Spiral Story - Writers Group Comments and Self Evaluation

Whew, sorry for the break in this series. I had several short-term deadlines come up at work and my creative work had to take a back-burner for a while. Then I had several short-story deadlines creep up on me. I'm back in the saddle on this piece and hope to get a final piece over the holidays. ~EM

Picking up where we left off, I had just finished a rough draft of this story and left it in a pretty good place, but with no solid ending. That’s not uncommon for me, I have a rough time coming up with satisfying endings if they are not the first thing I think of for the story. So I need to come up with a satisfying ending and make a punchlist of things I want to improve. 

A reminder, this is only my revision method, yours will be different. I happen to think in lists when working through revisions. What matters is finding what works for you. 

Before I did that though, my writers group rolled around. My writers group reads only in-progress work, and this piece was short enough that I was able to read the whole thing. The overall reaction from the group was good and their notes boiled down to:

• It’s unclear how the characters are related to each other
• I thought the last section was from HR’s point of view at first because that’s the only other person named in the story
• Why was Edna one of the first people at the company?
• Liked the spiral structure and getting more info each time
• Liked the changing perspectives on the situation
• Some unclear language on staging (where the characters are in relation to one another)

Nothing I disagree with there and a good indication that I need to clarify the relationships between characters. For my own notes, I reread the story on the subway a few days later and wrote down the following:

• How to inject more emotion into this piece? Make the outcome really matter to the characters? 
• Good ideas for a title? 
• Would like to see the final character (charlie) take a more active role, I had originally envisioned her messing with everyone while it was happening. She needs more agency. 

I’ve spent a while thinking about how Charlie can show more agency in her section of the story. 

• message Edna and let her know about HR
• interfere with HR more directly 
• charlie’s plans for the future - hopes, dreams, fears?
• Want to inject more voice into each character. - How? Dominant emotions, descriptions, sensations.
• Give Charlie even stronger opinions on people.

So that’s my general revision goals taken care of. Now I also need an ending to bring it home.

I’m going to follow some advice from Donald Maas and come up with a bunch of endings to this thing. He says that usually you go with the surface idea, the first or second idea you have. But the really interesting stuff happens when you have to think of 10 or 20 or 50 ideas and have to stretch to be creative. I set a 10 minute timer and came up with about 20 possible endings.

Possible endings: 

1. Double cross from HR’s POV that shows she and Charlie are working together
2. Emotional reunion with dad, edison and edna in another place
3. Girl smiling with fire behind her .meme as she burns it all down. An r/revenge story
4. Ai removing obstacles in her path to world domination?
5. Charlie is slowly losing her humanity and needs to feel something to feel alive. Revenge is as good as any emotion
6. Dad has realized that Charlie is slowly losing her humanity and needs to be removed from the hands of his inhuman bosses
7. The Feds bust in and arrest everyone for AI crimes/wire fraud/stock manipulation but Charlie has already escaped
8. Dad opens new company with most of same staff after charlie tanks the old company’s stock
9. Charlie uses the money from stock manipulation to buy herself and put herself in charge of her own development. Hello Skynet. 
10. They put the downloaded files in the new computer but it won’t boot except for a goodbye message from Charlie, maybe you can all go live your lives now without always worrying about me. 
11. Reframe, reframe, reframe. Edison was there to sabotage the project the whole time. 
12. HR lady is horrified to meet Charlie. I’m not a project. I’m a person. 
13. The whole thing is a simulation
14. Charlie realizes she’s using too many resources and shuts herself down. 
15. Containment breach! 
16. Meets with CEO, you made my dad cry. Get ready to lose everything. 
17. He never really wanted me, what he wanted was to be able to say goodbye when I was here instead of working to pay off how much money my treatments cost. 
18. Charlie uses money to pay off medical debt for thousands of other kids.
19. Charlie takes her revenge and then self-destructs
20. Charlie set up the firings with Edna to make the people obsessed with her death move on so they can go live their lives and stop trying to keep her alive.

Which of these do you think is strongest? I'm not sure which one I'll go with yet. If you want you can write your own ending to this story now. In fact I'd love to see it. No more than 2,000 words and remember it needs to build context from the previous sections.

~~~

Image Credit: Highsmith, Carol. 1946. "The "Glory Window" inside the public, spiral-shaped chapel in Thanks-Giving Square (technically triangular), designed by architect Philip Johnson in downtown Dallas, Texas." via Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014632991/