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Mrenda
Mar 14, 2012
I began this writing malarky a few years back. I wrote some stuff, then wrote different stuff, now I'm writing even more different stuff that's an attempt at taking into consideration the realities of this very serious, lovely world. Being a goon there's always going to be a fantastical element however the focus on what I'm doing is more towards the consideration of what people, thought processes, and circumstances do to us, and what we do to them.

This story features four people who want for nothing material. They live in a grand house where everything is provided for them, a house that is the world for them. It's an everything that they take for granted much as any of us take for granted the world we live in. Possibly rich and ripe for the taking, probably offering far less. It is their world, as is totally normal, so it's not trying anything as you'd fine in some genres: there's nothing you're supposed to try to figure out, no Cthulhu'esque evil, no plotting mastermind. At most the plotting mastermind is me playing with language, as should be blindingly obvious from the first sentence, attempting something at modernism/post-modernism. There's nothing working against the characters, as much as there's nothing working against you or I except the entropy of the universe. There's no villain, there's little standing in their way, the characters acknowledge, but still barely understand, that they want more. The story, mostly, is about how we as people find ourselves within our setting.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cLm5glaIg27rZRXSldniEUZGDk8Dzpxsremp6ILqyrg/edit?usp=sharing

I shared some of this with a friend who said it's like I have a fetish for language. At the time I thought it was a good thing, so, please tell me, goons.

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Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.
Just at a brief start, I would delete the first two sentences

quote:

The lack of light in the room, beyond a general even-cast hum had no help from the blue-white tiles reflecting nothing, due to their sheen as dim as time forgotten, or more accurately, time ignored. Most had forgotten to countenance this room except as a portal to some place they felt they needed to be.

this is overlong and doesn't grab me really

quote:

This was a welcoming room, but there was no-one to welcome.

This line is crisper and more interesting, and pulls me in way more

EDIT:

This is more a thing of taste, but I find it never helps to open by describing a location. Think of the great openings, almost none of them start with a description of place. There should be a reason for the reader to want to read the second paragraph, open on an idea, an event, a question, etc.

Mel Mudkiper fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Apr 12, 2019

Mrenda
Mar 14, 2012

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Just at a brief start, I would delete the first two sentences


this is overlong and doesn't grab me really


This line is crisper and more interesting, and pulls me in way more

Perfect. Thanks.

Hey! But what about the rest of it?

Mrenda fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Apr 12, 2019

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.
I want to ask what the mentality of describing simple things elaborately is

For example in the bolded parts

quote:

He had the type of stubble that was well maintained, although with plausible deniability from fashion. It wasn’t that it was sculpted, it was trimmed with a clippers he’d made sure would save him money if money had ever mattered to him. Each stubby beard hair was long enough to be considered growth, but just beyond short enough to do more than touch his skin with a wash of colour. Donald was very sure of this. Sure enough to spend a good portion of half an hour in front of a mirror ensuring he could be sure. During this time he made sure to not be touching up the stubble, that would be vain. Instead he looked for long enough to ensure he was happy with its effect and that his smile was as effective as he was happy with himself. That was all guaranteed by half an hour, or so, in front of a mirror that was not for fashion, nor for vanity, just that this looking at himself was as much a part of Donald as his name. That’s all he knew he had.

These are both descriptions that seem to be elaborate for no other reason than a certain desire for a lyrical tone to the writing.

However, think about the path the reader takes. A meal loses flavor if every dish is elaborate but the same. An album is boring if every song is just as pronounced as all the others. etc. If every line is meant to be gorgeous, no lines end up being gorgeous. You should consider simpler, blunter sentences to convey simple ideas so that when you decide to elevate the language that choice stands out.

Like, I like the lines I underlined, but their quality gets lost in the din of everything else. If you cut away at what surrounds them, they stand out better.

For example, you could say something like

quote:

Each whisker was short. Not too short, he made sure of that, just enough so someone could notice it was there. Donald was very sure to maintain the length just right. Sure enough to spend a good portion of half an hour in front of a mirror ensuring he could be sure.

Lex Neville
Apr 15, 2009
Even in that rewritten bit, the repetition is too heavy-handed to be quirky.

I'll read it over the next few days and post an elaborate response, Mrenda. But before I do: props for putting in the hard hours, as well as for posting it here, dude. Gotta respect that!

Lex Neville fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Apr 12, 2019

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.
I keep coming across the question of "Why?"

I am not getting a propelling reason to read forward after every page. If your reader is picking up this book without reading a treatise on its existence, there doesn't seem anything to propel it forward

I am not saying it needs action or a car chase or anything tedious like that, but it needs something as a drive.

Like, read some Yasunari Kawabata. Many of his novels are sheltered playing with language devoid of action, but they still have a [i]drive/i] to their narrative.

