/crit/ - Critique thread/general

Addie's Tube journeys affect her more than they ought to. The Piccadilly line trains are shaped like loaves of bread, and the people are the fermenting yeast. Addie observes a guy and a girl sat opposite each another, both assessing their reflections in the windows below the Uber ads and adjacent to their respective other's head. Both nudging their hair and angling this way and that, assessing as the train's jolts trick the images like raindrops on water. The windows show tunnels and/or night sky, with the commuters superimposed upon them like camera filters. They are both critical, scouring for constellations in themselves. Both wear earphones. Both smell. Both are reflecting on themselves, for they dwell in the post-9-to-5 lull, where they can keep eye contact only with the windows and their lips are benign growths. A jolt. The pair glance at each other. Reaction is futile: eyes avert, legs shift, hair is nudged conclusively. He tries to push up glasses that aren't there and it looks like he's wiping away a tear that also isn't there. She fiddles with her earphones and thinks about how many leaves might be sitting atop the train, which screeches presently. It is homeward-bound for everyone. The two settle. They look at the ads.
Addie blinks and shifts her gaze, readjusting her posture too for pins and needles, and in doing so notices a bloke sat across from her. He is also rapt with the mirrored pair. He turns to Addie for a mo. She looks away. The cushions are greyed and frayed and there are stains in the floor's rivets, where something once trickled. The cycle could be broken but it won't be, for she can barely bring herself to look back, let alone eek out a hello, before the bloke has taken out his phone. In the window's reflection she sees him start to tap at the screen before it illuminates. Yeah, she thinks. Addie moves a few locks behind her ear and then takes out her phone too. It shows her ads.

Just read Rupi Kaur for true art.

pastebin.com/e75tVdtp

Thanks user, and I agree with both of your suggestions. As for the nickname, yeah, it is supposed to be for the manatee skull, not him. I don't plan on giving him a name for the rest of the story. Again, much appreciated.

To the ones who criticized our book: Thank you. Thank you very much
>sigilworks.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/violas-chapter-1/

We are going to be published soon and it is all thanks to you. You know who you are.

I haven't edited the one posted on our website yet though

Der letzte Tag, ein Samstag, brach um sieben Uhr fünfunddreißig an, als N.M. klingelte. Sieben Uhr fünfunddreißig: Die Augen unseres Helden, D.F., bewegten sich rapide hinter seinen zugezogenen Lidern, Wasser mag doch jeder, das Klingeln dingdongdingdong dingdongdingdong dingdongdingdong vermochte ihn erst beim dritten - aber nicht letzten - Läuten zu wecken, dummer Hurensohn, dummer Bastard, und er verließ das Bett (lechzte, lechzte, lechzte), noch im Gestern verfangen, das erst um vier Uhr vier erlosch, mit einer Bewegung, einer Rührung, die die allerletzte dieser Art bleiben sollte. Ein Mann wächst nur bis zu einem bestimmten Punkt, das Namensschild an seiner Tür, der Türrahmen. Kleiner Hurensohn, nichtsnutzig, albern. Ein Blick aus dem Fenster, schlagartig wach, als hätte er noch nie geschlafen: Ein grauer VW Polo auf dem Parkplatz - ach was - der Zahnarztpraxis. Dort stand er zuerst im Sommer zweitausendsechzehn, zuletzt vor einem Jahr. Also, sieben Uhr sechsunddreißig, dingdongdingdongdingdongdingdong, kein Vogel war zu hören, öffnete D.F. seinen Schrank, derweil N.M. vor der Tür stand, warum - er wollte ihn ermorden - wusste nur er, allein, einsam, keiner sonst, auch wenn D.F. es hätte wissen müssen; vor 15 Jahren schon, gottloses Stück Scheiße, hätte er es wissen müssen, kétségtelenül. Er trat auf eine Plastikflasche, er war schon angezogen. Sieben Uhr siebenunddreißig. Gestern Nacht hat er wunderschön gekotzt, ist auf seinen Magen gefallen, mehrmals, immer wieder. Heute Morgen: Nicht einmal Vögel hört man, dingdong dingdong dingdong. Er ging die Treppe runter, wie jeden Tag. Sieben Uhr siebenunddreißig. Die Tür ging auf. Er hat wunderschön gekotzt, gestern noch, ist auf seinen Magen gefallen, ja, jetzt ist alles dumm, jetzt ist alles blöd, kein Vogelgeschwitzer vernahm er. N.M. stand vor ihm, wie ein Baum, hinter ihm war der Rest, die Sonne fiel auf seinen Nacken, unverändert. Der Rest: Sein Auto, die Straße, die Zahnarztpraxis, weiter rechts das Tanzstudio. Er, N.M., versuchte sein Grinsen - er grinste wie ein Schwertfisch -, wie immer zu unterdrücken, meistens gelang es nicht. --Sag auch, warum du lachst, D.F. fragend, selber lachend, er musste nach oben gucken, seinen Kopf heben, um in sein Gesicht zu gucken, sein Rücken tat weh, seit Jahren schon tat er weh, trotzdem hob er seinen Kopf, um in sein Gesicht zu gucken, entwürdigend war das, sieben Uhr achtunddreißig war es. Das wusste er nicht, konnte es nicht wissen.
--Hat seine Gründe, immer noch wie ein Schwertfisch.
--Seit wann bist du in S.?
--Seit ... Er schloss seinen Mund, musterte das Vorzimmer, als wäre D.F. nicht anwesend. Sein Lächeln verklebte, schmierig, blieb stecken, sollte für immer stecken bleiben, während, etwas später, D.F. nie wieder lächeln sollte, kein weiteres Mal, und auch das Gegenteil nicht.

