Not Quite Right features discussions that are unfiltered and uncensored,
and may include themes that are inappropriate for younger listeners.
Also, I swear a lot something doesn't seem
quite right.
Welcome to Not quite right.
My name's Ed and I'm Amanda and welcome to the first Daredevil for the January
2026 Not Quite right prize.
Mm Hmm, very exciting.
So Daredevils are the people who have signed up for the honour and the
privilege of having their story critiqued on air on the podcast.
So what we'll do is read the story, talk about the story, break it down,
share our thoughts and hopefully all learn something in the process ideally.
And so today's story comes from Team Ed.
Of course it does.
The winning team.
Let's not forget that little detail.
It's all right.
Nobody forgot.
And the prompt is a reminder.
We had the word prompt quick, the action of planting,
and we had the kicker prompt that your story had to include a flawed protagonist.
And our lamb to the slaughter for today is Eleanor Menzel.
Hi, Eleanor.
Now, Eleanor shared a question in the long
list episode about do we give our stories nicknames as we go through?
And we said we do.
Yeah, see that.
Now, I have to admit I don't recall giving a
nickname to this particular story.
And I suggest that's probably because it didn't make the long list on this
occasion, which is always disappointing when your
story doesn't make the list.
But the cool thing is with this episode, now we get to unpack why that might be,
some of our suggestions for how to hit the long list next time.
So you say it didn't make the long list, but it actually came quite close.
It did.
So we'll get into all that very soon.
But it is Eleanor's first time as a daredevil.
So best of luck, Eleanor.
Amanda will be reading your story, all right.
And the story is whoever wrote this hold music needs to pay for their sins.
By Eleanor Menzel.
You think you can **** with me?
Defeat me?
I am everything.
I'm an apex predator in my natural habitat.
My power cannot be contained by your petty corporate.
I appreciate your patience.
Our team is busy right now.
We'll get to you as soon as possible.
There are 11 callers ahead of you.
**** you.
Are those ******** still digging you around?
That's my roommate, Steph.
She's great and endlessly supportive, even as she taps refresh on her laptop as
it sits beside the chopping board.
Nicole is on speakerphone, so she's also graced with the shrieking
Jingle as it bounces off the backsplash.
Yeah, but it's not the end of the world.
I could hang up if I really wanted.
I really couldn't.
I can't let them win.
I once walked 9 kilometres in freezing rain after flipping my ex's car into a
ditch.
He didn't find it for three months and the damage wasn't covered by the
insurance I got him when we were still together.
I won't let my full refund for the mattress I returned two weeks ago slip
through my fingers.
Hands.
Steph calls.
I lift mine quickly and smile at the sandwich she made.
We take turns cooking on the weekends and then meal prep together for the week,
and if she didn't have something to do right now,
she'd explode all over the place in messy steffy meat chunks.
Gross.
Now that she's finished cooking, the tapping of her fingers on the
keyboard is regular enough that it almost brings a rhythm to the plaintive death
whale masquerading as a melody coming out of my phone.
Any change?
Please let there be a change.
Not yet.
Honestly, Beck, I think I should just give.
We appreciate your patience.
Our team is busy right now.
We'll get to you as soon as possible.
There are 8 callers ahead of you.
Seriously.
She says, frowning.
Anyway, it's not like there aren't other schools,
jobs, dream careers.
It takes everything I have not to roll my eyes.
I know she got in with flying colours.
I broke into the examiner's office myself.
I didn't even need to plant any doctored exam notes.
Nevertheless, the tap, tap, tap of the anxiety metronome resumes.
You'll wear out your keyboard if you keep doing that.
Please take a break.
You're making me worried now.
She's not.
It would take more than this to stress me out,
but if she feels responsible for my feelings,
she'll sit down and eat something.
My skin prickles.
Either something excellent is imminent, or I'm about to crush someone's dreams.
Maybe both.
You've got mail, Beck.
I got it.
Oh my God.
I sometimes it feels as though I'm a prophetic beast,
but it's actually just pattern recognition.
The background screech ends abruptly.
Hello, this is Claire from Sweet Sleep Solutions.
Guest support.
How may I help?
Dear sweet Claire, you won't know what hit you.
Thank you Eleanor for your story and Eleanor's left us a message as well so
we'll play that now.
Hi Ed and Amanda, it's Eleanor from Victoria.
