She really wanted to open that bottle of gin. It would have to wait. Jessie was on call for the weekend. And the fact that she was living in a ‘dry’ community. For the local nurse to get caught with alcohol – that wouldn’t go down too well. She settled for a ginger beer instead, flicking off the top on the kitchen counter like she’d done a hundred times before.
Not much on the TV. Especially when the remote community had only one satellite dish and it was constantly tuned to the football. Jess dropped onto the lounge, although that seemed a grand name for it. Typical health department budget buy. As comfortable as a medieval torture device. The air conditioner was working overtime. 8pm and still 37 degrees outside.
Jess had barely swallowed the first mouthful when something landed on the roof with a thud. She stilled herself. Hopefully it was a bird, –a cat even, although cats didn’t last long in a community full of camp dogs. Please just be an animal and not what I think it is.
She waited, the bottle resting on her chin. Nothing further. She took another sip.
Another thud, louder and more recognisable to the bush nurse. She stood up, put the bottle on the table and went to the loungeroom curtain, pulling it back just enough to see out into the yard.
Saturday night. Post football. Of course, there would be a call out. She pulled on her Blundstone boots and stepped into the yard. Ever since the gate buzzer was broken, the chosen method for attracting the nurses’ attention was to lob rocks onto the accommodation roof from behind the cyclone fencing.
‘Coming, coming. Hold the rocks,’ she called to the women gathered at the gate. What will it be? Hot baby? Guts ache? Jess shook her head at the knowledge that most of the community members would wait until after the sun went down, to call for the nurse.
As she got closer to the waiting women, something in her body told Jess this wasn’t going to be a routine call out.
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A quick draft. Setting is Central Australia, so reference to temperature means its hot! Not sure how this reads for international audiences. Be interested to hear any feedback.
Thank you for addressing this The air conditioner was working overtime. 8pm and still 37 degrees outside.
What dos the air conditioner working overtime have anything to do with the temperature outside? Thank you
Hi, thanks for the question. I was trying to convey that with the temperature still in the high thirties late at night, the air-conditioner in the staff unit would struggle to keep things cool inside. When its not so hot, you can cool the house down and then often turn the air-conditioner off over night, but not this night.
Not sure if this explains it. I have lived in places where the air-conditioner is ineffective against the high temperatures.
I enjoyed reading your assignment a lot — truly.
What works exceptionally well is the immediate authority of your voice. Details like the dry community, the social consequences of a nurse being caught with alcohol, ginger beer as a compromise, Blundstone boots, cyclone fencing, and “camp dogs” establish lived-in expertise. This doesn’t read like research; it reads like memory — and that’s gold.
Since I come with some background in screenwriting for film, I’d love to spend a moment with your inciting incident (the disrupting event that tilts the story).
The inciting incident is clean and built with excellent timing: the first thud followed by denial, the second as escalation, then the decision and the gut-level knowing. This sequence gives the story a strong trajectory. Jess reads as experienced, tired, and competent — which makes the final unease land even harder.
Your piece understands something crucial:
an inciting incident doesn’t have to be loud — it has to be irreversible.
By the end, Jessie can’t go back to her gin, can’t go back to boredom, and can’t pretend this is just another Saturday night. The story has tilted — and that’s exactly the job.
If there’s one place that might be sharpened slightly, it’s this line: “She stilled herself.” Given how strong the rest of the prose is, a slightly more specific physical cue here could deepen embodiment and help the reader feel exactly what “stilling herself” means for this character.
Overall, I really appreciate the clear inciting incident, the strong and confident voice, the setting integrated through action, the early establishment of character competence, and an ending line that fully earns its unease. This reads like the opening of a novel or longer story — not just a lesson exercise.
Thank you for your valuable feedback. I really didn’t expect that. This is extremely helpful. I do hope to write about this setting in fiction form this year, so your response is encouraging. I found the prompt of starting with the typical a helpful way to just get moving. In response to ‘she still herself’ do you mean being more specific such as ‘she took a few big breaths, tried to steady her heart rate…’ or am I taking this too literally?
I’m really glad my feedback landed well — and I’m genuinely curious to see what comes next. You already have a strong instinct for pulling the reader into the viewpoint character’s perception.
Your intuition around embodying “she stilled herself” is absolutely right. Referring to breath or pulse can do a lot of work at once: it anchors the felt experience in Jess’s body, deepens her competence (which pairs beautifully with her being a nurse), and often invites the reader to mirror her state — their breath slowing with hers, their heart rate tracking hers.
