/lit/ - Literature

>>5125013
>Three quotes by Stephen King

You're certainly succinct; that's great. You do have a tendency to repeat yourself, though. For example, instead of saying "Dylan looked up again, squinting, and stopped", you could just say "Dylan squinted up [again] and stopped." If the orange leafed trees are interrupted they aren't endless. Instead of saying "there was now", which implies these suddenly popped into existence, you might want to try "Appearing now", or "there appeared now", but that's just being nitpicky. Cut out the "couldn't see before" bit unless it's critical. Also cut out "They were tall". If they were taller than the surrounding trees, which we assume to be normal trees, we can safely conclude they're tall. Other than that, I'd certainly read on, though it would be nice if you could work "line of soldiers" in with "wall of white". Almost sounds like they're about to face a firing squad, pressed up against a wall and everything. It's solid, in other words.

***

For thirteen years and eighty-seven days the Clark boy hadn’t spoken, and the last three had seen his father turn blind. When the boy came to his bedside to tend the wound, his father’s hand would rise and grip his wrist while the other fumbled at the table for nothing in particular, and in sitting upright so abruptly he cricked his back and swung his arms as if he were threatened with being tied down. A mingling of here and hell: perhaps he looked from his eye lost to the fire and smoke, and the smothering ash descending, always descending. Derangement from his own inexplicable breath. The wound itself was the same as ever. When his father settled, the boy would dab with a cloth around his empty socket and the red contractures down his cheek and the half a piece of nose still left, and treated him with whiskey and sometimes morphine, and dabbed the other eye with a different cloth and iced it, but the blindness was sure, and there was nought to stop it. By and by, he watched the last eye fill with blood and his father look toward the ceiling and never again anywhere else. He took the arm scratched and dusty like dejected shrapnel itself and dotted and dashed his fingers across the skin and told his father it’d all be just fine, and that perhaps it was best he didn’t see, and this was perhaps the easiest and most fluent conversation they’d ever shared.

>>5125013
I think a single paragraph is a bit too short to really give good criticism, but eh. Your stuff looks pretty good to me, reminds me a bit of how I write I suppose. The only thing I can really say is that "Dylan looked up again, squinting, and stopped." looks a bit odd. I'd write "Dylan looked up again, squinting, and then stopped." just to break apart the squinting and the stop a bit. Other than that, maybe make your sentences a bit longer? Might just be me, but they seem a bit too short and direct. I'm not entirely sure.

-

As the the sun disappeared behind the rocky horizon, the only thing keeping the valley from pitch black darkness was one of the planet’s three moons, providing only a dim bluish glow, barely lighting up red dust that covered most of the area. The planet was nearing its aphelion, and as such the weather was growing colder, the temperature still lowering. Snow began to appear in the clouds, floating slowly downwards through the air, beginning to gradually cover the red landscape in white fluff.

The dragon dived down in a big half circle and snapped up like 20 people in it's claws. It happened so fast that the peoples legs were torn off and still standing on the ground like they were walking normally. Then they fell down like 2 seconds after.

>>5125061
This isn't really much to go on, like you say, but I'd recommend alternating your sentence length. Cut "the only thing keeping the valley from pitch black darkness", it's not a nice sentence, and repetitive. Just mention "the last light came from..." or something along those lines. The positive rather than negative. I like what you're doing with colors: makes it seem cinematic without appearing cheap and pulpy. At times it reads like a science textbook, though that might be what you're going for. Remove "and as such". I'm loathed to say make it more snappy, but that's the only way I can phrase it. "The planet was nearing its aphelion. The hail came in sheets...". We can't actually see the weather growing colder from your description until the next sentence: only give us the effect on the environment, and we can work the rest out ourselves. The temperature isn't tangible. The snow on the red landscape is poignant, but the language needs to translate this. You have some excellent imagery, you just need to back it up with your prose.

>>5125110
Was the dragon flying upside down? "Like 20 people", deliberately anachronistic? Detached protagonist checks out, that's cool. For some reason it seems better to say the body was torn from the legs if the legs were still standing on the ground, but I guess if we're speaking holistically ... eh. Also, why would the dragon snatch them in a claw rather than his mouth? He killed them, so he doesn't want them for any specific purpose, or he dramatically fucked up.

The dark figure walked hurriedly; hunched over, head deep in his coat to hide from the fierce wind that tore at his clothes. The long pathway on which was being walked was large and covered in near black gravel, further up, a large door at the end of the path, a large solid oak affair, which showed the effects of years of abrasive sea winds. When the warmly clothed person reached the door, eyes raised to appraise the newly acquired building. Outwardly, the building was grey, large windows paned with dull glass, plain crenulations lining the roof, and dark grey slate adorning it. The building, made in the 18th century for a minor lord, made with as many details as someone could to make it look like a house of good worth. It was, however, and always had been, a dump. The very location abused the building, battering winds and salt off the ocean attacked the building constantly, as though it were an affront to the sea. Problems lingered and festered in that building, like bacteria in a well-used cesspool.

>>5125179
Sorry, that was an older draft.

The dark figure walked hurriedly; hunched over, head deep in his coat to hide from the fierce wind that tore at his clothes. The long pathway on which was being walked was large and covered in near black gravel, further up, a door at the end of the path, an intimidating solid oak affair, which showed the effects of years of abrasive sea winds. When the warmly clothed person reached the door, eyes raised to appraise the newly acquired building. Outwardly, the building was grey, wide windows paned with dull glass, plain crenulations lining the roof, and dark grey slate adorning it. The building, made in the 18th century for a minor lord, made with as many details as someone could to make it look like a house of good worth. It was, however, and always had been, a dump. The very location abused the building, battering winds and salt off the ocean attacked the building constantly, as though it were an affront to the sea. Problems lingered and festered in that building, like bacteria in a well-used cesspool.

>>5125194
Behead the semicolon. It desperately wants to be a comma. I take it "on which was being walked" was supposed to be "on which he walked"? Either way, get rid of it. It's long, we don't need to know the extra dimension. New sentence before "further up". I'm rather skeptical of both "intimidating" and "affair", the former because from the following descriptions I can work out that it is indeed intimidating, and the latter because I really don't think it fits. A mass of solid oak, or something like that, would fit a little better, in my opinion. Description is good, but remove the "dark grey slate". You've already told us the building was grey. Also, you repeat "the building", and it begins to get tedious after that. Just get to the part you tell us it's a dump, although maybe SHOW us first. You do a lot of telling. Your final couple of sentences are your most interesting. Once again, you repeat the word "building". If not remove it, mix it up a little. "Mansion" or whatever.

It's a rather cliched scene, to be honest with you, and your descriptions don't help it along. That being said, there's a story there, and with practice I'm sure you'll be able to tell it in just the way it sounds in your head.

>>5125194
I'm a fussy asshole, so I apologise now for that. I don't like starting with "The", maybe it's personal preference but I think you can make it a bit more striking if you rearranged the sentence to be "Hunched over, head deep in his coat as he hid from the fierce wind that tore at his clothes, the dark figure hurried onwards." I do like the descriptions, but I think you do what I like to do best, dissect a sentence, with too many commas. My advice would be try and fuse descriptions into each other, for instance; "at the very end of the path towered an intimidating door of solid oak antiquity" or something along those lines. I like the sentence about the sea, maybe add a bit more description to that part though? A bit more flowery/fancy perhaps? All in all very nice and good luck!

---

“We killed our gods.” Wheezed the gaunt figure slumped against his corroded throne. “We gouged them from the earth and we fell upon them like starving animals, our teeth of iron and steel wet with their lifeblood as we devoured. They stood like behemoths, larger than any animal. They roared and wept as we tore them from the earth, to fuel our insatiable hunger.” He continued as he stared through ancient eyes, deep into the dirty petroleum night fire that burned on the red sands in front of him. The old mans face seemed to be a myriad of mottled greys and blues, pallid colours in the glimmer of the orange light. “The fuel for our greed was life, theirs…and eventually…ours.” Dark plumes of smoke billowed from the flames, fusing with the shade of the night sky above the small audience that sat on the sand around the fire. The throne at which he sat rose from the midpoint of a metallic arc that circled the night fire, the visible weld lines clearly bordered each different piece of constituent scrap. He started to shift uncomfortably, his withered hands grasping at a metallic object within his robes. A rasping fit of coughing exploded from him, interrupting his struggled inhalations with staccato bursts of the ragged noise, whilst bony hands shakily moved the hexagonal mouthpiece of a dented chrome ventilator module into position. A younger pair of hands was illuminated by the flames as they reached over and fastened supporting straps of tattered black leather behind the frail neck. The coughing stopped, but was replaced with the alternating rhythm of deep inhalations followed by a serpentine hiss as escaping respiratory gasses shot from twisted pipes at either side of the chrome. Slowly he slid the mouthpiece down to hang loosely around his throat. “Their ashes blow in the wind, remnants of their primordial vastness that are now indistinguishable from the dust and the sands.” His audience stared on in silent anticipation. After a deep breath, he continued.

>>5125218
>Behead the semicolon. It desperately wants to be a comma.

>>5125194
>The dark figure walked hurriedly; hunched over, head deep in his coat to hide from the fierce wind that tore at his clothes. The long pathway on which was being walked was large and covered in near black gravel, further up, a door at the end of the path, an intimidating solid oak affair,

I'm just a random passerby, but maybe this?

>He took awkward steps towards his salvation, clinging the iron railing leading the way. Salty winds whipped with anger and his hands seemed to get the worst of it. Just a few more now.

>>5125293
Very nice.

>>5125231
Well, the imagery is outstanding, but my God, I couldn't read a whole book like this. It reads like Faulkner with McCarthy's motifs, but you've pushed the prose a little too far into the purple end of the spectrum. You cram your sentences full of adjectives but without enough verbs to balance them out. For example: "A rasping fit of coughing exploded from him, interrupting his struggled inhalations with staccato bursts of the ragged noise, whilst bony hands shakily moved the hexagonal mouthpiece of a dented chrome ventilator module into position." You have nine adjectives at my count. Far, far too many. At worst it's melodramatic, at best it's good imagery, but a struggle to read. The dialogue especially is very melodramatic, especially with the ellipses. Alternate your sentence length, be a little more concise, and it'll be great. You have some beautiful imagery, but pace it. And avoid phrases like "serpentine hiss as escaping respiratory gasses shot from twisted pipes...".

For comparison, here's an excerpt from the ol' gal Amanda McKittrick Ros, who's (unfortunately) renowned for her purple prose: "The December sun had hidden its dull rays behind the huge rocks that rose monstrously high west of Dunfern mansion, and ceased to gladden the superb apartment Sir John occupied most part of the day. They had withdrawn their faint reflection from within the mirrored walls of this solitary chamber to brighten other homes with their never-dying sheen.

As the dull, grey evening advanced to such a degree as to render a look of brightness imperative to the surroundings of its sole occupant, Sir John requested that his favourite apartment should be made bright as possible by adding more fuel to the smouldering ashes within the glistening bars which guarded their remains. This being done, three huge lamps were lighted, and placed at respectable distances from each other, when Sir John, with his 14 accustomed grace, began to peruse some of his evening papers."

>>5125410
Thanks man, I feel like it's pretty damn purple too. Every time I open the word document I try and hack some bits off or shorten them at least. I'm worried that if I spread it out too much then people might lose interest in the story by not reading far enough. Anyway, I guess I just have to take a deep breath and go at it with a machete. Thanks again, I'm very grateful!

After the rain, we directly defied our grandmother's orders and ran outside to play in oversaturated grass. There were no shadows; just a sort of radiance that draped itself across the sky, pierced into every rogue raindrop and painted every leaf with a warm splatter of orange. A rainbowaway etched into the clouds above our house, and painted like an artist had just thrown all of their colours against arcing grooves, only to see how they would travel. Later, we told our grandparents about it; they smiled and said it was an ancient promise bestowed upon man, and everything was going to be fine.

That night a flood surged through town and took everything.

>>5125061
I'm too inexperienced to make constructive criticism that actually carries any meaning, but I think I would remove "fluff" when describing snow. It seems to me that it is overdone, but perhaps I am only paranoid.

>>5125477
And remind me never again to write on my iPod, which is prone from switching from English to Icelandic keyboards without my knowing. "Rainbowaway".... gawd.

James and I stood by the river. James handed me the glass of gin and told me to drink it. The liquid stung my throat, flowing into my stomach.
"Just a few more miles isn't it" I asked.
James pulled the bottle from my hand and tossed it into the water.
"I'm afraid so. If we make it through the night, I'm sure I can get us a steak dinner somewhere. My treat." he said.
It's funny how food creates a bond between humans. Those who are afraid to die. Those who were not afraid to kill. Those who have run from the authorities, the only pleasure can get is a piece of meat, or a bottle of spirits.
"The cops are on the way Charles, I suggest we get going." said James.
We carried on into the river, the moonlight guided us through the darkness.

A screaming dad across the sky. Mom, where is he going with that axe?

>>5125013
Her long, dark hair hangs down to the middle of her back. It cascades down past her shoulder's, and floats on the wind when a breeze blows through our small cabin. Her dark eyes, like I'm looking into the black of space, reflect tiny points of light. Her smile is beautiful, in ever-present sincerity. Her legs, longs, lithe, and lean reach higher than the peaks of Mount Olympus, and could make even the most stoic of Spartan warriors weak in the knees. And pert little ass is nothing short of divine.

His hitting the cat was not the source of psychologically trauma I’ve endured since the age of nine. Rather, it was seeing the Cadillac brake, stop, and finally reverses back into the cat, and the sound of a popped water balloon that accompanied this second run-over, that really undammed the child-trauma river.

>>5125477
This may or may not be your intention, but this is a prime example of bathos. The last sentence is rather laughable, in context. The "over-saturated" reads rather awkwardly, and that semi-colon should be either a colon or a comma. It's a little flowery, but that's no bad thing, although describing the pretty rainbows and rain is rather cliche. I'd certainly read on if it were to flow a little better.

>>5125516
Dialogue is excellent, nice work. You can cut out the "flowing into my stomach."; if it's going down his throat, it's safe to presume it'll reach his stomach. The little maxim on food is rather interesting, but could do with being fleshed it. Feels as if you're only half saying something where it stands. "The moonlight guided us through the darkness" is rather cliche.

>>5125550
"I don't know, dear; he's done it before, but there's nothing to compare it to now."

>>5125557
Absolutely not. As it stands, it's cliche, cliche, purple, purple, outright telling, platitude, tryhard references, forced humor. There's nothing good to be said about this. The descriptions are meaningless, you tell rather than show, nothing happens in the way of action. It's very poor.

>>5125568
The first sentence could deal with some work. It reads rather awkwardly. Perhaps: "His hitting the cat wasn't the source of my psychological trauma." Do we need to know how long he's had it? This is actually rather funny, if a little weak.

not the first paragraph of the book, but of the chapter most recent, if that counts

Outlooking the newframed world, I saught grey sky as usual, and white clouds, but their positions unending, without water alow, slivers of greenery found naught. How I could not hope to explain the vast expanse of cloudy sky afore my sight, the airship atop all known since, that I now found myself, hence, left me petrified. Bakerlegged, toddering aback, I fell floorly, and remained so until I hoped to resume control of my body. I tried to stand, but managed only to kneel on all four. My stomach reversed itself. I collapsed, rest atop my bile, and calmy questioned reality at hand, afore going back in thought to my falling into the water, to the blackness thereafter. I laughed, my mind surely tricked itself into this grand visage. Eyes and mouth held openly in awe, I stood, to wit the creative power of mind. I felt the walls so smoothly textured, and my own face, cold now and wet, but samely. Stumbling toward the exposed stairway, I wanted time to explore this fantasy, as my floor started to bend and shake. I ran myself blindly into the wall, falling down amid crates. I laid still as the wood around the room danced about, as the bright illusions rack terror to my soul. My head throbbed, every second that passed allowed the wooden appendages burst from the walls to come nearer. I hid my eyes with both hands pressed shut, my mouth opened to scream, but a shallow breath was all to be had, with a growing heaviness pressing against my chest. I felt the wooden spires reach my body, they injected their spiteful seeds within. Hands now limp, forced apart my face, I was forced to see the many trees sprout from my flesh, transformed into nothing. Everything faded to blackness and I was once again left adrift in the void.

>>5125614
Sorry, I'm rather tired, and it seems I'd rather spell "out" as "it", and my rather awkward use of "rather awkward" so many times is rather grating.

>>5125618
If you're trying to write in Victorian style prose, you're failing. It sounds like you're deliberately obfuscating. The prose is purple, you're grammar is severely off, and the phrases are pretty jarring. It's general nonsense for a good part, as if you didn't know what some of the words meant. "Samely" and "hence" certainly shouldn't be used in those contexts. Heart throbbed is a cliche. It's barely readable. Read the soliloquies in Moby Dick if you're looking for a good idea of the dialect you're going for.

>>5125557
>>5125614
This is basically the first thing I've ever written, and I knew it sucks. So, I'll be quitting while I'm ahead. Thanks

>>5125644
i see, then i should read moby dick

so far, it is exactly that, a book of nonsense writing with deliberate new words, i wasn't sure how to begin practicing writing

>>5125663
You're not ahead, and it's no reason to quit, it's a reason to practice.

