Kids in America

[Anonymous No.4069707]

They drank and talked of revolution like two kids eating ice cream and complaining about bedtimes. They talked of corporate greed and how the hell they could get things done. Benny ranted about the American zeitgeist being willful ignorance, but Bethany interrupted and sneered at them for being so boring. Jake looked around at the crowd pushing against their circle, embarrassed they might be thinking the same, then suggested a round of shots with a placating look at his girlfriend and a pat on Benny’s shoulder.

They weaved through the crowd towards the suspended kitchen light. They spilled out from the dark and into the eddy of bodies huddled around a plywood bar that tilted precariously and would topple by the end of the night in a shattering of shot glasses with college witticisms and martini glasses shaped like alien genitalia. The only thing left unscathed would be the plastic handles of vodka that Jake started pouring. There was a click of glass, and the liquor went down with the sting of an open wound. Bethany called for a larger round, and as the shots were poured, she pulled friends out of the amorphous mob because the prevailing wisdom in those days required the drinking of ten dollar paint thinner to include the maximum amount of people available, all wailing something resembling a war cry, with something approaching religious fervor.

These new faces imploded in strange patterns then dissipated back into the dark side of the room, still chanting: shots, shots, shots. The girlfriend was led away by the hand of a friend while Benny watched her round denim shorts fade away.

[Anonymous No.4069736]

>>4069707

Too boring and two fucking wordy. I stopped reading at the end of the first paragraph. Specifically, at this part.

>Bethany called for a larger round.

Just say they're drinking a lot. You don't need to specifically tell us that they ordered one round, drank it, and they then ordered another.

[Anonymous No.4069749]

>>4069736

>two fucking wordy

Oh my God, I am actually embarrassed.

>too

[Anonymous No.4069755]

>>4069736
really? I only made it to 'eating ice cream'

when someone pulls out a simile that bad you know nothing good is in store.

[Anonymous No.4069757]

>They. They. Name. Name.
>They. The. There. Name
>These.The

You can't write.

[Anonymous No.4069764]

>>4069755
I dunno, I like the thing about the bar toppling over in the future even though 'martini glasses shaped like alien genitalia' makes no sense.

[Anonymous No.4069767]

>>4069757
>my way or the highway

[Anonymous No.4069771]

>>4069767
Let's be honest, starting every sentence like that is tiring and shit.

[Anonymous No.4069778]

>>4069764
anything could be shaped like alien genitalia, for we might imagine aliens with any shaped genitals, shape-shifting genitals or not genitals at all.

[Anonymous No.4069801]

>>4069778
Which makes it a super shit simile, I guess.

Probably also something about how I drink from martini glasses all the time so they're pretty mundane to me and the whole alien angle just does not compute.

[Anonymous No.4069806]

>>4069801
>I drink from martini glasses all the time

faaaaaaaaag

[Anonymous No.4069809]

> They spilled out from the dark and into the eddy of bodies huddled around a plywood bar that tilted precariously and would topple by the end of the night in a shattering of shot glasses with college witticisms and martini glasses shaped like alien genitalia.
>a shattering of shot glasses with college witticisms and martini glasses shaped like alien genitalia.
>martini glasses shaped like alien genitalia.
>alien genitalia
>MFW

Only use a simile or a metaphor if the image you're comparing the thing to adds something to the mood or reveals something about the thing itself. Otherwise it makes no fucking sense and makes you sound pleb as hell.

For example, If I am writing a sad scene and I need to compare, I don't fucking know, rain coming down, I might say something like

>The rain splattered on the hood of her car, tracing down it's cold, metal frame like tears down a cheek (if I want to be transparent as fuck).

I would not write

>The rain came down from the sky like confetti.

If I'm writing something sad, chances are I don't want my audience thinking about confetti and parties and shit.

[Anonymous No.4069816]

>>4069809
>it's

You made a spelling boo boo :)

Hope we can stay friends, though.

[Anonymous No.4069827]

>>4069809
>The rain fell like confetti.
I actually like this. Contrasts with the person's sorrow in a dark but almost funny way. Like a sad clown.

