Young Writers Society

The lighthouse was made redundant in 1999. The lights were not removed, but made powerless by officials with clipboards. Its position now on the cliff was sentimental; it was a postcard landmark of a town with three caravan parks and a Woolworths. In turn, His presence in the house of the lighthouse keeper was a jovial prank played on the both of them. One morning in 2005 He peered over his cup of tea at the lighthouse and considered the position they had found themselves in. Their redundancy was not so dissimilar to an early retirement, a mutually respectful removal from the situation of life. In a way, they were veterans of harder times. A once vigilant giant loomed over hidden daggers, ever aware but silently complacent in the face of mortal peril, and a small man in cargo pants was alone in his kitchen, lost. Most mornings He did what he could with himself. He ate breakfast, watched whales in distance and fed potato chips to colourful birds. But this morning, He couldn’t find himself. A fog had descended like a cold breeze and briefly he was floating upside down, unsure of which way the world was supposed to go. Upon righting himself, He set to work finding the kettle, and brewed a cup of tea doubly strong so he could find himself. This brought him to the lighthouse. He pondered many of life’s greatest questions, is there a god? How were we created? What is art? How can we navigate the complicated machinery of life? Is tomato really a fruit? Why does the perfect cup of tea elude all who try to brew it for themselves? Why do we all feel so very very alone? But most importantly, a question ached inside his rib cage with increasing fervour. Without a light, is a light house still a light house?

It had been five years since He moved in to the lighthouse. Once upon a time He had lived in the city. He worked in an office job and drank coffee on the train. But one day He had to go. So He went. He drove to the coast, and ambled up the jagged lines until he found the old lighthouse and the advertisement in the foggy window of the real estate agent’s. He’d had romanticised views of learning to surf and letting his tension waft away from him like a released kite but the lighthouse reached in to that aching wound and he was filled not with air but with lead. He was a dead weight, thrown miles away to be anchored against the mossy cliff and the chipped paint of a bitter lover.

So as He sat and contemplated the existence of a Lighthouse, He allowed his mind to wander, and finally settle on a very curious incident. On the previous night he had decided, quite out of character, to go for a walk on the beach. As the soft cold sand parted beneath his bare feet he tried to make sense of what lay before him, but in the cool darkness he could not make out ocean from sky. He continued on his slow path until the lighthouse grew smaller behind him and finally disappeared as he stumbled around the rocky headland. And then, with the kind of cool collection He had never possessed, He bent over double and introduced himself to the sand. The sand, as one would expect, said nothing in return, so content with his progress He continued onward, rolling with the light banter he didn’t know himself capable of. Upon reaching the end of the beach, he turned swiftly and said his polite goodbyes to the fastest friend he had ever made. And so it was that the next morning he made a decision about a lighthouse.

The cement stairs were hidden behind a thick layer of dirt and cobwebs, a funeral home for cockroaches and flies. His journey up the steep flight was slow, as his fear allowed him to pause at every hint of movement to assess the risk involved in continuing. The glow from his torch bounced off the flaking walls and created monstrous shapes to follow from in front of him, glancing back to reinforce his grim determination. On his left a former boss fell into step with him and leaned in to offer him a familiar wink as his mother crouched down two steps above him to speak with an eight-legged compatriot. A parade danced its way up forgotten steps, lovers shaking hands with high school teachers and pets running playfully in circles around his tired feet. As he reached the top of the winding staircase the parade began to spin with increasing speed, melting in to a whirlpool of colour to coat his skin thickly with shining heat as though he were covered in a slick rainbow of oil. And so in a blink he was staring into the darkness from a salt crusted window.

He stood inside the soul of a wounded animal, his soul flashing brightly on his skin while beneath their private jail a war was raged. It was a brutal, dramatic, familiar display of anger and frustration, an invitation so difficult to refuse. It called to them both, slipped inside their ears and spoke of what came next, of what came finally. It pulled and pulled and pulled, manipulating their physicality in to a weapon of its own. But He could not be dissuaded. He turned to his soul mate, to the dead weight on his chest, and he danced. He danced with no sense of urgency, no sense of anger, only with great expectation. He twisted and turned his rainbow body around the empty shell, coating its transparent walls with the same shield his memories had shared with him. He danced his way inside of the cage and it began to fall around him, he was curling in to a ball, spinning wildly, filling the space with himself and illuminating not only everything around him, but all that lay beneath them. His feverish light fell upon the sharp danger below them and shot out toward the horizon, turning the darkest parts of the ocean into liquid flame. He was igniting them both, setting flame to the war that had kept them both anchored, outlining thousands of paths for them to follow. He was burning them both through, melting them until they found each other standing bare. Standing bare in the face of their future.

