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Hi Everyone, I've written this story for a university class and really like it. I'd really like to hammer it into something I'd feel good about sending out for publication, so I'd love a blunt critique. I'd also like to shave 300 words if possible to get it under 3000, though this might be a stretch. There is some New Zealand slang, but I don't think it will be too confusing. The Italics were in a different font in my submission. Samara It was after the long weekend that I found the tree in the board room. My names Barry, or Baz or Bazza, and I’m usually the first one in. I like to walk around and trigger the sensors and bring the white fluorescent sunrise around the office with me, making the shadows disappear as I walk. That morning I’d arrived even earlier than normal. There’d been some kind of late meeting on Friday and I wanted to pick over the wee bowls of lollies for the leftover banana fruit bursts and chalky wrapped mints that would be buried among the wrappers. I’m always straightening the place up so it’s only fair I get first dibs, you know? Anyway, I could tell that something was wrong before the lights came on, even before my eyes adjusted and I could just make out some strange shapes. The tree was very big. It wasn’t a whole tree or anything, just a single thick bough coming through the wall below the row of windows, before splitting off into branches that pushed up against the walls so that it practically filled the room. I was pretty surprised, so I stood there in the doorway for a bit, just because of how surprising it was. There were branches everywhere, twisted between chair legs, and vines threaded through the holes in the roof tiles. I didn’t think much for a few minutes, standing there, but it’s funny how the first thing that really struck me was how sort of polite the tree was. There were some leaves sort of brushing up against the white board which had rubbed off some of the red whiteboard pen, but apart from that there wasn’t a thing out of place. Apart from the hole in the wall It was the like the thing had been there forever and everything else had just happened around it. The building, the company, the meeting on Friday night, everything. I went and tidied up around it anyway, trying not to touch it or disturb it. To tell you the truth I was a bit weirded out by it. But when I was turning around to put my little finger through a coffee mug handle (I can carry six coffee mugs in one hand, each finger through one handle, and one in my palm. I have big hands and have practiced lots) I knocked my elbow into one of the main branches. The four coffee mugs I already had clinked together from the knock and the bark felt rough, even through my shirt. Yep, It was definitely real, not a hologram or something. I’d been thinking it would turn out to be a hologram or something. Even though it wasn’t scary, I have to say I got out of there quick after I tidied up, and made sure the door clicked shut when I closed it. I didn’t want to associate myself too much with the tree, didn’t want people to think it was my fault it was there or that I really had anything to do with it at all. People started coming into the office while I was refilling the printers with reams of bright white paper. I checked the schedule, the room wasn’t booked till the afternoon, but I was still getting anxious to let someone know about it. Caroline wasn’t in, she’s the office manager and normally gets in pretty soon after me. She would have known what to do. Instead I went upstairs and got George. George does graphic design and has a big beard. That day he was wearing a check shirt so he looked a bit like a pale skinny lumberjack, which was pretty funny because of the tree. We have a bit of a laugh together, sometimes on Fridays he brings in bottles of beer which he brews in his garage. People tell him that it’s very hoppy. Once I went round to his place and we sat in his garage drinking his beer, and he said that he doesn't really care how it tastes, it’s just a cheap way to get drunk all the time. “It’s beautiful” he said, his eyes were wide and his checked shirt looked just right beside the leaves. “I’m worried about it, George” He was right, it was a nice tree, but I still sort of felt responsible. I mean it was pretty strange to have a tree in the office like that. “Don’t be. How could there be anything wrong with something like this. Look at the colours, and how the branches cast shadows on the walls. Actually this gives me an idea.” He popped off for a minute, returning with his laptop and a cushion before nestling down in the leafiest corner. “You should reschedule that meeting, mate.” He said. “How long