|
Adjudicator’s report by Glenis Stott
First of all, I want to say thanks for letting me know what’s behind the green door; now I know that I must never, ever, open it!
Now to the entries. There was a good standard and I
found it difficult to choose between them. I was looking for a story with a beginning, middle and end, but just as importantly, I was looking for a chiller. I had to be chilled; I wanted my spine to turn cold, I
wanted to be made to gasp in surprise. It was an added bonus when the last line twisted the tale that little bit further.
First place went to The Man in Seat 71. I followed Sadie’s journey up to Inverness
with two ghostly companions without suspecting that it was Sadie herself who was dead. There was some great descriptive detail and the narrative flowed all the way through. The ending tied everything together,
‘Grandpa closed the green door with slow deliberation and an aching heart. His beloved granddaughter’s question was answered at last.’
Second was Don’t Leave me at Christmas which had me totally believing
that the grandmother (‘I just don’t want you expecting some nice cuddly grannie’) was the villain when it was Sadie all along, even though she wasn’t aware of it herself. A lot of the back story was presented as
dialogue which made it more interesting and boyfriend, Richard, had a couple of nice jokey lines. Plus there was that last line, ‘Didn’t they know people weren’t supposed to leave at Christmas.’
Third was A
Return to Normal. This Sadie returned home to a physically and emotionally cold house after therapy, only to find that she wasn’t really the one who needed therapy. There was a lot of emphasis on the cold in the
house all the way through and I thought Sadie’s dropping ‘her bag by the cold radiator’ was a particularly good detail. I really liked the last line, ‘The green door finally opened for Sadie.’
I’m sorry to
say that the two Highly Commendeds would have been in the top three if it hadn’t been that they both contained errors which affected my reading of the story. All About Family had half a paragraph repeated in two
places so I had to go back to check I wasn’t mistaken. The Final Frame used ‘mousse’s head’ instead of ‘moose’s head’, a mistake which stopped me in my tracks to imagine a pink wobbling blob hanging on the wall and
made me lose the thread. But, on the positive side, both these stories told me everything I needed to know to understand what was going on, there was a lot of good descriptive detail and I particularly liked All
About Family’s last line, ‘They just couldn’t hear the screams.’
Nearly all the stories focused on family which is probably not surprising given that they were about returning to Torridon at Christmas but,
actually, there was no mention of family in the given sentences so there was potential for other ideas to be used - a hotel, seeing old friends or a university town, for example. Sometimes it’s best not to go for
your first idea but to leave it for 24 hours before you start writing. Brainstorming is another possibility, writing down all the ideas that spring to mind. Fade to Black was a good attempt at originality, being
from a doll’s viewpoint and set in the North Pole, although it didn’t quite work for me this time. It took too long to let me know that this was a doll and the end part, where she’s given to some particularly nasty
children, was too short.
I spotted several punctuation errors, commas and full stops in the wrong place or missing apostrophes. Punctuation can have a big effect how a piece of writing is read. It’s always a
good idea to read your story out loud; that will help you spot problems. I would also suggest that you check you understand when to use its or it’s even if you think you know, just in case
Thanks for sharing
your stories with me. Each had its own merit and it was a pleasure to read them all. Give yourself a pat on the back, or, better still, a cuppa and a chocolate biscuit!
|
