/lit/ - Literature

>>2029803
>after /mu/

>someone comes on /lit/
>posts something clearly /lit/ related as per the sticky
>gets trolled by all 5 other people browsing at the time

This is why /lit/ is the worst board on 4chan.

>>2026609
This.

I mean, shit son. My favourite series is WoT and even I would screw my nose up at that.

>Not judging books by their cover
>2011

I seriously etc.

Not going to read the whole thing because it's not my sort of story but yeah:

You change tense from past to present a bit on the first page.
If all those names are referring to the same woman then you have successfully confused me.
Grammar and lack of punctuation in the opening few sentences is a problem.
Giving an actual dot-pointed list of things on the table is a bit of a 'wat' moment.
This is probably satirical, couldn't get past the sub-par execution to see it.

>>2016483
It's nice to have one for multiple characters, knowing their relative locations to each other and to their starting points is good. Since this is hypothetical I'd say include it, it's the sort of thing an editor would probably give the yay/nay on if you were to publish.

Do your characters spend the entire time travelling to places with obscure names to the point where the reader loses track of where they are relative to the starting point?

In my mind your character's relative positions to their starting points are what the reader will be most interested in.

critters.org does this. But you actually have to keep up with the stuff you get emailed to critique if you ever plan on getting any of your own stuff critiqued by the other members.

>>2005078
Just google 'writers forum', the first result should be the biggest one online.

As for nanowrimo, I post on the forums year-round but you need to be aware that the crowd there is young for the most part. Which is helpful when you are looking for help or fresh information because they have some genuinely great input, but terrible for things like credible input on what you're writing.

I go there to help other people mostly but I do occasionally get help on a plot point I'm having trouble with or other such things.

>>2005042
General thoughts:

1. I mentioned showing not telling. Work on this and it is the single biggest piece of advice you will ever get from anyone. I give it out a lot around here...

What I mean by that is that if you truly want to engage your readers, you need to SHOW them things from the POV characters eyes, rather than just flatly lay them out for them.

>The street was busy and noisy.
vs
>John stared in bewilderment at the grandeur of the market. People nearby haggled loudly with a merchant over the price of his apples but their voices were drowned out as the crowd jostled John further along the street.

2. Work on your delivery of information to the reader. This is in a similar vein of show don't tell, but it is all about making what you have written engaging. Don't make all your sentences the same structure and make sure you structuring is appropriate for the situation.

Trying to create a sense of wonderment about the scenery in the reader? Long flowing sentences with lots of descriptive words. Taking the time to read a 30 or 40 word sentence makes the reader appreciate what it's like for the character to stare at a beautifully decorated ball room for a full minute before moving on.
Trying to create a sense of action and adrenaline? Short choppy sentences work better. It makes action much more fast paced and it makes individual actions feel like they are carried out in a short amount of time.

3. Watch your punctuation. There's a bunch of unnecessary commas in there that just serve to make the sentences harder to digest.

>>2005040
>The creature known to the inhabitants of the Zone as a bloodsucker was a twisted parody of a man.
If we know this is stalker fanfic, then we can assume that everyone knows that the only invisible things are bloodsuckers, first part is unecessary. I've incorporated the useful bits into the next sentence.

>At least seven feet tall, the thing was covered in a leathery hide.
Since we know what it's called, it's not 'the thing'.
>The bloodsucker appeared out of thin air - a twisted parody of a man - standing more than seven feet tall and covered in a leathery hide. A truly fearsome creature.

>Below its beady black eyes was a mass of fanged tentacles.
Alright I guess. I'm getting lazy because this is taking too long so this will do.

>It leapt at my face at a blinding speed, as I continued to fire.
>With blinding speed it leapt at my face through my hail of gunfire.

>Just before it reached me the bloodsucker fell, its lifeless body splashing into the shallow waters.
I'm just going to go ahead and offer my own end...
>With only a matter of feet to go the beast fell lifelessly into the shallow swamp waters. It's blood hung heavily in the air. I wanted to double over and hurl my fear into the swamp but bloodsuckers rarely hunted alone. I ejected my spent clip as I tried to calm my breathing. A bloodcurdling roar replied to the new silence in the swamp. Their nest was close by.