"The only things I liked were pens and paints. They were the only things that understood me. Now it feels like that is going away too. Change really is a scary thing."
"I wish I could understand you."
She looks at me with melancholically, roused by my thoughts materializing as words spoken aloud.
"Me too..."

>>5125670
Actually it's a reason posting only the first paragraph is stupid. But whatever I figured out how to fix it anyway. Thanks again.

The garden's beauty transgresses all past notions held by the stumbling drunkard, and for a moment, a weight of guilt heavier than his than addiction occupies his mind, as he steadies himself on a delicately flowered violet vine, before unzipping his trousers and loosing a flood of piss.

>>5125663
>first thing I wrote
>quitting
If you want to write you've got to be able to take criticism and use it to improve your writing. If not, then find another hobby

Will the hours in these white rooms conclude themselves,
Will seconds near hear finalizing ringing bells
Will all of us in here get chances to story tell
Will dreamed words and thoughts just dwell

Been here too long, come back too often
Rigidness of the bricks never take time to soften
Door handle won't budge, hand must be broken
Windows let us see, never seem to open

We jump too much, walk pacefully too little
Only notice the sun when light begins to dwindle
Wanna get a chance to sleep and cry in a rain puddle
On the ground's own level

Will the hours in these white rooms conclude themselves,
Will seconds near hear finalizing ringing bells
Will all of us in here get chances to story tell
Will dreamed words and thoughts just dwell

Flying, swimming, walking creatures are a-laughing at me
They get water, land and air for free
World's theirs to see, theirs to seed
They get all types of muck in fields, seas and the breeze

No one pushed inside of this room knows the reason why
Something on our foreheads just wasn't the prettiest kind
Barely any of us are given mirrors to watch the signs
To this floor we all seemed bind

On the yard though, old friends and family there
Been through the crowded and awful stares
They made it down and out, they could bare
Sit with the ducks in the park's benched chairs

Oh, I say to them, I say to them,
Their names aren't quietly mentioned
Nah, we just gotta breath in
Seeing them and realizing
Their walks with those creatures,
Wasn't the result of some kind of seizure
Nah, it was of their own designing

I have two mirrors in my life. And I'm stuck mise en abyme between them, constantly watching the outline of my body descend into an electromagnetic nothingness. And it's always only the outer line of my form because my head, being too dense to be transparent, or even translucent, always blocks me from viewing my face recede into the greenish black yonder through the mirrors. Each reflection, present like air, represents a brand of reality that I like to buy into: what most people would call reality, the daily world where you pass strangers on the street and cremate your cat, and virtual reality, the window to every basement and attic. The lines between the two realms are well-defined in my mind like national borders, which also makes them subject to time's disintegrative relentlessness that will eventually wipe them off every map. Now I don't know, or care, if it's because of the fact that some statistically inclined scientists determined the probability that we, us fatalistically conscious members of some indeterminate whole, are part a computer simulated reality is basically one, or that I just like the idea that things are wispy and synthetic and exactly as experientially tangible as my thoughts allow them to be, but I really like to think that my interactions with technological universes (work and leisure alike) are as fundamentally sound as bowling a 155 at what I suspect to be a team-building seminar masquerading as after-work 'fun.' Still suspended between the two mirrors, I manage to break the strains of recursive depression and spark up conversation with Mary from work. Her dullness, or maybe my dullness, (Buddhists have always insisted that our thoughts of others are mere reflections of our own thoughts and feelings) bores me after what feels like ten seconds inside a black hole. Electrostatic echoes spark my finger tip as I pick up my ghoulish-green bowling ball and fight to break the imprisoning silver glass that whispers to me from my pocket with a vibration that I know to be the beat of Beat It by the king of pop. I bowl a strike, making it my second in our second game, and think about responding to forum-member Ashville1001 about the legality of all drugs, because I didn't have time before I left and really wanted to dismantle his shitty argument so I could satisfactorily take a sip of my beer and go on to masturbate myself to sleep. Mary hits three pins and I laugh inwardly as I holler something forcedly encouraging so my cynicism doesn't show itself. The rest of the night goes on like the latter half of a road trip as a kid: I can't help but to ask the anonymous driver (sure it might be Dad, but the back of his head and tone of his voice are muddled by the imperfections of imagination) "are we there yet?"

>>5125697
lol i was joking

>>5125701
then leave your shitposting for /b/

>>5125676

Is this really the beginning portion of something you're writing, or just a spur of the moment script? If it's the latter, then disregarded. But if it's the former, then I would suggest you try to not be so obvious in painting such a melancholic (and you meant *melancholy) tone.

>>5125695

>violet
>piss

>>5125698

Despite the fact that you're rhythm and meter isn't the most consistent or conventional, I think it works overall quite well here. It feels genuine, and also resounding of a certain pain that too many know. For giving us a peek of a nakedness too shameful and known, you have not failed.

>>5125676
Nauseating. It starts strong, but you ruin it with "melancholically" (which, as adverbs go, is one of the worst), the go-to puff word for "sad". "Materializing as words spoken aloud"? My lungs expanded, oxygen fusing with my hemoglobin through the lining of my alveoli, as carbon dioxide was also expelled. It's completely unneeded.

>>5125695
Nobody is laughing. You can find a better word than "transgresses" to fit that context.

>>5125698
Sorry, I'm no way qualified to critique poetry. Didn't want you to think you were ignored.

>>5125700
PURPLE. If you're going for Pynchon or Joyce or DFW ("mise en abyme"), you'll never hit that mark. And why would you want to? You're your own person. Good literature is not contingent on what obscure references you can make or how long you can spin a sentence. I know it said post your first paragraph, but this really needs to be split into two. It's attempted postmodernism, with "attempted" being the key word.

>>5125701
It was a piss poor joke.

>>5125719
That was the first paragraph of something I'm actually writing. I knew the hipsters here would hate it, which is why I posted.

>>5125701
>>5125725
I'm so sorry to have failed you. It won't happen again.

Talking with Alice is like playing chess with a supercomputer who does seemingly random moves as if to mock everything you know about chess. It's like that, but with human interaction. And even if I win, it feels like losing.

>>5125735
Anybody who'd ever read a book would hate it.

>>5125013
The vampire's girlfriend zoomed across the planet with super vampire speed to find her boyfriend. He was a super vampire with super vampire powers that include travelling in time. They are both vampires now. They have been separated because of the bad guy who doesn't like vampires. He lost his girlfriend to a vampire. His girlfriend is the now super vampires girlfriend who is a vampire. They are about to fight.

>>5125740
Yes, I suppose that's true

>>5125735
>the hipsters here
Dude why are you here? Take your bullshit to tumblr

A bloated figure works its laborious way through the night streets of Düsseldorf, keeping away from the lights, seeking a refuge in dimness, pliable flesh and bottles of darkness – it’s Pierre Périte, from Liège originally, and he’s entering a basement containing a small, deeply degenerated Satansbrut of deadbeats, too disgusting for the taverns and beerhalls: drug addicts, prostitutes and boozehounds spread across the floor, twisted into swastikas, a woman offering her bottom to a man too drunk to count his own fingers, yet somehow still standing, pants around his ankles. The stink of liquor, piss and God knows what else is so pervasive, it’s coming out of the floorboards, mixing with various mind-fogging smokes and the smells of unhealthily-prepared foods into a demonic fart of an atmosphere that gets into the hair of Périte’s globoid belly, where it mixes with his bodily sweats and greases into a veritable sheen. This fat man has a fat wad of marks with him, and he’s ready to pay handsomely for some discreet entertainment, quality food and fine beverages. But don’t go thinking he’s some kind of mindless hedonist, here – his mighty appetites are matched by a mighty brain, and a noble heart besides. Under his arm, he has a copy of La Guerre du feu, which he has nearly read all the way through – he has read nearly every story published to date in French, and what little he could find in German, dealing with other times, alien life forms, spectacular technologies, fantastical human progress. Somehow, sometime, there would be an event which would cut the catapult’s rope, and the world would be sent hurtling toward utopia, a spontaneous scientific revolution that would, through means that our base, modern minds cannot even fathom, ensure profound and lasting satisfaction for the entire species, the biological secrets of human happiness unlocked. The thought of this epiphany takes up a great deal of his mental space, and sometimes he even carries the conceit that it would occur to him specifically. To him, Germany, with its deeply biological politics, seems the place this would happen. If at first biology was to be the queen of the sciences in society, it was only a matter of time before physics, chemistry and mathematics rose as well, each with an equal crown, forming a hydraic monarch in the mind of every citizen, who would all begin to see the world objectively, without the troublesome rumblings of the less sophisticated cranial meats which, alas and alack, he knows too well.

>>5125739
See, this is good. Is sounds rather cute, actually, and I'm genuinely interested to see where this is going. The chess gives the impression talking with Alice demands a good deal of critical and careful thinking - an analogy done right. Well done.

>>5125725
The transgresses thing was just a joke, like submitting an mspaint portrait of a penis to a serious competition, and with this confession I make my leaveeeee

She stood stark and grim outlined against the dying light of the day, looking out over the waves as they sloughed into the shore far below her. He couldn’t see her face but he knew the look on it. She had worn it everyday for as long as he had known her, and no matter how he tried he could never keep it from her face for long. Even when she smiled and laughed, a thing he could swear only he had seen, that look was still there, just beneath the surface, hiding in the depths of her eyes.

>>5125739
You could describe it better...it's a little cheesy, but it's okay...okay...kinda.. I hate to like it because it just reads cheesy as fuck.

Things are moving. They're always moving. But what to where few care.

When I was fourteen years old I got into an argument with my father about throwing darts at the wall. We didn't have a bullseye set up so I just kept aiming for a little knot in the cedar next to my mom's framed photo of Celestùn, making holes in the wall when my father came in ablaze. The glass framing started to tremble under the weight of my dad's yell and as I shrank, the desire to scurry off with some mischievous grin multiplied. At the first silence, I threw the dart in my father's direction. It soared threw the air with four eyes honed in before it landed right between my father's big and Morton's toe. Even though flesh had been averted, disaster had not. Looking at the snuggled dart, a toneless shrill seized my nerves, and my father's icy anger pierced me through his eyes. I burst, and ran out of the room like a mother bull moose was after me in some suspicion that I would prey on her child. Ironically I had become the prey.

>>5125767
>mother bull moose
wat

I'd like a little more suspense when the dart is in midair, if ya don't mind.

>>5125748
For one thing I have only been writing for a couple of months, and I do need to get used to criticism. I also wanted to read reactions from people who wouldn't be afraid to look down on it.

Also come on, we're all a bunch of hipsters here, I mean jeez.

>>5125725
>>5125700

Well this news is incredibly depressing because I felt that I poured nothing in this from anyone's glass but mine. All these ideas and sentiments had bubbled up from within me, and while the sentence structure and word choice might seem indicative of a poor literary poser, I really have to argue that they're not. However, regardless, you may be right, in that it simply isn't very good, which I'm fine with. But being told I did a poor job emulating sits worse with me than AIDS.

What's purple??

>>5125721
Poem guy here. What's your opinion on these pieces? I agree with your sentiment about my meter's lack of fluidity, it's an aspect of my writing I've always struggled, yet, without trying to sound like I'm giving myself undue praise, the poems I write always feel like they come from a spring of emotion. Tbh, as long as there's still an emotional connection in my poems, I'm not too weary of a lack of technical skill, even though I'm still trying to improve.


Your song, for mine ears is where the gold-port is
When and what comes in the morning
What words of the man on the street will be sworn in
Play your song, play your song
Notes so strong, when they touch the ears, they'd be hurting
If they weren't helping lost eyes with assurance
Play your song, play your song

Rhymed, untimed, fiddling telling listeners who in the band's lying
Loud enough for the crowds and giving glimpses to those sent out
Those unjustly tried, sentence to lose their place and their time
Now done with whatever remnants they held of where hey came from.
Unwritten on paper, meant for the waiter, manager given time to hear later

Your song, for mine ears is where the gold-port is
When and what comes in the morning
What words of the man on the street will be sworn in
Play your song, play your song
Notes so strong, when they touch the ears, they'd be hurting
If they weren't helping lost eyes with assurance
Play your song, play your song

Unlaced with consuming production fighting need not be played
Honed enough of the original site, showing just what was learned
Fading, un-abiding, returning, or in bed lying
Timed, knowing the possibility that the composition moment is losing dimes
Deserted by those who had not yet heard or learned it,
Had not deserved it,
Honed enough of the original site, showing just what was learned

Your song, for mine ears is where the gold-port is
When and what comes in the morning
What words of the man on the street will be sworn in
Play your song, play your song
Notes so strong, when they touch the ears, they'd be hurting
If they weren't helping lost eyes with assurance
Play your song, play your song

(The next poem isnt fitting in this post and i'm on my phone so I'll have to make another post)

>>5125743
You don't need to tell us they're both vampires now; you already introduced her boyfriend as a super vampire with super vampire powers that include traveling in time, unless you intended to put us into a vampire time loop. Also, is the ability to travel through time a single power, or merely an extension of the super vampire speed the super vampire girlfriend used to zoom across the planet, as in the first Superman movie? Is the super vampire girlfriend introduced in the first sentence the same as that introduced as the former girlfriend of the bad guy who doesn't like vampires? The kids'll love it.

>>5125752
This is like >>5125700 done to a better degree. Yeah, I'd read it. There're some well crafted phrases in there, and you temper the ridiculousness to make it flow well. You've managed to pull off maximalism, which is a feat in its own.

>>5125759
They shred those contributions, and don't laugh once.

>>5125761
A cliched scene, which wouldn't be out of place in a contemporary romance novel, but which would be outright spurned in any other context.

>>5125767
>>5125778 said it all. You've written it well, actually. I laughed for the first time in this thread.

>>5125784
Well, drink from your glass, and know all the harm e're you've done, well, alas it was to none but ye. Hang your head, but, y'know, not literally.

>>5125784
>But being told I did a poor job emulating sits worse with me than AIDS.
We don't want to offend the newly acquired trans*bugchasing demographic. Change that.

> had bubbled up from within me
This is triggering to people with a PTSD around being boiled from the inside.

>However, regardless, you may be right, in that it simply isn't very good, which I'm fine with.
You may be right in that it just simply isn't very good, and that's fine.

>>5125799
Purple prose as demonstrated here >>5125410

The bullet sliced through the air, sliced through the flesh, sliced through the whims and wishes of the family of particles and people around it and behind it. The bullet, following that grimace and bang, helped only in the biting of the dust of a man that the slaves would proclaim to be emancipating, a man with a hat atop his head and integrity about his belt, a man wishful to give you a penny for your thoughts. Driving a ford now, I like to think of things like this, things like the stories that pervade and invade us all, testing our agreeability and openness to things that seem so foreign yet, only after the fact of squinting acceptance, so simply familiar and raw, local. I once talked to a man I didn't know at a liquor store for what seemed like four score and seven minutes. He was buying a 6-pack of Dogfish Head (one of my favorites) and so I inadvertently sparked up conversation by complimenting his choice of brew, which flung us into a discussion about the particularities of married life and the moral conundrums associated with capital punishment and the penile system in general. I embraced and entombed this man's words into my gut as we meandered out of the store and into the parking lot, plainly appreciating his unabashed conviviality and desire to talk to another wandering soul. His name was John, an easy name to remember, and even six years passed, I think about him from time to time, whenever I grab myself a Dogfish Head, and smile.

The second poem, though it's the first chronologically out of the three.

John Muir, where'd you go,
In the years since the two of us met,
We were wild and young,
Now it seems we've been done

John Muir, who did you meet,
As the skies travel over you
During the night, guiding your way
Backs towards your home
A place you'll never know

John Muir, what have you done
On the trail o' highway
Have you found any love
Make a new life

John Muir, who did you meet
On the path,
Trying to find the stream
Giving them the water they need
On this dirt road

John Muir, when'd you last sleep,
With your eyes open,
Content with the present
No worries from the past

John Muir, why'd you go
From your precious home
Where you could be free at last,
No one holding you,
No hands by your neck

John Muir, John Muir,
John Muir, John Muir,

I don't know what to say
We were friends
Then you left
Part of me wants you back
But then'll come the dark again

John Muir, John Muir,
John Muir, John Muir

"Aren't you blind?"
"ONLY LEGALLY!"

>>5125813
Cliche turned to melodrama. Whenever people write grimace, I remember the immortal words of my high school English teacher (/lit/ incarnate): "Do people really grimace? Seems a word for J.K Rowling". The little pithy insights seem to fall rather flat, but the latter half of this excerpt is actually very good.

>>5125811

Hmm

>>5125826
What an annoying post. Good job for consistency.