Years of life in which I didn't really know of a world outside myself, despite my claims, and by extension, without anything to define myself against, a world inside of me
Years of life in which, I didn't really know of a world outside myself despite my claims, or, without anything to define myself against, a world inside me for that matter
looking at these again I still don't like them actually. Maybe "despite my claims" could be sacrificed. I still stand by the serious issue though.

>>She stepped through the front door to his apartment
>Say open door. I doubt his apartment has multiple doors and I don't want to see her walking into a wall
Oh fuck. I went and fixed a bunch of shit you ended up highlighting but somehow this didn't occur to me.

Here's the creative chunk of my intro phil essay. The rest of it is mostly brick-layering and dialectical synthesis of Decartes and Hume

>"intro phil"
>says "dialectical synthesis"
>first line of the essay already uses the word "me"
>also uses "onslaught"
>>rhetoric
>>>while apparently complaining about relativity with no grasp of the irony
I didn't even have to reach the words "there-ness" and "world-ness" to come to the conclusion that this was likely a parody. Write an argument out in plain english.

I was once at a bar with a professor and one of his students came up to him and asked how to be more concise. Well, not "how to be" but rather "if he was". Either way, he asked, and my professor looked at him and said to write a whole page of text, TNR 12, single spaced, and then pick just three sentences to take from that page onto a new one and to type from there, and then to repeat the process several times. Don't become one of those wittgenstein posters who hasn't read wittgenstein and only posts him to blow off other readings as well.

Try to avoid 'poetic' similes and metaphors (molasses reference not needed). Philosophical writing allows for a far broader sense of personal input than other academic writing, but in turn if you use the same flair as you would in an English essay your work will come off as disingenuous. Try to stick to 'dry' comparisons, and let your own take on the matter and your own philosophical terms shape the 'spice' of your work.

Also, avoid direct rhetorical questions, they should be contained within the questions and not the answers (swap 'is consciousness a part of nature' to something like 'some may argue that consciousness is a part of nature'

You will get even more freedom post intro-specs but first and foremost should come an academic writing base, your rhetoric must fit between the lines.

Lose 'that haunts us' 'effulgence' and the 'dustballs' sentence

>t. Philosophy graduate

>trip
I crack me up sometimes

probably should have posted this here

jesus fucking christ, wtf did I just read.