>>2005036
>A rustle up ahead caused me to freeze.
Honestly you're in a swamp with tall reeds. There are going to be rustling noises everywhere.
>The reeds around my rustled loudly in the breeze almost entirely masking the snapping of reeds up ahead. I froze.

>Sweat beaded on my brow as my eyes darted around, searching for any signs of movement.
Keep this, it's fine.

>From the corner of my eye, I noticed a rustling in the reeds.
Swap around the phrasing to keep it interesting.
>Rustling reeds in the corner of my eye tickled some faint memory. I was supposed to do something-
When you're afraid you tend to have delayed reactions and forget what you are supposed to do. Finishing this with a dash shows that the thought is cut off by action at the memory of what he needs to do.

>I wheeled around, firing madly into the foliage.
I'd change 'madly' to 'wildly'.

>A roar filled my ears and spent shell casings spat from my weapon.
Not sure how these two separate thoughts made it into the same sentence in this fashion. By joining them with 'and' you are making them seem like connected ideas, rather than separate events.
>The creature roared madly as my weapon spat shell casings out as fast as it could.

>A light mist of blood appeared in the air where my rounds hit what seemed like thin air, and with a shimmer it appeared.
Through a light mist of blood the air shimmered and the creature appeared, still roaring madly.

>>2004978
This is my standard critiquing format. I tell you my thoughts line-by-line, then offer my own interpretation of what you want to say.

>The faintest glimmers of sunlight were revealing themselves on the horizon as I crept through the tall reeds, eyes shifting from side to side, allways searching for any sign of the creatures.
Good imagery, boring execution. Mix up your phrasing to keep the action interesting. SHOW the reader what is happening, don't tell them.
>All around me reeds crackled loudly as I crept through them in the dim morning grey. I shifted my gaze uneasily from side-to-side, trying to keep a watch on all directions at once. The creatures were out here; somewhere.

>The air was heavy and moist, filled with biting insects and dense precipitation.
Homework: look up precipitation. If you genuinely mean that it's raining, then this is not the way to get that across. If it's not raining then you are saying the air is filled with heavy rain and that it is also moist. If it were raining, moist air would be a given.
>My heart was pounding in my chest, sending the adrenaline thundering along my veins. I tried to calm myself with deep breaths but the air was putrid and dense.
Also, if this is stalker then he's probably breathing through a respirator and wouldn't notice the air.

>I clutched my weapon tightly, frightened out of my mind of what I knew must be in this swamp.
Boring execution again. You're also telling us about how he's frightened but not showing us. Instead of being 'frightened out of his mind' why isn't his breathing quickening, palms and brow sweating and jaw clenched as he swallows the lump in his throat?
>Swallowing hard against the lump that was rising in my throat, I tightened the grip on my gun for fear of it slipping out of my sweaty hands.

Post some of it up then (maybe 200 words) and I'll critique it.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R is based off a book called Roadside Picnic. You've been beaten to the punch.

/thread

*crickets*
I got nothing, I'm not interested enough in prose like this to know anything about it.

Reads alright, seems like some of the rhyming words were only used because they rhyme though.

Writers thread?
Writers thread.

Post up some of what you've written and I'll offer my advice/critique or whatever you're after...

I'll probably be here for a good few hours.

I'm joining in because I have marketing and economics I should be doing instead.

>>1998439

This is quite interesting - I sure as hell want to know why someone is beating themselves in the head with a brick - but a few tweaks would make it perfect.

>I felt compelled by an anger seething and fervid.
I'd keep fervid, I like its use since it's a pretty uncommon word.

>I picked up the stone red block, and brought it to my forehead with more force than I imagined I could have and heaved my head to meet it in the middle.
This is a bit muddled for my tastes. Fist I'd change 'stone red block' to 'red stone block'. Secondly, I'd change the second part to be more coherent. It's all the same thought/action but it doesn't read well:
>I picked up the red stone block and brought it to my forehead with more force than I'd imagined possible, having heaved my head to meet it in the middle.