do you think we can keep this to ourselves?” George emailed me through some of the work he did that morning. Our department makes tests and stuff. Educational Products for Our Children, Our Future. He’d been working on a logo for a range of intermediate foreign language assessments. It was a handsome logo, strong and brown and green like the tree. “The bastards loved it!” he’d written. George wasn’t too keen on the company bigwigs since we got bought out by the big Australian outfit. “Took it first time, no revisions. This tree is really something special. It’s an inspirational tree.” I went and poked my nose into the board room and saw him. He was having a wee nap, half hidden by a bunch of leaves. It was almost time for that meeting, so I figured the jig was up and went and got Gina from HR who was running it. Gina, who wears expensive dresses and high heels every day, disapproved. She stared at it hard with her angry face before saying that it was an occupational health hazard and hurrying off with a funny half run, half walk she does when she’s got a bee in her bonnet. She can get up to a pretty reasonable speed while still maintaining workplace guidelines on running (banned) and also keeping her balance on her heels. She was off to get an incident form for me to fill in. I hate incident forms, the worst thing about coming in to work early is being the one to discover the leak from the dishwasher or a box that’s fallen after being stacked on the top of a filing cabinet. So Gina makes me fill in these incident forms and then an email goes around saying “Barry has filled in an incident report re: boxes stacked on filing cabinets. From now on no open surfaces higher than 80 centimetres are to be used for storage purposes.” Then I get the evils from people the next few days as they move their stuff. She’s sneaky like that, but I don’t really blame her. She’s been alone for a few years, husband left her with their kids etcetera etcetera. It was a pretty unfortunate situation and since then he's been a bit cranky. Pretty soon everyone had seen the tree, and everyone was talking about it. We don’t actually have a water cooler or anything, just normal taps, but everyone had something to say about it at lunch. Cheryl who does accounts receivable was one of the happiest. She’s been on a bit of an organics kick, and is always talking about her trouble with gluten and dairy and orange coloured foods. She said she liked its energy or its aura or something along those lines, and hung a crystal from it to charge up. I mean, I like Cheryl, but I don’t really know about that sort of thing, and while the tree is nice and all, it’s pretty much like any other tree apart from being in our office. Alice H looked at the tree briefly and said it was cool. Alice S said it was hot. Alice McC took a picture of it and put it on her instagram. Then they went back to their desks at the corner of the office. Even Rob didn’t seem to mind it. Rob has a job that no-one seems to understand. He doesn't really make anything and has no direct relationship to anyone in our office, but somehow it keeps him totally intensely focused for 10 hours a day, seven days a week, barely even speaking or even making eye contact with anyone. “I am concerned with the tree solely from an atmospheric perspective.” Rob normally only speaks when he gets racked off, and he only gets racked off if the temperature in his part of the office goes more than a degree or two over 20 degrees. Drafts can do it as well. “So long as the tree, and in particular the extra unforeseen ventilation it has provided” He raised a finger at the ragged tear in the side of the building that lets it in “do not negatively affect the office environment then I have no qualms with its presence.” Rob’s a bit intense, a bit scary actually. I’m glad he doesn't talk much. All in all, I think that people pretty much liked the tree. The meeting even went ahead, as there was plenty of room even with the leaves and branches and stuff. The next quarter was a really good one for us, and the quarter after that was even better. The tree was adopted as a kind of mascot, after head office had failed to give us instructions on how to proceed. The cost of removing the tree was far above what anyone here had the power to give the go ahead for, so Caroline had tried a few times to send away the paperwork to get the tender form to obtain the quotes from a couple of tradies to get rid of the thing, to send away to head office, to get approval and a purchase order form to fill out and send back to head office again to sign and send through to the cheapest one so they can come and do the work and get paid. But the forms got lost a few times at various