[Anonymous No.4069829]

>>4069809
Look at this. We've got our own budding Shakespeare here. Please do lecture us on the proper execution of comparisons.

[Anonymous No.4069839]

>>4069829
He's giving decent advice. Stop being a butt-ass.

[Anonymous No.4069844]

>>4069816
>Caring about spelling on 4chan
Sort out your priorities mate.

>>4069829
He's right though. What's your fucking problem?

[Anonymous No.4069943]

>>4069829

If you can't handle criticism then take your shit elsewhere.

[Anonymous No.4071797]

>>4069943

OP here,

i have not responded in this thread yet. posted then went to sleep.

i don't mind any criticism at all. that's why i posted.

[Anonymous No.4071808]

Benny and Jake were left standing beneath the naked bulb that swung to the vibrations of a subwoofer shuddering against a nearby wall. They talked of what happened last night and what they hoped would happen tonight, how bad they felt this morning and how they’d keep it all down this time, what they remembered and how much they had forgotten. Having too much of last night in black, Benny didn’t want to stay to hear it filled in and took advantage of the girlfriend coming back to make a blind exit.

Outside, he paused to look at the tumultuous crowd of debauchery prowling the street, and it seemed to him, they all had somewhere to go. Some lucky few had even found their party on the street. These were the screamers, the most inebriated, perhaps, the best pretenders. Moving as a herd under a sepia filter of streetlights and the ubiquitous but ignored supervision of a police patrol, they were separated into the two lanes of traffic, not by the ranch hands with guns, but some innate urge for order. And as they crossed paths they studied each other, envious of what they may be missing, disguising their insecurity through smirks they hoped would say, “You fools are going the wrong way. The real party is this way.”

Benny began walking through the penumbra of the burnt yellow street, passing by windows bursting popsicle purple to the pulse of a techno monotony. He separated himself from the auspicious in space and thought, walking without their smirk or the sense that they shared his strong desire to feel nothing.

[Anonymous No.4071835]

>>4069809

those descriptions are just a way of saying that these people have fetishized drinking. so they buy shot glasses with slogans on them and the martini glasses with the zig zagging stems and vibrant colors. it's supposed to call up all that gaudy party stuff that you can buy at novelty stores and fill up college residences.

[Anonymous No.4071892]

>>4071835
Stop using so many metaphors and descriptions - it's purple prose and it bogs down your narrative.

If the glasses crashing are relevant, comment on them when they fall crash (if the characters are there), else omit them.

If you mean one thing (they drink from novelty shot glasses) say that, rather than inventing metaphors that make no sense unless you're writing about Iowans that have been abducted and spend the rest of their life longing for another probe from that 'alien genitalia'.

[Anonymous No.4071897]

>>4071808
>Benny and Jake stood beneath a bare bulb, planning their strategy for the night ahead.

>Benny walked through the crowd, feeling smugly as though he was the only truly special snowflake amongst them.

OP you need to move past your superiority complex and stop being so afraid of people.

[Anonymous No.4071924]

>>4071897

>without...the sense that they shared his strong desire to feel nothing.

i'm not representing the character as a snowflake, even if i am representing that he feels that way

author and character are separate

[Anonymous No.4071936]

>>4071924
I read the whole thing.

What did you intend "auspicious in space" to mean?

All that prose and what do we learn? The narrator/author/you is smug, non criminals don't care about the police and people walk in lines?

Why are we being told what Benny/the narrator/etc think? The old adage of show don't tell remains true.

If he desires to feel nothing, why is he even going outside? Why isn't the passage just

>Benny sat beneath a bare bulb and sought oblivion.

Or even show us his strong desire to feel nothing - does he get drunk, do coke, neck himself, fuck a whore, try to get himself killed, sit in a dark room for hours, what?

[Anonymous No.4071949]

>>4071924
>>4071936
Same-fagging (obviously). It's like with Sisyphus - we feel his pathos because we can see it. We're not told that the gods cursed him in a painful manner - we see him carry the boulder in perpetuity.

We see that Underground Man is incapable of living in society, and we see the impotent rage and hatred it inspires in him, etc.