>>5125824

I don't know if you picked up on it, but the man grimacing is John Wilkes Booth. Sinister people grimace, and just because your high school English teacher doesn't like a certain word doesn't mean it doesn't have an appropriate use. Please don't regurgitate other people's bad opinions as a constructive critique. Thanks

>>5125807
in the middle of the book the vampire girlfriend who used to be the bad guy's human girlfriend but isn't anymore becomes a super vampire as well, goes back in time, and cheats of her super vampire boyfriend and it changes the course of time because she gets pregnant and then the bad guy who doesn't like vampires because he lost his girlfriend to a vampire who was the super vampires vampire girlfriend who is now a super vampire too who traveled back in time and the super vampire who took the bad guy's human girlfriend away team up against the super vampire girlfriend because she technically cheated on both of them

>>5125830

Easily annoyed people are easily annoying. To be consistent with myself and 4chan, I hope you contract AIDS.

>>5125835
I picked up on it just fine. It's a fair enough word, but it's not a hallmark of someone "sinister". The first half just wasn't very good.

>>5125812
I'm new please don't kill me for this. I feel like this could describe any verbose writer (e.g. Nabokov, Dickens). How do they succeed when the the other fails?

>>5125840
It wasn't done easily. You kept pushing it down all our throats. I tried to give you benefit of the doubt, but even your casual posts were laden with obfuscation and verbose shit. Then you waste a post with "hmm" which, like most of your writing, says absolutely nothing.

>>5125847
you wrote the twice
because they were educated
their writing was their passion
they practiced relentlessly every day for years and years
others fail, like /lit/wannabes because they write 400 words a year

>>5125847
Dickens, sure. Nabokov twists it to his advantage, he openly comments on it, but never uses it to the point where it detracts from meaning.

>>5125852
But on a technical level, what did the years of practice do to their writing that others should be striving for?

>>5125847
Dickens isn't great because of his prose. He's actually pretty shit at just making text, but he has a real talent for epic, Shakespearean plot twists and big-ass themes.

>>5125866
their developed style, prose, creativity, and ability to put forth a plot...so overall practicing writing...as practicing anything...made them better writers.

>>5125860
>he openly comments on it
In Lolita, Humbert is a pretentious douche, but he is at least some of the time a self-aware pretentious douche. Is that what you're saying?

>>5125874
Well, yes.

The crow sped through the air. His ears still rang and blood poured along his feathers. With half his vision steeped in darkness, it was all he could do to avoid the trees. Still he weaved his way through them, urgency sharpening his senses for, even in all this chaos, he remembered his destination. He still knew his purpose.
The peaceful, solemn gathering was broken by his arrival. The flock scattered as his body broke through the bare branches of their meeting place, crashing onto the hard dirt below. As he let his exhausted body rest on the ground a moment, he could hear them gather about him.

After you learn to get past the basic stuff like grammar, rhythm, show don't tell, syntax and diction and have a strong enough mastery of them to subvert them and play with conventions, "practicing" your writing won't mean much. Once you're past the novice stage where you can effectively emulate multiple distinct styles and blend them and invent your own and consciously manipulate your prose, writing well is more about freeing yourself from distractions enough to direct your thoughts and fruitfully embrace your own subjectivity to write honestly and sincerely (which is actually impossible sort of and probably not even universally desirable (but I don't want to get into that)) about interesting subjects and themes. Getting nitpicky about mechanics when you can't even see them in context is kind of pointless. How many people would've called the first chapter of Infinite Jest wordy pretentious bullshit on a first draft? How many people would see the last page of Heart of Darkness in a critique thread and call it overwrought tryhard purple prose?

>>5125860
Purple prose isn't bad, per se. It's something to be aware of, and has to be done correctly.

>>5125874
Yeah. But also because one of the central themes of the novel seems to be that presentation defines perception, and Humbert's way with words helps him seem more palatable to the reader.

>>5125887
I don't see how going faster decreases your chances of collision. That's some dangerous logic there. Peaceful and solemn don't seem so related as to be put together like that: solemnity connotes formality, which I wouldn't say is related to peacefulness, though I may be nitpicking. It's interesting, though the word choice is a little bland. I'd read on to see how it turned out.

>>5125898
And you were doing so well. I'd all Infinite Jest wordy pretentious bullshit on the final draft. No work is infallible, it's artist even less so.

>>5125907
>per se
It would be wonderful if you had a sinus infection just now. Purple prose by definition should be avoided at all costs. Flowery prose, however, which seems to be what you're talking about, is something completely different in my book. Purple prose obfuscates the meaning.

The man walking on the sidewalk looked drunk and inattentive, despite his sober face and respectable clothes. If the beggar beside him had not been so holily deranged in asceticism, he would have seen this cold-drunkardness and not asked for money, but he was and he did; to which the man turned coldly aside. The threadbare beggar stood up with more strength than could be seen of him and tapped his chest mightily powerfully and hollered out like a hooligan:

"BEHOLD the face of iniquity and wickedness!
For verily it hath been said, It will be easier for a camel to enter into the eye of a needle, than it will be a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Thus!" he screamed, ripping off his clothes, "Thus do I rebel against the present state of affairs! " and with that, he threw a mighty right hook into the jaw of the rich drunk man. "Blessed are the peacemakers!" he frothed, red as a tomato in the face, foaming at the mouth, and throttling the man to death. He took the wallet out of the man's pockets and generously rewarded himself, and walked off into the dusk, a shirtless lone wolf.

>>5125926
The point is a sort of reverse confirmation bias affects perception in these threads. Every once in a while someone will post works from famous authors with character names changed so as not to immediately tip readers off and people always call it shit. Very few people get positive critique in these threads.

>>5125926
>is something completely different in my book
I don't really see it that way, but maybe that's why I'm more a fan of Asimov and Hemingway. I think I understand where you are making the distinction, though.

>>5125926
I don't see where you might get the logic of speed = less collision chance from the writing. Honestly, solemnity does have a certain peace to it as far as I can see. Formal or not, its a state of stillness, where conflict or disruption is unwelcome. I can certainly accept that my prose is bland there, however. I have a problem where I seem to save up my emotion in bursts and dry everything else. At some point in my reading life, I experienced a lot of flowery prose and developed a real distaste for it, so I've lost a lot of tone in my own writing. I'm looking to remedy this.

>>5125926
But that implies obfuscation is always a bad thing. Dense, purple prose that obscures meaning can be an effective meta-commentary on the obfuscation of meaning in the contemporary world or some shit.

The shower is where I think. I just spend ages at a time, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, just thinking to myself. Of course, spending long times in the shower often lead my housemates at the time to think that something a little less wholesome was going on inside. I was eighteen years old, what else was I supposed to do but learn, eat, sleep, club and masturbate? Still, it was where I thought. Still think, even today, but I remember what I was thinking about that day. I remember remembering. I was sitting on the ledge the landlord provided for a previous disabled tenant. The water got far too hot, as it often did with that faulty shower. I leant forward, elbows resting on my knees, scalding water falling on my back and hair. Painfully hot, it ran tracks down my face like fresh cuts opening. When I closed my eyes it felt like blood was dripping from me, not water. I didn’t reach up to change the temperature, I didn’t care. I was too busy remembering one moment, one year that felt like a lifetime away.

>>5125931
You do a lot of telling, but very little showing. Errs on the side of verbose, but not offensively. People may criticize you for the archaic language, but I've always loved it, and you manage it very well. Good work.

>>5125936
shiteatinggrin.gif
No, I see where you're coming from. I agree, it's a poor way to get criticism, but it's more of a help to the beginners than the intermediates. It's easy to identify flawed prose when present.

>>5125942
>The crow sped through the air ... With half his vision steeped in darkness, it was all he could do to avoid the trees.

I thought he was half blind? What is the "it" in "it was all he could do to avoid the trees"?

>>5125942
Oh, come on, we've already covered Nabokov et al. This is advice for people working on their prose, not the geniuses who want to provide meta-commentary on it.

>>5125954
"It was all he could do" is a statement of the difficulty in the task of avoiding said trees, explained by the fact he's half blind. It's a figure of speech I've commonly heard and read

>>5125964
Yes, but you need to say he was doing something to actively avoid the trees. It doesn't make sense otherwise.

So I wake up at 1:13 and it's dark and my dad's snoring next to me in this Best Western bed and I'm like what woke me up and I look at the tv and bright moving pictures with the blur of waking contact lenses make it hard to see what's on but I hear a bunch of people yelling and my eyes focus and it's It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and I'm half asleep so I don't know what's going on really but like I said they're all yelling and Charlie Day's pacing around in a figure eight yelling AHHHHHH WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT STOP WAIT and the camera is doing this weird shit where it focuses on him moving (and he's always somehow oriented toward the camera despite running around seemingly aimlessly) but jerks back to the rest of the people somehow at the same time and there's this 7/10 blonde woman and I don't know what she's saying but it keeps bleeping her out so I assume it's fuck and I'm sitting there in a state of wut and just decide this show isn't for me.

>>5125969
I see the problem. I should've made mention of his weaving, the action he was taking to avoid the trees, before the difficulty in the task. You could say that "avoiding the trees" is the action in itself, but it would read easier ordered or worded another way. Thanks for the input.

Just finished a short story yesterday. Here's the first paragraph- I'm happy to show anyone interested the whole thing.

Princess Suhandi of the Rai Dynasty stood up atop the dusty slice of ridge that rose along the valley's edge. This valley, this ancient gouge within the tired old Earth, had in the dawning of the world been home to the very first people in all the vast empire to farm and work with tools. It was said, whispered by the learned in the courts of gold and silk, that the valley was the first civilized place ever to be, that before the Indus folk all everywhere had been savages. Many dynasties and kingdoms claimed a share in that tremendous heritage, though Suhandi had always doubted how a people who had lived so long ago, whose vanishing had come an age before the rise of Shiva, might have even the faintest ties with modern Sindh. But she did not doubt the valley's sacredness. It was a creche, a birthing place of gods and men alike.

>>5125971
The scene seems to be describing a pretty relaxed scene (getting up way too early and watching TV), so why is it told in such an intense, breathless fashion? There seems to be a lot of mismatch between form and content here.

>>5125807
Dusseldorf guy here. Here's a bit more:

Périte pays for his whore, food and drink, and proceeds toward a belly-stretching meal followed by copulation that leaves his body in sated exhaustion, but his soul in a chilly limbo which he blames vaguely on cognitive imperfections. Her hair was possibly dark brown, and her tits were disappointingly formless without her brassiere. The important part was not the coitus itself, but the fact that he ate enormous quantities of meat in her presence beforehand, not sharing any, contributing to a gnome-scale famine on her part. He has done this several times before; once, the whore even visibly salivated, and Périte felt that he was truly a man – not the abomination of nature that is the “gentleman”, but just a man, nothing added or subtracted. The satisfaction of these experience are usually limited, as Périte finds the regular mode of human copulation to be tiresome, and continually imagines exotic forms of reproduction that might be happening among the stars at this very instant. Rosny aîné, with his brief description of the reproductive habits of his inorganically geometric Xipéhuz, has been his greatest ally in this work, which one can find scrawled across the pages that litter his little, sparse house. Sometimes, when he is in arrears, he will write up a short alien erotica, make a few copies, and charge for its distribution among his fellow dilapidated men. He is not the only one with a hunger for union with a non-human entity. In Périte’s case, these entities do not resemble any living thing found on this planet. His creations have perfect lines, and can change shape and colour (and sometimes size) without effort, and are nearly always featureless, sometimes not even comprised of solid matter. In the cases where he finds the need to appeal to other human beings, his creations are more humanoid, but with distinctive features he finds attractive: his best-received story was about a species with cuboid wombs. Humanity had to be the basest of all intelligent species, he thought, and without some kind of intervention they would throw themselves upon the altar of galactic history, a sacrifice to an indifferent god.

>>5125999
It's intense because thought trains when you wake up are a weird mix of not fast enough to be rolling machines of multi-branched complex ideas and really intensely "what's going on?" in feeling. I think I described it kind of well as a "state of wut." Then you know thematic extrapolation postmetamodern life is a state of wut.

>>5126018
My experiences of waking up are different (I tend to slowly connect things in a decidedly non-intense fashion), so I don't know how jarring this will be readers. I'd recommend showing it to a few more people and asking how well they can relate to your depiction of waking up.

>>5126044
Nah the character lives in a post-ironically overwrought pastiche of a dystopia so everything's intense. I don't wake up every morning drenched in sweat freaking the fuck out.

>>5126064
How is it overwrought?

>>5126094
Any earnestly presented dystopia is overwrought because the idea of a doomsday IT'S HAPPENING dystopic future is really silly. Things get bad indeed, but they happen slowly enough to not be noticed. Big "oy watch you say the government's listening to you we'll reeducate you with this patriotism machine god bless america" shit is obsolete. Infinite Jest, with the subsidized time and the Quebecois separatism, only worked because it was presented in such a comically ridiculous way.

>>5125013
A piece of advice I have heard is not to start out with scenery.

Why is Dylan concerned with the trees? What part of his character, conflict, or desires has brought him on a walk?

Those are generally the things to open with, not build up to.

>>5126100
But how is your dystopia, in particular, overwrought? What makes it yours?

>>5125802
>>5125815
Can I get some comments on these?

>>5126135
It's not a real dystopia. He's a latte leftist combined with a /pol/tard in that he's constantly paranoid about both crazy gun-toting racist redneck fundies and extreme cultural Marxist SJW feminazis. It's a further commentary on the widening gap between rightist irl politics and leftist internet politics. It sounds contrived and hamhanded when I spell it out like that but that's the gist of it.

>>5126158
I don't think it sounds too contrived. If you have a steady intake of Tumblr and /pol/, you're going to get all kinds of paranoid and fucked up. I think the more interesting approach would be to detail the character's fall into paranoia first, rather than have him start there.

>>5126171
Yeah. I like the idea of someone convinced they're sensible in their paranoia. A sanctimonious moderate who thinks he's above it.

– Wait, what, do you mean tonight? Do I go now?
– Yes, son, tonight, yes, go, I'm sorry, it's done.

A momentary silence was split by the shriek of his sliding chair as he shuffled away from the kitchen table and away from his family unit, all of whom had gathered for the delivery of the news. Briefly rearranging the chairs and stools scattered about the kitchen into a walkable path for the last time, riding the plush smoothness of the back edge of the crushed velvet living room couch with his palm for the last time, catching a glimpse of the lion-shaped pattern cast on the hallway wall by the ceiling fan light fixture from around the corner for the last time, he suddenly became acutely sensitive to the extra weight his actions carried in their finality.

He opened the door to his room slowly, quietly, entered, then shut the door softly with the knob rotated and the latch retracted, as if he were avoiding creating a disturbance. There was no one in his room, but his room was also dressed in the cloak of finality his actions wore, so it felt alive. Alive is to wear clothes. What are clothes, he thought, why do people even wear clothes – wait nevermind that's a stupid thought, he thought, literally everyone has thought that probably, it's just like when people say 'I wonder who decided to yank on the dangly thing on the bottom of a cow and drink whatever comes out,' it's such a pointless, stupid thought, people need to stop thinking and saying that, he thought. His thoughts dematerialized and his body sat simply on the edge of his bed as his eyes scanned his room for a container for his belongings.

Told to please, just leave, just go, you know why, you know we can't really do much about it, you know it pains us for it to have arrived at this point but we can't not follow through with this, so yes, son, tonight, yes, go, I'm sorry, it's done, he sat on his bed and looked around because he needed to find a container for his belongings. His luggage carrier. It was in his closet. Shoving the sliding door of his closet along its track to get access to his various belongings – for the last time – his luggage carrier tumbled out and onto the floor, open, empty, ready to be packed, and a slight puff of laughter jetted from his nose as he looked at it and thought, that was just like a movie, the way it efficiently opened and made itself ready for me to pack.

A light knocking pattern at the door – three taps, then one more, for the last time:

[dialogue that I've omitted bc this is getting long]

The encrusted afternoon.

The forest grinning at me from the the eastern rim.
His black sense of fancy as he rubbed away the levels of resin his palms had collected. It crumbled off into the sink with audible tinking.
---
It was the 14th, the day of the picnic. When polaroids came Swaying into focus through cloudy pinks and green flares.

>>5125999
hehe my bretheren there's a lot of tantalising little quips in here
>cuboid wombs
>sacrifice to an indifferent god
The "gnome scale famine" is such a good line but it needs to be cut, as this sentence has such a perfect flow and the punchline is perfect on its own:
>The important part was not the coitus itself, but the fact that he ate enormous quantities of meat in her presence beforehand
i feel there is a stray "edginess" in the criticism of her tits without the bra on but this is just a personal distaste for casual or "cool" misogyny. the overall impression is correct (bra's are so round, evoke a perfect imaginary breast that the real thing can never live up to) it's just the way it is delivered maybe? or something.

>>5125971
jeez :/
the stuff about the camera is cool though haha

>>5125947
right in the feels
> I was eighteen years old, what else was I supposed to do but learn, eat, sleep, club and masturbate?
haha i'm 21 and i still think this way
i feel that this moment is very nice but the stuff about the water being too hot, blood and cuts etc. at the end throws it off a bit. not sure how to remedy that though without exorcising the gore FX entirely. cool stuff

>>5126185
Another benefit of the "descent" approach is that it allows us to see that parts of the pre-paranoid personality remain, so that the character has some basis for thinking he has not been altered to as great a degree as we know.