points in the process, and eventually Caroline put it in the too hard basket, which is what she calls the rubbish bin by her desk. There was a slight problem with the tree, though. I was in the conference room one day on my break, folding the leaves so they cracked and smelling the sweet and spicy smell that came out. I seem to spend a lot of my breaks in there at the time. I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eyes. Sometimes there’s quite a bit of movement in that room, like when Cheryl from accounts receivable has set up a fan in the corner to make a soothing rustling sound. This was a bit different, and I turned and brushed up against a branch and it happened again, but this time I could see that it was dozens of tiny seed pods, spinning slowly down from the branches like helicopters. I’d seen these things before when I was a kid. I seemed to notice stuff like that more when I was a kid. George had told me it was a sycamore tree, and that the spinning seed pods falling all around me were called samaras. To be honest it was pretty beautiful, but there were a ton of them, and I knew the cleaners would throw a wobbly if they had to clean them up. I went and grabbed a broom, a dustpan and a brush and swept them up. I’d grown pretty attached to the tree by now, I would have been sorry to see it go. I knew it was just barely tolerated so long as it didn’t cause anyone problems, so even if cleaning up after it was a to keep it around was a pain I didn’t think that was too bad, really. I’d just stay a bit late. I got back to my desk to find an email from Chuck Zetsche, CEO of the company that owns us. It was sent to everyone in the country. “Dear Employees, In light of their exceptional performance metrics, I shall be personally visiting the Christchurch office to investigate the qualities that have made their output and profitability levels rise so sharply over the last six months. By harnessing their processes I hope to maximize synergies across the entire business and continue our mission to deliver quality products for Our Children, Our Future. I shall also be presenting a small plaque of recognition. Please join with me in recognizing their achievement in increasing EBITDA by 9.86% compared with the same accounting period last financial year. Kind Regards, Chuck Zetsche CEO” George was sure it was the tree that was making us better workers. “Close your eyes” he said, and grabbed my wrist and held it to the steel framing of the conference room table. It was cold, and my fingers slipped around and it in the darkness. It was hard to get a hold of, almost greasy even though I knew it was sanitized nightly. “Now here” and we repeated the test with one of the main boughs that separated out near the wall. It was rough and hard, and I winced slightly as it made a little scratch on my skin. One of my fingernails caught against some kind of crack, and my nail and the bark strained against each other, each one supple and alive, until the bark gave out and flaked off and my finger continued along the wood. “Now look” I looked at the shiny black conference table. I could see myself, and also a reflected strip of fluorescent light from the ceiling, a bit like a puddle of oil. The branch cut across my view, all silver scales with brown cracks, and even a little river of amber where a branch had broken. “They say the office was here first, but does that really make sense to you?” He hit the table with a knuckle, giving a clack that hurt my ears. “The tree. It's so much realer than the rest of this place” Knuckles against the thick branch this time, giving a deep satisfying knock. “It connects our work to the world. And now Zetsche is going to come and take it away.” George had been put in charge of the marketing campaign for a series of computer programs for handicapped kids. He’d called it Samara, after the seed pods that rely on the two of them working together. It had been a big success for the company. “I guess I can see what you mean” I said to him “But you know, I like the office. I like the way the lights work. I like that I don’t have to worry about forgetting to leave the hot tap on, or fixing the leak in the roof. I like how clean and white and shiny and always the same everything is. I like the tree as well, but I worry about whether it really belongs here. If it does I’m sure he’ll be able to see it”. A few weeks later Zetsche turned up. As soon as he arrived he gathered everyone into one corner of the office, where the Alice’s sit, and talked for a while. He gave Gina the plaque, and showed a powerpoint. One of the charts had big blue bars that started getting taller and taller from when I found the tree. The next was George’s Samara