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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 17:21
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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 17:50
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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 18:15
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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 19:39 on Jan 22, 2021 |
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Jan 22, 2021 19:33
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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 05:06
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 02:52 |
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The first scene doesn't work for me and the second and third didn't entice me to continue so the editor is probably right. It's difficult to start a story with dialogue because it is spoken by people we don't know or care about. It needs to be really striking to work. I have been part of sales presentations of new technology and this is absolutely nothing like what happens. The audience may be uncomprehending idiots but they still need to ask questions and THINK they understand it. Why else would they buy it? They're bored but he gets the contract? They don't care about the tech but they get interested in paying for it?? They're raising their hands to speak instead of blustering right in? The first interesting detail in the beginning is the protag's insecurity over being "the sales guy".
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Apr 5, 2021 16:43
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