Firstly, wow! This is a really perceptive and amazing story -- it has a lot of great imagery and turns of phrase. I'm not sure I fully understood the point of the ending, but I'm really glad that the character didn't decide to commit suicide (I was worried this would happen, and that would be a tad clique).

Secondly, paragraphing. I understand that sometimes run-on paragraphs are good, from the point of view of portraying the character's state of mind. However, in this case I think that they are very long, which makes the ending harder to understand. It also makes the piece seem less "approachable", which would be a shame, because it is a fantastic piece of writing and you don't want to scare away readers.

The lighthouse was made redundant in 1999.

My English teacher says you should always anchor stories in time and place. I'm not sure that would apply in all situations, but here, it works well. It gives the piece a good sense of specificity.

The lights were not removed, but made powerless by officials with clipboards.

Great sentence.

Its position now on the cliff was sentimental; it was a postcard landmark of a town with three caravan parks and a Woolworths.

Another great turn of phrase. I'm loving the piece so far.

In turn, His presence in the house of the lighthouse keeper was a jovial prank played on the both of them. One morning in 2005 He peered over his cup of tea at the lighthouse and considered the position they had found themselves in. Their redundancy was not so dissimilar to an early retirement, a mutually respectful removal from the situation of life. In a way, they were veterans of harder times. A once vigilant giant loomed over hidden daggers, ever aware but silently complacent in the face of mortal peril, and a small man in cargo pants was alone in his kitchen, lost.

I like this part too -- at first I was a bit confused by the capitalisation of "He", thinking that the story might be about God, but I get the point of it and think it works. I also like how the lighthouse is set up as an almost sentient character.

Most mornings He did what he could with himself. He ate breakfast, watched whales in distance and fed colourful birds potato chips.

The first criticism I can find in this piece (I got down this far without finding anything problematic!) is the phrase "colourful birds potato chips", which is a tiny bit confusing or ambiguous. "fed potato chips to colourful birds" might be clearer.

But this morning, He couldn’t find himself. A fog had descended like a cold breeze and briefly he was floating upside down, unsure of which way the world was supposed to go.

Another image I love.

Upon righting himself, He set to work finding the kettle, and brewed a cup of tea doubly strong so he could find himself. This brought him to the lighthouse. He pondered many of life’s greatest questions, is there a god? How were we created? What is art? How can we navigate the complicated machinery of life? Is tomato really a fruit? Why does the perfect cup of tea elude all who try to brew it for themselves? Why do we all feel so very very alone?

At first I thought these images were becoming too comically trivial, but I can actually see the deeper meaning in the less "obvious" ones now. I like how this shows that you've put a lot of thought into this piece.

But most importantly, a question ached inside his rib cage with increasing fervour. Without a light, is a light house still a light house?

Great -- this ties in fantastically with the theme of redundancy and retirement (being past one's prime) which is conveyed so well throughout this whole piece.

It had been five years since He moved in to the lighthouse. Once upon a time He had lived in the city. He worked in an office job and drank coffee on the train. But one day He had to go. So He went.

I love the non-specificity of this: "He had to go. So he went." Fantastic!

He drove to the coast, and ambled up the jagged lines until he found the old lighthouse and the advertisement in the foggy window of the real estate agent's. He had romanticised views of learning to surf and letting his tension waft away from him like a released kite but the lighthouse reached in to that aching wound and he was filled not with air but with lead. He was a dead weight, thrown miles away to be anchored against the mossy cliff and the chipped paint of a bitter lover. And so, five years later, he made a decision about a Lighthouse.

Excellent -- I like how you've subverted the "romanticised views", and throughout the piece given an alternative, much deeper portrayal of the character's relationship with the lighthouse.

The cement stairs were hidden behind a thick layer of dirt and cobwebs, a funeral home for cockroaches and flies. His journey up the steep flight was slow, as his fear allowed him to pause at every hint of movement to assess the risk involved in continuing. The glow from his torch bounced off the flaking walls and created monstrous shapes to follow from in front of him, glancing back to reinforce his grim determination.