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat
I want to echo the other posters' praise of your work ethic and courage here, and I also like your posting in general, but I do not like this.

On one level, this really needs proofreading – it's a Swiss cheese of missing hyphens and commas, moldy with worse errors – but proofreading won't fix the writing. As others have already said, it's labored and overwrought, given to drawn-out, rambling descriptions that add nothing but length. I can see the inspirations, what you're trying to do here (this really wants to be Virginia Woolf), but it just doesn't make it.

Page 10 posted:

Embedded in the wood were brushed steel flaps that hid network ports hinting there was a cupboard filled with computer hardware somewhere hidden deep in the house. Racks of blinking lights routing bits and bytes to a great world outside. Geena knew if there was a room filled with computers, for what must have been an office before any of the current residents arrived, there must surely be a stationery cupboard for those same office workers. She knew there would be a shelf bearing empty A4 pads, staplers, staples and rulers. If she was lucky there would be bright yellow legal pads, boxes of pens red, blue and black. There would be a stray three or four green pens, for marking accounts and indulging a curly haired women who’d made a special request and Geena’s special request would be for the used whiteboard, hidden, leaning against the wall below the lowest shelf bearing abandoned, cheap, out-of-ink printers.
Why all the speculation about the exact hypothetical contents of this cabinet? She needs a whiteboard. That's the single thing that she's looking for, not this mess of pads and pens and staplers. There's nothing informative about this to anyone who already knows what office supplies are, nothing poetic about listing the items and their various colors. The stab at cleverness in the sentence about the "special request" doesn't actually come together and wouldn't make up for the whiff of Jonathan Safran Foer see-what-I-did-there if it did. The computer stuff at the beginning of the paragraph is nonsense. Only in the last line, where the abandoned printers are used to a discernible emotional effect, does this paragraph make sense in the way that Mrs. Dalloway's description of laundry and flowers and laundry-like flowers does. If Geena were thinking about how old and abandoned the cabinet was, exploring that in her mental examination of its various contents... it still wouldn't ring true, because she's looking for the drat whiteboard, but at least I could understand why the author was writing about it.

But even as it is, this is still better than the subsequent paragraph, where the Virginia Woolf worship crosses into outright parody:

Pages 10-11 posted:

She thought on the balance of her hands, to which, she thought how her right hand was empty. There was no balance to the world. She wrapped both sets of her hands’ fingers around the gum bottle, holding it before her as though a chalice. This communion of body parts, holding so tight the mostly empty plastic container didn’t settle her. She shook it again, this time both arms moving up and down, strenuously, but not violently. Her body felt out of place. Her arms felt heavy, or stiff. It all felt pointless. The point of this wasn’t evident to her but for that she was thankful. The point was she knew what she needed to do and her investigating her arms for their connection to herself, and her hands for connection to her arms, and her fingers for their purpose at the end of it all showed her she could easily throw the gum bottle hard against the wall without consequence. It didn’t occur to her until it came as a shock. It’s what she wanted to do. Smashing something would cause action. Doing so would be her fault. No-one would see it but her. No-one would bear the consequences but her. She wanted to throw the bottle. She wanted to find the whiteboard. She wanted to cook.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Apr 12, 2019

Mrenda
Mar 14, 2012
All the comments are fair. It might be that my self-consciously indulgent writing, part of my weird brain, only works for my weird brain.

If you're stopping, or already stopped reading, but would take a new jumping-off point then reading from the section that begins around page 31 (or the next section at page 34) would be doing me a big favour. I would say it's around then the pace slightly picks up. It won't change in style, but what I was trying for at the beginning changes around then.

FormerPoster
Aug 5, 2004

Hair Elf
Are these people supposed to be insane? Last night I read this while half asleep and thought it was a pretty interesting look at the unraveling minds of people in a mental facility, but now I'm fully-awake and realizing it's just four people in a house. Are they still crazy though? Because they all sound loving crazy. The whole thing does. If that's what you were going for, you got it. If not...well, I guess what were you going for?

Lex Neville
Apr 15, 2009
I gave editing the first four pages or so a shot, but tbh it became a little too much. I have it saved, in case you'd like to see it still (though perhaps it's more efficient to have a back-and-forth on discord), but you'd probably catch a lot of the more basic remarks yourself by way of a thorough proof-reading. I'm afraid there's quite a few darlings to kill ( :( ) but as Sham said, there's more basic improvements to be made first.

