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Hi!
It’s just a short newsletter today, where I’ll be picking apart some of the choices in last week’s tiny microfiction The Last Game in the Universe. If you’ve not read it, it’s less than 300 words, so go check it out before reading ahead:
Okay, let’s dive in!
Setting the scene and characters (and their pronouns)
I knew this was going to be a fantasy setting, using anthropomorphic personifications.
I learned the term ‘anthropomorphic personification’ from reading Sir Terry Pratchett’s wonderful Discworld books as a teenager. It was such a lovely a complex sounding phrase for something which is so simple and utterly human. In essence, it’s about creating human-ish versions of non-human things. In this case, it’s the concepts of Time and Death.
Obviously, time and death don’t have voices, limbs, or opinions, but through opening with ‘Time watches Death’ I could instantly establish a bit of the genre and set some expectations in the reader.
The capitalisation of ‘Time’ as the first word of the sentence means it could be ambiguous: it could be simply the abstract noun (referring to non-physical concepts like love, or beauty) and only capitalised due to its place in the sentence, or it could be a proper noun (a name of a specific thing, like Paris).
When we reach ‘Time watches’ we suspect we’re dealing with a proper noun, not an abstract noun.
And then we get to ‘Time watches Death’, and we can assume we’re dealing with two creatures whose names are also abstract concepts. Given this is a story, we can assume they are probably embodiments of these concepts—although it’s still possible for them to be children of hippy parents!
I then resolved this lingering doubt in the next sentence, by clarifying they are only slightly anthropomorphised: they certainly aren’t beings on a human scale, and don’t seem to perceive time at the same speed as us:
galaxies whirl, sparking and dimming, colliding and separating. Their bodies span light years, so large they break perception.
The universe visibly changes around them, meaning time is flowing faster in this story, and their bodies are enormous — far beyond the typical boundaries of life as we know it.
The pronouns of Time and Death
Now there’s a subtitle I didn’t think I’d ever write… Anyway…
Given the lack of gendering for these enormous beings, I considered using gender neutral they/them/their pronouns, but it felt like this humanised them too much. These universe-spanning creatures needed to be beyond human. I can’t fully rationalise it, but ‘it’ (the singular, neuter, third-person pronoun) felt more appropriate. Sometimes you have to trust your gut!
Raising the stakes
In most story structures, we need to create a challenge for the characters and then find a way to make it more complex. This could be small (they have run out of tea) or large (the universe is about to end).
In this story, I decided to blend the stakes: a low-stake game between two evenly matched players appears linked to the highest-stake end of the universe.
The characters don’t seem to acknowledge the end of all existence in any way beyond how it impacts on the game they’ve been playing. However, it’s very serious that their playing-pieces keep on disappearing!
This reinforces an important points of writing: your readers only care about the stakes as much as the characters do. This also applies to other places in life, such as public-speaking or job interviews, where you can only expect your audience to be as interested in your topic as the excitement you convey.
As the pieces vanish, the game is at risk:
“We should each hold a piece, so we can finish.”
There’s an implied question for the reader here: in a game between Time and Death, who could win? If Time dies, there is no more existence for Death, but if Death ceases to exist then Time becomes meaningless.
By creating an intriguing question in the story, the reader is encouraged to keep reading.
Resolution
In the end, the answer is a draw: neither can ever win, and it was the companionship that mattered.
We get a little character progression:
It’s revealed that Death only knows one word, '“goodbye”, which it has saved until this moment.
Time implicitly gets to understand its companion better, through hearing this one word.
And then the universe ends, because it must when Time and Death stop playing. You don’t get much more final than that!
Is this horror? Sci-fi? Fantasy?
What genre is this?
The universe ends and stars are casually shattered (horror)
It’s set in space (sci-fi)
There are giant inhuman beings playing a game (fantasy)
The pieces in the game are very abstract and don’t seem to match or follow typical physical rules (fantasy).
In the end, I think this shows how flexible most genre labels can be. Horror is a lens through which different situations can be amplified to the point of crisis. Where we go in our stories with that extreme situation is up to us.
Next week I’ll reveal the rules of the writing exercise I followed which prompted this story for me. It’s a lot of fun, so keep an eye on your inbox!
Have a fantastic week, whatever you’re up to. Go out and be your awesome selves.
Thanks for reading!
Mata xxx