Ya like huey lewis and the news?

Really great advice, I'm actually surprised. My teacher didn't leave commentary on my essay though it was intro phil at community college so not the best quality class. I started reading philosophy (mostly existentialism) way beforehand due to depression/anxiety, I guess that's where the verbosity/angst comes from. Lack of focus in my writing is probably due to a lack of curriculum.

I knew the way I wrote was decadent but I tend to get real self-absorbed every time I read it so revision was poor. Reading Nietzsche is also a factor.

> complaining about relativity with no grasp of the irony
explain?

Also I've never read Wittgenstein (including his wiki page)

>explain?
Pair it with the previous line, I indented them on purpose. Like the other user said, try to avoid wishy-washy 'poetic' similes and metaphors, especially when you're starting off by venting your angst about how things look wishy washy.

I agree with the other critiques, mostly. I think if there's a single piece of advice you should reflect on, it might be:
>Speak plainly and let the force of your arguments speak for itself.

Passion is a good thing and you clearly care about what you're writing. But the best philosophical and social-theoretical essays always manage to convey the passion and intensity of the author's point through the sheer factual power of every consecutive sentence. You can experiment with style, but the core of a philosophical essay making a deep and important point should be that solid backbone of precise argumentation. Read something by Leo Strauss for example and see how he manages to make a potentially world-changing argument just by prosaically hammering it home sentence after sentence. He doesn't need flourishes.

When the passion comes across in "external" flourishes, things that aren't essential to the statement but added to it as an emotive afterthought, and especially when you have to clarify your points with that kind of emotional flourish, as if the reader might have forgotten how important what you're saying really is, it hampers the force of the argument. Makes it seem more journalistic.

I would ask fewer rhetorical questions and be more "sympathetic" to the reader, if that makes sense. Try to imagine the reader is someone who is interested in what you're saying and on your level intellectually, but an equal in conversation, so that it would be awkward and presumptuous to talk down to them, to say things like "Is not x but y?" That comes across as disingenuous, like the other guy said. You want to come across like you know the truth of the matter, and you can explain it blow-by-blow and unrelentingly, but not like you are up your own ass about having this knowledge. The most daunting stuff I've ever read was in the work of philosophy professors who wrote very plainly, as if it was a matter of course that you should be following them along, as if they were "serious," but so expert at being serious that they could also be relaxed (and sometimes even playful) at the same time. They made it look easy.

Your style has a bit of both, but it jarringly transitions between that presumptuous kind of rhetorical flourishing and more straightforward pronouncements. It gives it a loose feeling, like a speech-giver who is a bit arrogant about the importance of what he's saying but who can't deliver it in a consistent tone, and keeps starting and stopping as he remembers just how important what he's saying is.

With something like this, if you have the time and energy, it's a good idea to rewrite it in different styles a few times and experiment with stretching your ability to still "hear" yourself in the different styles. You will gradually realise that what feels immediately natural is not necessarily what you're stuck with, but you have to persist at that stretching.

>1/2

Warm up your ears and prepare your hearts, for a terrible murder has occurred. There is a victim dead and a murderer who has —for the time being— not yet been caught. To lead us closer to know who the killer is, we must think like he does. What is his next move? What is he to do after he is finished? He had in mind the death of another and actualized it; it is completed, but now what? Well, he may take the murder weapon with him after the deed, but it is of no matter, the weapon will be known by the wound he left. He may even comb the scene for any instance of his DNA, but a hair will inevitably be found. He may have an alibi crafted to account for his whereabouts, alas a hole in his patchwork will be unfolded. Before any observation of the crime scene, we know he will be caught, weapon present or absent, DNA or none, alibi or admittance. The murderer is a man, a fallible man. Expecting success to reign superior when covering up a murder is a façade for failure. Culpability is inevitable, but more importantly, it is only a matter of time. This is all under the assumption that he intended not to be caught. What if the murderer killed in a passion of wrath, like an animal?

