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Crit for Hammer Broquote:Winter Wine (764 words: winter water) I really liked this, and I don’t think it deserved a loss. It has a story arc, two reasonably well developed characters, and it’s competently written. I could mostly understand what was going on. It definitely needs some edits, and a better understanding of the character’s voices, backgrounds, and word choices. But it’s solid and it was an enjoyable read. My first time through I didn’t even notice it was all in dialog; I was busy enjoying the story. Anathema Device fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Nov 11, 2014 |
# ¿ Nov 11, 2014 18:46 |
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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 13:46 |
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Hammer Bro. posted:Thanks enormously for the line-by-line. I agree with you on 96.7% of those points. Didn't even notice how badly I was talking to the audience, and the only voice I was happy with was Damon's. I'm still on the fence about the timing of the mechanism reveal: I very much enjoy rereading a story in a different light after making a realization, although in this case it's more like rereading the story in any light after being told a thing, which is a painful distinction. I, too, would like a detailed crit of my story this week. Specifically I am looking to expand it into a longer story, and I'm wondering what readers would like to see more of. I will also crit the next three people who link their stories. They do not have to be recent stories.
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# ¿ Nov 11, 2014 23:06 |
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newtestleper posted:Grace is Gone This isn’t a bad story, despite the briefly confusing and then terribly sad introduction of the dog. My biggest complaint is that Grace doesn’t take any action to save herself. This story is the story of men interacting about a girl. She only has one line, and it’s just her going back to her miserable life. I’d like to see more of Grace, and even see Grace take some action on her own behalf. I don’t like it when women become plot points in stories and stop being their own people. I like the quiet stoicism of the Dad and the narrator, and you do a very good job staying in-tone for this first person view of someone who isn’t a literary genius. You manage to pull that off while keeping the story both realistic and enjoyable to read. Ironic Twist posted:snip You did an amazing job sticking with the kid-voice all the way through. It was a very difficult read, in part because it was too realistic. There’s a reason I don’t read fiction written by eight year olds. I felt like I had to spend more time working out what was going on than I really wanted. An eight year old might not be able to write very clearly, but they can understand a lot. I didn’t get a sense of understanding from this kid. In fact, I didn’t really like this kid much. All in all a very well executed example of a really annoying gimmick. Somebody fucked around with this message at 08:18 on Jan 1, 2015 |
# ¿ Nov 12, 2014 02:45 |
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I’d take a crit of this: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3598931&userid=158999#post433362475 or this: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3598931&userid=158999#post437452767 from anyone who’s interested.
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# ¿ Nov 12, 2014 23:46 |
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Post crits. Do not respond to crits in this thread. thehomemaster posted:64 new posts and no crits. Just drama. quote:Flow (810 Words) The biggest problem with this story is that, while lots of stuff happens, Lysa doesn’t make any of it happen. Neither does anyone else. There’s no tension, no character growth, just a list of events. You start out well: there’s something your character needs that she doesn’t have. You establish the stakes. But you never show why the water hasn’t come, and you never show why it does. Lysa doesn’t learn anything from the experience, except possibly not to camp in dry riverbeds when flash floods are expected? She doesn’t even learn to be patient and wait for spring. You could use some work on comma placement and a bit more proofreading, but that’s not a big deal. You tend to use “the girl” to talk about your viewpoint character a lot, which pulls me out of her head. People don’t think of themselves that way, usually; her name or “she” works. If you feel like you’re using that too much, think about using a different sentence structure instead of “the girl.” Focus on your details to provide active, vibrant details that are relevant to the story. Each description should either move the plot along, or tell us something important about the character doing the describing. Ideally, it should do both. Also, because I was bored and Hammer Bro does all the crits ever: Hammer Bro. posted:Kelvin (921 words: "wherein somewhere He sleeps, His bones grow cold with the passing of time, and an empty hearth") I’m not sure the structure of this, with the flashbacks, is doing you any favors. You have an interesting character progression that seems to go (in chronological order): after a traumatic family event, Cat bounces between foster homes until she’s taken in by a religious group. She becomes the leader of a group of colonists headed for ??? but wakes up from stasis alone on a spaceship, where she emotionally reverts to the young child she was. Once she cries herself out, she takes action to save herself. The way it’s structured now, it feels like there’s too much emphasis on the character’s weakness and not enough on her strength. I think seeing more of her development from Cat into Starchild might lend more power to her reversion back to Cat. I think this story is confused rather than strengthened by being out of chronological order.