I spent the whole day at work marathoning Old long List,
Shortlist and Daredevils before realising I haven't recorded this for you yet.
It's 11:00 PM and all I can think about is the real phone calls and hold music
that inspired the story.
I'm open to any feedback either of you have.
I find the Daredevils interesting because you both have a very different approach
to storytelling than I do.
There are scenes and subtext in other Daredevils that seem incredibly obvious
to me that you both miss.
And there are critiques you've had for other writers that have opened my eyes to
issues I didn't know existed and didn't notice myself.
I'm interested not only in the feedback, but how you both see my writing and how I
can better connect to an audience that doesn't see things the way I do.
Thank you both so much.
I really appreciate it.
So thanks, Eleanor.
I think.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Like, thinly veiled yes.
Isn't of a backhanded compliment in there.
That's all right.
We can take it.
Yes.
Yeah.
We dish it out, so we should be able to take it,
but don't expect us to go easy on it.
Exactly.
But you know, it's a valid point and I agree.
I mean, probably the classic example of subtext
that we missed in my mind is the Nathan and Nigel story by Kerry Goldsworthy
where I completely missed the the POV was the body parts of this person.
And in hindsight, I feel ridiculous for having missed it.
But I wasn't the only one who missed it.
All three judges missed it, I believe.
And I think the big part of that probably is the blind judging factor.
We are without context when we're reading these stories.
We don't know who wrote and we don't know sort of the demographics of the person
who wrote it and where they're coming from, what their interests are.
And we do give each story due consideration.
It's not like we're just flicking through.
We are absolutely reading each story and processing each story.
But I think when you're jumping from completely different genres, you know,
completely different topics, time periods, characters,
it's just such a mixed bag that sometimes it's the story that came before it that
can impact your view of the story that you're reading as well.
So I think with all of that in the mix, it can be quite easy to miss things that
would maybe in a lit mag or on someone's blog,
like be much more obvious and much more clear.
But also, you make a good point in that everyone
has a different perspective, right?
And you can't just assume that your perspective is that of whoever is reading
your story.
So regardless of whether it's us or someone else that is better reading your
story, you need to get those different
perspectives to really understand how it's going to hit for different people.
Yeah.
And I think getting beta readers is a really good start for that,
to at least get someone other than yourself to have a read.
And you can ask, you know, a loved one to do that for you.
And that might be your starting place, but your loved one knows you too.
And so your little quirks of speech or things like that are going to be things
that make complete sense to them in a way that might not make sense to just the
average reader.
So that's worth bearing in mind.
You can get people to read it, and that will pick up some things.
But certainly, I think communication is an art.
And that's what this is essentially, this is communication.
And there are skills that you can pick up that will help you communicate your
message to a broader audience.
You don't then guarantee they're gonna like what you're communicating and
connect with it, but at least understand it.
I think is is our baseline of what we hope to achieve.
And so you've asked how you might better connect with your audience.
So that's gonna inform our feedback to you as we go through your story now.
So let's get into it.
Let's start with the title, actually very quickly.
So whoever wrote this whole music needs to pay for their sins.
I believe I had this down as one of my stand out titles.
You did.
Dean called it out as well.
OK.
So definitely a memorable title.
You know, it's one of the things you're going for.
Memorable.
Also recalling the story, all those kinds of things.
You know, you mentioned Amanda about having a
nickname, but we didn't really have one for this
story.
What would you give it?
But it would have.
I would have just called hold Music.
Yeah.
And that's part of the title because it is a long title.
I certainly wouldn't be saying that over and over.
No.
Yeah.
Hold music for sure.
OK, so let's get into the story so it opens
with you think he can **** with me, defeat me, I'm everything.
And we talk about opening lines all the time and kind of setting the stage and
filling that darkened room.
These opening lines don't do that.
But what they do is give you this great voice,
which sets up kind of the tone for the rest of the story,
which is equally important.
And I think the title gave us a bit of that context,
that very important context that once you've read that title,
you get a sense of what's going on.
This person's ****** *** about being on hold.
So I think that works in that context where you've got the title doing some of
that heavy lifting for you.
And we get into it fairly quickly.
The next lines, we appreciate your patience.
Our team is busy right now, so we know exactly what's happening and
that is that the person is on hold and really not handling it well by the sounds
of it, handling it extremely well in my opinion.