logo, Zetsche seemed particularly pleased with that one. He had a huge forehead, striped with big deep wrinkles that rolled into one another as his eyebrows moved up and down. After his presentation Gina started giving him the grand tour. People had been even quieter than usual when he asked if anyone had any questions, and I couldn’t help thinking about the elephant in the room, thought I guess it was really the tree in the room actually. I watched George watch them as Gina pointed out the break room and the little mini fridge that’s kept stocked with fizzy drinks (I wonder if she told him about the one per month limit?). As they passed the conference room Gina looked from left to right with a sort of innocent “and what’s the next interesting thing on the agenda?” type look. But Zetsche was no mug, and after exchanging a few words Gina dutifully lead him in. They’d been in there for ages. Gina had been acting really strange around Zetsche, she’d actually been happy, smiling at people and making conversation. He had a reputation as a bit of a hard-rear end, so I actually felt quite sorry for her, in there getting yelled at for something that wasn’t really her fault. I still felt responsible for the tree, so i started to get up my nerve to go in there and admit that it was me that found it. I was half hoping they’d come out while I was doing it, so I took longer than I should, but I finally walked up to the door. I listened for a few seconds first, but didn’t hear anything. When I opened the door it took a bit for my eyes to adjust to the light, but when they did I saw Gina smoothing her dress and hair, and Zetsche adjusting his tie, and looking sort of guilty. “So as I was saying…” He started and paused. “The tree” Gina prompted. “Yes, the tree. I like what you’ve done with it. Very unconventional, I wouldn’t normally allow it. But it’s very” he stole a glance at her “romantic. Who did you say put it in? Send me the proposals and we’ll look at rolling it out company wide. Now where’s the bathroom?” He said in his funny American accent. I supposed he meant the loos, so I pointed down the hallway. Gina waited in the hall while he went to the toilet, and I went back to stacking up some boxes of stationery that had come in from OfficeMax. I couldn’t wait to tell George what I’d heard. It was nice to think that this had worked out, because everyone had grown attached to it. That was when I heard the most horrible noise to ever come from a bathroom. A gurgle, followed by a sound like water sloshing around a bucket but times a thousand, followed by a horrible scream and a string of American accented swearing. It turned out the roots from the tree had found their way into the pipes from the loos, and about two days worth of poo, from our office and the one above, had backed up at just the right time to soak him to his ankles. It smelt pretty bad. It didn’t take long for the tree to be gone after that. The tradies came in and got rid of it over another long weekend, after it’d been there for just a shade over six months. Funny how the CEO can just say a few words to Caroline and bam! it’s gone in a jif. After that things pretty much went back to normal. One of the Alice’s lost her job for posting some post-plumbing-disaster photos of Zetsche to instagram. I think we hired another girl called Alice to replace her. George got fired for drinking at work as well, which was sad. They redecorated the conference room with some photo wallpaper showing some native forests, with birds and a stream and dirt and stuff. It didn’t stop our results going back to normal though, and I don’t think things panned out between Gina and Zetsche. It was an interesting time at the office, that’s for sure, but I still like coming in early and making the lights turn on.
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Aug 31, 2014 10:10
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Well, since I read it (aloud, in a quest to get rid of my Russian accent)... I'd say it's basically alright, although you have some unproofread glitches like articles out of place and stuff, and some peculiar punctuation, like "Alice's". It's probably a matter of preference, so I'd prefer "Alices". The apostophe isn't warranted grammatically, and a bit confusing at first read. You also might want to consider putting some proper names and terms into quotation marks, such as "Our Children, Our future". Maybe capitalize "accounts receivable"? Makes you pause as you try to establish the relationship among the words in those sentences. As far as cutting, I can suggest the bit about six mugs. I'm not sure what's the proper punctuation for a parethetical clause like that, and it felt pretty awkward to me anyway.