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# ¿ Nov 14, 2014 16:11 |
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Problem 739 Words The needle goes into the arm that isn’t twisted and bloody, swollen and broken. The arm that isn’t hurting worse than anything. Dad hovers next to the bed. The nurse connects the syringe, pushes the plunger in. I accelerate, the world blurring around me. I float, with nothing holding me but the bright cloud of euphoria. Somewhere, my arm hurts, but not here. Here is warm. Here is nice. … I feel every bump in the road, every jolt to the old jeep’s shocks, as a grinding of bone on bone. I crank up the radio to drown out my whimpers and grunts, and Dad pretends he isn’t hearing them anyway. The muscles in his jaw work. When he goes into the pharmacy I sit in a purgatory of pain, the still, sunlit air pressing heavy against my skin. Time blurs and stretches. The creak of the door startles me. I cry out in pain as I jolt my arm. Dad opens the prescription bottle and shoves two oval pills at me. I put them in my mouth and almost gag at the bitter flavor that seeps over my tongue while I hold out my hand for the warm gatorade. “I’m sorry about your arm,” he says. “It’s not your fault I crashed.” By the time we get to the house my eyelids are heavy and drooping, and I’m smiling. … I swallow the pills dry and wait, but the pain still nags at my arm. Frustrated, I take a third pill. ... I wake up and think about pills, yellow and bright in my palm and bitter in my mouth. In the shower I imagine crunching them between my teeth, the sharp, pervasive taste of them on my tongue. I poo poo twice before I leave the house, runny thin diarrhea with no bulk behind it; I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. On the schoolbus I try to do my math homework. In my notebook I scribble calculations. Ten dollars for a pill. Three pills to stop the diarrhea, four to feel a rush. I have a couple twenties in my pocket, the last of my Christmas money. I think I might have a problem. … “Is your steak okay?” the waitress asks. The steak is perfect, medium rare. Dad and Aunt Jane are nearly done, but I’ve only choked down a few bites. There’s money poking out of Aunt Jane’s purse. It nags at the corner of my eyes. It’s two fifties, and I can’t believe she’s so careless. Anybody could take it. “It’s delicious.” I force a smile. “I’m just not very hungry.” The waitress smiles sympathetically as she walks away. I could take it. “How’s your wrist?” Aunt Jane asks. “It’s fine,” I say. “All healed.” “What did you learn about four wheeler racing?” she asks. Irritation prickles at me skin. My hand slithers down into her purse and closes over crisp bills. ... As soon as Mark dumps the grubby, sticky pills into my hand I have them in my mouth. It’s twenty minutes ‘till lunch and my empty stomach rebels. I swallow bitter spit. “Hey,” Mark says. “You can’t take those here!” “Why the hell not? They can’t catch me with them if I’m not carrying them.” “You’re going to be high as gently caress for English,” he says, shaking his head. ... I’m not. The pills leave me feeling bitter and unsatisfied. … “A hundred dollars? Really?” I stare out the window while Dad talks into the phone. “And you had it when we got to the restaurant. Yeah. It must have been the waitress. Yeah, you should call them. You won’t get your money back, but you might get her fired.” He hangs up. I’m floating on the warm wave of five pills, but something feels hollow in my stomach. “How do you know it was the waitress?” He glances at me. “She just seemed shady,” Dad says. “And who else could it be?” There’s a long, pregnant silence. “But you don’t know,” I say, panic trickling ice into my warmth. “Aunt Jane could have dropped it.” “She didn’t drop it,” Dad says. The truth is leaden on my tongue. This is my chance, my last chance, to fess up. To tell Dad what’s going on. Before I let my greed ruin some poor woman’s job. The guilt eats at me, ruins my high. “I did it,” I say. “I took the money.”
