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It's high time we open up another workshopping thread! What this thread is for This is the thread where you can post your short stories and novel excerpts for feedback! Previous threads had maximum word counts. I don't think that's useful, especially for those of us working on longer short stories, novellas, and novels. I'm going to put this right up front:  If you are planning to submit your story for publication, please be aware that publishers may or may not consider posts in this thread as "prior publication" which could make your story ineligible. The way around this is to post your stories behind a link; most people will use Google docs for this purpose. How to post You can of course just paste your story directly into the thread. Many CC writers use Google docs. If you would like to share your story as a Google docs link, make sure your share settings are set to "anyone with a link can read/comment"  You do not have to allow comments on your doc. You can certainly make it read-only and direct crits back to this thread. If you want line-by-line crits on a Google doc, however, it's better to enable comments. How to post goodly Any story or excerpt longer than about 5000 words should be posted as a Google docs link (or similar format) so readers don't have to scroll for ages. Any story or excerpt shorter than 5000 words may be posted in this thread. Please see the caveat about publishers at the top of this post. If you post a story, you should be prepared to crit someone else's story. If you are posting your story in the thread, make sure to hit preview to catch any formatting errors. No one wants to read a horrible block of text because you couldn't be bothered to format your story for the forums. If you write in standard manuscript format in a word processor, you will need to do a small amount of work to make sure your spacing and formatting is appropriate for this thread. Bad: quote:Title Good: quote:Title How to crit goodly The Fiction Advice thread has an excellent post about giving and receiving feedback! Scroll down a bit for advice on giving critiques. I'm not going to post a rubric or guide because there are a lot of different ways to critique and some of it will depend on the format. Offering line-by-line critique directly in-document is going to be very different than writing a general content critique on the forums. You do not have to have to have any special experience or insight to offer someone a critique. The only thing that isn't helpful are short, shallow responses like "this sucks" or "this is great". I'll say it again: if you post a story, you should be prepared to crit someone else's story. Resources: Feel free to join CC's premier writing Discord! Also the home of the Thunderdome contest community. https://discord.gg/FHT2UVM I will add other resources here as people give them to me. Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Sep 28, 2020 |
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Sep 28, 2020 18:42
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I'm looking for feedback on the opening section of my novel. A lot of people have looked at it and I got a few sparse notes but I had one recent viewer that had an issue with almost every line. I was so thrown by the reaction that I'm now second guessing my ability to string a sentence together or construct a scene at all. Wondering if people here will have similar reactions. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yQn0Ehp2HM11BlNUr5eNojWZnkl61siqKHi1Qas7ea8/edit?usp=sharing Feel free to comment on the doc or quote sections here, though as I just learned trying to copy from Google Docs into a forum post leads to very strange formatting issues. I'll also take a look at the next few things posted in this thread that people are looking for feedback on, as long as they're not too many pages.
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Sep 28, 2020 21:04
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Ccs posted:I'm looking for feedback on the opening section of my novel. A lot of people have looked at it and I got a few sparse notes but I had one recent viewer that had an issue with almost every line. I was so thrown by the reaction that I'm now second guessing my ability to string a sentence together or construct a scene at all. Wondering if people here will have similar reactions. I left a few comments on the doc. In general, I enjoyed this! It's punchy and funny. Cantus is really legible as someone who really really wants his job to be more exciting than it is. I had a few nitpicks, but I am having trouble figuring out what was so egregious in the mind of your other reader.
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Sep 28, 2020 23:31
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Sitting Here posted:I left a few comments on the doc. Thanks! Your critique is useful and gives me some confidence back. The other reviewer basically had an issue with everything, from the idea that doors crashing to the ground would create a lot of of noise, that there would be dust created by them falling ("how old would the doors have to be to send up a cloud of dust?") to the magic system not being clarified when "astral world" is mentioned, to not understanding why there was a fight happening, finding fault with the tone of sentences ("clumsy suggests a value judgement that a third person narrator shouldn't have, describe instead") and so forth. I can understand some of the critiques but in my opinion providing a lot of clarification would bog down the pacing with extraneous information that isn't pertinent to the story. Oh well.