>>5126207
>[H]is luggage carrier tumbled out and onto the floor, open, empty, ready to be packed, and a slight puff of laughter jetted from his nose as he looked at it and thought, that was just like a movie, the way it efficiently opened and made itself ready for me to pack

This is a nice line. You've made a very intriguing in medias res opening, which I'm not generally a huge fan of.

>>5126243
The comment about the bra is more a comment on the character's grossness than on how they may have actually looked. We can already tell he's not exactly Mr. Sensitivity. As for the "famine" part, do you want the bits cut out about the salivation and manliness, etc.?

>>5126260
Well he's a minor character. I start a lot of my longer works from the perspective of a side character or describing a side character. He's kind of a running punchline in the background of a greater thing. Every few chapters he gets some stuff from his perspective.

>>5126260
mm figured it was a criticism of the male character but for whatever that kind of language just rubs me the wrong. as for the gnomes famine it's great just needs to be inserted somewhere else, as the sentence i greentext-ed (??) was perfect as is

There were phrases of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that still made Coe cry. He always thought it had to do with the circumstances of the composition itself. He imagined Beethoven, deaf and soul-sick, his heart broken, scribbling furiously while Death stood in the doorway, clipping his nails. Still, Coe thought, it might have been living in the country that was making him cry. It was killing him with its silence and loneliness, making everything ordinary too beautiful to bear.

>>5126265
How does he fit in to the larger story?

>>5126267
Don't worry, Pierre is supposed to rub you the wrong way. He's one of the few characters who has absolutely no redeeming qualities (we've only seen the tip of his depravity so far).

>>5126286
>Pierre is supposed to rub you the wrong way
Cool :)
keep it up anon

>>5126286
A bunch of characters hang out and he's a friend. They talk about shit. He's always spouting his golden mean fallacy shit. But it gets worse as the story goes. A big turning point in the story is when one of the main characters gets accused of rape (under affirmative consent laws enacted in California) and this paranoid moderate guy just tells him not to worry about it because a leftist undercurrent in social issues can't influence major policy in the long run in a largely right of center country.

>>5126315
oh the affirmative consent laws are fictional. IRL they've only been proposed.

Every morning Cole rose from his made-in-China bed and traipsed hazily into his economy-sized bathroom. He’d look in the mirror and check that his teeth were white and that they captured the fluorescent lighting just right, as if he was on the cover of GQ. Washing the tiredness out of his eyes, he’d go back into his room, turn on the radio, become disheartened, and promptly shut it off. He’d cook himself three eggs and two strips of bacon, drink a glass of orange juice, take supplements of vitamins A through D, shower, and get dressed in earth colors. He’d swing his backpack across his shoulders, step into the newborn air, hop on his bicycle and ride down Brewer Lane towards campus. And every day he rode down Brewer Lane he’d smile at the tall, green trees on either side of him, leafy masts against the muted sky—beckoning him forward like torches along a sunless trail.

At 7:40am on the 13/06/2015 was when the news of the event was first broadcasted to the world. No forms of media were exempt. The world would end in 48 hours.

John, who was asleep a the time, was not informed until he turned on the computer for the first time that day to commence his afternoon wank. As the browser loaded he was bombarded by the news. The time was 12:30pm - 44 hours and 50 minutes remained.
Dick in hand, John sat there silently stewing over this information, trying to understand exactly what this meant. Dumbfounded; saddened; confused; angry; scared; fearful; perplexed; devastated; lonely; John was overcome by emotion after emotion as they washed over him all in the space of a few seconds as the news sunk in. A moment later, John understood. He closed the page he was on, opened a new tab and scrolled through his bookmarks. After careful deliberation, the site and video were chosen for what would be Johns final wank.
When he was done he shut down the computer and cleaned himself up. On his way to the bathroom he glanced at the clock. It was 12:39pm.

>>5126283
top kek

>>5126397
;)

>>5126343
the contrast is a little heavy-handed

>>5126351
if you're gonna go there with the story you have to GO there and do a detailed jerk off description

I'm writing a piece that will be used in my final exams this year, it's on Identity and Belonging, the prompt I will be using is "We all want a normal we can fit into"
I'm going against it but unsure of whether I want to do a pseuodo-philosophical drawl (Like the final two episodes of Evangelion), A short story (must be written in under an hour, I'm thinking something like a really compressed Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter or Notes from the Underground) ,an expository on the SJW special snowflakes (drawing from /pol/) or a tactical poem to save time in the exam. Please inspire me /lit/

>>5125013
I'm writing a pastiche of victorian era erotica and surrealism for fun.

Editor’s Preface
It is customary for the authors of this sort of literature to introduce their work with exaggerated claims about the fervent desire enthralling their spirits as they were inking one word after another on parched paper. Like inveterate criminals, these pens-for-pyre, precede the candid confessions of their crimes with sordid declarations of universal love. In them every bodily pain, every soreness, is always preceded by aching longings. If one was to believe them, they all would be St. Anthonys with no desert to run into to escape from temptation, they all would be St. Sebastians with hands and feet tied to a pole while Eros takes pot shots at them. They have loved too much, they say, or too soon, while at best they should have said to have loved too indiscriminately. Fortunately this will not be the case. First of all because nothing is furthest away from my soul than such turmoils, if anything characterizes my person is the certain-footed self-satisfaction of a life lived in its appropriate boundaries. In my youth I have donned every mask of humanity, one after another, from the pilgrim, to the miller to the miner burning the midnight oil, only to be able to declare, in good conscience, that desire is safely nowhere to be found. Second because I’m not the author of the work.

– You're never gonna see us again, isn't that weird?
– It will probably be weird after it's not weird anymore. Like, it's not weird to me right now because nothing is different yet, and then when I actually leave I'll probably feel numb and fucked in a way that goes beyond just not seeing you guys anymore, so it probably won't be the dominant thought in my mind, but at a certain point I will probably look back and think, 'Woah, that was super weird, what a weird part of life.' But at that point, it won't be actually weird anymore because I will finally be far enough removed from this whole thing that I won't feel like it's the same version of me experiencing it. So, I mean, I won't realize it's weird until after it's done being weird, which means I'll never actually experience the weirdness. Does that make sense? I don't know. I don't know, it'll be fine, I'll figure it out. I guess I need to think about this.

>>5126609
what class is it

>>5126633
English
I just had a flash of inspiration and decided to write a meta piece on me searching for the perfect, abnormal piece.
"
A flash of brilliance shone brighter than the sun, the idea was inspirational and the world seemed brighter and more colourful than before. Griffin had figured out how he was going to tackle this English prompt. For the past weeks he had been in an unimaginative slump, unable to think of anything and worrying about the English prompt, it was the last two days before school and Griffin was running out of time. He could do an uninspired piece about discrimination, but that would be too easy. He could do an expository about films or books which deal with the issue, but that would be too boring. He could write an imaginative piece about despair and hope, but that would be too hard. Suddenly it dawned on him, he could write what he is doing right now. It was sublime, indescribable and brilliant. His attempts to go beyond the call of duty and write something that wasn't generic or expected had led him to write on a meta level."

>>5126661
Oh god please don't do this unless you can be truly hilarious with it. (And, of course, answer the prompt.)
I've read way too many self-centered "this is my writing this very essay" essays. Just listing the possibilities you didn't take is really dumb--it makes me want to read those stories instead.
That said, if you do take this route, the trick is to be both self-effacing and -aggrandizing (insofar as it will relate to your prompt--and this prompt seems relatively well suited to that style of humor).

>>5126571
It was the first thing I wrote since high school which I wrote in a bout of insomnia last night.

Going THERE seems a little crude.

I want to write a story but I'm stuck working something out

the story will follow a man who attempts public suicide, notices no one reacting to his threats and so gives up and goes home

what I've thought is that maybe he's standing atop a billboard looking over a freeway. but there's the issue of no one being able to hear him speak. which could be awkward or it could add to the theme of futility that I'm working with

I'd like absolutely anyones thoughts as to what would be the most graceful/least awkward (wrt narrative) method of this mans threatened suicide. something that can be done in public and in the view of many

Flush of leaves, field of colour. Red, Yellow, Green. The orchard displayed few colours, but abundance was not needed, for she shone proud and great her trio: Red, Yellow, and Green. Old Oak Green, a well-aged village of humble nature found far away from the city, was home to the orchard which grew berries of the famed three shades. The village was thought by many inhabitants to have been named after The Great Oak, planted over two and a half millennia ago. Or so they say. Others believe that the ‘Green’ in the name is a reference to the green berries in the orchard, the first berries ever to be grown there. Or so they say.

my first go at writing something

>>5125110
Oh my god that was so funny the part that gets me is the part where you say they were still walking normally like they were unaware that they had their limbs chopped off and they were just oh I'm walking down the street to get a pint at the pub with my pals and then hoop down they go those little midgets now with their legs chopped off

it was a dark and stormy night.

“Do you think you’ll win?”

The scars on Samuel’s back are white and broad against his tanned skin. The rod that Dean clutches has no line. The lake is murky, with dark shapes that slip and slide under the surface, just out of sight.

“It’s not about winning or losing, Samuel,” Dean tells him. “It’s about getting you back.”

“You want to own me, too?”

“No. I want you to be free.”

“You’re going to kill my brothers, aren’t you?”

“I don’t want to.”

“But you’re going to do it anyway.”

“I’m sorry, Samuel,” Dean says, “I’m so sorry.”

“Just say it,” Samuel snarls, jolting to his feet. He smacks the rod away, grabs Dean by the front of his shirt and hauls him upright. “Say it. Say it. Say that you’re going to murder my brothers.”

“I’m going to do it,” Dean whispers, “I’m going to kill your brothers.”

Samuel shudders. He lets go of Dean’s shirt and gently smooths it back into place. His head drops forward, and he gently knocks his forehead against Dean’s. “Do you promise?”

These people are assholes. They're robots. I ran my fingers through my brown hair. I'm smarter than them.

John's cock dripped sperm on the ground, drip drip drip. "Wow" I quoth "now there's a saucy lad"

ITT:

Lots of people who have never completed a novel and who labour over minor details of style, ultimately hindering them at this stage.

Only when you're editing a complete manuscript with a publisher, will you realise that the trite internal conflict you endured over that one paragraph was fucking irrelevant.

Asking for critique on a few lines is like judging a sexual partner by the shape of their finger nails.

>>5127411
You have absolutely no evidence of your first statement; most of what's been discussed are simple literary techniques intended to improve literary style and are by no means minor; the comma in your second paragraph is superfluous; you've used "trite" where I think you meant to use "trivial" (it's not THAT cliche); you don't need to swear to make your point; and if there is dirt present under a single nail, I openly refuse to sleep with them.

Prose and style are important. We are addressing simple writing techniques and trying to veer people away from using cliches and purple prose, which are more than apparent in just a few lines. You're no better than anyone. Get over yourself.

>>5127442

Chill out man, that was my opening paragraph. Thanks for the critique.

>>5127442

But, yes, you are correct. Prose and style are very important. However, I believe that content is far, far more so.

Having technical ability is the first step, but it is given too much weight by beginners.

>>5127288
nice 1

>>5127288
What happened next?!!

I changed it to this recently, but now I don't think it's any good:

There has always been change, but this change is different. All change has seemed groundbreaking at its time--life changing--but that creates the false impression that all change is equal, and that the new change is just like the preceeding; that the new change is only emitting a false feeling of difference...Nothing is ever the same after change, but everything is different after the events that transpired in my lifetime. It's the most important change since the wheel.

It's an encyclopedic novel about the internet. In fact, this is definitely trash compared to the rest so I need criticism.

>>5127558
the problem here is that you're thinking about each individual sentence more than you are the overall progression of the paragraph, like you're trying to craft clauses that have an impact without considering the impact of the paragraph as a whole. the tenses of the verbs don't initially feel like they agree and the repetition of the word change doesn't go anywhere specific; repetition that doesn't have an explicit purpose comes across as laziness or thoughtlessness.

try to rewrite the paragraph in the simplest, most straightforward way possible, then rewrite and expand it in a stylized way. that helps me sometimes

>>5126613
Can someone tell me something about this?

I lived in this house for over twenty years, and slept within these walls nearly every night until my eighteenth birthday. The same room with the same mattress, and the dull lighting that couldn’t hold a flame to a candle for the candle would always perform better. The walls were white, as was the ceiling and the liveliest it got was the brown door scuffed with chipped paint. Before I fell asleep I projected film strips tangled in my thoughts onto the whitewashed canvas, usually the monsters perched outside my windows, or stationed at my door, otherwise fantasies where I ran along the streets of the city alone and claimed everything as my own.

There were restless nights when I drove myself into a paranoia from the nightmare variations, so I stared at the ceiling illuminated from the vagrant streetlamp just down the road. I played connect the dots with the sores littered across the ceiling from water damage or suburban decay. I created asterisms and haphazard constellations to make up for the ones I couldn’t see outside from my view of the world. When I got bored with that I turned on the radio and listened to classic rock, the same ballads and brawl songs, memorized the lyrics and spent many nights singing myself to sleep with Tom Petty and the Who.

But anyway, no matter what I eventually fell asleep in this room, in this house, in this city And it’s been hard to sleep peacefully anywhere else. Now most nights I spend nursing coffee or reading into the early hours of the morning and whenever I do finally fall asleep it is because I am tired of thinking, of remembering.

-----
This is just a little nostalgia trip I wrote last night--recently if I can't fall asleep I try to write something down to bide my time. My problem is I like constructing sentences that feel nice rolling off my tongue when read aloud, but this tends to make the prose less succinct and somewhat convoluted. It is difficult for me to write straightforward prose, which sucks because I want to become a writer better understood than "admired". I guess my mindset is if I wrote these pseudo-immersive lines I may stand out more. Started reading more to help correct this.

>>5126613
>First of all because nothing is furthest away from my soul than such turmoils, if anything characterizes my person is the certain-footed self-satisfaction of a life lived in its appropriate boundaries. In my youth I have donned every mask of humanity, one after another, from the pilgrim, to the miller to the miner burning the midnight oil, only to be able to declare, in good conscience, that desire is safely nowhere to be found. Second because I’m not the author of the work.
I really like what is being attempted here but there's something grammatically fuzzy about the the First of all... sentence that dulled the effect because I stumbled over it. I think it's the second "is"

otherwise, this reads well, although I'd definitely need a firmer grounding in victorian era lit to appreciate where it'd be going. good job at writing coherently

>>5127855
i enjoyed the middle paragraph a lot

i think the biggest problem with the writing is word selection; your descriptions are good and the nouns you choose are interesting, but you mess up the rhythm of some of the sentences when your conjunctions/prepositions/various pieces of sentences aren't quite as precise as they need to be. you're already doing the best thing to improve that, which would be to just keep reading and develop a sense of what to say when and why. you have a good intuition for choosing interesting phrases; you just need to develop that same intuition for piecing together interesting sentences

bumping thread to get posts going for today

i'll be around commenting on writing so that people don't feel like they're posting into the void

btw, any feedback on these would be cool: i wrote this >>5126207, and this >>5126629 is just the end of the exchange I omit from the first link. trying to avoid too much tryhardness

>>5127967
I'll read your stuff, give me a little while. This is mine, meanwhile >>5125986

>>5125013
I.The drive
1.It is Friday in Chicago, the monthly acid rain beats against the acrylic glass of the Jockey's thirtieth floor penthouse on the outskirts of Museum Park. He is mulling over the classified section of the Tribune, looking for possible stories to call. He runs a show called No Hope Radio. It collects stories from the hopeless and reads them aloud on air, a form of schadenfreunde.
On his way to work he sees a women burning alive in the rain, she is wearing red. In the lobby his secretary is wearing white ( she hates this sort of thing). His studio is blue.

II. The Show
It is nine PM, the shadows come come out across the streets. They are gathering around the glow of digital displays. They are are murmuring in anticipation. They are clustered under metal umbrellas as the acid rain pings and sizzles. They are waiting for his voice.


He smirks. His lips approach the mic, but never touch it. A smacking, a button press, he is live.

The canned intro plays out, and he announces tonight's cross theme. Even through tinny speakers he seduces. He reads the stories, he knows their end, he knows the deaths, the lives, the characters, he reads it all, he drinks coffee at night.

>>5126207
>>5126629
It's a good piece, overall. If there's a criticism I have of it, it seems you're sort of mulling about in a twilight zone between minimalism and maximalism. You're very detailed at the beginning in describing all the effects of all the fellow's actions, but then you get more spare towards the end. I can see this being an intentional decision, but I can't be sure, so I wanted to bring it up.

Also, you use the word 'thought' a lot in the second large paragraph, which again I'm not sure if it was intentional, but as you probably know, it's generally frowned on.

The conversation is nice.

>>5125986
This, my friend, is me>>5128167
In regards to your writing: this is decent but confusing, and I'm not encouraged to read on. Give me some more understandable thoughts before you delve into your character waxing about some mythology. Left Hand of Darkness opens up with a man thinking about archways, and then he moves from the familiar to the alien by thinking about the alien's reasons for building the archway. You're on the right track, just put in some buffer.