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# ¿ Nov 17, 2014 01:20 |
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In I will also do three in-depth crits for stories this week, just link your story.
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# ¿ Nov 17, 2014 19:34 |
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chthonic bell posted:Anathema Device: I'd really appreciate your crit on The Tram! quote:The tram has been knocked right off the rails by the blast. It now lies on its side amid the snowdrifts, like a dying animal. I’m put off by the “has been/is now.” Present tense is all about immediacy, so why start with something that has already happened? Snow settles on Isak's face through the shattered windows. He opens one eye and stares up, unseeing. He can taste blood. There's something hard and round under his back. He reaches down and feels someone's fur hat, wet and sticky and then the unmistakable texture of hair. On a line level, this (especially the last half) is pretty good. The strength of present-tense is immediacy, so you need to think especially hard about phrases that pull attention away from the moment. I don’t want to be reminded that someone is writing this; I want to experience it as it unfolds. There are some lines with unnecessary words, but there’s also a few times when you use “like..,” as in “like a dying animal, like he’s moving underwater, like a marionette.” These don’t feel like Isak’s thoughts, and remind me that this is being written. I normally wouldn’t advocate for anything that makes it harder to understand what’s going on, but the first line reads a bit like the camera is zooming in across the tram, to Isak. Everything else follows really tightly from Isak’s perspective. A bit of confusion at the beginning would make sense, given Isak’s confused state. The ending doesn’t really follow from the beginning or middle. His need to get to Bolshoi isn’t mentioned until the last line, so having time to get there (if he doesn’t freeze to death) doesn’t have a lot of impact. For the rest of the story, I’m wondering is Isak will survive, and the ending doesn’t really clear that up (can he really walk overnight in the state he’s in in that weather?) Overall this has a nice, floaty tone that makes sense with someone in shock, and decent description, but not a lot of plot. blue squares posted:musical flash rule: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHrkv4JRnC0 Your characters aren’t strong enough to carry off such an emotionally based story, and it ends up being pretty melodramatic. In general seeing a character at their weakest moment only carries power if you’ve seen them strong, and seeing them strong only carries power if you’ve seen them weak. A good character arc contrasts a starting point with an ending point, and there’s change in the middle. Here we have a character who starts out not wanting to die, and ends up not wanting to die. We have another character who starts out wanting to die, and ends up wanting to die. There’s no change or movement, and so there’s no power. Otherwise, your writing is pretty good. The pacing works, and there’s some nice imagery. Your Sledgehammer posted:Whenever This World is Cruel to Me On a line level, you had a few little rough spots that more reading and practice writing will help you avoid. You did a good job keeping your descriptions relevant to the story and the characters, but they could be a bit more vivid. On a story level, this reads almost like an essay with an introduction “Everyone’s gender was swapped” and a conclusion “everything happens for a reason” with the middle bits either expanding on the introduction “yes, everyone’s gender is really swapped” or the conclusion “Terri makes an interesting girl.” It’s okay for the reader to be confused when the viewpoint character is (within limits.) If you state your premise in the first sentence, you don’t need to show us that it’s true with the conversation about the football team. I have a hard time connecting to this story. I guess I don’t really see what the big deal is. So what, everyone’s a different gender/sex (these aren’t the same thing.) They don’t seem to have trouble with it; it’s been like that all along for them, so you’re not exploring trans* themes really. The only person it really changes anything for is your protagonist, and mostly it seems to change how he views people. I’d connect more strongly to this piece if it explored questions like “what does gender/sex have to do with personality” but it doesn’t go very deeply into that. It’s possible this was a humor story and I just missed the funny. Overall, your writing isn’t bad but I encourage you to dig deeper for the emotional consequences of your story premise.
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# ¿ Nov 19, 2014 18:13 |
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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 13:46 |
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Sitting Here posted:Who wants a chance to choose their destiny? I'll take He Gives Speeches. In. With a (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
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# ¿ Nov 26, 2014 07:39 |