And I have to say, just before we go too much further,
it was such a fun, relatable premise.
Yeah, I love that.
And yeah, you talk about connecting with the
audience 100%.
This kind of idea, this universal idea of hating being on
hold is a great starting point for a piece of flash fiction because you know
already that you've got people on your side.
And what I think the phone call does is add an element of tension to the whole
story.
Like in the background, the whole time.
There's like a what's gonna happen with this phone call?
I would say basically at this point in the story, first couple of paragraphs in,
we clearly understand the premise, but we really wanna know what is the
reason that they're on hold and what does that character want to get out of the
scene?
Yeah.
And this probably brings me to my big challenging piece of feedback for this
story overarching.
And I think it bears mentioning at the start because it's something that I think
we can reflect on as we go through.
And that is the concept of cohesion.
MMM.
So cohesion is the idea of all the parts of something coming together in a in a
satisfying way and might be biggest criticism of this story is that cohesion
was lacking.
So there are a lot of parts to this story and they are all very interesting,
but they don't connect in a satisfying way.
So I'll just go through some of the many things that this story covers.
So we have, of course, the hold music and the phone call.
We have this idea of being an apex predator and then Steffi exploding into
meaty chunks and things like that.
We have the X and the rolling of the car into the ditch.
We have the mattress refund.
We have a lot of talk about the laptop and the tapping on the laptop.
We have the setting of the kitchen and the making of the sandwich.
And all of those things are interesting, but they're not really working together.
They're just kind of existing in silos in this story.
And we talk about Poe all the time and the idea of Poe is really about emotion,
right?
But if we extend that concept in a piece of flash fiction,
what it's about is that everything in the story is working towards a single message,
in Poe's view, towards a single emotional effect,
which is the case, but also thematically being quite
consistent.
So rather than going off on these tangents about rolling the excess car and
this idea of being an apex predator isn't really a component that feeds into the
plot here.
So in that sense, it probably doesn't need to be there,
and something else could be there in its place.
The biggest evidence to me that there may be a lack of cohesion in this story is
that we've got some lovely circularity.
So we've got the hold music at the start and the frustration, and then at the end,
we cycle back to that.
And it's dear, sweet Claire.
You won't know what hit you, which is great.
I just want to say I love that.
But the rest of the story in between is just happening while she's on hold and
doesn't have anything to do at all with being on hold.
Yeah.
And so the ending of the story isn't the ending of the story, if that may Yes,
it's it's kind of sits outside it.
Yeah.
Look, that stood out to me as well.
And I think there are a couple of plot lines here that bump up against each
other but don't really intersect.
MMM.
If I think about this piece as a whole, it is quite an effective character study.
I think like we're getting we're getting a picture of this main character and and
what she's all about.
But we also have these plot elements that don't really resolve, I guess,
in a satisfying way.
It's not to say that you can't have two very different things going on in a story.
Probably in a piece of flashy, you don't want too many because it starts
to become unmanageable.
But you can certainly have more than one.
So when we talk about poets, like, look, we don't want you to reduce your story to
like nothing.
You know, your story can have complexity.
Your story can have different things going on.
But as you say, they need to intersect.
So we can have this phone call and we can have the university results working
together.
That's totally fine.
But one needs to impact the other.
Yeah.
And at this stage, neither is impacting the other.
They're sort of happening at the same time.
So yeah, I guess that's probably my most
challenging piece of feedback.
So hopefully, Eleanor, you can relax that.
That's probably the worst it's going to get.
I don't know what kind of writer you are, Eleanor,
but it's maybe indicative of a pantser, you know,
someone who's comes to the page and just their ideas flow.
And they've got this picture of this scene and it's coming out of them.
And it's a compelling scene.
You know, there's a lot going on.
There is tension and all this stuff.
So it's compelling.
But what you then need to do is go back and refer fine,
and see what's contributing and what's maybe just there and good and interesting,
but not playing into the story itself, not impacting the plot.
Yeah.
And actually, Eleanor in her message said that she
couldn't get this idea of that on hold phone call out of her head.
And I think that's probably, you know, the starting point for this story.
And I will say like, while that is a universal experience,
we can all easily identify with it, it's usually going to be quite low stakes
as well.
And it would be challenging, I think, to deliver a story where that is the
entirety of the plot is the outcome of that phone call,
unless you found a way to raise the stakes or that is such a man thing to say.
