from two other publications but Podcastle is reviewing it now (the reader sent it to the editors, and I read that most of the stories they read they don’t pass on to the Editors) so I guess it can’t be that bad... but of course any way to make it better would be great.
There’s no word limit, per se, to the Workshop (at least not that I’m aware of), however there seems to be a limit to the tolerance of readers. I’ve posted fragments of a number of sizes for review, ranging from a few hundred words to a couple thousand, and the shorter ones get reviewed more often than the longer ones. I also posted a story of about 8000 words, and that got some feedback, but it took a while. Does your story have a number of scenes in it? I’d make one post per scene. Also, regarding the quality of writing and your ability to critique, think of it this way: saying “I liked it” is a critique. It’s not terribly useful, but it’s something. If you say “I liked it, particularly the part where Bob showed Nancy his aquarium, because of the description of the fish” is a lot more useful. Saying you didn’t like something isn’t helpful without additional description of why. Most useful is, “I recommend delving a little further into the mental illness of your secondary character Bob, particularly given the part where he completely describes (vibrantly) an aquarium to Nancy where one clearly doesn’t exist. Also, your description of Nancy’s reaction falls a little flat, at least to my reading.” Dive in. Critiquing takes a little getting used to, but once you get it, you’ll be fine. Also, a scant few of us (not to include myself) are experts.
Thanks! I’ll give it a go. Yes I think there are scenes. I’d have to look back, I haven’t looked at it for a few months.
