A modest proposal for fixing short-form fiction
Seth (real-boy) Godwynn and Jack (talking insect) Atkinson
“You are what you eat,” said The Blue Fairy, unwisely.
Pinnocchio (sic.) turned sly eyes upon the elementary school.
Challenge accepted!
As is quite common here at Edgeverse, Jack and Seth both formulated their own take on the subject matter, before turning in their assignments for the other to laugh insanely over.
So without further ado, here are those takes.
Seth's take
The premise of the horror themed micro-fiction is quite clever, and potentially funny. It relies on basic cultural knowledge of Pinocchio—which is broadly universal—and contains all the information it needs to tell a complete story, while hinting at a wider context.
Where it falls short, however, is in the delivery.
First, I’ll give an example of how I’d approach the delivery, and then explain the main changes I made.
“Never forget,” said the man. “You are what you eat!”
“Interesting…” mused Pinocchio, casting a sly glance towards the local orphanage.
So what did I change and why?
1. Ditch the adverb in the first paragraph.
There are two strong reasons to avoid it, or rather, two reasons why adding it is a mistake.
As a general rule, strong writing avoids unnecessary adverbs. For example, if you find yourself writing “ran quickly,” consider instead: sprinted, dashed, bolted—something vivid and specific. Adverbs in fiction are like granulated sugar in a stew or curry: it adds generic sweetness, but provides no additional texture or complexity; it does nothing to enhance the experience of eating it. Adverbs modify information in a clinical, sterile manner that doesn’t increase the resonance with the reader.
Worse, they often violate the “show, don’t tell,” principle by summarising what should be revealed through action or tone. That’s especially wasteful here, because the second sentence already shows us what “unwisely” tried to tell us.
Now, breaking the rules is not itself a problem, providing you understand the rules and why they’re there. The point is to make you stop and think. It’s a discipline. If you add an adverb, stop, think, why is an adverb necessary here? How could the same information be conveyed without one? If there’s a specific effect you’re going for, an adverb might be the answer, but this is by far the exception rather than the rule.
The second reason relates to the overall structure of this kind of fiction, which benefits from a technique known as delayed context re-framing. The first paragraph is the setup, which should provide most of the information you need to understand the story, but presented in a benign fashion. “You are what you eat” is a common expression that’s harmless enough, so you want the reader to see nothing ominous in it… yet.
Which leads us to…
2. Change The Blue Fairy to something more generic.
The Blue Fairy is a well established Pinocchio character, which gives the reader a lot more information than necessary.
One option is to go for “the cricket”, which starts out as a generic anthropomorphic insect, but when you get to the second paragraph it becomes clear precisely which cricket is being referred to.
I went the route of “the man”. Why? Because it doesn’t matter who it is. The speaker’s identity is irrelevant; what matters is how Pinocchio interprets the message. A generic “the man” keeps the setup neutral, letting the twist do all the heavy lifting. It also avoids tipping the reader off too soon, which is crucial in such a short form story where control of information distribution is everything.
And how could we forget…
3. Change elementary school to local orphanage
At an information level, we understand that elementary schools are occupied by “real boys,” but to most people (including myself, who has a child in elementary school right now), it’s simply not emotionally evocative of anything. It stirs nothing inside the reader.
The local orphanage does.
Throughout recent history, countless stories have been told featuring orphanages, filled with interesting ragtag characters who have been dealt a hard hand in life. Their parents are dead, they’re taken in by a cold, dank institution that barely feeds them, offers them no love, and ultimately they have to fend for themselves to survive. Worse yet, if any number of them just went missing one day, nobody would look for them, assuming they even noticed in the first place.
These are people that the reader can sympathise with, and understanding everything they’ve been through, it seems ridiculously unfair that NOW they have to additionally worry about some cursed marionette stalking them in the shadows with a bloody knife or a really sharp stick. It’s so disproportionate that it becomes hilarious. It pushes all the right emotional buttons.
An elementary school does not.
I also made additional changes for flow, and these were just personal preferences on my part. Any other writer will make their own choices.
At the end of the day, you have to trust the reader to take the pieces you give them and put the story together in their own heads. Evocative language that resonates is crucial to drawing the reader in, and deciding precisely what and when each piece of information will be received allows you to take them on a journey, albeit a very short one in this instance.
Jack's take
What we have here is a very good idea but written by someone who isn’t an author. The difference between an author and a normal person is rampant alcoholism, depression, self-loathing and a terrible gnawing emptiness that can only be filled by violence. But there is also a positive difference, and that is that they have an understanding of how to construct a story so that people can follow it the way they intended. They have a natural, and practised, knowledge of how people think, how their minds work and how their imagination functions. This second fact more or less explains the previous one.