Really.
You don't think this **** is high stakes?
Every time I call customer service, it is high stakes name.
But you know, I'm perimenopausal, as we all know.
Well, it's it is high stakes when it's your
life, but not when you're, you know, hearing it recounted in the story.
I don't know if I was trying to return a mattress and they were dicking me around
inverted commas, I would be taking very seriously.
But in any case, that's not really what this story is.
No, I know it's about all of the other things
in the story.
And so the other thing about the school results subplot here is that we don't
find that out until later on, right.
So we're invested in this story around the phone call at the beginning.
We, we're in, we're in the phone call with the
protagonist, but then we get a bit of a switch later
on to this other storyline, you know, about the midpoint of the story,
maybe even a little bit later.
We have what I marked down to myself.
I called it a bit of a jackknife in the plot, right?
The lines.
It takes everything I have not to roll my eyes.
I know she got in with flying colours.
I broke into the examiner's office myself.
I didn't even need to plant any doctored exam notes.
I do feel that that use of plant there felt a little bit forced.
It felt a little bit sort of shoehorned in, not maybe a natural thought process.
But more importantly, we haven't had any clue of this up until
now.
You know, we've talked about this character being
an apex predator and sort of being quite aggressive, but where did this come from?
You know, I don't sort of know.
And since that's the core of the story, I think that's a challenge.
I think, you know, you're setting up one thing.
So we're setting up the phone call, but then halfway through the story,
by then it's almost forgotten.
And then we get into this other thing and it becomes about Steffi and her goal of
getting into university, which of course has been drip fed.
But we didn't have the information we needed to sort of follow along with what
she was stressed about.
It's actually not clear until that moment.
And even then, I'll be honest.
Yeah.
And again, maybe it's a a feature of reading quickly
and so on.
I didn't really click what was going on because it's almost like a throwaway
comment.
And so this idea of I broke in and I changed the results.
I didn't get it.
I didn't know what had happened.
And you know, that's a pretty crucial aspect of the
plot that needs to be, I think, quite clear, right?
So let's return back to that third paragraph or third or fourth paragraph
where we're introduced to Steph and she's endlessly supporting tapping refresh on
her laptop.
So that's a clue, I guess, the refresh on the laptop.
But I have to say that didn't trigger anything in me.
I assumed it was related to the phone call because she's supportive, right?
So we assume that that's got something to do with it.
And look, this is something we talk about a lot.
So it's something that a lot of writers do, which is hiding, I guess,
some of the details of the story to sort of slowly reveal them as we go along,
kind of keeping it mysterious.
Now, I would say my opinion almost always is
don't hide.
Yeah, there are some things you're gonna wanna
hide, and they're gonna be more of a reveal
later in the story.
But almost always it's far more preferable to bring your reader along
with you from the very beginning.
Yeah, it is hard for us to care about the
results of Steffi's exam even as we watch her stress about it when we don't even
know what she's stressing about.
So by the time the exam results are mentioned,
we've sort of missed that opportunity to get on board with her and sort of share
that stress, which is what you want.
You want readers to be sharing the emotions of your characters.
That's kind of the gold standard, if you can go for that.
So that kind of information is so important to bring upfront.
Make it really clear What are they want, what are the stakes if they don't get
what they want, and then go from there.
Don't keep anything a mystery if you can avoid it.
So I want to call out a couple of things about these paragraphs that I liked.
So the detail here of the chopping board.
She taps refresh on her laptop as it sits behind the chopping board,
and then a moment later talking about the Jingle as it bounces off the backsplash.
And I like those details as a as a showing moment of just setting the stage.
You can clearly picture that your protagonist is on the phone and Steph is
in the kitchen.
And it's not said at that point that she's in the kitchen,
but you can picture it just from those little context clues.
So I like that.
Yeah.
Also in the next paragraph when we have the ex and the car.
So I can't let them win.
I once walked 9 kilometres in the freezing rain after flipping my ex's car
into a ditch.
I like that detail.
As an expression of the reasons why the character in the opening paragraphs
claims to be an apex predator, the fact that they won't give up and they
are unhinged in that way, and giving a real example instead of just
saying it, I think is really important.
It did maybe go on a bit longer as a digression.
So he didn't find it for three months.
The damage wasn't covered by insurance.
We don't need to know that because it's not really related to the plot.