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Sep 28, 2020 23:55
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Ccs posted:I'm looking for feedback on the opening section of my novel. A lot of people have looked at it and I got a few sparse notes but I had one recent viewer that had an issue with almost every line. I was so thrown by the reaction that I'm now second guessing my ability to string a sentence together or construct a scene at all. Wondering if people here will have similar reactions. Just threw my crit in the doc as well. I did a few line-by-lines and then an overall at the bottom. You've got a good grip on your protagonist and his conflict and it came across well, so that's the bulk of the hard poo poo out of the way. Now you can focus on all the boring stuff, like verb choices and sentence order. As for the recent crit bringing you down, I just went through something similar and I know how much it sucks. I got through it by reminding myself that a) the person took the time to critique, and that's absolutely better than someone not caring about the story enough to say anything, and b) some people's critique style is focused strictly on pointing out problems, rather than highlighting both what works and what doesn't. And that's okay! Strangely enough, there are people in this world who really want to have their flaws pointed out in excruciating detail, which is why the subreddit /r/roastme exists. For others, this isn't particularly helpful, and they need some positivity in the mix too. That's why /r/getmotivated exists. Those groups couldn't be more different, yet each one has millions of followers. Point is, it takes all kinds of make a world, and even your harshest critic can be trying to help you in their own way. having said all that, i still hate getting harsh crits, and i for sure stay up all night thinking about them as i take sad pics of myself in animal crossing. such is life...
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Sep 29, 2020 00:13
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Ccs posted:I'm looking for feedback on the opening section of my novel. A lot of people have looked at it and I got a few sparse notes but I had one recent viewer that had an issue with almost every line. I was so thrown by the reaction that I'm now second guessing my ability to string a sentence together or construct a scene at all. Wondering if people here will have similar reactions. Thirding that I really liked this. I didn't have much to add on top of what has already been commented inline, so I just made two notes of my reactions as a reader. If you need beta readers later, let me know, I'd be game for this.
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Oct 1, 2020 11:25
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Leng posted:Thirding that I really liked this. I didn't have much to add on top of what has already been commented inline, so I just made two notes of my reactions as a reader. If you need beta readers later, let me know, I'd be game for this. Hey thanks! I don't have private messaging so I can't really send you the full thing through PMs. I added my email address to the end of the document though so send me an email if you'd like to read the full thing, and I'll add you to the google doc!
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Oct 7, 2020 18:32
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Ccs posted:I'm looking for feedback on the opening section of my novel. A lot of people have looked at it and I got a few sparse notes but I had one recent viewer that had an issue with almost every line. I was so thrown by the reaction that I'm now second guessing my ability to string a sentence together or construct a scene at all. Wondering if people here will have similar reactions. This was refreshing to read, I liked it. It reminded me strongly of the comedic fantasy elephants in the room. If that's not what you were going for, take all my crits with a grain of salt.
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Oct 9, 2020 09:04
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Tell me what you think of this opening scene. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UX2ogH4HATx43_pw7yuYFWBd_9mWB4lkjC5rY9gt48Q/edit?usp=sharing Ccs posted:I'm looking for feedback on the opening section of my novel. A lot of people have looked at it and I got a few sparse notes but I had one recent viewer that had an issue with almost every line. I was so thrown by the reaction that I'm now second guessing my ability to string a sentence together or construct a scene at all. Wondering if people here will have similar reactions. A great opening. It has me interested in what comes next. Its so short though that I feel I don't have anything to add to what's already been said. I've struggled to find the perfect size snippet before - too short and all critiques are identical, too long and few will read it.
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Oct 9, 2020 21:25
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animaldog posted:Tell me what you think of this opening scene. My first impression of this is one of unpolish. There's many grammatical/spelling errors (plenty of which Google has underlined so I'm not sure why you didn't fix them.) The characters names (as well as some in-universe terms) are sometimes capitalized and sometimes not which is particularly confusing due to their names. I highly suggest reading this out loud and going through sentence by sentence. It's just too rough to give feedback right now. There's parts during the action I am completely lost.
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Oct 16, 2020 16:21
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I know that I tend to create a muddled mess when I go for style I'm just too tangled up in it to see where I went wrong. Could you give an example of where you were lost and break it down? I've gone over it so many times I cant read it for what it is. I need someone else's eyes.