To kill another like an animal is to let go of any distinction of humanity. A wolf attacks a lamb by the neck to violently shake it to death, spewing blood from its jugular, allowing its content to fly where it pleases. It is a horrific mess; and it is not cleaned up at all. It is left to dry, intended to stay. The beast might even parade its fresh kill with euphoria in mind. What if this murder killed in pure wrath with such passion? Would we would see no attempt whatsoever to clean the scene? He would want the whole world to see what he committed. He wanted the murder weapon to be left in the heart of the corpse. He wanted the victim’s blood to pour over the floor. He had no care for his DNA being left. He wanted it to be a violent, merciless death.
He did not even create an alibi, he admitted his crime! But he did so not of guilt or righteousness; it was of pleasure. Given he has proclaimed owner of this dark deed, he will be imprisoned.

It is evident the murderer will either be free or imprisoned, not both. We know his fate, but we must address what the possible outcomes are. For him to be free, he would’ve done everything in his capacity to cover up the crime and have his work be successful. For him to be imprisoned, he would’ve been like an animal parading his kill, fallible too, for leaving proof of his crime. And as we know, he is imprisoned. He is proud of what he has done. He is the beast with the bloody lamb in his mouth. He does what comes naturally. But who is the victim? The victim is the lamb, he is God. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” The murderer is not one, two, but many. Many today and those since Nietzsche proclaimed His death are murderers of God.

>2/2

They are God killers. Given their procession and proclamation, they are sentenced to imprisonment! But what are they to do? The Madman, a maniac, urges the culprits to become gods themselves, “simply to be worthy” of this supreme act of man. So yes, God killers, become gods yourselves, for your heaven is barring steel and your earth is cold stone. Your morality is dictated, and your every whim is scheduled. You are Gods free to define your morality and divinity in the confines of a small cell, for you all have committed the crime of killing God. “The stars will be only dots in the blackness of his own brain …. But over his cell shall be written, with dreadful truth, ‘He believes in himself.’” Yes, the stars are limited to the cell of his mortality in the prison he gave himself. We must add, as Chesterton notes as “dreadful”, is that God Killers believe in themselves. This is most unfortunate because they gained no divinity by murdering God. They have created no meaningful morality by slaying God. They have developed no freedom from killing God. They have only condemned themselves to the darkness of the abyss. They are deaf without God. They are mute without God. They are ultimately blind without God.

By affirming His death, they fall into the pit of the blank slate where no pen of man’s may dare mark upon. No firewood is in the abyss, so they are cold. No light reaches them, so they are without sight. No means of real escape is apparent, so they are marooned in nothing, so close yet so far from divinity. God reaches for their hand to help them escape, but they have chosen not to take it; they believed they have killed Him and know His corpse is stagnant. The pit of nihilism that these murders have fell into was the grave intended for God. It is no wonder they cannot escape the great pit of that size. And it will pain them to know at death that God is alive.

I'll critique others when I get back from Mass; Happy Day of the Immaculate Conception friends

Holy shit thanks. Here's the introduction if you guys want to critique that also

>humanity
might be better to cut away at your claim and not make it human-centric. "Sentient beings are distinctive from all living matter in that they are aware of themselves..." would be drawing more or less the same kind of "this entails that" you're doing without working in specieal specification.

strictly speaking you mean "in reference" or "by referring to"

I still don't get why you're using there-ness. It sounds like it's just a less obvious way of saying "the true nature of one's self" or something equally vague.

>if, if, if, if, is an absolutely introspective thing?
I think you mean
>if, if, if, if, then is [subject goes here] an absolutely introspective thing?

His head turns to look at me, he has not moved. Face to the painting, mask to me. Searing darkness behind the eyes. We stand in front of a painting, the only one in the room, distant murmurings filter in from other exhibits. A white canvas. No. Subtle structure begins to take shape- hair thin lines- red and ochre intricate.