And I think at this point where several paragraphs in,
we don't really know yet why they're on hold.
And that's what we understand to be the central scene goal and the point of the
story.
So we need to really get to that, you know, earlier, in fact, as you say,
don't hide things.
Bring it up front.
And there's an opportunity here when you're editing to, you know,
I talked about cohesion to bring these elements together.
So instead of the example of flipping the ex's car into a ditch,
which is extremely dramatic, I find that incredibly compelling,
to be honest.
But at the same time, it's not really intersecting,
as we say very clearly, with what's going on in the story.
Now, at this point, we don't know about breaking into the
examiner's office and so on.
Is that maybe the example that you could give?
Yeah.
You know, use that example instead, or some of the antics that led to that
example?
Like what did you do before you got into the examiners office?
Break and enter, right?
How did you do that?
Did you have to disable an alarm or what was the crazy thing that you did in that
context?
Might give a little bit more information about the story that we're reading now
rather than this X, because now we're wondering as soon as
you introduce a new character, how do they play into this story?
And he's never mentioned again.
So he's not important to the story.
You know, we can work with that.
We can maybe make that something that's a bit more of a building block that we can
work with here.
And look, the mattress refund as well is a hanging
plot point.
We don't know what the back story is there.
And I know it's just a mattress and you, as you say,
that is actually serious business.
But I think we need to know more about that if that is the thing that we're
supposed to get invested in.
But again, here's another opportunity.
Why mattress, right?
And that feels like maybe something personal that's come from Eleanor's life
or experience or just something that she imagined, which is fine,
but it's an opportunity again to bring that cohesion in.
So how about instead of a mattress, it's something you broke while you were
trying to break it into the examiner's office to get these results.
So maybe it was an item of clothing you left behind as evidence or I don't know,
like, what is it that you're missing?
What are you complaining about?
Maybe you damaged your car in the getaway and now you're calling about insurance
for your own car.
Like, there's infinite possibilities for what
it could be, but to have it be something that's
central to this plot, I think would build on that idea a little
bit more and give us more to work with as it stands.
Well, now we've got a mattress in our mind.
What does that mean?
The context of the mattress is never really woven into the story either.
So we don't know what happened to the mattress.
We don't know why it's relevant.
As readers, we wonder why mattress?
Like, what about this mattress?
And then we're never given that information.
So just another opportunity to weave it a little more tightly together.
Mm Hmm.
So this next paragraph, and this is maybe an example of one of
the things that Eleanor calls out as being obvious to her, but not to me.
Hands, Steph calls.
MMM, what does that mean?
Hands out of the way.
Lift your hands like I'm bringing you this and I got hands.
Oh, so you got I couldn't, I just couldn't picture that.
Do you like my little demonstration?
Yes, and I can picture it, but I will say it took me a minute.
So when she just sort of says hands out of nowhere, again, we've got no context.
We haven't seen her making a sandwich.
We don't know it's a sandwich that's in her hands coming in front.
You can tell us that so that when you say hands,
it's clear that she's passing it under.
But if you don't do that, then you're leaving us wondering again.
And it's just the whole thing of giving us a clear picture of what we're looking
at in this kitchen.
What is it that's going on in this room?
Yeah.
And because I was picturing her still in the kitchen because following on from
that line of hands, we take turns cooking on the weekends and
then meal prep together for the week.
And if she didn't have something to do right now, she'd explode.
And then it says now that she's finished cooking.
So I assumed that she was still cooking, and she was sitting in the kitchen
chopping.
And she was like, hands.
OK, well, yeah, I mean, that's weird.
So that's a bit of a distraction out of the story if you're not picturing exactly
what's going on.
But yeah, easy to fix, easy to fix.
I mean, I think in general, like I would say clarity wise,
I think this story could be structured in a way that takes the reader along the
journey a little bit more.
So there were times when I was kind of trying to play catch up a little bit.
And it's not that there's anything confusing happening in this story.
It's fairly straightforward stuff, but just the phrasing and the order that
things are happening in, it's sort of jumping from here to there
and we're jumping from this character to that character.
And I would include in that the dialogue tags at times.
We talked about this in Jenny Lyons, Bells Daredevil in the last round,
but when do we need dialogue tags?
When do we not need them?
Should we use action beats instead?
Now?
It's an art.
There's no rule, but I will say that I got lost at times
here with who was speaking and what they were speaking about because it wasn't
always clear because there's more than one thing going on here.