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Oct 17, 2020 01:15
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I had a look when you first posted the link last week. My eyes glazed over pretty quickly and my brain went, this is way too hard to comment on. Here are some thoughts after rewatching Brandon Sanderson's 2020 lecture on plot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrIogch5DBU) and a second pass. The lecture I linked specifically addresses hooking readers with plot. Sanderson may not be your cup of tea, but he is very good at explaining the basics of craft: your opening makes certain promises (tone, story) to the reader and it's on you as the author to convince them to keep reading by giving them a sense of progress towards satisfying payoffs (i.e. delivering on the promises you made at the beginning). Here are the tone and story promises I get from your opening:
I have no idea what your story is about. This "useless Prince" gave...some orders? To Guard and Help who then did stuff that pissed off the mob and the Errants and they're now on the run. The Prince seems to be a whiny delusional rich kid that Guard and Help (understandably) don't respect. Why should I care about these characters? Why should I keep reading? My answer to both of those questions are "I don't know" and that's not a good thing for your opening.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:58
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Thanks for the comments in the doc. I'll use them to rewrite and will post another version soon. I may cut the journal entries entirely, they are supposed to be milestones in the prince's transformation from "We're on a fun adventure to escape the ungrateful peasants" to "Oh, God. Literally everything is my fault". I'll try to bring these ideas up more naturally. As for caring about the characters: The prince is based on the "let them eat cake" version of Marie Antoinette. Guard is the only reasonable character but he has no morals. A pure self-interest machine. The narrator isn't quite omniscient and they despise the prince, in a way they are Guard's internal monologue. Is the way I introduce them bad, or are they just not interesting? The way their personalities interact are fundamental to the story so if there's something wrong there I'm not sure if I can fix it. animaldog fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Oct 17, 2020 |
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Oct 17, 2020 04:03
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animaldog posted:The narrator isn't quite omniscient and they despise the prince, in a way they are Guard's internal monologue. Ok, this is the missing piece! animaldog posted:Guard is the only reasonable character but he has no morals. A pure self-interest machine. It's more that I had NO IDEA that we're supposed to be in Guard's head. Your current opening is written in such a distant third that I mistook it for omniscient. Get closer, so that it's really clear who the POV character is. The journal entry is actually a red herring, because it made me assume that if we were in anybody's head, it was going to be the Prince. That was really off putting since he's unlikeable, incompetent and uninteresting. I'd suggesting watching this Sanderson lecture on characters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NCiuI6F5O0 - he talks about figuring out where your characters sit on 3 different sliding scales (likeability, proactivity and competence) and how that will change over their character arc. If Guard never develops morals over the course of the story, that decreases his likeability so you have to make up for it with his proactivity and competence - it's ok to have an unlikeable character if they are always doing badass and interesting things. If Guard does have an arc that ends with him developing some morals, then you'll need to show that he's got some hope of overcoming that flaw. That is your hook: Guard has the world's whiniest and most incompetent boss who just destroyed the kingdom. Somehow, he's got to keep his Prince (a ridiculous idiot rich kid who is completely out of touch with reality) alive for the ??? (insert period of time) drive across a rioting country over the ??? (insert direction) border to seek refuge with the closest ally while fighting mobs and dangerous Errants. Everybody knows somebody like the Prince - whether we've worked for them, been bullied by them, had some aspect of our life ruined by them - and we all hate them. That makes your reader immediately identify with Guard. Having a clear goal (direction of nearest ally) - and knowing how far away it is/how hard it is get there - establishes your stakes and gives me an idea of what the progress will be. We also then have a number of clear conflicts established: 1) conflict with the Prince - he's so incompetent that he's bound to blow their cover and Guard can't get rid of him for (insert reasons) 2) conflict with the mob 3) conflict with the Errants - they're armed and dangerous There wasn't enough in your opening for me to understand what the specific issue with #2 is, but you get the idea. I look forward to seeing your next version.
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Oct 17, 2020 08:09
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animaldog posted:I know that I tend to create a muddled mess when I go for style I'm just too tangled up in it to see where I went wrong. Could you give an example of where you were lost and break it down? I've gone over it so many times I cant read it for what it is. I need someone else's eyes. Leng is giving you good advice. I'll take another look after you edit. I never would have guessed this is from Guard's POV. Seems like it's supposed to be the Prince's from the start, which greatly adds to the confusion later.
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Oct 17, 2020 16:50
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So hopefully this link works, I'm not very familiar with google drive https://docs.google.com/document/d/13o8wMpIWu8DpWcVFnbsS_Q5--opGrF9S1qfV_-3pqrc/edit?usp=sharing That's the first part of my novel. Comments and criticisms all welcome and don't feel you have to read the whole lot in order to comment. It's an urban fantasy about a secretive British agency called Unit 13 tasked with protecting the country against paranormal threats. Only because it's a British agency it's woefully underfunded. The main character is meant to have a cosy desk job but gets drafted in to cover the London branch's ghost hunter when she goes on maternity leave. It's meant to be a do nothing job, after all ghosts only haunt tumbledown castles and manor houses, there are never any actual hauntings in a big city like London....
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Oct 23, 2020 08:14
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FightingMongoose posted:https://docs.google.com/document/d/13o8wMpIWu8DpWcVFnbsS_Q5--opGrF9S1qfV_-3pqrc/edit?usp=sharing Works fine and I'm happy take a look over the weekend, though I might not read all 20k words. What sort of critique are you specifically looking for? EDIT: Alright, a quicker read of your 20k words than I thought it would be! Since you haven't specifically said you wanted a line critique, I'll just give you general comments (bear in mind that I don't normally read this genre unless you count Cassandra Clare).