Looking past those, but keeping it general: stylistic idiosyncrasies are too abundant and of too clearly a for-the-sake-of-it nature ("her coffee, but not his, rested between them" comes to mind). It's also unnecessarily vague too much, imo; the reader is constantly made to wonder with hardly ever a reprieve by way of an answer. This is particularly bad when it comes to evocative speech. You want the reader to go "I can picture that" at least every now and then (e.g. the dim sheen of time ignored which is made worse by the correction following it, because if anything it makes it less clear).

To be brutally honest, more so than as a stylistically idiosyncratic but relatively uniform text does it strike me as a composition of shticks, of which repetition, wordiness and getting bogged down in vague or irrelevant minutiae are your worst sins. Repetition can be used very effectively, obviously, but here it's predictable and, frankly, a little tiring - I found myself guessing which word would be repeated ad nauseam next and I found myself proven right on many occasions, which made it worse. I've underlined some examples. Mind you, it does work well on other occasions (the welcoming thing early on is good, as Mel said), but those instances are drowned out by instances like these:

quote:

Larger than reasonable, this was an entrance room that should by all rights be left empty, or at least not regarded with its lacking in reason. Except, for no reason, it had been put to use today. Today had no reason, much like those who sat in the room.

...

The coin Donald rolled was an old coin not much use for anything other than what use people thought it could be put to.

Stephanie grabbed at the coin, with her palm and fingers slapping down against the table. She was as fast as Donald was away with his thoughts, putting the coin to the end of its use. She didn’t contemplate what came next.

...

He had the type of stubble that was well maintained, although with plausible deniability from fashion. It wasn’t that it was sculpted, it was trimmed with a clippers he’d made sure would save him money if money had ever mattered to him. Each stubby beard hair was long enough to be considered growth, but just beyond short enough to do more than touch his skin with a wash of colour. Donald was very sure of this. Sure enough to spend a good portion of half an hour in front of a mirror ensuring he could be sure. During this time he made sure to not be touching up the stubble, that would be vain. Instead he looked for long enough to ensure he was happy with its effect and that his smile was as effective as he was happy with himself. T

Stephanie stopped looking at him, forgoing a reaction to his lack of reaction.

Stephanie wasn’t proper, and most certainly wasn’t prim. Unlike Donald she also wasn’t vain. She was methodical, in both appearance and her lack of perceived effort in appearing to maintain an appearance. This was their difference. Whereas Donald went to great effort but denied any effort, even to himself, Stephanie went to great effort but denied it only to others. This was all she gave herself.

The clothes she wore were comfortable and grey. They were soft and grey. They were well cut and grey. Each item of clothing she wore, from the off-white, thick socks, to the almost-silver snood, was a different shade of grey. Everything she wore was grey, except for a thin black hairband holding back hair so unremarkable as to be considered a brown-grey, and her runners a mix of luminous green and pink, with only the thin breathable material around the top of the toes a dark grey. Stephanie was methodical about appearance, amongst other things. Grey everything gave her more time to keep up with her methodically grey appearance, as she wanted others to see it.

...

“The comment,” he said. “The one comment,” he added to fully place his statement within its worth and considered measure, “Made no sense.” That was his conclusion, not giving it or her much thought.

Being told that her comment, her one comment, made no sense didn’t bother Stephanie because she was busy examining her one comment for all the sense it made. Then, having decided it made plenty of sense, she left the room.


I hope you'll find this to be constructive. I'll read on from page 31 (let me know if you'd rather I shut up, of course)

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat
I went to the "Normal Changes" section. Lex's "schticks" and "minutiae" are good words for most of what's going on here. Lots of hemming and hawing over specificities that don't warrant the attention. The narration makes a show of considering things very thoughtfully, even though actual thoughtfulness doesn't lay down each of its baby steps on the page itself. Sentence fragments pile up in loose clumps that make each separated detail seem like a hasty afterthought to the one before it, a string of postscripts without a letter. Stephanie and Geena gaze at their navels in self-pitying self-absorption while the narration repeatedly insists at me that Donald is the empty-headed one. I'm not buying it.

quote:

She looked at the ingredients littering the counter. She didn’t know what they were for. Why she’d put them there. She’d put them their to force herself to cook but she hadn’t. They were ingredients she’d assembled to make into a meal but looking at them now she couldn’t understand what meal they would form into. What tasty meal they could form into, full of richness. Satisfying. Filling. There was an emptiness in her stomach that told her she mattered. She deserved to eat but it would come again the next day, and the next, and the next. It would consume her.
Nobody thinks like this but an author looking for excuses to doodle around. It's free association of trivialities masquerading as reflection. I don't learn or feel anything from reading it.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Apr 12, 2019

Exmond
May 31, 2007

Writing is fun!

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Think of the great openings, almost none of them start with a description of place.

"The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault." would beg to differ.

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

Exmond posted:

"The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault." would beg to differ.

Noted literary great.... Jim Butcher?