The mask cracks a smile, loudly. How did I ever think the canvas was blank? That darkness seeps out of the broken porcelain. I keep watch on the painting- lines assembling, no intention or intelligence, but assembling all the same as in my peripheral the darkness shimmers like air from a boiler.

“From the illusion of control we derive control.”

The words shock back the ink and the air is clear again but for a thin keening. The man spoke those words, the walls shouted them. I feel the first bite of a cold- that dreary weight, that heat in your gut.

One hand clasps my shoulder. Avuncular, familiar, wrapped over steel cords. He has not moved. Mask to painting, face to me. Why would he smile? He has no need to comfort me and no desire to gloat. One rock in the riverbed has resisted the water’s wear and will forever. The water flows over it in the same way it always has. He nods and smiles and is not moving. If I could one day learn that trick: to walk while staying perfectly still.

The air fills with music and the hand on my shoulder pushes me sideways, lying down. With a touch I stop the soft bedside chiming.

Today I am going to the museum.

Thanks, I everything you said makes sense
>there-ness
It just feels more natural than being, presence, existence, self, soul, all these mean roughly the same until a meta-language is made on the individual level. I really can't say why.

I really can't say why* it feels more natural

pastebin.com/7avD7Z9R
I kinda just wanna go on and write about her life

>an ed after this that should be an ing
and did I break this guy's neck? how's he this far under her while she's standing and he's sitting on the bed? Better version: pastebin.com/MJsBh1jd

medium.com/@a5ce59f204d9/8abb86798e17
tldr im a soyboy

I am being compressed in this room. Through three windows that from a triptych of a moon, a light creeps along the hairs of a carpeted living room. To my left: Three blue-collared men that drink the air like the red wine on cold counter top. The dust: A heterogeneous mixture of dead skin and live mites, oaring through a shine pike along the waves of a droning fan. The fan: Back and forth, a sprinkler for a room to fertilize the skin of the elderly. It is 4:37 AM, Eastern Time. I am in Clayton’s Memorial Hospital on the Sabbath, standing over a gurney supporting a man that resembles bone more than life, and I begin to wonder if the militia of mites are tearing at his skin and feasting on the sunspots. His head is a jungle of grey hairs; I am beginning to think the mites live there in that jungle, in ziggurats of dandruff, like a colony of ants that dig through the earth. Maybe they’ve been feeding off this live fertilizer.
The white noise of that fan is buzzing in my ear. It is a silent jackhammer, that artificial wind in this terrarium. Yes--a terrarium. I am the zookeeper, the owner. The pungi of a steel sink by a needle dispenser. I look down again at the figure on the sheets again. Homo erectus, cast in a pale cloak, relying on me; cleaning symbiosis in action. I begin to wonder how long I’ve been awake for watching over humans held by their final fibers. Maybe too long. I begin to think of how much money is being dumped into their savings account and right back out from medicare, from insurance, and from their crumpled wills. I wonder how bright birthright glows in the hands of their children, if any. I wonder if they’ll continue the chain of humanly biological growth. Like father like son. Humans see human do. I wonder: Do these kids climb the same ladders as their mothers and fathers? Will they eat to grow, grow to go to school, and go to school to get married? To have a family, a kid? A home and a cheap condo in the middle class suburbs of a metropolitan state known for it’s one appearance on a Diners and Drive Ins episode? Maybe they wish to save enough money so that they can scrape by for a few years and finally go to Disney in Orlando where they’ll ride the rollercoasters for a week. Then the process begins anew.
I don’t think this skeleton did that. This body, a wlaking corpse, is a flag on a new land. Hundreds of thousands of ancestors, only to end. To break the chain of life from a paleolithic anchor. That is bold. But how sad. I saw him crying the other day when I entered the room to give him breakfast. He sat towards the windows with a face glazed with water and his head didn’t turn in the slightest.

it felt like I was watching a guy do a figurative dance of a soyboy than an actual parody soyboy, especially with the blunt "I am blind" line. You also have him boot up the computer at the end of one paragraph, then immediately have him say "My work is complete" in the next one.