Hope that helps and is what you were looking for! Leng fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Oct 24, 2020 |
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Oct 24, 2020 02:49
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That is really helpful, yes, thank you!. Those are actually the only two epigraphs in the novel. The first one was deliberately meant to cheesy but it seems it missed the mark if it's gone into full cringe. It's probably easiest for me to just remove them both. I do have the other two parts written up. If you have any interest in reading them let me know and I'll share the links here. Otherwise, thanks again for the comments.
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Oct 24, 2020 07:52
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FightingMongoose posted:So hopefully this link works, I'm not very familiar with google drive My impression of this is that there is a tremendous amount of detail that is not very important. It feels like they're in the car forever before they arrive at the 'rave'. Nearly all the details about Chris don't matter when he's about to be shivved. I started skimming until they arrived. The story picks up from there, but the detail overload continues. For example: quote:He turned and scanned the foyer for the seats that the receptionist had told him to go to. There were no obvious chairs or benches that he could see. There were some dark grey stone cubes that were roughly the size and dimensions of a stool and Tom wandered over to them. They could be intended as stools, he reasoned, but equally they could be corporate art of some kind or even security barriers to prevent someone driving a car through the windows behind them. That is 100 words and more than 1 paragraph to describe a relatively unimportant bit of scene setting. Here's me trying to reduce it by 2/3rds while using almost entirely your words: "In the foyer, there were grey stone cubes that resembled stools, but could equally well be some kind of corporate art. Too risky to sit on them, Tom decided, and opted to stand instead." Alternatively, if you want to write detailed description, I think the details need to be more interesting. You'd have to describe the stools in an interesting or funny way. Lastly, when you write about London, you almost have to characterize the city itself. Or at least acknowledge most of your audience has some idea of the city. I don't read urban fantasy but would expect it to be extra important there. I wondered which tube station Tom was at and was unhappy I couldn't place him anywhere. Felt like it could be any crowded city with mass transit. I stopped reading/scanning after the interview because I felt I had read enough to give feedback.
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Oct 25, 2020 17:15
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Makes sense, thanks.
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Oct 26, 2020 18:04
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Hi critique thread! I wrote a lot of fiction when I was younger and then got ground down by academic and business writing. Thought I'd give fiction a try again this year and I just finished my first short story in about 17 years. I think I'm just looking to figure out how to work through some of my weaknesses. Things like dialogue and character voice. I still read a lot so I'll do my best to provide helpful feedback as well. Here's my story, all 6900 words of it. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FODMAjpHdotUvltpe0qKmtMRqUVz4m91kOdL_EaZU2o/edit?usp=sharing I don't know if a line-by-line critique is necessary. I think I'm mainly dissatisfied with the car ride, and the final setting at the end with the tunnel/cave system. I think it's unintentionally disorienting and I'm not sure how to describe it clearly while portraying the character's confusion. While I was writing it I was trying to remember how Ballingrud communicated things in the crevasse story from North American Lake Monsters. Thanks in advance, I've also joined the thunderdome discord.
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Jan 19, 2021 15:00
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tuyop posted:
Hi and welcome back to fiction writing! Here's what I got out of your piece: Overall story = Guy whose work clues him in to the problems waste is having on nature and the lives of animals. He begins noticing more and more how wasteful the world is until one day he follows the waste. At the end of the path he discovers a horror-bird that elicits a terrible price from people to atone for their wrongs against nature.? I like the overall premise of the story and I like how the path of the protagonist is compared to the client he is researching on behalf of. They also are interested in helping the planet, but their interest is superficial whereas the protagonist is willing to give up so much more. I like the unreality of dumping a wheelbarrow full of rice and pouring out perfectly brewed coffee, but I think these things should be done in escalation. From noticing litter, to finding whole fields of buried toys and then finally to throwing away what isn't even trash. The biggest problem I had with reading it is just how laden this is with details. The protagonist seems to notice everything until the very end when I feel more confused than the protagonist probably. I think some focus on details that really matter to the protagonist or that matter to the story being told will help tighten this up. There's a lot of focus on the weather and the natural setting and while I can understand that it relates to the narrative by the time I get to the end, since this is a first person POV story, the protagonist's interest in taking note of these things seems out of place and unexplained. This surplus of details at the beginning would be a good contrast with the end if there were fewer details to show just how dazed and confused the protagonist is such that they gloss over their surroundings and only get vague impressions of bad/dead/detritus, etc. Since I think the story could benefit from some rearranging and cutting of details I didn't want to comment on too many specific things but these two lines made me cringe: "It happened one day in November while I was waiting for a bus on Windmill Road." - This is the opening line and needs to grab people or at least propel them onto your second sentence. And unfortunately the "it" that happened doesn't actually define this piece. In fact, I wonder how much anyone is going to remember wheelbarrow full of rice. "This was an afront and could not stand." - Delete Not bad if this is your first attempt in 17 years. Congratulations on finishing a story! And I would definitely recommend the Thunderdome thread if you want to do some more short story practice.