Now, here I got the idea that he was going to commit suicide. I'm not 100% sure that that's not what happens. But if it's not, I love how you've set this up like he will jump off the top of the lighthouse, but then subverted the reader's expectations.

On his left a former boss fell into step with him and leaned in to offer him a familiar wink as his mother crouched down two steps above him to speak with an eight-legged compatriot. A parade danced its way up forgotten steps, lovers shaking hands with high school teachers and pets running playfully in circles around his tired feet.

Interesting imagery again. Are these all the people from his life?

As he reached the top of the winding staircase the parade began to spin with increasing speed, melting in to a whirlpool of colour to coat his skin thickly with shining heat as though he were covered in a slick rainbow of oil. And so in a blink he was staring into the darkness from a salt crusted window. He stood, his soul flashing brightly on his skin, in [is this "in" meant to be here?] the soul of a wounded animal. Outside of their private jail a war was raged beneath them. It was a brutal, dramatic, familiar display of anger and frustration, an invitation so difficult to refuse. It called to them both, slipped inside their ears and spoke of what came next, of what came finally.

Again, I'm getting a sense of a suicidal theme here. Is the point that they are thinking of jumping off, or am I interpreting it entirely wrongly? This is where I think that paragraph breaks would help.

It pulled and pulled and pulled, manipulating their physicality in to a weapon of its own. But He could not be dissuaded. He turned to his soul mate, to the dead weight on his chest, and he danced. He danced with no sense of urgency, no sense of anger, only with great expectation. He twisted and turned his rainbow body around the empty shell, coating its transparent walls with the same shield his memories had shared with him.

This image is interesting, although I don't fully understand it.

He danced his way inside of the cage and it began to fall around him, he was curling in to a ball, spinning wildly, filling the space with himself and illuminating not only everything around him, but all that lay beneath them.

Tiny nitpick: between "around him" and "he was curling", there should perhaps be a full stop, colon or semi-colon (I personally prefer colons to semicolons, but that's a personal preference), as the ideas are not quite linked in a way that calls for a comma.

His feverish light fell upon the sharp danger below them and shot out toward the horizon, turning the darkest parts of the ocean into liquid flame. He was igniting them both, setting flame to the war that had kept them both anchored, outlining thousands of paths for them to follow. He was burning them both through, melting them until they found each other standing bare. Standing bare in the face of their future.

Great ending! I like how it ends with dancing, and the thought of the future, when it begins with these complex ideas about retirement and redundancy.

One thing I would say is that I'm not sure exactly what sparked this progression in the ideas -- you just say that he "made a decision about a lighthouse". Although you don't want to completely spell it out, maybe it would be good to slightly hint at what caused him to make the decision he did.

Overall, this is a fantastic piece. I cannot get over how amazing your characterisation is of the lighthouse and the man, as well as this abundance of very original and inspired images.

Keep writing!

I think the user above me covered most of it, but I'd like to point out that some paragraphs and seperation would be nice. On these computer screens, it's hard to concentrate when the text is all in blocks.

This wasn't much of a review, but keep writing!
-Dai

Hi, Fizz.

This piece has some real gems of imagery, but I feel like they're a little buried at the moment, and there are a few things you could do to really make them shine. To pick an example, I love your description of the nearby town ("a town with three caravan parks and a Woolworths").

The first suggestion I'd like to make to improve this is to do with paragraphing. At the moment, this is a wall of text, which makes it harder to read - it's always harder to keep track of where you are in the middle of a big block of text, so your reader will miss bits, which would be a shame. It is better to break up big blocks into paragraphs, and then use chapter breaks or extra line breaks to make clearer distinctions between sections of a story. A general rule of thumb for paragraphing is to start a new one every time the action changes. So, a couple of examples in this piece: try breaking it up when you move from introducing the lighthouse and Him to the morning in 2005, and then again when you switch to describing how his mornings play out ("Most mornings...").

Next, I'd like to talk about the introduction to this. I've already mentioned that I love the Woolworths line, but it's a little stuck behind the start of the paragraph. These first sentences have a slightly...textbook-y feel to them, and while I'd hesistate to call it an infodump, because this isn't a bad place to introduce this information, it feels a bit awkward and doesn't quite flow. I think it might be the use of the passive voice; perhaps moving it into active would help.

