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M-Moya (Season 8 Runner Up)
Mfundo Moya's Submission
Final Score Breakdown:
Creativity and Originality: 25/30 pts
Structure and Organization: 14/25 pts
Engagement and Impact: 17/25 pts
Grammar and Spelling: 6/10 pts
Prompt Adherence: 10/10 pts
Total: 72/100 pts
Creativity and Originality: Low stakes stories involving cooking or baking were all the rage for awhile, but your story is able to incorporate the theme of dreaming quite nicely.
Structure and Organization: This piece felt like you were holding too much back in order to preserve the reveal at the end. It made for some disjointed portions that could leave the reader confused. While the main character was dreaming the future, it felt like there wasn’t enough contrast between the dream state and reality.
Engagement and Impact: The food-themed description of the dawn was the star here. It was a great hook that compelled readers to continue the story.
Grammar and Spelling: There were too many easily fixable mistakes throughout the piece. An editing pass through with MS Word or Google Docs could have solved many of the issues here. Grammar and spelling are invisible when perfected, but mistakes shine bright enough to take most readers out of the story. And that is not where you want them to be. Here are a few examples of what I noticed:
Capitalization: Dostoevsky, New York
Double word: was was in 2nd paragraph
Prompt Adherence: This piece did a good job of following the prompt.
Overall:
This piece felt like it had a couple of interesting ideas that needed to be better connected in order to form a cohesive story. The surrealism of the breakfast dawn was intriguing, and the cooking competition setting was unique and compelling. Despite the dawn sequence, the synesthesia twist at the end felt like it needed more explanation.
However, the main thing that this piece needed was some editing and formatting. There were several words that needed capitalization, some word repetition, and some of the sentence structure didn’t flow as well as it could have. There was also inconsistent indentation throughout. Issues like these take the reader out of the story. Instead of admiring the excellent description of a rising sun, I’m wondering why New York isn’t capitalized.
Still, some of the concepts were compelling and there is an excellent story in there with a little editing.
Writing Challenge:
Suppose you are in a lucid dream of your own creation. This lucid dream lasts for an entire month in your dream world but only one night in the real world and you have complete control over what happens in this dream. Write a 2000-word short story that vividly describes the experience of having this dream. This experience does not need to be exclusive to the events you encounter in the dream itself. Some parts of your story can focus on what happens to you and your surroundings before and after the dream. Finally, the dream you refer to does not need to be a dream you have had before (i.e, you can make up all the relevant details as needed to complete this challenge).