A story, even a story as short as this, needs to be structured so that a casual reader can go over it once and extract all the information in a single pass, and be left with the exact impression that the writer intended. This story fails to do this by making some interesting mistakes. The result is a jarring narrative that is difficult to read and doesn’t lead the audience into the tale in the correct way.
It’s a very simple premise, and a very good one. It relies on the well known trope that Pinocchio, the living puppet, desperately wants to be a real boy. This fact is a key element of his character, although the most popular, and well-established, facet is that his nose grows when he tells a lie.
As soon as you see the name, your mind fills in the details for you, the word is a tag under which your memory has filed all the pertinent details in order of priority.
Because the story relies on our knowledge of this character, it might be better to mention him right from the outset, establishing the framework for the story. In a more fleshed out narrative, we begin with the introduction to establish the world we’re painting and the most important element of that world is the protagonist who will explore it on our behalf. For this reason, I would open with the mention of Pinnocchio, getting our audience thinking about his character. Wisely, it avoids all references to noses or lies, which would set the audience off in the wrong direction, making the story confusing and derailing the flow.
The next problem is ‘The Blue Fairy’. Now, I have no idea who the Blue Fairy is. Apparently she’s a character from the Disney movie but does not exist in other iterations of the tale, at least in that form. This causes a minor problem: it means I have no frame of reference since I haven’t seen the film since long before I was a self-loathing, depressed, borderline-alcoholic. Such details are lost to the fogs of time. Another issue is that mentioning her first shifts her to the position of protagonist which she cannot be since it’s not her actions driving the narrative.
There are two other far more well-known characters, Geppetto, the puppet-maker who built Pinnocchio, and Jiminy Cricket, a character assigned as his conscience, to drive the protagonist to make good choices. Because these two characters are much better known, there is a much higher likelihood that they will resonate with the audience. Interestingly, either one would have been a better choice to deliver this line, one being essentially a father offering good advice, the other suggesting a moral path. In both cases, they make more narrative sense as well as forging a stronger connection with the reader.
The grammar and syntax is poor in the original story and it makes reading it less pleasant and rewarding than it could be. The Blue Fairy has all three words of the title capitalised, which goes against conventional norms. This doesn’t appear to be a narrative choice but a minor grammatical error. However small an error it might be, the audience unconsciously is aware of it. On some level, we really notice everything.
The first sentence ends with the word ‘unwisely’, which too strongly signposts the nature of the story. It’s hammering a message home that needs only a gentle tap. Likewise ‘turned sly eyes’ is a poor narrative choice. The word ‘sly’ doesn’t properly encapsulate the intended meaning the author is trying to convey.
All of this shows a lack of writing maturity and experience. While this is not unexpected, if you were to apply this to a larger story, can you imagine what you might end up with? The answer is probably, fifty million dollars if you included multiple references to sex dungeons, but from a creative standpoint, it wouldn’t be a cohesive story. That’s a shame in this case, because the idea is one that warrants a little more care.
Pinocchio nodded as Geppetto placed an apple on the table, and told him, “You are what you eat.”
He turned slowly to gaze out of the window to the elementary school and began to smile cruelly to himself.
The revised version places Pinnocchio as the main character, his thoughts and actions drive the plot and are tethered to his perspective. He is the one who hears what’s being said, and he is the one reacting to it. We’ve shifted him front-and-centre so that the audience isn’t confused about what’s happening.
We’ve selected Geppetto to deliver the message. I chose him because I wanted an action to be involved. I didn’t just want him saying it, I wanted it to feel more natural. For that reason, he places an apple before the puppet and then adds the comment. Jiminy Cricket cannot perform such an action so I rejected him for the role.
The second sentence ramps upwards. Again, I wanted an action so Pinnocchio now turns to look through a window at the school first. At this point, the audience still isn’t sure why. The final message is that he smiles cruelly. It is only at this point, right at the end, that we finally connect the dots and work out what he’s thinking. We don’t want to deliver that message any sooner, it’s our final reveal and it belongs in the last few words.
Pinnocchio was told by Geppetto, “You are what you eat.”
He looked at the children outside and began to grin.
A more simple and concise version might work better for the intended purpose. It certainly nails the message home, it keeps Pinnocchio as the main driving force behind the narrative, it cements a well-known character into the story and it closes with a ‘grin’, a dark little note that the audience will understand.
The previous version allows the story to breathe more, the second works more quickly.
Both include small changes over the original that make a big difference. Writing isn’t as easy as it looks, it takes practice and understanding of how the mechanisms work. But if you put in the effort, it allows you to lead the imagination of the audience anywhere you want them to go.
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