>>5127926
Thanks for the feedback. So you mean to say there are instances when I should say whatever it is what I am trying to say in simpler terms, so choosing the correct word over the better word? A problem I have is whatever book I am reading at the time I sometimes adapt the writing style without knowing it, which then mixes with how I usually write to create a strange melange of wording.

I guess the important thing to remember is I'm still twenty-one, which gives me a lot of time to hone my writing. Thanks again!

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. Except of course the post-op recovery period where my new plastic face felt like it had been beat with a bag of bar-soap. In today's world, hell, any day's world, beauty has a cost. To some, it's fifty pesos in a Tijuanan alley, to others it takes a lifetime of self-delusion. But I don't have pesos, and I don't have the time to delude myself, time being money-you can't buy money. So I decided to take fate into my own hands, because I love my hands, and I love my fate. Amor fati I think is what they call it, either way, I sought out a miracle sculptor with a scalp that could turn my Janis Joplin into a Greta Garbo. Dr. Zyzz, cut and sterile, (he is a faggot, but only in the homosexual sense) had too much ambition to make money to have time to play with words, so I decided, after only one bunk interview, that he would be the perfect candidate to give my countenance a permanent makeover. But before I met him and went through with the procedure, I figured that, hey, I'm a smart, affluent, even slightly sardonic girl who deserves a little more than getting asked all the time if the shovel hurt, so why not? Why the fuck not? I mean, if that dumb bitch Anna is going to be have the mental capacity of a brain-dead field mouse, and still (wo)manage to make a figure more than me, why shouldn't I do something to stretch my neck out, and maybe my skin a bit too? So yeah, I made the executive decision to reupholster.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. My face. My face fucking hurts; better refill my hydrocodone because, let's be honest, this wine isn't going to put me into a opiate hazed stupor by itself.

The masquerade ball was filled with double masked mermaids who had convinced the world they could walk. The schools of guests swam in dance towards the end of Beethoven's 8th as the ors d'oeuvres got gobbled like Dodo birds. A porcelain visor set around stiff eyes quietly walked onto the podium centered back in the chamber, whose ceiling had strung up a constellation of chandeliers, studded in crystalline light and a hint of empyrean gold. Cleared throat: "Good evening ladies & gentlemen, I want to extend my gratitude to all of you for coming here tonight." His fitted suit decorated with decorations and medals, his voice was measured and authoritative, making it easy for him to direct the crowd through a lecture of notes on the reverie of the Swarthington family's honorable patriarch, Darius II.

>>5128272
>choosing the correct word over the better word
yeah, this! more importantly though, with practice and exposure to well-written stuff, what you will eventually develop is an intuition that allows the "better" word to actually be the correct word.

and regarding writing like what you're reading at the current time: don't overthink that point. it's good to try to retain your integrity and try to remain as original as possible, but that can almost be detrimental to your development as a writer if you're not letting yourself be influenced by things. if you're struck by how well something is put, let yourself try to understand why it works. you'll inevitably make it your own.

>>5125986
I loved that first image of Princess Suhandi – I repeated "dusty slice of ridge that rose along the valley's edge" to myself aloud a few times because it reads really beautifully. my only criticism is along the lines of what the other anon said >>5128211; the paragraph zooms away from the present space to an abstracted thought train pretty quickly, and even though the valley is present in all the sentences, it's never given much life. as a reader I feel like I have to just trust you on the sacredness of the valley, when a little more context-building information would make me know it to be true.

>>5128275
>So I decided to take fate into my own hands, because I love my hands
I instinctively smirked and nodded at this; such a good line. from that point on I got into the rhythm of the writing and was able to flow through it and I really enjoyed the paragraph. the first few sentences are a little heavy-handed – it felt like you were grinning and winking at me at the end of every sentence – but it evened out. I don't know why, but I especially like the use of (wo)manage. comprehensionwise, I was briefly assuming that it was gonna be a self-surgery because of an overly literal assumption I made (taking fate into my own hands bc i love my hands), so it was a little jarring to then accommodate Dr. Zyzz, but that's probably just me reading absent-mindedly.

>>5128298
>A porcelain visor set around stiff eyes quietly walked onto the podium centered back in the chamber, whose ceiling had strung up a constellation of chandeliers, studded in crystalline light and a hint of empyrean gold.
this sentence is particularly good, although I got a little caught on "chamber, whose ceiling had strung..."
i think the "whose" is incorrect or something because it threw off my comprehension of that sentence. there is something grammatically fuzzy about the last sentence too. otherwise, too little unfolds for me to say anything too substantive, but the writing is interesting, if a bit overwrought at times.

>>5128193
I appreciate this. I wanted to make a subtle transition from tactile and detailed to spare and internal as the dude receded into his own thoughts, but with more readings I realize that it basically jumps around stylistically. I think if I emphasized the detail again in describing the room or the luggage carrier or something it'll recall the maximalism of the first part and feel less disjointed. thanks yo

Natural light had dissolved into comfortable darkness in the sky over Henderson; the living spilled out of the city in silent babble, trading asphalt roadways for the concrete drives of their homes; mothers called, then screamed, for an upstairs child to crawl down for supper amid the grating and welcoming clinks of glassware. Two towns over, Wallace Aubrin settled into a stack of salt sacks in the back room of a chain grocery, spoke and cried and laughed and remembered, or did none of these things, and shot his own skull open in two places: an entry and an exit.

>>5128464
>Natural light had dissolved into comfortable darkness in the sky over Henderson
take out "had" and this is ok
>he living spilled out of the city in silent babble, trading asphalt roadways for the concrete drives of their homes
the "trading..." line is great
>mothers called, then screamed, for an upstairs child to crawl down for supper amid the grating and welcoming clinks of glassware
this I'm not too fond of; it feels a little arbitrary and less incisively memorable than the last two clauses.

the next sentence is genuinely surprising, well done

>>5125013
When i found him he sat, like always, in the chair in the glass walled room. The inhuman steps leading down from the entrance midway up, looking towards the vast square space. He was gazing out against the raging sea which battered the cliffs below. Above the sky it's perpetual cloudy grey, snakes of lightning en-wreathed inside. The rain battered against the great glass wall.
Before he had mentioned that the scraggly rocks the rooms were built upon once jutted out into the sea, over time they had collapsed leaving only this mountain backed shore.
He made that subtle gesture with his hands, beckoning me over. As the only chair in the room was taken by him, i stood. Standing he offered his place to me and began a slow pace around the floor.

>>5128373
So you suggest maintaining a certain intimacy with Suhandi's thoughts on the valley for a while? The very next paragraph discusses a battle taking place below, and I didn't want to brood overlong on her own thinking.

>>5128635
that was what i was intuitively expecting while reading it – it might not make sense for the story, of course, but it seems appropriate for the paragraph. it also depends, I suppose, on whether or not what Suhandi's thinks even matters or if she's a vessel of narration/exposition/etc

>>5128524

Thank you for the suggestions.

>>5128839
I suppose in a sense it does matter what she thinks.

Actually, her meditating on her personal experiences with the divine could be rather useful to the main thrust of the story, because this is a historical fantasy story that takes place in a world where all religions are true, during the beginning of the 7th Century AD. There are mythical beasts and magical warriors fighting on the fields below, and Suhandi herself is currently being escorted by a demigod warrior.

Here's a modified version, let me know what you think:

Princess Suhandi of the Rai Dynasty stood up atop the dusty slice of ridge that rose along the valley's edge. This valley, this ancient gouge within the tired old Earth, had in the dawning of the world been home to the very first people in all the vast empire to farm and work with tools. She could feel, detect its sacredness, note it in the prick that trembled up her spine, sense it in the breeze that played upon her skin. It was whispered by the learned in the courts of gold and silk that the valley was the first civilized place ever to be, that before the Indus folk all everywhere had been savages. Suhandi was no scholar; she had in fact been inattentive with her tutors, preferring more to gaze outside upon the lush green forests arrayed all about her father's palace. But she sensed a rightness in the claim. Here, she felt, had gods been born, here had men commingled with almighty forces at the sun's first rising.

Don stepped outside.
It feels good to be alone.
He wished he was drunk.
He thought about something he said,and how stupid it had sounded.
He should forget about it.
He decided to piss, but he couldn't.
(A plane passes silently overhead)

The streetlights, and the buds on the trees, were still.

>>5128902
Is it wrong that I thought of Don Draper? Something about it feels very Draper-ish. Not the least because the whole poem has a sort of midcentury quality to it.

Regardless, good work. I like it, except for the last line, which bothers me for reasons I can't explain.

>>5125013
Three weeks ago, I entered Dubai and began renting a motel room within the city limits. On my first meeting with the property manager, I can remember bending my knees into the dirt and grabbing a handful, smelling it. A car door shut some feet away, and someone spoke in a peculiar accent. It was a man around the age of fifty, accompanied by two others. With a thought that passed softly over me, I recognized that would kill him. Brutally, if I had been allowed the chance. I wasn’t alarmed at the thought nor did I entertain it for any longer than it took the dirt to fall from my hand. I didn’t care for the voice--it could come later. What I cared about was the dirt. “A year ago, this dirt was not here. A year ago, there was nothing but ocean… and now not even the dirt smells of it.” I was curious. I couldn’t help but imagine the dirt. Fantasize of the dirt’s coming. Where did the Shiek get all this dirt?

I plan this to be about a man that thinks of himself as one of the last "champions" (think of the epic war stories, notable hero that fights other notable heroes one on one). He devotes himself entirely to his two great loves: killing and day dreaming. I am writing the story much more as a literary fiction than any sort of genre thing. It seems kind of humorous or ironic but I want it to be serious... it gets serious anyway.

>>5128913

Damn it, /lit/, I was hoping you would get the reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-T63_DK8hc

>>5128875
hell yeah. what do you think? I think it has a much more vibrant and interesting quality to it. the previous version feels a little lifeless in comparison.

>>5128991
I agree, yes. I may go back through the story and insert more of Suhandi's perspective, being a mortal (albeit a royal one, and that means something) on a field of gods and demigods. FYI, here's the next paragraph.

Now it was a land of war. Furious battle raged across the reddish rock and dirt, as men in silver armor charged at speed against a sea of crimson. The banners of each regiment were by now ragged, tattered by the passage of great flying beasts, while knights half-divine bore tridents as they strode across the plains. Elephants blared up their trumpets to the pale blue sky, great warships of the land with cabins mounted on their backs, from which the archers rained down whistling barbs. The flag of the land of Sindh rose fluttering upon the standards of their heads. Long and alabaster cobras slithered with the charging men, their bites carrying not venom but salves enchanted so to heal near any wound.

>>5128464
you're trying too hard with "literary" language to the point that it mars your clarity. For instance: "the living spilled out of the city in silent babble, trading asphalt roadways for the concrete drives of their homes"--I apologize, but this is frankly a clusterfuck. Take the first clause, in which there are three attempts at a "literary" portrayal of a scene: 1) the unspecified "living" as a subject 2) "spilled out of the city" as a form of saying "exited" and 3) the insufferably vague contradiction "silent babble." Now obviously I won't tell you to remove all of these and resort to a realist style, but your approach to literary language can't be that anything that can be said simply should be dressed up. In terms of the previous sentence, I like the phrase "spilled out of the city" but you need to put this in a clear context for it to be both artful and understandable without having to be read three times.

On the other hand, "trading asphalt roadways for the concrete drives of their homes" makes a different sort of error--it doesn't describe what I think you want it to. Again, its roots are not firm enough in reality. You're describing a commute, but a trade is something quick, an object passed from one hand to another without the slow changes that a journey brings. And going for a road to a driveway would be more appropriate if you were describing the cars, which you are clearly not given that all we know of our subject is that it is "living." If you are dying to use the "trade" metaphor, a more accurate rendering would be that the city workers are trading offices for their homes with the currency of a commute.

Moving on, the last sentence doesn't fit with the narrative voice of the first. You're so sure of everything going on in the city, so why do you have to mention the possibility that Wallace might have done "none of these things"? As a rule of thumb, I would (almost) never use "he was not thinking x" or "x did not happen." It's illogical to single out x when you could literally say that anything did not happen ("He didn't ride a unicorn!") because all that could be described as nonexistant is of equal value: naught.

"If you spin around enough, you eventually will stop being dizzy."

"That's the most retarded thing I've heard today Bernadette."

And so some backwards logic trying to explain the dynamics of balance and equilibrium began pouring out of Bernadette's mouth and into Behrakis' ears, making him want to grab a nearby pool noodle and playfully beat her in the face with it. The summer's persistence always encouraged people to shed not only clothes, but other things too, like dignity, self-respect, and sobriety. The cooler was cool with condensation and "Big Poppa" shook bathing suits and smiles and eyes around and round.

"I wonder when everyone's going home," Bernadette asked. Behrakis sat there with his eyes shaded, jaded, in an inner tube watching Cynthia from across the way talking to Kimbo, the house's owner. Ronnie decided to do a cannonball, and the two dozen guests, would you believe it, put their hands up, not for Detroit, but for making a splash. People enjoy carefree action and adventure like Indiana Jones or Pixar films, thats why Behrakis had worked to find himself in the pool-shed with Cynthia, forgetting his whatever-you-call-it with Bernadette, slipping her a mouthful of Austrian schnitzel. The party persisted, pooling heaps of laughter and fun, until the sun said goodbye and Behrakis and Bernadette hopped in B's Porsche Cayman and droned on home in shallow conversation.

Once upon a time there was a dunce upon a dime (like the svelte, smelt, F.D. Roosevelt) who had not polio but was paralyzed: Jermaine McCarthy, coldly hunched over in fear of the locusts swarming, oceans away, still in Normandy.

>>5129139
Not bad, has good style. But it seems too condensed. You gloss over a lot in that second paragraph. Were you planning on returning to bits of what you described later in the story?

>>5129153

Yeah, all the characters mentioned pop up again in the story. And Kimbo's house get's properly described so that you get a sense of where they are. Basically, what is shown in these first excerpts is that Bernadette and Behrakis are dating (spottily) and at a pool party in the summer where Behrakis manages to get a blowjob from Cynthia in the pool house.

It was getting dark, and the ice was still falling, and it was too risky to drive until it stopped. So she sat by the bed in the chair and I was in bed. The ice made little ting-ting noises on the fogged window and it was getting colder. Averi had hung her heavy coat on the wall hook and was just using her thin cardigan to keep warm. She was rubbing her arm and tapping her foot. She was chilly, clearly. Take the blanket, I told her. No, then I'd be cold. So then here, I scooted over, we can share. She shook her head but still slid under the blanket. We laid there by each other on our backs, not talking, and we had to share the one pillow. The ice kept falling on the fogged window and I said how grateful I was that she took care of me and helped me get better. It's my job, she said. We kept laying there. You're warm, she whispered. I closed my eyes. It was nice to think so.

>>5129152

This is pretty brilliant. But something tells me that you can't manage an entire piece of work in this style, or that you have even written more than what you've posted.

>>5128167
thoughts?

"Humanity has weakened", told without hesitation the interlocutor of a communication from Mars, "during the past twenty years, it has been divided, without any intervention from the superior organisations, I hold. It has been fragmented and transformed. You see, since our facades-companies had eliminated most of the american rival, America is alone agains't the rest of the world, beside the EU, who became a neutral territory to both camp, thankfully to Leclair's monster investments."

(It's starting with a conversation, as a prologue.)

>>5128167
>He reads the stories, he knows their end, he knows the deaths, the lives, the characters, he reads it all, he drinks coffee at night.
"he drinks coffee at night." that's so good.

overall it feels like a very loose outline of something that could be interesting. things I initially thought were just stylistic quirks weren't resolved and retrospectively seemed like laziness, and the sentences feel like they are all basically the same structure, although you select some nice words. do you know where the story goes?

>>5129152
that's so fun to read but probably unreasonably exhausting to write

>>5129405
this is too little of anything to really critique; there is some grammar weirdness but idk, what would you want feedback on here?

>>5129483
It is more of an outline that started off as an experiment in minimalism– which I'm no good at. The story is meant as a framing device for several other things I've written about on post-capitalist U.S. in the middle of a massive civil war.

>>5129504
I write in french, so I tried to traduct. Some sentence loose their beauty.

I'd like feedback on how to make my dialogues more vivid, to give them a personality of their own.

Here, I tried to give this unknown character a deep feeling toward humanity as a whole and a urge to improve its situation. Since he's on Mars, he can oversee humanity not being as great as it could be.

>>5129252
I love this writing style and would purchase a book written like this pretty much regardless of what it's about.

these are minor things but I don't have much else to criticize, so some thoughts:
>It was getting dark, and the ice was still falling, and it was too risky to drive until it stopped.
>It was getting dark and the ice was still falling, and it was too risky to drive until it stopped.
that first comma interrupted me pretty emphatically at first read; I think the sentence is reflective of the rest of the paragraph written this way

>So she sat by the bed in the chair and I was in bed.
>So she sat by the bed in the chair and I was in the bed.
my brain mentally filled in the "the" before the second "bed" but it wasn't there. I like the callback to the first "the bed" in the sentence; it feels more right, I think.