So one minute we're talking about Stephie and her exam results,
the next minute we're talking about a sandwich,
the next minute we're talking about being on hold and how they're dicking you
around.
So it's not a conversation that we're following easily, which is fine.
But if it's not a flowing conversation, you have to give us a way to sort of go
from beat to beat in a clear way rather than kind of jumping around because it
becomes hard to sort of follow what we're supposed to care about.
If we're not sure exactly what they're talking about, You know,
we can go back and it all makes sense.
Yeah, but it should make sense on the first
read usually.
Yeah, I agree.
And there are a few moments where, reading this,
I felt that some of the sentences could have been rearranged for clarity.
So I'm just gonna go back a couple of paragraphs to Are those ******** still
ticking you around?
Because that paragraph has a little bit of A cause and effect problem, I think.
Hmm.
In those opening paragraphs when she's on the phone, it's actually all internal,
like the whole apex predator.
We appreciate your patience.
That's phone call.
And the **** you is internal, right?
It's not said.
And so Steph is reacting, presumably to something saying you're
those ******** still dicking you around.
And then we're introduced to Steph.
She's my roommate.
She's great.
She's supportive.
And then we hear that the call is on speakerphone,
so she's graced with the shrieking Jingle.
So May, if we had the Jingle 1st and then we knew
what she was reacting to and then kind of had that logical cause and effect,
I think that would have read a little bit more easily than than happening in
reverse order.
Yeah, absolutely.
Like it's just an organisation issue.
I do want to just say though, I feel like we're being pretty critical,
which is I guess our job.
But I also want to say a positive piece of critique,
and I feel this very strongly.
This is really strong prose.
Like it's really engaging.
It's interesting at every moment, you know, you don't get bored.
And it's also grounded in action.
There is some interiority at the start, which I think is appropriate in this
instance.
But for the rest of the story, it's all happening.
You know, there's a sandwich and then, you know,
you're you're hitting the enter key and it's a busy scene.
And I like that.
It's giving us a lot to work with.
So I would say that as a a really big positive of this and something that I
hope that you, Eleanor, would continue with your writing to just
keep it grounded in action, to have things happening on the stage
that we can watch.
It makes it far more interesting than someone sort of just musing to themselves
how annoying it is to be on hold.
Yeah, I completely agree with that.
But I will also add some critique to that.
I was trying to give her a break.
But anyway, the critique I would add is, is just to always be conscious that
things are moving forward and escalating because we are fundamentally still on
hold right throughout this point.
We've had a little bit more information come in.
It's always active, it's always moving, which as as you've said is great.
But you know, halfway through there hasn't really been
a change to the fundamental point of the scene, which is that phone call.
She's still on hold, we're still waiting.
And that's something I would just offer as a general thing.
Just always be conscious that things are moving forward,
that things are escalating and you're not repeating yourself too much.
Well, you're right.
But also like it is beautiful pose anyway, right?
And the character development is great.
It's bouncy dialogue.
It feels vibrant.
You know, it's a vibrant story is a word I would
use to describe it.
I like some of these lines a lot.
So I really liked the plaintive death whale masquerading as a melody.
Like I really like that idea.
Very purple and dramatic, but that's just so appropriate when
you're going mad on hold.
And also the tap, tap, tap of the anxiety metronome.
I mean, it's sensory as well.
Like we're getting those sounds and the pressure building because of those sounds.
And I think that's a great skill.
And I did feel immersed in this story.
So even though maybe I felt like I wasn't being brought along like I could have in
understanding what was going on, I was there and ready to be told,
you know, I was keen to find out what was happening
next.
And I think it was resonant too, like Ed, maybe, you know, you're the calm one here,
but it's resonant to me to be like going that insane while you're on hold.
So I really like that.
Absolutely.
Those things are really strong and and I feel like those are things that a lot of
people really struggle with.
So that's a great place to be starting from.
Like, you've got great sense of voice if you're
going out into traditional publication these days,
that's pretty much the number one thing publishers are looking for is voice.
It's like we can fix all of your problems.
We can get an editor.
We'll work on the plot, We'll work on sentences.
You know, we'll get you a line editor for that.
But what we can't make someone do is write in an interesting way.
And I think to have that skill is like a blessing that you should work with
because, you know, I'm jealous.
