/lit/ - Literature

>>22487055
I like it. Sadly the rest of your respondents have no taste.

>>22487137
>start off with something more concrete.
No, it's good. It's direct. I immediately liked it more than most stuff that gets posted in this thread, for that reason.

When people start 'The weak shaft of dying daylight straggled into the dank dungeon chamber as the two prisoners shuffled into its fatal gloom, trembling and cursing their plight,' or some bullshit like that, then I immediately don't care. I feel like the writer doesn't know what they're going for. So they just go for detail, for description, because 'it's what you're supposed to do'.

Ready any Kafka story, and you won't get more description than what the original poster had. And anyway, two men being led into a room for their execution *is* evocative, it does summon up something vivid and phantasmic, but it does so through tale-telling, not by attempting to mimic a video-game cutscene.

>>22487372
Again, I disagree.

>let us know why we're supposed to be scared
We're supposed to be scared because of the man waiting for orders and instead receiving a machete, because of lines like 'His exposed spine jutted up'. You don't need to give them backstories, a memory of their sweet wife.

>when your write like that for the entire page it makes it boring
At what point do you think it needed to be spiced up? I can't identify the point where the energy of the piece lags. What would disrupt its momentum, though, if it suddenly stopped to insert an obligatory description of how horrified and remorseful the character was feeling, or how scared he was of death. It would be totally redundant, even bathetic.

If you're writing a one-page grim execution nightmare, make it a grim execution nightmare. Imagine if amid all the otherworldly austere figures in an Aztec carving, there was one character rendered in a contemporary realist style, just because the Aztec stone-carver thought his style was getting boring. He'd deserved to be executed himself.