>I heard a sound like someone banging on neighboring keys on a piano or an old, rusty school bell and I heard, and felt, nothing else.
'neighbouring keys on a piano' tripped me up, but I wouldn't change it since it technically makes perfect sense. I'd also cut out 'I heard, and felt, nothing else.' and make it its own sentence:
>[...] rusty school bell. I neither heard nor felt anything else.

Overall 8/10, I want to know what happens next... seems like you'd need massive balls to hit yourself in the head with a brick using any amount of harmful force.

>>1993220
The grammar issue is really just sentence structure. There's nothing overtly wrong with how you combine words to form your ideas - certainly a hell of a lot better than more then half the people I've ever seen write - but the concepts sometimes come across as disjointed. It's not such a problem for you in the first write up, but as you go back through it just edit some of your wording to get the sentences to flow well.

Last thing and /lit/ is probably going to track me down for saying this, but don't worry about your writing becoming too flowery. Better to get some nice descriptions in that you cut out than not include any good descriptions in the first place.

You don't need to do it for everything, we don't really need to know what someone is wearing unless it has a purpose, or how every single building in a street looks. Every now and then though, you really want to give the reader something to picture as vividly as possible.

But you have to leave some of the descriptions to the reader, it's easier to imagine a world that a story is set in if their mind's eye can make up some of the details... it's a fine balance.

>>1993202
Definitely not. They were having a wild chase with magic and flying arrows and galloping horses. The faster the better in this case.

>>1993195
You don't need to strain yourself trying to make everything come from the character.

The best way it was ever explained to me was to imagine what the character was doing at that time and how they would notice the things that are happening around them. That's what I did when I talked about how Silas was looking into his cup. From his cup he noticed the noise and the person drawing up the chair next to his.

And yes to the second, that's the best way to run perspectives. So like I said just before it means you get what the character is seeing and feeling to make a complete experience.

>>1993192
It doesn't all have to come from a character, but it's overall far more entertaining to read something from the POV character's eyes. It also helps in terms of how well you identify with the character. If you are seeing through their eyes and know all about their feelings then you get the complete experience of what it is like to be that character - which is more or less what you're after in adventure/fantasy stories.

>>1993185
Okay I read the rest.

The writing improves as you go, but some of the same structuring issues remain. The perspective switching works well and doing it so often speeds up the pace of the whole fight scene and the woman's escape.

And yes, show don't tell means that you need to give information from the character's perspectives. Even if you were going for omniscient narrator, the details you gave of immediate settings should still feel like they could have come from the character.

>>1993172
It's just my two cents, but yes you really shouldn't put too much effort into editing as you go. It's really easy to get bogged down in re-writing parts that you've already done well enough instead of moving on.

Flood detection on /lit/... srsly?

cont... >>1993158

>She then got up out of her seat, taking her drink with her; and started to walk away.
Once again your semi-colon use is wrong. No joining words are used when a semi-colon is. Sentence structure is disjointed for such a simple concept as well. It does not require the semi colon nor does it require being split into two separate sentences:
>Avoiding the mans' attention she quickly grabbed her drink and moved away from the bar.

>But as she started walking, the man grabbed her arm to pull her back to him. As she was pulled back to him, her hood fell off. She was indeed beautiful; dark hair, light skin, and piercing green eyes.
Sometimes you can start a sentence with 'And' or 'But', however, this is not one of those times. Also more uninspired writing. Check it:
>As quickly as she began to move away though, the man grabbed her arm and roughly pulled her into his lap. The quick change of direction caused her hood to fall off, revealing to Silas that she was indeed beautiful.
Leave out her description. You'll probably throw out the old argument that "he's a skilled soldier he would notice all of those things in an instant" but no. No he would not. Describe her later.


The only other thing I would change would be his name. 'Silas' makes using the possessive look weird (for me personally), but if it's the sort of thing someone from his hometown would be named, then run with it.