That said, I’d love to go one layer further with you. Later in the piece, you write:
“She waited, the bottle resting on her chin. Nothing further. She took another sip.”
To me, this already shows how she stills herself — quietly, almost unconsciously. It’s a lovely, restrained moment.
Because of that, where you explicitly write “She stilled herself,” I found myself expecting something slightly different — perhaps a brief flinch or jolt. Not shock exactly, but that instant of alertness when the thud comes by surprise.
Structurally, the arc might read even more clearly as: external trigger (first thud) >> bodily reaction (alertness, e.g. a flinch or a jolt) >> thoughts about what it might or might not be >> silence, waiting (lack of external trigger) >> character action expressing stillness (taking another sip, body reaction not necessary as it follows automatically, back to the ginger beer lets the reader know it already). Showing breath and pulse might be a little too deep for a surprise, but it might be as well worth playing around with. Whichever feels more natural for you and your character.
I hope that distinction makes sense. Please always weigh my observations against your own intentions — the story is yours, and I may not see every layer you’re working with.
And finally: Happy New Year to you from Hungary. 🙂
I know this is a little late, but I hope I will help.
I agree with everything SunLover said. This is a very nice piece. I also realize it is a quick first draft, so my comments are meant as pointers for you to consider if you decide to take this to a second draft. As SunLover says, this is your piece, so take my comments with a box of salt.
1. I think you could compress the first paragraph a lot. This is my style, to be sure, but I would have written:
Jessie really wanted gin, but a bush nurse on call in a dry community didn’t dare get caught with alcohol, so she settled for a ginger beer, flicking to top off on the kitchen counter.
1.1 When you say, “she settled for a ginger beer”, you don’t need to add “instead”: it’s implied.
1.2 Is the expression,”like she’d done a hundred times before” developmental? IOW, does it tell the reader something important about the character? Or is it just a colourful detail? You can use this kind of seemingly trivial detail to introduce another character. For example, if Jessie’s family is going to play a part in the story, you could say “like her brother/her father/her mother/her grandmother had taught her”. If she has a boyfriend, it could be “like Todd, her boyfriend, had taught her one time when they were camping and forgot the bottle opener.”
2. I think you mean one satellite channel, not one satellite dish.
3. If the interior of the nursing station is going to be an important element of the story, you could flesh it out a bit by giving the lounge a colour (aquamarine), a texture (vinyl) and a feel (sticky or slick) – or whatever you want the reader to see as you begin to build the interior of the station as a setting for future action.
4. The air conditioner and the outside temperature: I would put the cause before the effect:
It was 8pm and still 37 degrees outside, and the air conditioner was working overtime.
5. The next point is technical. When you say, “when something landed on the roof with a thud”, you take the reader’s mind’s eye outside looking down on the station, though with almost no detail as to what they are supposed to see. I suggest keeping the POV inside: “when she heard a thud on the roof.”
6. I was hoping for a corrugated metal roof.
7. I agree with SunLover about “she stilled herself.”
8. Would she not be able to distinguish the sound of a rock hitting the roof from the sound of a bird or a cat? I like the momentary tension of not knowing what caused the thud, but I would like more information about why she didn’t immediately recognize the sound, since it was now the accepted way of getting her attention.
9. You can delete “to the bush nurse” if you have already established in para 1 that she is one.
10. You can delete “stood up, put the bottle on the table and went to the loungeroom” because you can trust the reader to figure out that she would have to do those things to pull back the curtain. This comment is based on the Hemingway dictum that you don’t need to tell the reader all the steps leading up to an action if they are obvious.
11. This is probably a vocabulary issue, but I got stopped by “Post football.” I first thought you were referring to a pickup football game on the post (ie, the remote settlement). I suggest, “Football’s over.”
12. Is there something about Blundstone boots that I’m missing?
13. Try “the gate buzzer had gone on the fritz”, or something else more colourful than “was broken”.
14. In the second last paragraph, you could add some frustration that people would wait until the sun went down, potentially endangering themselves and making her job more difficult.
15. Last point: I think it would be more powerful if it was something in the waiting women’s faces that told her it wasn’t going to be a routine call out. Which opens the question, what was it on their faces?
Final question: Does Australia use the British single quotes for quotations rule?