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Jan 19, 2021 19:46
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tuyop posted:Hi critique thread! Good work getting back to writing after 17 years. There is a tremendous amount of detail in this that is not very interesting. You wrote that you didn't want a line edit but the writing itself kept me from the story. Partially because there's a lot of erroneous detail, but also because the writing isn't . . . I don't know, sharp or evocative enough. I think I'm supposed to find it strange that this guy is walking out of a dim sum restaurant with a wheelbarrow, but it doesn't come off as that weird or interesting. Sometimes, I don't understand what is happening. I found this very strange: quote:This week I was “maximizing advancement synergy” for a startup in New Brunswick focused on “solutions-based ocean education on the plastics crisis”. Based on their website this company seemed to have spent a significant portion of their original funding on graphic design. I was impressed. The protagonist is impressed by a startup blowing their funding on graphic design? Is it important that Mary is a lesbian because the rest of that line is a negative judgement and that's the first thing the protag thinks of. Secondly, if Mary thinks poorly of these people why is she impressed by the website too? Is Mary responding to something the protag said here? The plastics line makes me think the protag is an idiot. I don't understand Mary's last line because I thought she was complaining about the startup but now she's complaining about nonprofits. I'm guessing she's giving the startup a chance because nonprofits have not been successful, but if so, this isn't communicated. Everything about that exchange implies the startup is full of poo poo (but has the most amazing website in the world), but both characters are credulous for some reason. You mentioned wanting to work on character and voice. I think improving that section would be a great opportunity to give both characters a coherent voice, largely through dialogue. Instead of telling me plastics are bad, tell me something that reveals why protag is there. ultrachrist fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Jan 22, 2021 |
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Jan 22, 2021 18:33
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I wrote a ~3500 word spec-fic lite that I'd love to get some crits on, if anybody's interested. My goal is to maybe try and shop this around at some point, so any kind of feedback is helpful. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kY4Coz_A4DEmEJve-RuWrtJ1ffQBzlaXwKLQeQhVX8k/edit?usp=sharing
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Jan 24, 2021 22:45
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Nae posted:I wrote a ~3500 word spec-fic lite that I'd love to get some crits on, if anybody's interested. My goal is to maybe try and shop this around at some point, so any kind of feedback is helpful. The prose in this is pretty good! It rarely got in the way of the story for me. I read the entire thing. Here's what jumped out at me: - The first vignette is boring. I think a big problem with it is the girl does not read as her age. Her internal thoughts seem much older. Kid writing is hard but it's one of those things that's really obvious when it's done well. - Partway through the second vignette, I started thinking "the writer better have a really good explanation w/r/t how these link together", but I was disappointed in the "I explain everything" ending. - It's not as egregious as part 1, but the teen girl doesn't feel completely like her age either. - When you look at how these sorts of stories work... stuff like Cloud Atlas and David Mitchell's other books or If on a Winter's Night a Traveler... usually the different stories are highly different in tone and setting. The reader is immersed in different worlds/characters while wondering how they're tied together. This is of course difficult to accomplish in 3500 words. In your story, the tone is fairly similar across each, especially the first two. Jewel as macguffin isn't very intriguing. All in all, I found it well-written but it didn't really grab me.
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Jan 25, 2021 04:06
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ultrachrist posted:The prose in this is pretty good! It rarely got in the way of the story for me. I read the entire thing. Thanks for the feedback! From the other crits I've gotten and this, I really need to make it clear that all three sections are being narrated by the person at the end, which is why the voice and tone are all the same and why the eight-year-old and fourteen-year-old's thoughts don't read as their on-page ages. The ending has been poorly-received across the board, too, so I'll have to go back to the drawing board on that.
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Jan 25, 2021 04:13
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ultrachrist posted:Good work getting back to writing after 17 years. a friendly penguin posted:Hi and welcome back to fiction writing! Thank you both for the thoughtful critiques, I really appreciate them. I just didn't have the energy last week to return to it and give it a big structural edit. I'm going to dive in a bit this evening, hopefully.
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Jan 25, 2021 16:23
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