You're most welcome AAV. And
@Lady_Ty, you're right to say that the grass is a minor detail. I was critiquing it more as a writer looking at structure based on it being aimed as a twist story.
The best twists tend to be those where the story has a double meaning. The reader's led down the garden path and then hit with a detail at the end which, if they reread the story from the start with the new information, changes it into a completely new tale. That's what this story was certainly going for, it's what ClintACK's awesome whale alternative was about (by the way, you can come out of the corner now
@ClintACK. Come on... That's it. Don't be shy).
As an example of a story with an excellent twist, there was one a month or so back called "Sorry, Kid." I think it was by some up and coming superstars called
@Raptori and
@Saurus? That was such a brilliant twist that had it been in this competition I think it could have very well won.
As this story stands though, if you go back to the start with the new information, while there's an abundance of good water references across the board, things like the grass and the flying breaks the illusion which was what I was trying to point out. You could fix the flying by calling it gliding, or you could take a step outside the box and directly describe the movements of the wings as stroking to propel them forward. For the grass, had it been changed to clumps of weed, does that really destroy the illusion of the above sea flight? The sentence is vague enough that without knowing it was underwater I would still picture the cliffs. Heck, I may even picture the grass, since tufts of long wild grass are more akin to weeds than the cultivated beds that make up our lawns.
But getting away from the short story for a moment, even if this were a scene in a larger novel I'd still criticise the grass, because as a writer myself I know it would have been a slip. It wouldn't have come about because the author was trying to build a 'different' world, but because they had a cool idea of an underwater setting but never never fully imagined it, essentially writing an upper world setting and just filling it with water. Unless the grass is a fundamental part of the plot, if they then hide behind the fact that it's a fantasy world and anything goes they're just being lazy. And while most readers won't care, it doesn't change the fact that the author's short-changing them, and this is why so many frown on the Fantasy genre as a whole as poor man's writing.
Like you, I'm also a nature lover, and one of the reasons I chose to write fantasy was because I wanted to go and explore the heights of mountains, the thick of the forests, the depths of the sea. I think some of the most fantastical things are right outside these concrete penitentiaries of civilisation that we hide away in.
If I were to write a deep ocean scene I could say the cliffs of the gorge were sprinkled with tufts of grass and rubble, or I could describe the jagged stone walls pricked with holes like a petrified sponge. Bubbles blew out in places and tickled the clinging tassels of waxy weeds. The light pouring from Ayatton's hot chest illuminated a cloud of otherworldly colours as a school of fish washed down into the depths. He scanned the dark cliffs for the entrance to the cave which held the air prisoner; they almost appeared to be throbbing to the beat of the ocean's current. His target was confirmed when a mighty ray exited the wall like a floating leaf with a piece of string tied to its stalk. Ayatton swept his wings back and glided on towards his target.
Obviously I took a few liberties here and you would expect another author to also go into more description than is allowed in a short story, but the point is that nothing I wrote was me intentionally making things up. I tried to keep it as real as I understand it from things I've seen on TV, but just because I'm hooking the land into our world does it make it any less fantastical?
Were I to want to use the seagrass, I could describe the disturbance in the vast stretch of crystal ocean coast where the dragons were frolicking in the meadow of swaying seagrasses, each playfully snapping at the other's limbs, churning up the sun-kissed white sands to turn the clear water foggy. I pulled all that out of the picture from the link you sent earlier, because it's a beautiful picture worthy of a beautiful scene.
At anyrate, I digress! The bigger issue with Raptori's story was that some didn't quite get that it was underwater.
On looking at it again, I think the real problem was that there wasn't quite enough direct references to the water once the twist was revealed.
Looking at the ending again, the only line that makes mention of it was the fountain of water following him up as he breached the surface. If you happened to not take that in for whatever reason (which is easy to do when you consider the exciting action going on at the time) there's nothing else that really tells you they're in/on water. All the rest is ambiguous text that only works if you've come to that realisation. Even when you're talking of ships and boats, unfortunately, due to the wonders of modern sci-fi television and video games like final fantasy there exists enough flying vessels that are labelled ships and boats--and in fact many are shaped and move like them too--that when you're already immersed in an elevated mountain land the mention of them doesn't break the illusion.
You could drum this home with a few added extras for clarity:
- He breached the surface
[of the sea] with a roar
- the surface/
[roof/ceiling] of his
[ocean] world spread out beneath him in all directions
On a grander scale, you could well scrap the whole battle and just focus the story on the race. The race is exciting--more so for me than the fisherman battle--and after you've taken us around the underwater course, possibly even starting with them wading through that meadow of grass, you can punch the twist home by finishing up with them breaching the surface of the water at the finish line.