So yeah, I agree.
And look, it's not to be understated as well.
Like, you've got a story here about being in
the kitchen and being on hold, and that has the potential to be quite an
interior story where nothing happens.
But as you've said, a lot happens and the voice is
interesting and, you know, it keeps you entertained all the way
through, like, something's always happening.
So absolutely.
Well done on that.
I think the key takeaway really is like, there's a lot of different elements here
that are bubbling to the surface and being introduced and then disappearing as
soon as they've been introduced.
So how do you keep those relevant?
And especially in 500 words and, you know, you've kept it to a scene.
You've got 2 characters, maybe three if you count Claire,
who comes in at the end.
So 4 sweet Claire.
So a lot of positives there.
Yeah, absolutely.
And look, all of that vibrancy and what we're
talking about here did give it a maybe plus that pushed this story to long list
consideration.
So it was in the long, long list, as we say.
Yeah.
And I think had it been more cohesive, it probably would have gotten there.
We've got all the other aspects we need.
It's emotionally resonant, it's interesting, it's engaging.
We've got good sense of character and all of these elements working together.
So it just becomes about having a plot that we can kind of sink our teeth into
and feel satisfied at the end that we've got the answers we were looking for by
the end of the story.
Yeah.
And just to elaborate a little bit, you said it was on the long, long list.
So what we normally do is we take every story that one person has given a maybe
plus at least one person has given a maybe +2 and we put them all in the long,
long list.
And then we see what the number is and, and we cut that down to 40.
So it usually ends up being somewhere around 50, you know,
thereabouts that we cut down to 40 depending on how the numbers come out for
that particular round.
But that means you weren't too far off.
So didn't need to do that much to get on the long list,
but you can always elevate to the shortlist and beyond.
So just to cover the prompts very quickly we have the word quickly that was used
and that was most stories for my team used that word, which is totally fine.
Nice, easy one to slip in there.
We had planting in this case planting or not needing to plant any doctored exam.
Yeah, so it's actually not planting that was
happening here.
But you know, prompt met in my opinion.
So even though it was not planted and the kicker prompt of the flawed protagonist
comes through very clearly.
In fact, that's what this is stories about.
This is stories about a character study of this flawed protagonist.
And we talked about that in the long list episode as well.
I believe it was Sally who said, oh, you're gonna get more stories that are
character driven in Ed's team and more stories that are plot driven in Amanda's
team.
And I think that plays out very clearly here.
We've got a very character driven story.
It's all led by this idea of being an apex predator and someone who's morally
grey.
MMM.
And I think that's a great place to take it.
So thank you, Eleanor.
Hopefully that provides some insight into our thought process and gives you a
little bit to think about.
And I just want to thank you on a personal note for joining my team and
helping us, helping us win.
Yeah.
Thanks a lot, Eleanor.
No, but seriously, it's such a brave thing to do,
to come and do a daredevil.
You know, you put yourself out there.
It's an extremely vulnerable moment.
We don't just, I mean, we do sometimes churn out a story,
but from my perspective, when I write a story,
there's always a piece of me in that story.
And so to put it out there for someone to, to say, I'll fix this and change this,
it can be really confronting.
But I hope that you know, Eleanor, that we say all of this with love and
that we trust that you'll understand and hopefully be able to adopt some of these
ideas.
By no means is it reflective of your writing as a whole either.
We're just talking about this particular story.
And for each story, it's always going to have its things that
it needs and potential that it could explore.
So with all that said, I guess I just want to say, you know,
I'm really grateful you entered the competition and gave us such a voicey
piece.
It's always fun to read.
That sort of snaps us to attention, you know, as we're reading.
So keep writing.
We look forward to reading your next story.
If you're still alive.
And I don't know, should we be scared?
Like, yeah, it's a little bit of a worry.
Don't, don't phone us up.
But hopefully your main character is not based on you.
But you have signed up for an annual pass, Eleanor.
So we do look forward to reading your next story.
Too late now.
You're gonna have to come back, but that's all for this episode.
Thank you, Eleanor.
And we will be back in a week's time with our second Daredevil.
And until then, right on, right on.
We hope you enjoyed this special Daredevil episode of Not Quite Right.
If you have thoughts on this story, follow us on social media and join the
conversation.
And if you'd like to participate in the next round of the competition,
head over to our website at notquiteright. com.
That's WRITE.