This was a good read for me. You've got the writing down well, well enough in fact, that I'm pretty confident in your ability as an author to accomplish what you intend with your work. I suppose then, my comments are going to be more open-ended questions about what you intended artistically than they are open criticism.
1) Conflict
Conflict doesn’t need to be external, of course. It doesn’t have to be well understood from the onset either. Certain people might have difficulty with these, but that only means that the story isn’t for them. That said, there are certain things that must be present in every conflict, and I feel that some of them were lacking here.
The conflict should be distinct by the end. On the first two viewpoint sections, the second really since I felt little was established in the first, the main dramatic questions I’m asking myself are: Will the city allow the Anchor be built? and Will Jana be able to complete her song? What I actually got from the story was a solution to an interpersonal conflict with Aryl that doesn’t get introduced until ¾ of the way through. This is a problem for the reader because he/she doesn’t know what to root for, and worse, still doesn’t know by the end who she SHOULD have rooted for. Furthermore, I still don’t understand how being looked up to is such a conflict for Aryl. People usually like being respected, and it’s hard for me to believe honestly that someone would feel trapped by it unless she’s successfully shown as a really unusual character in this respect (which I wasn’t shown). My question is what you intended for the conflict, what you intended to show by it. There’s plenty of fiction about artists looking for inspiration, people feeling trapped, etc. A lot of these themes are common. It just depends on what you were feeling as an artist when you put it to pen.
There has to be strong opposition. Opposition brings a healthy amount of doubt to the questions posed by the drama. If the story makes you ask whether Janna will finish her song, her situation and her character need to be painted such that there is serious doubt whether that will happen. There should be strong obstacles, whether internal or external. Even in the most passive fiction, like romance, the best romance is that where the romantic interest remains mysterious, and there’s a strong chance that the person is just too distant to end up with the heroine. There’s a short story called “The Cathedral” where the conflict is all about whether the protagonist is going to feel sympathy for a blind man, and it works because the author shows him to be insensitive in the beginning. Whatever you’re feeling as an artist for the conflict, nearly all of your attention in the beginning of the piece should be about framing the issue, and specifically, setting doubt in the mind of the reader that the issue is to be resolved favorably.
2) Structure
One problem flows into another. Because they’re brief, short stories have much less license to deviate from their basic structure – introduce the conflict, heighten it, resolve it, reframe it. In what I read, conflicts seem to be resolved at odd times and new ones posed far too late in the work.
About halfway through the short, the reader finds out that the Anchor was built successfully. That’s one duck shot down, and the reader is spending energy looking for another. But instead of either finding a new issue quickly or going back to old ones, the characters spent time watching things, walking to City Hall, Aryl and Janna both spend a page talking to a new character named Braeden, who contributes nothing to the drama. And then ¾ of the way through, Aryl starts feeling trapped, seemingly out of nowhere. This is a new duck, but there’s not enough time to shoot it down. Instead, the reader is left with questions about why Aryl left. Basically, you are going to have problems in any short story where the characters are congratulating themselves 2/3 of the way through on having solved a major conflict. If you don’t want construction of the Anchor as a conflict, it shouldn’t be introduced as something the characters themselves are doubtful of, and if you want Aryl feeling trapped as the conflict, it needs to be restructured. My question is what you want out of this story as an artist. Perhaps you need to begin the story at a different point in time you did in order to key up the conflict you wanted, or perhaps end it after giving more explanation than you did. Only you can know.
Other problems with structure are that too much time is spent by characters watching things that don’t contribute to the drama. Janna gazes at the city, watches people by the docks and thinks of her mother, etc. Along that same parallel, too much of the dialogue is spent on welcomes, good byes, “There you are!”, etc. It feels forced, like you realize that there should be something there but you don’t know what it is. Principles of Structure will tell you what it is. Trying to imagine what the characters would do in commonplace situations will not.
3) Character
Having read the short, I’m still asking myself why there were so many characters. There are three that I wanted to care about - Janna, Aryl and Janna’s father. The last is shown very little, and does little for the drama. The second gets swept from under my nose without any explanation. Even the third ends up being nothing more than an empty vessel from which the reader observes the consequences for Aryl’s decision to leave. Good characters in drama are those whose decisions matter in the resolution of the conflict. I see little decisiveness here. It doesn’t mean that their decisions weren’t important, just that I didn’t see them making any. The most glaring example of this is that Aryl just shows up missing. She starts feeling trapped, but she doesn’t decide to leave out where the reader can see. This is frustrating.
Another problem is that the characters do not appear distinct. I understood by the end that Janna was an artist and Aryl a scholar, but I never quite grasp how these roles affect them personally, what’s the difference between the two, etc. Both characters seem to speak with the same voice. Even if the viewpoint is a distant third-person narrator who speaks with the same voice for all characters, the characters should then be given opportunities in dialogue to showcase their uniqueness. All I got were hellos, goodbyes, thank you’s, and some teasing banter that avoids serious establishment of character by its very nature of being teasing banter. Even cliché flamboyant artist/bookish scholar would’ve worked for me. It’s something. Again, you probably have a good idea of these characters’ personal traits, motivations, frustrations. We just need to see it in pen.
4) Style
The change in tense was distracting. I understand that you’ve spent some thought on this, but allow me to dissent. I believe that there is a bright line between what you’re showing to a reader and how you’re showing it. What you’re showing makes two stories as different as night and day, the real center of writing as art. But how you’re showing it is simply an obstacle. It’s an inconvenience that we have to use words to evoke images, emotions and people. As artists, I think we shouldn’t make that any more of an inconvenience than we have to. A painter should never paint with spaghetti sauce, for example. I would not alter the tense of two characters unless there is a reason in the narrative for why you can.
Arabian Nights, for example, has a character shown in the third person viewpoint talking with another character about what he’s done in the past. The stories this character tells are told in first person, as if he is speaking to the second character. Other stories that pull this off are those that involve a character in the present tense, but once in a while she reads excerpts from another character’s diary. Maybe Aryl leaves her diary behind when she leaves, and some of the drama is Janna finding out through her diary why she decided to leave. You know what you want from your characters better than I do, of course. I’m just saying that unless there’s a reason in the narrative for the tense shifts, it’s distracting instead of expressive.
Another issue with style is your viewpoint. I’m never quite sure how deep I’m seeing into a character’s motivations, especially when I’m in the viewpoint of another character. Also, a character will ask themselves a question in internal monologue that I’m not sure whether I should have an answer as a reader, or sometimes what they are even asking themselves and thinking about in the first place. Other times the characters, even though they are so young, seem to know in perfect detail certain complex things. For example, Aryl somehow knows exactly why the city has a certain attitude toward the Anchor – that sailors think scholars belong elsewhere. If she’s guessing at things of that nature, that’s ok, but it doesn’t come across that way. It’s too easy for me to get distracted by the realization that an omniscient author wrote this.
I hope I’ve been able to help some, and I wanted to say that I really enjoyed the read. I hope to read more of your writing in the future.