Mrenda
Mar 14, 2012
It's back to the drawing board for me. I was far too circumspect in what I was doing and in my whorl of language. That's fair, it was an entirely indulgent story where I left rip.

Seeing as there'll be no-one reading I figure it's ok to lay out some of the logic behind it. Madness is definitely a part of it. All the characters (bar maybe Donald, although he has his own issues in this world) have suffered a trauma or mental malady of some sort. It's not enough, or the trigger wasn't enough to cause acute issues, just the type of psychological tripping that pulls someone down slowly in a type of society where individual purpose is lost. The house is a place where everything is provided for them, somewhat a reflection on a society where if not UBI, then at least menial work is available for people who want more but can't achieve it. It's an experiment on what happens when a world is devoid of opportunity but basic comfort is provided for. All the characters have gone a little crazy from such a world (crazy like the awareness we now have of people's troubles in today's post-modern world.) The minutiae and shticks, as it was put, is the evidence of there being nothing more for the characters. They're living and experiencing the triviality of a world without possibility, much as I wanted the reader to.

This doesn't work as a book. So I'll just say thanks to everyone who gave it a go. I'll keep writing but I'll rein in my flights of fancy back to a more normal level in future.

Exmond
May 31, 2007

Writing is fun!

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Noted literary great.... Jim Butcher?

Hugo award winner of my heart: Jim Butcher

Sorry for the detail

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Mrenda posted:

It's back to the drawing board for me. I was far too circumspect in what I was doing and in my whorl of language. That's fair, it was an entirely indulgent story where I left rip.

Seeing as there'll be no-one reading I figure it's ok to lay out some of the logic behind it. Madness is definitely a part of it. All the characters (bar maybe Donald, although he has his own issues in this world) have suffered a trauma or mental malady of some sort. It's not enough, or the trigger wasn't enough to cause acute issues, just the type of psychological tripping that pulls someone down slowly in a type of society where individual purpose is lost. The house is a place where everything is provided for them, somewhat a reflection on a society where if not UBI, then at least menial work is available for people who want more but can't achieve it. It's an experiment on what happens when a world is devoid of opportunity but basic comfort is provided for. All the characters have gone a little crazy from such a world (crazy like the awareness we now have of people's troubles in today's post-modern world.) The minutiae and shticks, as it was put, is the evidence of there being nothing more for the characters. They're living and experiencing the triviality of a world without possibility, much as I wanted the reader to.

This doesn't work as a book. So I'll just say thanks to everyone who gave it a go. I'll keep writing but I'll rein in my flights of fancy back to a more normal level in future.

I've been reading this and was planning on finishing it, but I understand if you're not deciding to continue with the project. I think your concept here is sound enough -- "what happens when people are given what they need to survive but not anything else to live for?" -- but the actual writing needs a lot of work on clarity. I admit I have a problem with reading prose as puzzle boxes at times, but as I was reading, I was extremely confused on the basic scenario, and still am: very architectural-horror, but how supernatural is this situation, and how much is just psychological? It's okay to have some mystery, but I think the reader at least needs to be able to build a hypothesis about what's going on.

Another thing to work on is character voice, I think. Each character has quirks, but honestly, the voices all seemed very similar to me, particularly Stephanie and Gemma, who seem to be intended to be wildly different types but whose initial sections read very similarly. If you want to do psychological studies with multiple viewpoints, you really need to have distinct voices for everybody, which is a major challenge.

FormerPoster
Aug 5, 2004

Hair Elf

Mrenda posted:

This doesn't work as a book. So I'll just say thanks to everyone who gave it a go. I'll keep writing but I'll rein in my flights of fancy back to a more normal level in future.

It doesn't work as a book, but it could work as a short story.

FormerPoster fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Apr 14, 2019

HeyItsLiam
Apr 14, 2019

Mel Mudkiper posted:


This is more a thing of taste, but I find it never helps to open by describing a location. Think of the great openings, almost none of them start with a description of place. There should be a reason for the reader to want to read the second paragraph, open on an idea, an event, a question, etc.

COUNTERPOINT: The Hound of the Baskervilles, I believe, opens with a juicy description of the godforsaken British moors.

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FormerPoster
Aug 5, 2004

Hair Elf

HeyItsLiam posted:

COUNTERPOINT: The Hound of the Baskervilles, I believe, opens with a juicy description of the godforsaken British moors.

And East of Eden opens with an entire loving chapter about the Salinas Valley. Those are great examples of when it can work, but they're memorable because they're outliers. They're also much older books, and literary styles have changed. Can you do what you want? Sure, it's your book. It just always helps to be aware of what's considered the current 'standard', so you can decide if you want to deviate from it, and if so--most importantly--why.

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