>ting-ting
tink-tink makes more sense to me; the only reason I can come up with to explain why I might feel that way is that ice on glass tinkles rather than tingles, I think

the rest is great and Averi is a wonderful name. hopefully you keep this up!

>>5129531
>I'd like feedback on how to make my dialogues more vivid, to give them a personality of their own.
>Here, I tried to give this unknown character a deep feeling toward humanity as a whole and a urge to improve its situation. Since he's on Mars, he can oversee humanity not being as great as it could be.
got it. that bit of dialogue feels like information that the reader simply needs to know, so it would be hard to give the dialogue more character without obscuring meaning if you're simply trying to inform. but that doesn't mean you can't get deeper into describing the character's thoughts, setting, context, etc. as well. you won't be able to get across the feeling you're describing about this character without having it expressed in the writing. what tone are they using? what's going through their mind? how many people are listening? try to include answers to questions like that as you go along to fill out the passage

>>5129597
Two poeple are discussing what has weakened humanity and the unknown man offer a solution, which they both agree to.

Yes I try to add a lot of backstory about the setting with dialogues, sometime to explain why an event happened and its impact. Also I try to describe the environment as a result of change.

He's part of a secret organisation who all hold his view, so I'm afraid some of his allies sound the same. They are all very fond of their cause.

Maybe I should contrast him by challenging his person and get this unknown character to elaborate his view, to let the reader understand him better.

I like debates, so a character could debate his view.

A tomahawk kissed the cheek of Twerking Bull, slicing a chunk off his ear as it whizzed past. Then the searing pain came and he heard a sound like an old telephone ringing, he instinctively patted the sputtering gash and inspected his hand, the sight of blood on his fingers transportedhim back to the fond day at the riverbank, where he had taken the flower of his sweetheart, Shimmiying Dove and as his mind wafted, the reigns slipped from his grasp and he slumped over his ass, which was now carrying him through a phantom labyrinth in a frantic haste, raising a storm of dust in itswake. Then the second tomahawk detonated a few feet away, sending shards of shrapnel right into his ass and willy-nilly elsewither. As his ass crumpled beneath him, he was launched into a tripple somersault and traced a fine cycliod through the suspended dust before plummeting headlong into a ravine.

35 years old. You’ve hit that point. Statistically, it’s when culture starts pretending you don’t exist. TV and movies are going to stop catering to your interests, and no products are going to be made for your generation until they need walkers and scooters. In all likelihood the cartoons you watched as a kid are about due for a reboot that’s nothing like the original. Of course, there are lots of people who are 35 now who’ve made it up the ladder of success in Hollywood, and now they can have their generation’s voice be heard in the mainstream. Just be ready for that voice to be directed at people who aren't 35. Happy birthday, Lyle. Your present is oblivion.

The sun rose quickly in the morning, but more abnormal was the intense heat which felt to possess its own thickness and weight that moved the stems of grass in the field where the boy and Bonnie sat. The field was large and almost perfectly square, surrounded by statue trees which bulked into a forest, thick and lively. If one were to observe the pair from above, they would be sat alone in the centre, with no apparent exit or entrance through the woods, and the route they took to arrive here would be a mystery.

>>5125194
>The silhouette brisked hunched, head in coat, through the fierce wind. The graveled path was black and led to an aged oak door. Torn from years of abrasive sea winds. The cloaked figure raised his eyes upon reaching the door, admiring the building.

>>5125194

>The silhouette brisked hunched, head in coat, through the fierce wind. The graveled path was black and led to an aged oak door, torn from years of abrasive sea winds. The cloaked figure raised his eyes upon reaching the door, admiring the building.

>>5125058
god damn that was good

Black sand flowed through the greenish blue energies flowing across the old stone portal angled as a halfcircle. I watched with keen interest, my golden locks flowing past my shoulders and my powerfully bright green eyes staring on in shock and wonderment. When the black sand turned white, my green eyes turned to grey, as they've been known to do when I'm shocked or amazed. Why in Barátograe's name was the sand changing color so magnificently? Briefly, my memory shifted back home to the love of my life and his short brown hair and great tallness and fantastic muscles and biceps. I certainly hoped he was doing okay.

(Note: This is the beginning of a second book in a 7 or 8 part series).

>>5129721
>In all likelihood the cartoons you watched as a kid are about due for a reboot that’s nothing like the original
Dilemna of a /co/ user.

You really sealed the deal with this simple paragraph, good going.

>>5129061
Thanks, I needed to hear this.

Eric didn’t seem to notice anything different about his old lady on this particular day. Veronica jolted awake and turned to look at him on the other side of the bed. He smiled at her, his teeth a dark yellow with black outlines. She smiled back, her teeth just as in shambles.

“You watching me sleep?” Veronica said as she closed her eyes and stretched her arms out over Eric. Embracing him.

“Yeah.” Eric replied as he kissed her forehead.

Eric continued to kiss Veronica all the way down her face until he got to her lips. He gave her a gentle peck on each lip before finally laying a long kiss on her. She reciprocated the gesture and kissed his neck when they unlatched.

A little something I'm working on that's slowly shaping up into a novella (not yet edited):

My soles scratching against the asphalt remind me of the friction I'm going to experience in the morning between me, myself, & I for having done what's probably going to be about a gram of cocaine dissolved in a kiddie pool's worth of liquor and beer. As Dre and I pass under each successive street light, we lightly comment on some stray grey cat sprinting by, some ridiculous 1972 candy-blue DeVille, and of course, the rising anticipation of the numbing novocaine-like nuptial to come between my nasal cavity and euphoria. Now as I pretend to scrutinize the manifold ways in which my actions represent certain qualities about my life(ahem)style, I'm placated by the fact that this is only my third visit to the Ice-cream Man, what I like to think of my dope dealer as on the grounds that he's hopefully jolly (I hope) and jollily fat; his Christian name, however, is Bread and this is the fourth fortnight since our having met in Bloom's through my man TJ the bouncer. Anyway, while his pad peeks around the brick Boston corner the right corner of my lips raises (maybe two teeth in a poker game with Loosey-goosifer). I finally feel like I'm warped to his front step, past the vestibule and onto his couch petting a cat eerily similar to the one I saw in the street, making me wonder if they're family and also why his owner's taking so long to slice up an eighth. Impatience, my only problem, dissipates as I'm out the door with Dre and a snowball solid enough to land an elephant à la trebuchet in my pocket. The stars might've been blurred while speedily speed-walking back home, that is if the clouds blocking them didn't morph so quickly into a heap of Columbian gold on my absurd mahogany desk that my mother had the impulse of giving me-bless her heart-confronting my face. Cut up like a line of suspects, the powder found its way into my nose like convicts into prison, con after crook after criminal until the hands on the clock can't keep up anymore and the whole system starts breaking down like rusted clockwork and the gears keep grinding somehow for long enough to tell what time it is just before the entire wall starts to kind of border itself in some dark drape that creeps up and down and left and right until its all over the room and then your're, no wait, me, am, I am falling as-

>>5129932

Is this really the first excerpt from something you're working on? Either way, I feel like it's a bit dragged out, even for how little happens. You could really say all of this in half the words, maybe less. Give it a try.

>>5129782

You dwell too much on color descriptors and not enough on shaping a scene in which the colors can actually manifest in recognizable, interesting forms. You also focus a bit much on 'flowing' without ensuring that your writing maintains a certain flow. I'm also going to need a bit of an explanation on why both the sand and the protag's eyes spontaneously changed colors, because it isn't really crystal clear. Overall, it isn't necessarily bad, it just doesn't grab the reader's attention like quality writing should; but that could totally just be me.

>>5125058
This is excellent

“I don't want to die,” I tell them. But the slender man at the oars says nothing and only continues to pull with quiet determination. I cannot make his face out in the dark. We lurch back and forth on the water, Henry at the bow, trailing his fishing line out into the black. Thin white fingers curl again over the wooden oar handles, find new purchase, and pull.

It seems unfair that the skinny one should be the one to row.

Mary says something I miss. She is checking on the sleeper, fingers in the shadowy nook of his throat. Henry's fishing line twitches and glimmers. Someone lights a smoke with a snap that cracks out across the deathly bay.

>>5125013
Mine's some practice-writing for some VN stuff. I don't really like second person, but I really can't do first person either, and third person feels too clinical for me.

"Zalmoxis - city of the future, where citizens idle in luxury and their every need is tended to by cutting-edge automata. Well, not so anymore. For centuries the mechanical stewards of this ancient and deserted place have kept the grounds clean and the buildings repaired. But time has taken its toll, and tireless and diligent as the stewards may be, their limbs have rusted and broken, their proto-magical cores have cracked and sputtered, and their once bottomless supply of oil and spare parts has dwindled to near nothingness. You are one of the few functional units left, and the only scrivener left. Today started out as usual, with you sweeping up the marble floor of the city's primary library and proceeding through a checklist of its inventory. Numberless tomes containing the accumulated knowledge and experience of your absent masters' civilization filled its thousands of shelves, and a full account of its inventory was a years-long project for you, the lone scribe, but one you had done dozens of times over already and one that you were nearing the completion of now. Only four hundred shelves were left in this cycle, and today would see at least a quarter of that finished."

>>5125194
This sort of line:
"The [subject] [verb] [adverb]; . . ."
reeks of high school, to me.

There's also a sort of cursory insincerity vibe coming off your graphical descriptions. Partly, I'll credit that to age and inexperience, but there's also a mental/psychological component there which you can deal with now. Being self-critical is good and necessary, but at a certain point you have to embrace what you feel is campy or kitschy. The alternative is to wind up with the stilted, awkward faux grit that we find in lines like: "The building, made in the 18th century for a minor lord, made with as many details as someone could to make it look like a house of good worth."

>>5130225

Yeah, it's from a short story about two crystal meth fiends walking through a 99 cent store. It begins in their drug den.

I'll work on it. I'm taking a fiction writing class next year in college. Hopefully that will help. I'm more used to writing screenplays.

I looked up into the heavenly darkness above; the serpent messenger of the stars greeted me for the final time. Over the course of my journey, its starry outline had spiraled into nothingness. Never have I seen such a depressing display; I was witness to the death of a divine being. I pulled my steed over to the side of the dirt path to pray for the fallen deity. I shoveled a small charm out from the wagon behind me, the constellation had been scribbled onto it. I set it aflame, and throwing it up into the air, I watched as it disintegrated into ashes. My journey continues hereon, one less god to watch over my travels.

Shit? Not shit? I'd take time to critique others but I feel as though I'm not quite up to par as the rest of the community.

I poop mah pants. I poop mah pants. God, oh God, why did I poop mah pants. Is it because I had Mexican? Or because of some deeper reason, because of something deep in my gut from where the poop came. Is pooping mah pants indicative of some dorsal flashback of a childhood disaster regarding pooping mah pants? I might never know the origin of my incontinence. But I will someday know how to stop it, this infernal pooping of the pants, that I can never seem to rid myself of in times like these.

>>5125824
>"Do people really grimace? Seems a word for J.K Rowling"

Fuck you say

A Text Message Love Letter Masquerading As Anything But

No I mean.. okay you're right I'm sorry this ones my fault. I'm gonna uh tell you what I think cause you did and that was really comprehensive. I like you because you're perceptive and you're alive. I think you're the best person I know. You're one of the only people I can talk to without feeling like I'm talking to a wall. There's a natural tendency to be solipsistic, to not be sure if anyone other than you actually exists because how could you know, but I know you exist. I know you're real. You have dimensions and layers and if I don't talk to you you'll talk to me and I think you're the only person I know who exhaustively overthinks as much as I do. I don't think of you romantically but I consider you a similar person. There's a phrase in Arabic that means two of same. I feel you validate me by being extremely different from me while also being extremely similar and I think if it weren't for you I would quite literally go insane, not because you talk me through tough times or because I love you or anything, but because you confirm that I exist. I know it's ironically egocentric that I define you through me but I'm sorry. I could say you're funny and smart and strong-willed and humanizingly flawed and that would be true but you already know I know that. I don't know this sounds stupid

>>5130366
It's like a more honest approach to John Green stuff.

Gone

Sun seeped through a small crack in the blinds, hitting me right in the face. I reached for my phone; the phone read Sunday, September 01, 2013. A little lower I was able to see nine o’clock, and the sun told me morning. An overwhelming quite engulfed the house, not a sound to be heard. I called out hoping either my mom or brother would respond, though neither did.

>I know awakes and dates are bad form, the date is the first day I started writing. This is a rework of the first part of a short story.

The captain awoke from his dreamless sleep on the soft bed in his cabin. He never seemed to have dreams anymore. He simply went to sleep and woke up feeling tired and lightheaded. He occasionally considered consulting with the ship's doctor about this, but, considering that the rest of the crew slept in damp, crowded, stench-filled quarters, it seemed a tad insulting for him to complain about his own sleeping habits. He rubbed his unfocused eyes and practically fell out of the bed. He quickly undressed and put on his work clothes and boots. He looked at the half-filled bottle of rum on his bedside table and took a swig of it.

>>5130493
Stories that start with people waking up are bad. Try again.

>>5130522
>>5130502

>>5130538

This is actually the second chapter, so it's not really "starting off" with it.

>>5126989
Goddamn that was some good shit wasn't it?

Deep within the deceptively small limits of the pasta aisle at Joe's, George Decanter was lost in a self-contained argument as to whether one could actually get drunk off the vodka cream sauce. It had been nearly six, maybe seven, years since he had even thought about picking up a bottle, cream or marinara. The prospect of getting drunk whilst eating pasta intrigued him in a way pasta had not since his coworker had directed his attention to that TED Talk about Moskowitz– he couldn't remember the exact details, but he did feel a sudden craving for extra-chunky, also something about a bliss point; though that could have been that thing about three scotches for creativity, four for sleep .
Over in aisle six (canned Mexican vegetables, proudly not grown in Mexico) Jane Smith pushed her cart with the passive aggressive fury unique to sexually repressed suburban women with a taste for jumpsuits only matched by fictional Russian immigrants. Her hair was done up in an unintentional tribute to the worst of 80's mullets, while her knuckles were white with grip onto her cart full of non-gmo grains, and sixteen gallons of apple cider vinegar– homeopathic intestinal lubricant. She was turning onto five when she noticed a rather heavyset man gazing intently at a bottle of Prego vodka cream sauce. His hunched stance, coupled with his long suit jacket, took up around two feet of the three and a half foot aisle. Jane was in a hurry, so she recalled her basic math, and figured she could fit her cart through with a politely enunciated excuse, and still get by only grazing the back of the man's suit jacket.

Still deep in thought, but now over the suspicious origins of vodka cream sauce– drunk Russian, or adventurous drunk Italian, and don't even get him started on the Polish variable, let alone those wily Ukrainians. George failed to notice the blonde train wreck of a mother hurtling towards him with the blind intent of a CN train slamming into a drunk. He did, however notice her– as the drunk usually explodes– when the cart's prow sent him to the tile. His head bounced, and he faded into dark.
Waking up, he felt a gooey mess under his head, fearing the worst, and believing the women was going to get away with this fucking excuse of a manslaughter, George removed his newly polished Glock forty five, and ensured her lungs were as perforated as her brain surely was. Turning his head to look at his success, his own blood seeped over his tongue,hmm, he thought, vodka.

>>5130568

Pretty entertaining, and quality writing. You've formed the scene very well and so my only complaint is with your use of 'whilst.' It can work sometimes, but not here. Just use while. And also I have to ask: is this really the beginning of something you're working on? I can't imagine this as the first sequence of a novel, though-yes this is a complement-I'd like to.

Above: half a universe, maybe more. Below: same thing, except much more immediately: a sidewalk that appeared to move under a pair of brown suede tasseled driving shoes. Fine tweed pants, a thin, matching leather belt, a white button down shirt under a tailored navy blazer, a fitted fedora all progressed up from the shoes and remained either unseen or entirely neglected, unlike the swinging shoes and reeling ground, which were only seen because a certain set of grey-not quite blue, not quite green-eyes intended to see them. A frame of pleasant looking olive flesh hung around the now squinting lids and lashes that protested the oncoming rain from between the buildings above. The eyes read 5th and 60th on green signs, not distracted by some cascade of honks. After sifting through a constantly shifting scenery, a scene eventually presented itself through double glass doors and an elevator was placed under those driving shoes and some ding was heard after the grey eyes read 11th and brass doors slid open and a few turns and steps provided another door titled 1111 which when walked through presented a lovely receptionist that said, "Hello Mr. Noone, how are you today? Here sign in"-some scratching's heard-"it's been awhile, about three months now?"
"That long? Jesus, time flies doesn't it?" Nothing but some 'sure does' sentiment is donated back and a room meant for waiting in is waited in by one Mr. Noone for about 10 seconds longer than such a patient's patience should be tested-that's about four minutes-until a generically white lab-coat and man walks through the door opposite to the entryway and left to the desk and says, "Hey Mr. Noone, how're you doing? Good, well we're ready to see you. The nurse'll be in room three as usual. Should take about as long this time." Two nods were all that was needed.