Same with Huck and Jim - we know they both desire freedom from a decadent and corrupt society because they seek out freedom and in the process have a number of encounters with the society they seek to escape.

We know the Invisible Man (Ellison) desires visibility because of the opening scene in which he is immensely illuminated by spotlights he has stolen.

[Anonymous No.4072253]

>>4071892
lel contemporary minimalism

writing is dead
long live stories dumb enough for retards to understand them

[Anonymous No.4072285]

>>4072253

contemporary minimalism

making facebook and gmail into a literary act since 2008

[Anonymous No.4072287]

Twenty seven minutes after the acid dripped down his tongue and into his mind, Benny’s phone lit up and the abstraction of global communications cleft his head, more than once, and his mind hysterically clung to a tenuous grasp of its skull while it flew through images of satellites floating in oblivion and expanses of oceans and deserts being crossed by cancerous waves in units of time too small to define or even perceive. They scared him.

The apartment seemed so small and vulnerable to a world of dangers represented here by the flashing lights of a cellular symphony. It was portentous, he thought, because that was a word he’d recently learned. But of what?

He imagined a satellite crashing down through the roof. He wanted to run but didn’t want to look like a fool, so instead he read his phone, Where’d you go? and it all changed. The network of satellites, towers, and signals rearranged itself to him, yes to him–what a strange word. The universe revolved around him and not him to it.

The smallness of the apartment compared to the world instilled him with a sense of power, and he begun writing a reply. He commanded the machines, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds at home, changed his ringtone from the Psycho theme to The Office one, and sat back to marvel at the control he had of the world from this small room.

[Anonymous No.4072289]

contemporary minimalism

thinking drugs were new since 2006

[Anonymous No.4072290]

Carl had been talking incessantly for the last half hour, divulging Beatles trivia before the talking heads–from a documentary they had both watched before–had a chance to say the same. Benny wasn’t listening. He received a reply, I’ll be there soon, and asked Carl if Jake could have a tab and probably his girlfriend too.

“I haven’t met her.”

“She’s a bit of a ditz.”

“Hot?”

“Yea.”

Benny’s paranoia alternated between anticipated annoyance at the new couple’s irritating twin mannerisms and being flagged into a DEA database. He began to weigh the possibility that government agents were listening to them through his phone. In a few chapters we will learn, when Benny visits a psychiatrist, that he has an anxiety problem. The current scene will be used, by said psychiatrist, to demonstrate that he uses drugs both to numb and indulge his anxiety, but Benny will have already known all that and consider the whole thing a big waste of time and stress.

[Anonymous No.4072295]

Besides his cartoonish paranoia involving government suits with dark glasses, Benny did not put much thought into what they were doing as being illegal. This was not an effect of the drugs. The normality of it all was the effect of college and, most importantly, Carl Bulbous who had the contagious tendency of imbedding criminal activity with a nostalgia for the moment yet passed. To him, any weekend they weren’t criminally intoxicated was a waste. He wasn’t self-medicating like Benny. He was manufacturing memories often styled after movies, tv, and the side careers of rock musicians. He was under the pressure that these nights were supposed to be the greatest of their lives. But most of all, Carl wanted to prove that laws weren’t real.

In a dangerous combination for an adolescent in high school, he had read Machiavelli when his favorite movie was still The Godfather. This was safe enough for your average teenage pseudo intellectual except that Carl approached the genuine article, as close as a twice a day masturbating teen could get, the kind with no friends and years of free time to build his own internet music search engine that was valued at half a million dollars before it was taken away in a piracy lawsuit. Since then–while pseudo intellectuals everywhere lamented the meaningless of life, the nonexistence of god, and the question of truth by reading the Wikipedia entry on existentialism–Carl Bulbous forged a philosophy that, while no man may come out of life a winner, there were definite losers and he was in danger of being one of them. He was perhaps the only flag burning collegiate that had a legitimate gripe with the Man, and he was intent on evening the score between them in whatever form it took.

[Anonymous No.4072311]

>>4069707
>the liquor went down with the sting of an open wound.
Doesn't fit. Use that phrase later, in a violent setting. The foreshadowing/themes don't fit with the real story.