>Our voices fill the web, shouting in tongues like in church, and we are saved.
this is an obnoxious "gotcha" that loops around on itself. Look at this for example:

>We went back to church, that place where we diddle children.
This is still a zinger but a much more stable one. The first one is poking fun at atheist soyboys for being churchlike, but it doesn't deny churches being bad in the process, and in fact needs them to be bad to actually make soyboys look bad through the comparison, thus granting them their argument that churches are bad at the end, making the insult all for naught. The second one just plainly says "churches do things that are contradictory" in a casual tone and leaves it at that without shooting itself in the foot.

never heard of this website though

-to make this more clear, it wouldn't make sense for the speaker in the example to go "haha, you're a child diddler, how terrible!" if he was one himself.

Thanks for the critique senpai, will def be using it. Can you explain the "figurative dance of a soyboy" bit? Im a brainlet

I'm a brainlet too and not really able to explain it more. Ending on more of an image instead of a declaration might help, like "it blinded me". I'm not really getting behind that suggestion though, it's just a way for me to get my point across.

I don't think I should post this but I will

I can’t remember much of when or how I heard Ethan died, but I traveled back south to New Mexico after the news came to me. They said he was lying face down in the dirt outside Bernalillo. I drove out there to see the ground. Dust hung in the air all around a wooden porch where his body lay face up. His dad told me this was it, and I believed him. His eyes were open and his teeth were shut tight. I told the man thank you as he drove away. I sat at the pole stabbed in the center of the porch with my back against the sun. It felt nice with the warm light breathing down my neck. He knew how much I loved him I think. I said my life is weird and unfulfilling, and I hate myself. He said he feels much the same, and we were quiet for a long time. I think that’s ok, but I don’t know. I fell to my side and cried. I climbed up the pole to a second story window, and killed myself.

I woudn't know, all names blur together, being so in touch with yourself sometimes has a heavy price of admission, I, for example, am so disconnected from popular culture, that I had to use my search engage to know what you were talking about in the first place.

>I am being compressed in this room.
"show don't tell" -I would just cut this. The next line is fine, though you wrote "from" when you meant "form"

>To my left:
>The dust:
>The fan:
>It is 4:37 AM, Eastern Time.
good outro. Maybe just say "My left:" at the start. You could have a sentence like "I look around" before it, or move your very first sentence over there.

>and I begin to wonder if the militia of mites are tearing at his skin and feasting on the sunspots
the way you introduce this makes me want to ask "as opposed too...?" because it seems like the mites are there either way

>I wonder how bright birthright glows in the hands of their children, if any. I wonder if they’ll continue the chain of humanly biological growth.
"if any" sounds good, but terminal, but you kept up the pattern. You could cut the "I wonder" out of the next line and just make it a question.

>on a Diners and Drive Ins episode
I didn't need Guy Fieri's face there. "on some TV show?"

>Maybe they wish to save enough money so that they can scrape by for a few years and finally go to Disney in Orlando where they’ll ride the rollercoasters for a week. Then the process begins anew.
>I don’t think this skeleton did that.
"I want to get off mr. bones's ride"

the double "with" in the last line sounded bad

>a wooden porch where his body lay face up
"the" instead of "a". "a" makes it sound like it's "a wooden porch where his body lay face up, one of many wooden porches where his body lay face up" as opposed to the one and only.

>I sat at the pole stabbed
my brain is immediately going to put this in the dead guy; it was stuck there even after you gave the location

>I don't think I should post this but I will
Not really the weirdest thing here. In a strange way stories about suicide are more palletable than sadboy "the being of the world itself upon my self in and of itself-being" undergrad existentialist bits.

He was at the age where one first considers his mortality,--where he takes his life expectancy, measures it against the age of the universe and discovers his insignificance,--young enough that his dreams and aspirations were not yet dead but old enough to see some incident of evil in the world and extend judgment to the whole of it, not able to imagine compatibility between goodness and a system whose gods permit rape, torture, orphans and genocide.