>>5126780

bls respond lit

>>5130671
Jumping onto the freeway.
Make sure to put a herostratus reference in there

I know this one has some issues, would love some tips about the "resisting flailing"-part, but I dug this up from the 'archives'; it's not finished, but the concept, more than anything else, is really entertaining to me.

Quick run-down of the plot: It's paranormal in the subtle "masquerade"-sense. Polish immigrant kid got dragged into some drug-running bullshit with new gang in Stockholm (basically just teens and young adults); after some trouble with more established groups, specifically bikers, who wanted to stomp out the competition, the leader, a 28-year-old Albanian, flips out, looks for a "nuke" to get back at the competition, and a small-fry in the group tells of this guy who you basically have this back-and-forth coded discussion with and then you name someone, he gives you a birch-leaf, and exits through the back door; within a year, the named individual is dead, seemingly from heart-attack, a birch leaf next to the body, and the face frozen in discomfort or sheer terror.

It's basically a flavour-piece for a larger, well, urban-fantasy world I've been toying with for years, but never really gone into. It's pretty much like any other, but more subtle (no blood-raves as in Blade, for instance), and the times there are monster-hunters involved, they're often broken and paranoid, painfully pragmatic, or full-blown psychopaths, so the running theme in ALL of this is basically "just behind the corner", and when you know, it doesn't mean that you see, only that everyone is a suspect. Let's say that my friends enjoy it when I gm horror games.

Note, I wrote this tired as fuck and English isn't my first language.

Shit, too long, text comes in next post.

>>5130902
Stefan lights another cigarette, the third one in the span of less than ten minutes, ”Kurwa”, he mutters between his teeth, but he can’t help it, he needs to calm down, and he lights it. It proved to be harder than he’d thought it would be, to just stand here, but far more difficult to actually imagine the man sitting in the stall-like area in there, sipping his Karhu, staring down at the table. He looks through the window of the bar, resisting the urge to flail with every motion – his adrenaline is through the roof and he doesn’t want the bouncers to suspect he’s on heavier stuff than alcohol. He’s had one beer so far, and his first cigarette had contained more than tobacco, but that’s it; the time is 23:30, the day is Wednesday and the month is September. Just around that corner to the left the man sits, Stefan knows that, he checked it before, his heart leaping with the strangely interwoven emotions of warm relief and cold terror – like meeting your ex from a bad breakup at a party – and he knows that the man will stay there until closing time.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this; he wasn’t supposed to be a nervous wreck on a nice, warm evening; he wasn’t supposed to have two hours (one hour on party nights) worth of cigs in ten minutes; he wasn’t even supposed to be at a rock bar – he hates the music – but that fucker inside has his pattern and this is where he goes on Wednesdays. Point is, Stefan is running out of time, or at least that’s what he believes. He slides his hand down his pocket, looking for another reason not to go inside, changes his mind when he sees another patron raising an eyebrow, and goes for another drink instead. No, it wasn’t supposed to be like this at all, and all is that bloody Lucas’ fault, but that doesn’t matter anymore; in many respects, nothing does. He settles down at the bar, the corner under surveillance, and takes a large gulp of cheap lager.

"When you-- when you think Sunshine, I think Rain." All things considered, Reiss wasn't enthusiastic about answering this, or any question. He could never find it in him to resist Walt, no matter how superfluous his curiosity seemed.

"Okay, I get it. Rain's beautiful. So's sunshine. Sunshine's warm, rain's cold. Why not go for the heat?"

"You don't need to see the sun to know it's there. There's a reliability in the sun. It's not a matter of life and death to debate when the sun is going to come back."

"And Rain is?"

As usual, the question was bait. To Walt, saying something so seemingly innocuous like **'Enjoying the weather?'** was just another chance for him to beam through the dust settling around Reiss' facade. Eventually, perhaps on a pretty day in August, he'd crack.

Today, it wasn't meant to be. The dismal murmur of the server room coupled with Reiss' throat clearing was interrupted by the phone. Eleven-fifty am, Amanda was early. The two men sat there making increasingly impatient motions at each other to pick it up, Reiss, being the caver, caved. Making the all the pleasantries associated with professionalism, he put the phone down, instantly pointing at the door.

----------

Please crit pls

Please be nice, I wrote this before I started reading a lot and was forced to use the opening quote for a school project.

----

“You better not never tell nobody but God,” undeniably the most nonpareil advice an attorney can give to a client. It is insignificant whether the plaintiff is accusing the suspect of an indictable or fallacious crime and whether it was committed from the side of the defendant. The homage of an advocate is to honor the client with utmost reverence in the most vulnerable situations notwithstanding the truth. As a perfectionist and a pessimist, I have wronged on numerous occasions to myself and others, however there is one transgression that will fail to abandon my ratiocination for the rest of eternity.

“Sometimes I would like to imagine all of this didn’t happen. That we were just some random adventurers living in this wonderful world, fighting the good fight. At the start we really were that . We fought all kinds of enemies. And we won. But not for good, not permanently. True (Big Evil) is dead but the others won’t go away. We fought for so long that (World) grew accustomed to it, that war was some kind of peace. Even for us adventurers, why kill that boss if it is going to come back later as if nothing happened? We did it anyway. Not for justice, not for the challenge, not even for (World). For gold, for loots and for ourselves. Suddenly we weren’t fighting the good fight anymore.
The rest of (World) caught too. Threats once so big but now with us seems so small, but more importantly manageable. With nothing to unite (World), we squabble. City against city, race against race, fractions against fractions, guild against guild. Politics ooze everywhere. Plus the fact that the novelty of places, things even enemies peeling off, suddenly the world wasn’t so wonderful anymore.
I wish I could say I knew what going to happen next. That the gods told me or that I deduced it myself. But who could and more importantly would? That some of us wanted to keep fighting the good fight, one that could actually be won, even if it is delusional? That the extremists are done squabbling and willing to take arms? But it did. After so many enemies, it wasn’t the more alien that shocked us. But the more sympathetic, more heroic, more like us. More of us. We found the greatest foe (World) had to offer: ourselves.
Suddenly we weren’t adventurers anymore.

Please rate thanks. I edited some names out so it would be less confusing

>>5130905
The "It wasn't supposed to be like this" beginning seems a little cliché, even though yours is written well.

>>5130309
Shouldn't the death of a god warrant a little more description? This is an event of cosmic proportion, yet it reads like the death of someone's pet fish.

>>5130927
How seriously are we meant to take this Walt guy? Is he supposed to be comedically melodramatic?

>>5131151
Lookit that, a fantasy I might actually read.

>>5129730
pls respond

>>5129730

I would try to avoid unnecessary phrasing like "if one were to..." You're the writer, so therefore you know exactly how the scene looks. That means you can state simply what a certain aspect of the scene looks like without mentioning a free floating 'one,' or other unrelated noun. You could also use a different concrete perspective, like say a bird, and say, "an eaglet flew overhead and saw the pair alone in the centre...." or something like that. Also, you should ask yourself: why does the sun rise so quickly and with such heat?

>>5130620
One complaint I've had about this is that descriptions were vague, and that no novel should have death occur so early. Yes, this is the opening to a novel about the workers and customer of a vast (seemingly infinite) supermarket next Sunday AD.

>>5131824

True, I suppose I was giving him the benefit of the doubt in terms of pacing and explanation.

Red night in the land of dust and bone and upon the remains of a road long dead walk the bare feet of a woman.

>>5131782
thanks for the feedback, taken on board.

Giving more feedback to fish for some of my own (>>5130300).

>>5130939
Bro-tip: don't use the words 'nonpareil' or 'ratiocination' ever again.

I get that you're presenting an insufferable autist, but this is just too much. Actually, I guess that depends on how this continues.
>>5131151
>fractions
Forget about what your teachers told you, the best term for this circumstance is 'factions.'
Also, this whole sentence just isn't very sensical or smooth:
>Plus the fact that the novelty of places, things even enemies peeling off, suddenly the world wasn’t so wonderful anymore.

As for the concept, I'd say it's acceptable but this intro makes me think your protagonist is some edgy fighter type, which is pretty much the least interesting fantasy character in history.

>>5131896
Interesting start, though I think the "1 paragraph" rule didn't mean to literally extract the first paragraph if it was a single sentence.

>>5132148
Does edgy mean cynical and sarcastic and generally angry (especially after someone close to him died)?

>>5132416
It means that your cynicism is shallow and feigned.

>>5132148
Does yours being "practice writing" mean that you're not really looking for feedback on settings/characters/plot as much as the presentation?

>>5132487
Exactly. The content is completely unrelated to my project.

>>5130633
Stop trying to sound deep and just write a damn scene. You're focusing too much on trying to have an cool style and too little on actual substance.

>>5132520
Well there's a fair amount of awkward phrasing in there, things like
> their limbs have rusted and broken, their proto-magical cores have cracked and sputtered, and their once [...]
>You are one of the few functional units left, and the only scrivener left.

And this is a pretty massive run-on
> Numberless tomes containing the accumulated knowledge and experience of your absent masters' civilization filled its thousands of shelves, and a full account of its inventory was a years-long project for you, the lone scribe, but one you had done dozens of times over already and one that you were nearing the completion of now.

If you're focusing on presentation, you should pay a lot closer attention to things like repetition and sentence structure, along with trying to get a good rhythm going. Read your writing over a lot and maybe even try recording yourself reading it and then listening back to it.

>>5132588
I think I write like that because I imagine myself speaking it. When I write, I do it as a sort of stream of consciousness biased towards oratory. Probably because of that, I find description and dialogue especially difficult.

>>5125013
As soon as I saw her walk towards me, I knew that everything had been a huge mistake. In that instant, I regretted both, not spending my life with, and ever meeting her.
***
The call came the night before. Halfway between wakefulness and sleep I paw at the ringing phone.
-Hello?
Nothing.
-Evan?
That voice. I didn’t need to ask who it was. Honestly, I didn’t have to –and shouldn’t have to- say shit.
-I’m bored.
And just like that I had Amy back in my life. Just like that, the relative stillness of my life was to be threatened once again by the bittersweet experience of spending time with her. At almost predictable intervals we would love and hate each other. More often than not, both at the same time.

>>5132637
>When I write, I do it as a sort of stream of consciousness biased towards oratory
This kind of seems like a bad way to go. Stream of consciousness is good for certain things, but presenting a setting and characters isn't really one of them. It just doesn't make for a good read.

>>5131542

I'm >>5130927.

Moderately seriously. Slightly more seriously than he takes himself.

Here's the second paragraph, at any rate.

Today, it wasn't meant to be. The dismal murmur of the server room coupled with Reiss' throat clearing was interrupted by the phone. Eleven-fifty am, Amanda was early. The two men sat there making increasingly impatient motions at each other to pick it up, Reiss, being the caver, caved. Making the all the pleasantries associated with professionalism, he put the phone down, instantly pointing at the door.

Walt couldn't force him twice. "Twenty fucking fourty-four, and I still have to manually open the damn door."

"Shitty poetry."

It was a lot of stairs to have to climb up and down so many times a day. There wasn't any room in the budget for anything as fanciful as an elevator, despite having so many millions to play with. The whole operation remained low-key, and for more reasons than one. To the untrained eye, their setup almost looked makeshift. Amanda's hair shone through the frosted glass that opposed the bottom of the stairs, all Walt could think about was how unusual it was for Reiss to pick a blonde, he slowed his pace a little, had he been trying to pull off a nonchalant movement, he'd have succeeded.

>>5132763
I'd read more. I like that it's in the future but still down to earth.

>>5132794
Pour vous, Anon.

Pushing in his keycard, he was somewhat eager to meet the latest in a string of ever-failing hopefuls, so that same eagerness manifested in a friendly but unflinching face. Pulling apart the tricky sliding doors, he breathed deep.

"Hi, I'm Walt. You must be Miss Holden?"

"I am, I am. I took you for Mr Sandberg, he wouldn't happen to look like you, would he?" All Walt could do was laugh. He'd been mistaken for a taller, and admittedly more handsome man.

"By the way, you can actually call me Holden, Amanda always seemed like a little girl's name." Smiling back at Walt's smile, she stuck out her hand.

Shaking it, Walt nodded. "Holden it is."

The journey back up the stairs resulted in the same small talk it always did with newbies. Walt fielded questions about what was expected, what was going on, and of course the lack of an elevator. Going up always seemed easier than coming down to him.

The pair walked in on Reiss returning from the balcony overlooking the street. It'd become his favourite place in the building since Walt banned him from smoking inside. It was also the place the two seemed to share their most memorable moments these days, with work having become an endless loop since the project started. At the very least, there, they could mourn the death of the weekend.

>>5125110

>>5132833
I like it. I'd say your main hook right now is learning more about the kind of work they're doing, so hopefully you've got something interesting planned.

>>5130306
I know that feel. I've only written screenplays for years and I feel the jump to normal written storytelling was so liberating it was nauseating. But I'm sure it taught some important things like flow, direction, and the practicality of being concise and interesting

Nehru stood in the shadow of Aemu, the great floating giant, and waited. He was waiting for 'someone', he was sure of it. Few men visited Aemu – few returned, at least – and so he suspected that ‘just climbing it’ wasn’t an option. As much as he wanted to run at it, claw it, break it stone by stone – he knew that if he wanted to return alive, he had to wait. They had said at the village: “Wait for them. They will seek you out, otherwise you will never find them.” So he waited, at the edge of the valley, where the Kaeloder Mountains gave way to Aemu and his valley.

>>5133040
Prose is decent, names are a little lame. Write more.

>>5132528

Fair enough. No excuse, but I wrote it while drunk and high.

>>5133094

>>5130316

This is genius.

Currently working on some YA novels to fill the time between my pleb fantasy series (one book down, six more to go! At least it got published :^) ).

Off of the corner of 5th and 6th, dodging the empty beer bottles that roll along the sidewalk as remnants of the weekly dumpster dive that a 43 year old homeless man I’ve named “Cockmuncher”, a bullet grazes by the side of my ear. I stumble, and nearly fall – but thank God, the chain link fence catches me while I’m on my trip down, and happily, I crash into it face-first and rattle the thin iron with a violent heave against it.
“Get back here you thieving little whore!”
I’m scrambling up the side of the fence, trying to stick my worn converse into the hexagonal break in the chain links. Another bullet flies past me, right towards an open slab of brick wall that acts as the dead end of the alley that I’m sure I’m finally going to die in. The idea is a welcome one, but all at once, it strikes me as selfish. I mean, you don’t just steal a few hundred dollars for no reason unless, I guess, you’re stupid as all hell permits. The fatass I stole it from is still shooting at me from the end of the alley that goes out into 6th, but I’m not listening, because sticks and stones may break my bones, but a bullet can fucking kill me.

>>5130316
Go home Junot Diaz

>>5133097

Come on, the other excuse is that I'm bad at writing. And you know I don't wanna admit that.

If you want, you could read the whole first part.

http://fav.me/d7qjp0j

>>5133284
forgot to quote:
>>5133064

The fountain beckoned with comfort that felt like the thought of vomiting on a stomach full of pills, an encroaching landmark that reminded me how far I was from home and how badly I wanted to go back. My mother had left me to live my mistake. All I had to do was exist, and exist I did. I existed with my old crew, clique, cocksuckers, whatever at the local park. It was a five minute walk from my apartment. All they did was smoke weed and intimidate kids who didn't look like us. Idiots, all six of them. We don't, didn't, wouldn't even look up if another group of kids playing the same juvenile game walked past us. The gang I was a part of was afraid of guns.

This is part of a Fantasy project so try and take it's genre-fiction attributes at face value :^)

The dull brunt of my iron staff carried swiftly, recklessly into the wall of the cell. If ever there was one thing in life I loved, it was the resonance and depth of a solid sound, and the rod I held in my hand knew how to make such a terrifying clamor. I am always amazed at the increase in perception you achieve right before you kill a man. Not only do your auditory senses grow more acute, but everything around you is brighter, easier to feel. My hands, solid and stark white, gripped the stave with such intensity that it seemed like the bones in my knuckles would burst apart. The echo of my feet against the tiles was the ghost of inescapable death for the man groveling before me. His low moans and sobs surrounded me, echoing mournfully beautiful harmonies off the floor and around the chamber. Men make the worst faces when they’re about to die; the ugly twisting fear performs on the skin is sickening, as much as the fact that it’s an involuntary action. Very few men die attractively, and even fewer die with dignity. I brought the staff up over my head. My joints creaked in what I hoped would be a mournful manner. I held in this position, his breathing intensified, his cries increased. I loved a dramatic pause. If I could speak I would have told him not to be afraid, that I was there to help. I truly was there to help him. My staff came down hard, impacting his skull and creating a spectacularly vivid cracking sound, accompanied by a sudden deluge of blood down his face. One strike left him bleeding, still gasping, no longer for air but for life. Still, he could force out a little audible sound: “You can’t keep doing this.” His glow was now quickly leaving him. The old man was wrong, of course. I knew I would live forever.

