Evolving a Story: the writing group feedback loop – Part 1

Infinite loop by Faruk Ateş
(kurafire)

Several months ago, I started a new story during a writing group pomodoro session – I came up with an opening line “We found the rip in our world quite by accident” and ran with it.  A month later there was going to be another pomodoro session where I intended to continue the piece, but I had made a commitment to the writing group to post something new to WattPad by that meeting as well.  So, I dusted off the start of the story, ran it through a cleanup editing pass (sometimes those pomodoro pieces get off in the weeds) and got it released to WattPad:

———————————————————

Team Approach – part 1

We found the rip in our world quite by accident.  Sure, there’d been reports of strange goings on in the Arizona desert, but they’d been filed by some pretty out there folks and it just sounded too incredible.  But, even crackpots want to be heard and eventually the volume caused the signal to overtake the noise and some clarity to rise above the chatter.  So, we dispatched a crew and we took it seriously, sending them with all of the gear they’d need, a well-appointed security detail, and a full support structure back at home base to mitigate the risks should any crop up.  See, we don’t take our responsibility lightly.  When you’re the lone defense against the extra-normal you have to keep things sharp, always striving for dotted i’s and crossed t’s.

The team on the ground covered all of the disciplines: cryptozoology, extra-terrestrial chemistry, ESP, alchemy.  Everyone has at least two areas of expertise so we can be efficient and nimble.  The smaller the crew the less noticeable they are, the easier it is to blend in and act like tourists.  Our security details are dispatched with advanced weaponry, nothing that screams out their purpose – the average joe would be hard-pressed to distinguish them from the scientists.  Our vehicles look normal from the outside, nothing too flashy.  We try to avoid anything that would garner a second glance.  Now, the insides of those vehicles are a different story.  The highest of the high tech, stuff that would blow the mind of that same average joe: sensor arrays, long range scanners, data collection, chemical composition analysis.  You name it, we’ve either got it or are working on acquiring it.

So, when this team hit the ground, they were ready for just about anything – hours of training spent honing their particular skills, turning the extraordinary into second nature and habit.  Makes my job in the command center look like a walk in the park.  I’m more of a coordinator, keeping tabs on the real worlds reactions, making sure the team’s cover sticks.  Even I get some of that high end tech.  There’s not a police force in the country that we can’t tap into to get up to the minute intel.  Even some of the feds are accessible, and the ones that aren’t are already in the know about our missions and keep us in the loop as peers.  Mostly, I think they realize that without us, they’d be dealing with this stuff themselves.

Right away, we realized this mission was turning into something real and important.  The scanners registered something big, the sensor arrays tuned all sorts of disturbance: electromagnetic flux, super-gravitational bursts, extra-terrestrial chemistry – the whole nine yards.  Everyone was going to get a piece of this one.  Then we hit the first snag.  Everything was pointing to a remote piece of land, a small canyon that was privately owned.  It’s easy for us to make our way onto public land or anything managed by a government agency, but private property can get tricky.  I started working up a back story for a few of the team members, hoping we’d be able to bluff our way in for a little sneak and peek.  Once we had confirmation, we could bring in the state or federals to help get everything smoothed over, usually by offering the land owner a swap for something worth much more – usually they were amenable, sometimes not.  We always got in, sometimes it wasn’t pretty, but it was always quietly handled.

So, I put together a usual cover: environmental group looking to verify a species’ habitat in the canyon.  Usually that was better received than going in with a mining and minerals story.  We would send in the cryptozoologist since she could talk the habitat talk.  Even cryptozoology is rooted in regular earth biology and ecosystems.  Then we had to track down the property owner.  It was a desolate canyon, they didn’t live out there, they just owned it.

———————————————————

During the next writing group meeting, once the other members had had a chance to read it through, I got some great feedback:

1. The story had a subtle contradiction: this group apparently has lots of resources (the narrator even says that) but there is a “seat of the pants” vibe.

2. Inconsistent voicing: the narrator tries to be conversational but it slips into sounding like a filed report at times, giving a “well, this already happened” feeling.

3. The first person narrative is likely going to prove limiting since the narrator is removed from the action so everything will be filtered through what he was told, not what he saw himself.

4. What if you focused on the “feet on the ground” and put the action in the present, bringing the reader along for the ride vs telling them what already happened?

———————————————————

Even though I had already written the continuation of the original, I recognized the validity of these observations and embarked on taking things in a new direction (the value of having a smart group of folks whom you trust).  Come back tomorrow to see where I took it from there.