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Sep 2, 2014 19:41
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Thanks for the crit! I hope you attempted a Kiwi accent, it's got to be a good antidote for Russian. The six mugs line was definitely a tricky one. I like that it shows more of him taking pleasure in the small things in life, but it's almost certainly not worth the difficulty. newtestleper fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Sep 3, 2014 |
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Sep 3, 2014 00:39
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Oh, it's hard enough finding reliable resources for more "mainstream" accents, such as Texan, which I'd like to achieve. Unfortunately everyone, say, on Youtube, seems to take as their examples 19th century farmers or something, and if I followed them I would be laughed at by modern speakers. I think I've just heard the Kiwi accent for the first time on the selfsame site, and I'd probably need a personal tutor just to understand it. (No offence.  )
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Sep 3, 2014 10:29
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Hey, dude. You asked for a crit in Thunderdome, so here's something. My comments are in bold.newtestleper posted:It was after the long weekend that I found the tree in the board room. My names Barry, or Baz or Bazza, and I’m usually the first one in. Only one other time beyond this line is this guy's name mentioned, in the incident report, and it's only as Barry. Having nicknames is cute, but it doesn't tell us anything about him. Is Bazza something a good friend would call him? Nobody ever addresses him by name. Plus, I feel like if I'm telling you about an event in my life, I probably am not going to introduce myself. At all. I like to walk around and trigger the sensors and bring the white fluorescent sunrise around the office with me, making the shadows disappear as I walk. That morning I’d arrived even earlier than normal. There’d been some kind of late meeting on Friday and I wanted to pick over the wee bowls of lollies for the leftover banana fruit bursts and chalky wrapped mints that would be buried among the wrappers. I’m always straightening the place up so it’s only fair I get first dibs, you know? Anyway, I could tell that something was wrong before the lights came on, even before my eyes adjusted and I could just make out some strange shapes. As someone who worked overnights, I know the feeling of being the only person in the building and how the dawn fills the place up with warmth and energy. So I get the feeling this is supposed to evoke, but I feel you could really distill it into a few highly focused sentences to really nail that special time Barry has all alone in the office. As it is, it meanders. I felt as if you were going for a dreamy, fairy tale-like story about this transformative event; the tree's appearance. In that regard, the beginning meanders and doesn't build up enough that this event is coming. Barry comes in, and the first thing I want to know isn't his nicknames that no one uses, it's something being different. Maybe there's a freshness to the air which is uncommon. Part of the lead-up to this event should have been some kind of reference to How It Was. What were these people like before? How was the office doing? What's the score, man, before Wayne Gretztree hits the ice? And afterwards, even though Transformative Tree is gone, its influence should still remain. People's lives falling apart loving sucks, man. It definitely did not leave me with warm fuzzies like I think you intended. For instance, take Rob. He's that rear end in a top hat who nobody likes. The tree, in microcosm of the office at large, should fix him. He hates everything... but he likes this tree! And he becomes friendlier, poo poo like that. The tree is the thing which takes this broken office of broken people and glues 'em all together into whole, functioning entities. That's what I wanted out of this, was a tale of how the tree changed their lives. You didn't give me that. You gave me a meandering story about a tree which I guess made two people horny and then had a shitwater joke to justify killing off the tree. And those seeds, man. You named the story after them, and Graphic Designer George named the office's product after them, too! These things are important, yet they appear in only one section. Barry says he'd hate to lose that tree, but it seems like he just tips the seeds into the waste basket and moves on with his simple-minded life. Would he really have done that? Wouldn't Barry have kept some? Wouldn't they all? This tree is important, it has transformed this place and the people within it... but nobody cared enough to keep its seeds, apparently. Not even Barry, who seemed to feel a connection to the tree. Finally, the way you wrote Barry really does make him seem like he's the functional-but-retarded nephew who shows up everyday and everyone likes him like they like a squirmy puppy and he works hard at tasks everyone else hates doing and poo poo like that. He has no vitality, no sense that he's his own guy with his own life and drives. Your story has the potential to be something cool and fun, but it's deeply, deeply flawed as it stands. I wanted to like this, it seemed interesting at the start, but you shot yourself in the foot. And then your toilet overflowed and got smelly poopwater in the wound.
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Sep 14, 2014 05:28
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Thank you so much for the crit! Heaps of really awesome stuff for me to work on. The intent for Barry was to be the office dogsbody, not Forrest Gump levels of dumb but not quite 100%. I Feel like if I want his voice to dominate the story as much as it does it ends to bang up against the other characters a bit more. I appreciate the need to be a bit clearer about who he is and what he does. The ending is definitely problematic, I have had feedback to that effect from others too. Thank you again.