>>5125058
holy shit man. "When his father settled, the boy would dab with a cloth around his empty socket and the red contractures down his cheek and the half a piece of nose still left, and treated him with whiskey and sometimes morphine, and dabbed the other eye with a different cloth and iced it, but the blindness was sure, and there was nought to stop it. By and by, he watched the last eye fill with blood and his father look toward the ceiling and never again anywhere else." you sound like hemingway this is excellent

>>5125194
>The building, made in the 18th century for a minor lord, made with as many details as someone could to make it look like a house of good worth.
Kek

Cheap cashmere curtains, wood shutters, and half a dozen Walmart-brand t-shirts I had crammed against the window and sunlight was still smacking my bloodied ass. It was morning, and I was trying to inject 100 milligrams of test. One would think better visibility beneficial to invasive self-surgical procedures, but it becomes difficult to see the blues and reds of veins and arteries under natural lighting. Just as well, the angle of my hand mirror aligned itself into my eyes so that I was blinded; A sharp pinch entered my ass cheek.
A raging erection kept pressure off my neck, allowing my head passage over to my backside. The needle was lodged deep into the tissue. With a pull, I brought it out along with some blood that quickly disappeared into the carpet. The wound grew a red coat and closed. This was my third failure. My ass now crawled with ant bites--curses filled the room. “I don’t have the time!” With my teeth latched onto my shoulder blades, I resumed my rear-end jousting. Sweat soaked my hands but I dared not wipe them. Any break and I might cease it all together. I had no time for weakness, I had get that test in there. Cataracts crept into view. Iron grated against my tongue. Several times I heard the popping of my troubled heart but I finally felt the pinch of victory before oxygen deprivation sent me to the floor. With a coughing and a wheezing, I regained my sight to visions of disquiet: One of stained svelte chairs stuffed into a corner; one of wall paper hung rigor mortis over cardboard bed sheets atop a mattress that brought back pain by mere physical proximity. Between my toes, in the white carpet turned pinkish by mold, I felt the lives of past residents, and they felt of fluids. Through a door that had to be swung ever so softly (I had opened it with force earlier and there came screams from the hinges) was the bathroom. The mirror was missing, the piping to the sink was unscrewed, and there were no shower curtains. Waterborne everything lined the walls--a living Pollock painting. And just beside me, inches from where I placed the used syringe, was a whiskey bottle filled with something not-whiskey. This was the room I had opened myself to. My throat sored for antibiotics.

>>5133543
Don't insert the character's narration into the physical descriptions. I would keep them separate. Have the action speak for itself, then have the character comment on it.

>>5125058
>He took the arm scratched and dusty like dejected shrapnel itself and dotted and dashed his fingers across the skin and told his father it’d all be just fine, and that perhaps it was best he didn’t see, and this was perhaps the easiest and most fluent conversation they’d ever shared.

Everything else was good but I would revise this sentence. It is too long as it is. Maybe have the last part about their conversation be its own sentence.

>>5133797
I'm new to this writing thing, could you give me an example of what you mean? Thanks for the feedback

>>5133967
Like this:

"The dull brunt of my iron staff carried swiftly, recklessly into the wall of the cell. If ever there was one thing in life I loved, it was the resonance and depth of a solid sound, and the rod I held in my hand knew how to make such a terrifying clamor."

Remove the second sentence and keep with the scene. Describe the action in full then insert the characters thoughts. When you are writing a scene and then telling of someone's thoughts, it breaks the flow. This isn't true in all cases, but when you do it often, it will.

>>5133976
So you think I should carry through with the action kill before I insert my main character's thoughts? It makes sense in a flow way, though I wanted to give the feeling of the action taking a long time, I just didn't know how to do it

To the coldly sober the noise must be unbearable but for us drunkards it blankets us; it keeps us warm and it comforts us and it protects us against the monsters of the dark (which are an actual threat to be dealt with in times like these). A quick survey of the room is all you need to see who falls where. There are those literally falling, all smiles and gazes, and the distantly aware, all grimaces and glances. For their own private reasons, everybody wants to leave the party. Two girls are sitting on a couch perfectly capable of supporting three, maybe four thin people. They are the only people in sight range who appear to be actually engrossed in their own words, say nothing of each other’s. You’ll walk into the bathroom, sick of either their conversation or your jealousy and you’ll look into the mirror and you’ll wonder why you’re here and what you want and who you are.The night is sepia.

>>5134016
>though I wanted to give the feeling of the action taking a long time, I just didn't know how to do it

This takes training really. Make your sentences shorter by cutting out certain adjectives, then add those descriptions in as new sentences. If you want it to take a long time, say it. Describe it taking time.

>>5134020
Describe the scene more. What are the monsters of the dark? What are the people gazing at? What are the reasons they want to leave the party? Describe the girl's conversation, so that the audience can feel it. The second to last sentence I like. "The night is sepia." I would warn against using the word "sepia" but the sentence itself is nice.

>>5134070
Thanks bro, I appreciate all the advice a lot

>>5131843
What can I do to make it better?

He lit a cigarette as he walked down the dimly lit corridor. Florescent lights flickered as he moved toward the door, and the white brick walls echoed his footsteps on the marble beneath his feet. He turned the doorknob with stoic precession; knowing only death waits on the other side. As the brass sphere in his hands let loose his inevitable fate he began to contemplate the actions that brought him to this very point.

>>5134020

I like, but scrap "range"

>>5134385
bump for input

>>5134385
Perhaps center more on the feeling of the lit cigarette. It's his last ever, he would want to savor the feeling. Don't make walls (or other inanimate objects) the subject of the sentence.

>and the white brick walls echoed his footsteps on the marble beneath his feet.

Say: "his footsteps echoed over the marble hallway." It makes it seem like more of an action and less of a state, if that makes any sense.

Another thing is the
>He turned the doorknob with stoic precession

I'm not entirely sure what you intended with this, but you shouldn't, in my experience, ever say "he did x with y" where 'y' is the 'how'. Try adding a thought bubble after saying he turned the knob. You can *show* the stoic precession, rather than *telling* the reader that it was happening.

Other than that, it's okay. The prose is well done, but one paragraph is nothing to go on.

>>5134706
Thanks. I'm 19 and this will be the first thing I've ever worked on. So I'm still trying to learn how to do this whole writing thing. I appreciate the help. Do you have any recommendations on things books or essays on how to fix my writing style?

The opening to my pet project for the summer. I've been having a hard time getting motivated to put it together. Chalk it up to internet addiction.

Tephomet looked out at the fallow expanse beyond the walls of his home. It was a blasted, black terrain, cracked and scorched, stretching on endlessly into the sunset, which now cast its waning light across Monument’s twisting towers and withered buildings.

>>5125824
>seems a word for J.K. Rowling
>a word for one of the most wealthy authors on the planet

>>5134727
>one of

>>5134706
>>5134717

I'm desperately tired since it's 4:05 in the morning and I'm sure I could do better, but I made some changes on your suggestions.

The heat enveloped his face as he lit his last cigarette, and thick smoke poured from his mouth into the still air that surrounded him while he walked down the poorly lit corridor. His footsteps echoed over the marble hallways as florescent lights flickered and he made his way closer to the door. A feeling of completeness took over his conscious as he turned the doorknob to what he knew was his inevitable death, and a final breath of air and smoke filled his lungs as he began to contemplate the actions that brought him to this very point in time.

>>5134763
The heat enveloped his face as he lit his last cigarette, and what's this yes a tongue, coming from where, licking the envelope , and a fat hand coming down SLAM sealing it shut - enveloped, in an envelop of heat no less, being mailed ("to where", goes the chorus of gals) to where? is it priority mail, first class? THUD there goes the stamp, stick it on tight, FWOOP FWOOP scribbling, no return address how bold.... well, off to the post office and FWAP dropped right into a pile ....

>>5134763
Now that's a paragraph. Nicely done.

Watch Brandon Sanderson's lectures. They *are* about fantasy writing, but so much of what he talks about is writing in general. He helped me a whole lot.

>>5134785
Thanks Ill watch them after I get some sleep.

>>5134784
lol

It was going to be a bad day. Most days that begin with alarm clocks screaming at you are bad days. You wake up, terrified, in the dark with an electronic thing making an ungodly racket and are expected to recover from this. It's possibly one of the most horrible things that can happen to a person aside from being born. The next trial you face is the battle with the buttons on the alarm clock. Hammering at the top of the thing randomly until the noise stops. Finally, in silence, you look around, struggling to keep your eyes open and noting that it is much colder here outside of the security of your warm blankets. Now, you have to break the darkness. Turn on the electric lights. Great. White hot light blasting your retinas. To sum up, the first things you feel before your day are as follows: terror (alarm). Dread and exhaustion, and pain (electric lights). This is the point at which you tell yourself that you only have eight hours left until the weekend. Great. Eight Hours.

I was amongst the pallbearers as the casket was carried out of the hearse and placed by the grave. Even with five others, I found it difficult to bear the weight; I could feel the tears welling in my eyes as the reality of it all became unavoidable and I nearly lost my grip as I held back the a sob with a half breath.
I gave no eulogy, as I had nothing good to say. As much as I hated my father, I could not bring myself to besmirch his funeral; but neither could I make honest light of him. My suit was little protection against the cold and as the priest spoke a few meaningless verses over the grave, I shivered briefly, and an old neighbour put her hand on my arm gently. I assumed it to be her attempt at reassuring me; that my shiver was one of emotion and not the cold.
I recognised some of the men and women in the crowd, but many I did not. My father’s business associates, I thought. Or drinking buddies, more likely. Regardless, a few of them wore their emotions on the sleeves, weeping openly. Others seemed unmoved even as the casket was lowered into the grave, although I allowed myself token tears.

>>5130300
>Mine's some practice-writing for some VN stuff.
Oooo I hope it's porn.

One time I sneezed and thought I’d attained enlightenment. Kids make a big show about sneezing, but this came on too suddenly for any kind of theatrics. I was running around with my classmates on the playground, and had to stop in my tracks. I don’t even think it was that major of a sneeze, but the world suddenly seemed clearer afterwards, like a veil had been lifted. The other kids noticed something was different about me, too, when they saw me staring straight into the sun. I’d learned the word “enlightenment” from my mother during her brief affair with New Age thinking. She told me it came suddenly, after meditating, which itself took years of practice. Since I was constantly in a “meditative state,” I didn’t think it so strange at the time that enlightenment should come to me on a sweaty spring day in 2021.

But I wasn’t actually ascending, I was having a stroke. Thanks to my gym teacher's cell phone, I woke up later that day, albeit with only half my stuffed animals. Aside from losing use of my right eye, I made a full recovery. My parents were frank about the doctor's warning about the possibility of a recurrence. I had "syrupy blood" which tended to clot. Still, this story always makes me feel better when I do something dumb or fatally misread a situation. I can tell myself "It's okay Vivi, that's just who you are."

You know how there's something you want to teach other people, but you think that its an idea that's already been considered? Yet, when you search for its obviousness in society you realize the idea hasn't been considered, and that there's nobody but you who has the original pure form of the perspective. You know its impossible to have an original thought, except when you find yourself unable to inform others the full extent of your meaning. Then you have to conclude that your either ignorant, alone, or original for the duration of your attempts to enlighten others. I'd point out my own character flaws worthy of anyone's criticism, if I wasn't so determined to hide them. And I wouldn't be so determined to wipe them away if they hadn't first been pointed out to me a long time ago. In those times in particular, I first felt imperfection, and that was when I developed a moral imperative to change the world. Here I am now, fully capable of meeting this goal. I'd love to indulge in enlightening you of how that came to be.

>want to write a story about a self made god, just wrote that as a first paragraph

>>5130568
You've literally been posting this for a year. Write something else.

>>5133543
the edgiest thing i have read all day

I walked into the den with my head hung low, my father sat, back turned, level headed as always. He spoke in a chastising boom, freeing one hand from his keyboard to sign along to his speech. It was a habit I had grown to disdain. "You're not a kid anymore charlie, you can fuck whoever you want but when I get calls at three in the morning from your girlfriend asking me to pick her up from a Walmart we gotta make some changes." I cleared my throat, I could feel my face flush and my lips cracked as i attempted to speak, "D-dad she was, well, very cold, i didn't know what to do. What was I supposed to do? Let a bitch walk all over me like that? You taught me bettter, You told me this would happen but you never showed me how to deal with it". I ended with a little more confidence then i knew I had and my head had lifted from my shoes to meet the back of his well kept hair. "Keep making excuses boy, keep blaming everyone but yourself." His chair turned and he had a toothy grin on his face, a devilish glint in his eye and he was holding his cane. "The world keeps turning no matter how many stupid kids die in it, understand? Whatever you do, it's on you, but don't get me involved." At this point his hands raised like he was getting arrested, the oak cane dropped from his grip and hit the persian carpet with a thud. It echoed around the study as if it was his little physical exclamation mark. "Dad, understand this, whatever you think happened, whatever she told you, she tried to... to..." I studdered hoping he would catch the gist of what I was trying to tell him. "To what?" He nodded towards me, his facial expression changed, he looked bored. "she tried to suck my dick!" "She tried to suck my dick dad and you know what, god damn it i should have let her, I should have sat back while my dick got slammed wide open and clogged her lungs with cheese" I crossed my arms and shook violently, I slowly backed out of the room and felt the glock in my pants pulsating like a heart monitor. "God damn it dad!" I screamed and ran to my room sending one hand down my pants to grip that dick like a blade.

my hand was screaming at me, I knew I shouldn't have touched that hot stove but lord knows I was too curious. I could smell the singed hair and feel the blisters starting to swell a deep pink. "Oh god" I breathed in heavily staring at the stove. It looked so innocent, so ready to be dominated. I shook violently and pressed my hands against it once more. "oooooh! That's hot" I screamed launching my head back like a god dame rocket. Maniacal laughter cackled as my member throbbed like a choke on a hose. "There ain't no rest for a god" I said in a sing song voice forcing the side of my body on the heat. "OOOOH THAT IS SO GOD DAME HOT!" I yowled out in pleasure and started to choke myself with a free hand. I knew my little dick couldn't take the strain anymore and with a little asphyxiation it would bust. The area right under my dick pulsed hard and i could feel it building in my stomach. "OH YEAH!!!" I screamed as loud as i possibly could that all the neighboors called the cops and my cock exploded literally.

First draft, don't really know where I'm going with this fantasy story other than the fact that its going to have several POVs and a rebellion featuring people who can turn into shadows.

The lush red coloured sycamore trees swayed above a flowing, bright blue river leading into the coast of the Bay of Zeal. The men of the parting of the Eirik, ruler of the konungar, first king of the draumur isles had just landed on the shore of the Bay. Carrying large battle axes with marks of the god, Vard with small crosses with bending ends carved on the end of the axe.

Any kind of criticism would be nice, if I made any spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes that Word couldn't pick up, I'd be glad for you to correct them as English is my second language.

>>5135695
Don't forget to capitalize your made up names. They're still names after all.
Also:
>Had just landed on the shore of the bay
Sounds awkward to me. Also, adding a comma and rewording the description of the axe would be well.
I like how it sounds thus far. Definitely write more!

>>5135695
It's just a stream of meaningless names tbh, I can't see what's going on.

>>5134897
It's supposed to be about an edgy loser murderer in a fantasy setting, so I was going for what would be in his mind at the time

Still not really sure how I feel about this, it'd be nice to hear some feedback. I personally want to rewrite the first three sentences, but my friend suggested I keep it:

The Gallic cock had a strange taste about it. Soot, salt, and iron. Fucked by a nation against its will, who’s the victim? I saw boats bombarded, beaches of blood and bane, and a Bastille for self-fulfilling bastards. Hello Hell: Hitler’s home. I screamed bloody Marianne, but tears were drowned out by all manners of clappers, horns, and blowouts. It seemed France was foreign to me both in flavor and festivities. What would Pa and Em think of me now? I told them I’d do them proud. I told them I’d be a hero. Yet here I was, face down in a blushing brine, no more a hero than the men shooting at me.

>>5134860
i'm bad at suggestions but can I get some crit for this? is it a good/bad opening for a love/horror story about a haunted waterpark.

>>5135722
Thanks, yeah I'll totally do that. The axe thing I thought of rewording before but wasn't to sure but now I am.
>>5135733
I've realized that, just don't know how I explain these places and names. Maybe through speech?

>>5133755
Can somebody please crit mine? I already know of several sentences I need to change (mostly at the beginning), but I would like an opinion on style.

>>5134860
>>5135754

I like the style. The character is charming. As for what you posted, I think too much is happening in too little time. We are given way too much information, good information, but too much of it at once. Describe things more and slow down your pace.

>>5136305
ty i will work on my pacing.

Here's what I have so far. This is just a prologue where a character is being prosecuted similar to how Prometheus and Lucifer were.


Whistling.
Loud and bouncing off of the walls outside was what awoke him in his cell. The tune was somehow nostalgic but he couldn't exactly place his finger on what it is.That and the noise of footsteps growing gradually louder with each step pressing forward along with the clanking of keys on a big metal chain with several others.