There's a little bit in this first paragraph that confuses me: the bit where "briefly he was floating upside down". It's not entirely clear whether you mean this literally, or metaphorically. If it's literal, it's a bit sudden, unexpected, and subsequently unexplained. If it's metaphorical, I'm not sure what 'being upside down' is supposed to suggest is happening.
I quite like what you've done with the 'life's questions' part, raising the lighthouse question up to the same importance as the others. However, I think the questions are a little distracting. In general, 'three is a magic number' applies with things like this - try picking just three of the questions, and make them short and punchy so that they don't distract the reader too much from the important one, which is of course the lighthouse one.

Now, in the second paragraph, we get a whole load of backstory. I appreciate that it's quite hard to get important backstory into a short piece like this without info-dumping it, but I'm going to bring up that oft-quoted writing mantra "show don't tell". By this, I mean that at the moment, you are telling us his backstory straight, as the narrator, saying "he used to do this then he did this". A few small tweaks could make this feel a bit less 'told' and a bit more 'shown' - for example, you could make this his thought pattern, rather than a narrated passage: He thought back to the years in the city, with his office job, drinking coffee on the train. You could also expand it a little - what did he feel about his office job? Why did he have to leave?

I like the imagery you have at the end of this second paragraph - the kite/air/lead ideas are lovely. I have just one small grammatical correction to make (because I'm a bit crazy about grammatical perfection, I'm afraid). In the sentence about his thoughts of surfing: He had romanticised views should read He had had romanticised views. This is because you are writing in the past tense, and the romanticised views were further in the past than the setting of the story. An alternative might be something like 'he had dreamt'.

The last sentence of the second paragraph is slightly confusing. It's not clear what decision has been made, or why, or how this follows from the dreams of surfing and being drawn into the lighthouse. Perhaps if you expanded this idea a little more, it would be clearer what is going on.

On a similar note, at the start of the third paragraph, the action of the story has leapt to some concrete stairs, and the reader doesn't know where they are, where they came from, how we got there. A little more explanation wouldn't go amiss. This applies again a little later: you now mention "his fear" - again, it is unexpected. Up until this point, the character has seemed philosophical and ponderous, rather than at all afraid. Why is he scared? Is it the stairs that scare him, or has he always been scared?

I'm afraid I find quite a lot of this last paragraph confusing. Some of it is described very nicely, but I'm having trouble visualising what is going on or understanding why. The visions of figures from the character's past were nice, but then they turn into a whirlpool of colour, and there's something to do with souls that isn't quite clear. Similarly, the war metaphor feels like it needs to be grounded into something - I assume it's describing the stormy sea beneath him, but it's not obvious.

Despite the confusion, I do love how the piece ends with returning light to the top of the disused lighthouse. It feels like we have come full circle, and that's a nice feeling.

So, overall: I do like some of the ideas and imagery in this piece, but I think that some things could use a little more explanation or clarification, to save your reader from losing track of what's going on.

Hey again, Fizz.

First, I'm glad my first review was helpful! I'm happy to take another look at the piece, and see what I think of the new version, but because I can't see the old version as well, I might miss things - sadly my memory is not perfect

Now, I still feel that the first paragraph or two could use a little work - I can't see any noticeable change there, so I'll let what I said last time stand for that. On the other hand, I see you have broken it up a bit more, and that's helpful, especially where you've broken up the old third paragraph, which was a bit monolithic. A little more breaking up would probably help a little, but you've made a start and that's a good thing.

You've definitely made the deciding about the lighthouse and the move to the stairs less sudden in this rewrite. The bit about the night before, and talking to the sand, is nice - an intriguing little flashback that raises some interesting thoughts and questions.

I'm still a little confused by the fear as the character climbs the stairs - could you perhaps elaborate, or at least give us a hint as to why he is scared? On the other hand, you've made the bit about souls and wounded animals a little less confusing with your changes near the end - that's better.

I'm glad to see that you've been making changes to this, and I hope you'll rewrite and refine it further, until the gems of imagery shine out without any distractions.

Hey, it seems this has been thoroughly reviewed enough. I felt obliged, however, to post something after reading this piece of work- it's a captivating piece of writing and I enjoyed it very much Keep it up!

This pulled me in, but like others have said the giant blocks of text intimidated me and made it difficult to read. Great job though! Keep writing!
---Shooting Stars