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Sep 14, 2014 06:29
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supermikhail posted:Well, since I read it (aloud, in a quest to get rid of my Russian accent)... I'd say it's basically alright, although you have some unproofread glitches like articles out of place and stuff, and some peculiar punctuation, like "Alice's". It's probably a matter of preference, so I'd prefer "Alices". The apostophe isn't warranted grammatically, and a bit confusing at first read. Alice's cat = the cat belonging to Alice Alices cat - two women called Alice standing next to a cat The possessive 's (the first one) can be confusing, because 's can also be used as a contraction of 'is'. Barry's a pimp = Barry sends women out onto the street corner Barry's pimp = the man who sends Barry out onto the street corner Finally, it works differently. It's _______= it is a ___________ Its _______= the __________ that belongs to it As a Kiwi, didn't feel the slang was an issue, probably because the bigger grammatical and structural issues are taking up all my attention. This really, really needs a proofread.
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Sep 14, 2014 09:18
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newtestleper posted:The intent for Barry was to be the office dogsbody, not Forrest Gump levels of dumb but not quite 100%. I Feel like if I want his voice to dominate the story as much as it does it ends to bang up against the other characters a bit more. I appreciate the need to be a bit clearer about who he is and what he does. I think you could get it out of the way right at the beginning by opening with a line like "When I was eighteen, I worked for a year at a company which did X" which would let you naturally go into what Barry does there, and what the company is like before Transformative Tree. Maybe the Christchurch branch hasn't been doing well, they're the worst-performing office of Megaconglomo, Inc. or something. Then once you've established that Barry is a guy who just does all the little jobs nobody else wants to do, you don't have to fill space with describing the mundane things he finds himself doing like filling printer trays or stacking boxes from OfficeMax. You can just focus on the story.
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Sep 14, 2014 16:00
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The crit that I promised in the Thunderdome thread. I'd respond to other comments too but I'm kind of in a rush. I really like the way your voice here demonstrates this event that is obviously significant and unusual while at the same time not really having the vocabulary to express it. Like, I think most people, if faced with a tree in the middle of their office that apparently came out of nowhere, would be at a pretty big loss for how to react to it. There’s this wonderful ambience of life goes on as usual but also this tree must be magical or something and so over time everybody slowly starts to worship it. You make good use of the first person voice for description, even if the main character is a bit of a cipher. …And that is, in fact, where most of the weakness in your story is. All of your characters, not just the narrator, are ciphers. The immediate problem is that there’s just too many of them. Most of them are well defined, but their characters are pretty limited and most don’t stick around in the memory that long. Without going back to check, I remember the mildly authority-hating quirky guy, Instagram girl, the CEO and manager who were hooking up, and that there are two Alices. I think the main problem with the characterization is that you seem very content to define their personalities in terms of what life was like before the tree, which just isn’t all that interesting. The reason why George in particular sticks out in my mind is because the simple presence of the tree appears to have made a serious impact on his office output. This is dynamic and feels very true for the kind of character he is. Now, I’m not saying every single character needs to have their life changed by the tree. But your prose paints a picture of a very subtle change in ambience at the office, and the best way to expose and layer over this would be to show how the tree changed daily life rather than immediate reactions. Who goes to the board room the most often and why? How does the presence of the tree change their atmosphere? Do they even notice the change? You talk about the improved office performance but never actually show it. The starting background hook is the main intriguing factor your story has going for it, but after the first half of the story you never really take it all the way. The defining moment ends up being the revelation of Gina and Zetsche hooking up, which I frankly didn’t really care about because neither of the characters are gone over in that much depth. For what it’s worth, I do like the idea of the tree leaving as unceremoniously as it arrived, with Barry not really sure whether it made much of a difference at all. It’s that kind of office zen your story should really focus on, and the characterization should be an outcropping of that idea rather than just trying to describe the characters in terms of how the narrator literally sees them. There’s a few redundant sentences that can be trimmed down for the sake of the word count, and one gender-inaccurate pronoun that I noticed. But in all honesty most of the story that’s not dealing with the tree from a direct or emotional perspective could stand to be cut.
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Sep 15, 2014 01:38
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Some Guy TT posted:The crit that I promised in the Thunderdome thread. I'd respond to other comments too but I'm kind of in a rush. Thank you both very much. There's a real theme coming through to the crits here which is awesome.
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Sep 15, 2014 02:14
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