quote:

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It is 2 am and my workstation won't lock.

At an institute as competitive as Bryston, your fellow classmates follow you around, waiting for that one unguarded instant they need to swoop down and steal your research. I can see Carol three workstations away. Bryn is sitting across the room. They studiously avoid looking at me, but the clicking of their keys is crying out for blood.

Everyone here at Bryston is given free private housing, which people think of as a Very Big Deal, given the price of adding another cubic centimeter of space to the orbiting station. They don't realize how crazy the place makes you. The housing's not even good for anything. They won't put computer terminals in the rooms -- they're trying to force us to sleep at night. It's not like it works. People just sleep at their desks, five minute cat naps, which is what I give up and do, my body hunched over the keys to keep the academic scavengers away. Just ten minutes, I promise myself.

I wake up at seven the next morning. I must have fallen off the chair in the night, because I'm sleeping comfortably on the floor. My notes have been deleted. It's already too late.

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This beginning is getting on my nerves.

Not because there's anything major bugging me here. It's a rough draft and I know it has some warts, and I'd love to hear about them- but there's something else I'm worried about.

What's irking me here is the rest of the story. I feel like this beginning sets up tension I'm not resolving in the rest of the story. (There is a complete draft, but hasn't progressed beyond because, well, it bugs me, and I'd like to figure out what to do with this beginning).

First, you could go the path of rising action, making this some sort of spy/action hero thriller. It is well set up to go that path. Set in space, with "notes" being deleted, all that is a great hook, at least for me.

Number two would be to calm things down a bit and let your hero go about his business with more paranoia than is warranted. This then turns into a psychological thriller beloved by many.

I'm not saying you shouldn't write it that way: One of the two best stories I've written was in first person present tense. I'm just saying that unless you need to write it that way, it's better not to.

As for your main question, it's hard to tell what your main storyline will be from this beginning, but I don't think that's a real problem.

You've set up a situation that has various tensions: the bad working conditions, the scheming classmates, the theft of the notes. We don't yet know which of these tensions will be the focus of the story -- maybe all of them.

Any of your proposed resolutions could work. Even if all the narrator does is figure out who stole the notes and get them back, or turn the thief in, or get revenge, that would be sufficient for a satisfying resolution. (Assuming the story is interesting along the way, of course.)

About the tense issue . . . please don't succumb to the pressure to write it in a past tense. I know people around her don't like the present tense (for the life of me, I don't know why), but I'm a sucker for it, when it's done well. And from what I can see, you're doing it well.

Concerning the rest of the story, one question you might ask yourself is this: What does your main character want? To finish her research? To find out who deleted it? To find it if it was stolen? Maybe if you can figure out what he (or she) wants, you'll have enough drive in the story for it to "write itself," so to speak.

In almost all cases, first person present tense is false. It has to be, unless the narrator is talking into a tape recorder or typing the narrative during the course of the story.

Now, by definition, fiction is false. But in writing fiction, you want to help the reader suspend disbelief. Using the past tense, the tense we use to describe things that actually happened, helps the reader believe what is written.

The vast majority of English fiction is written in the past tense. That is what readers are comfortable with, and by using present tense you make the story more difficult for the reader to accept.

I'm not trying to pressure Gen into using past tense -- as I said, one of my best stories uses first person present tense.

It is a truism around here that you can break any rule of writing, as long as you are willing to pay the price. But it's important to know why the standard is past tense, and that there is a price for deviating from that standard.

Let's just say that despite the fact that the infodumping was moderately flagrent, it felt comfortable by comparison.

The real problem for me was of plausibility. Why in the heavens (literally, in this case) would you put academics (and students, at that) in orbit if the cost were so prohibitive? One presumes that there is a reason in the story (I presume from your hints that there is a sinister motive behind it). Clearly, they are looking for something other than honest academics here. But honest academics are the only ones that are worth anything at all...as academics. Besides that, I still can't see how it would be useful to put them in space.

It is possible the same question is subliminally bothering you (unless you have a reason that is illustrated later in the story). You say, after all, that something about the story itself doesn't resolve. I think that you need to find out (and have the story reveal) the motivation behind creating such an inherently screwy situation at such extravagant cost. It smacks of supervilliany, I can feel it. If you don't reveal the supervillian and explain why this nefarious force is doing such strange things, then the story is indeed a cheat.

The posts helped me clarify the main reason this story was bugging me. You were right, Survivor, about the payoff being an explanation for Academics in Space (sounds like a bad 60s television show), but I wasn't establishing that fact early enough.