I Must Not Hurt Children by Matthew Taylor - Short, Horror, Micro - A terrified man wakes up in a room with clear written instructions. He better do what the room asks. 1 page - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Fascinating take on eternal punishment, Matthew. You packed a great deal of agony and imagery into one page. One word for this:  Excellent!  

Thanks, Kathy.

It’s a little more crammed in than I would like but it’s for a 1 page competition so I compacted it down as much as I could.

Glad you liked it though  

Certainly does pack a punch. Nice work, Matthew. Wow, the title page just adds that extra macabre imagery too. Not seen a title page add quite that much before.

Can I make two suggestions? The black walls need some kind of illumination or it'd be a cavern that we couldn't even see into, (for added punishment) maybe a bare bulb/spotlight hanging over him? That'd be hot too, like hell, sweat dripping off him..

Write 100 times "I must not hurt children." 10:00
I just copied and pasted that line and upon pasting it revealed the 10:00., not 1000 as I thought it read.

That's why 'the time' appeared off to me without any prior description. Makes sense now, but you might want to think about adding a space 10 : 00. Might be just me, we'll see.

...but his mouth is
professionally sown shut

Just for pure horror I'd ditch the 'professionally sown' bit. In my mind they were big ugly crudely-sewn stitches.

Nitpicks asides, this is terrific. Sure to get picked up. Good luck with it!

Thanks LC

Yep, love the addition of a single exposed bulb that can add a little heat and make him more uncomfortable and sweat. It could also start pitch black and the light comes on suddenly to burn his eyes for a few seconds, make him more disoriented.

I have however, ran out of real estate.

I’ll see how it does in the competition and will probably come back to it and expand a little, try and get a bit more atmosphere in there.

My reasoning for the professional stitches was that this is eternal damnation, the powers that have done this have done it before, so the stitching is perfect. But crude stitches probably visually add more of a horror element.

Oh and yes I agree about the time, I did think myself that it didn’t seem too clear. Never thought about adding a space though, good idea.

Thanks for giving it a read.

Matt

Wow, that was very compelling, Matthew.

Excellent title page also.

For one page, you really packed it in; I was almost claustrophobic reading it

I like the sense where he thinks he gets rewarded for completing the sentences in time, only for the reward to be a window of endless loops.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't   I'll see myself out

Matthew,

Very good. These one pagers are hard to write, even harder to do it well. You pulled one off! Kudos!

Steve

One of the best, if not the best, one-pagers I think I've ever read.

Congrats on a great short.

The Fury. - blown up, put back together, continuous.

A repeated death sentence, tho disimular in execution.

That was chilling... Well done, mate.

This is a fairly well developed story for one page. I have never tried to write a one page story so I wouldn’t know where to start. I have a feeling the OWC may go that way some day if it hasn’t already.

I love the title page. Going with the full-page black to mimic a chalkboard is genius. I’m not sure I would have thought of that but I will now.

The only suggestion I could offer would be “His lips are spiked shut with rusty staples.”
Professionally sown shut made me think he was being held captive by a vengeful, past victim. It wasn’t until he saw his future workload through the window that I realized where he was. I think that made the story better for me. I love stories with an a ha moment.

Good luck with your entry.

Thanks guys. High praise indeed.

Now to stop procrastinating with one-page shorts and actually finish my feature  

Hey Matthew,

I'm pretty much going to echo many others.

Between narrative action, the character, and the plot you've created such an effective use of repetition that puts us in the same state of mind as the character. And it starts on the title page. Well done!

I bumped once and LC touched on it but for a different reason '...but his mouth is professionally sown shut."

I read your reasoning, and it's exactly where my mind had gone, but for whatever reason (maybe it's just me) the word "professionally" in that order draws more attention to itself than the idea being communicated. The phrase "with precision" came to mind for me. I'm not entirely sure how the sentence would be reworked, but yeah that's my small nitpick that doesn't really matter because this is legit. Looking forward to any expansion. Good luck with the competition!

BLB.