Unlikely as it may, Unlikely that I do
Unlikely has the tendency
of sometimes being true

good riddance

I sat on the wooden step of the cabin surrounded by the smell of fish scales and firs. The whole of the cabin was constructed of that wood, bent out of shape and snored in the wind like an old man sleeps on public transport. Id been hold up here for the past two weeks. The clocks ticked in defiance, spiting my restlessness. It isn’t that I don’t love nature n’ all, but there some things happenin outside of it I intended to be a part of. I got up and chopped some wood; lit a fire to fight away the night. The flame ate up the air, gettin hotter and brighter and smellin like it used to. The sounds of birds, carried by the wind, was sporadically punctured by the fires pop of burnt up wood. The trees snored that contagious snore of the cabin, like a bacteria coughed up by the wind. And I couldn’t see too much. All I could do was sit and listen, while the fire kept the darkness but a few steps from me. That fire that couldn’t keep them images from being burnt into the back of my eyelids when I closed em. That fire that I could stare at deep, till the back of my eyes looked all white when shut - but those images always were there.

I took the drainin fish to a spitroast over that fire; walked over the creek to toss the bucket of guts. Not that there were tons of em, but enough to stink some’mh over here bigger than me. Some’mh that might be scared of the flame and my uprightness take to eatin me. The bears weren’t hardly what I was scared of, but - it was something to consider hard enough - least to walk through them dark n shrubs to toss ‘em guts. The sound of an engine, like a breath outta the woods’ lung, leaked from it, coughed a spat of birds cries. Maybe they were pickin me up at last. I lay into the chair and lit my pipe to complete the picture. A flame burned in my chest; in my eyes’ lids. My ears swallowed them motor sounds like a resuscitated swallows up air. There’s a fire inside of me that burns for this, that pushes back the long day’s night; and I was scared of that fire like the bears were scared of mine.

>pretentious faggot
>posts picture of pretentious faggot
go figure

>"the" instead of "a". "a" makes it sound like it's "a wooden porch where his body lay face up, one of many wooden porches where his body lay face up" as opposed to the one and only
>my brain is immediately going to put this in the dead guy; it was stuck there even after you gave the location
Are these mistakes obnoxious? I like the effects you described in a weird way, but I'm not attatched.
damn...

...

Is there anything of value in this, Veeky Forums?

pastebin.com/xvVjijw3

Bit at the bottom isn't a continuing paragraph, piece of a planned later sequence.

Canute kicked down the door, the expensive lock proving little obstacle to a well-placed boot. Blood dripped from his ax, leaving a sanguine trail as he trod over the splintered remains. The pale moonlight illuminated an empty room save for a bed, the richly embroidered blankets in disarray, as if someone had just scrambled out.

He walked over and placed his hand upon the pillow, which still retained the indent from a person's head – And was still warm. He glanced over at the solitary window. Closed and locked, just like the front door. Glancing over the room again, he paused, then crouched down and dragged the abbot out from under his bed, holding a simple wooden cross as if it were some sort of a shield. Perhaps it was – Canute still remembered some of the old man's lessons, but he preferred a more practical approach.

“Y-you will be damned for all time!” The abbot shouted, his quavering voice belying his strong words, “W-we should've killed you when you were first brought here! You and your heathen mother would've made fine food for the p-pigs!”

“Quit your blubbering,” Canute replied, ripping the cross from the old man's hands and tossing it through the window, sending glass tinkling across the garden below. The sounds of battle rushed in through the hole, though by now the fighting had mostly ceased, and the massacre begun. Outside, he could see the flames eating up the stables and outbuilding, the surrounding farms having already burnt themselves out hours ago.

Chainmail glimmered in the firelight, as Canute's men looted and carried off the riches of the monastary. Danes, Norse, Jutes and Swedes – Even a few Picts from the far northern wilderness had come under the northman's banner, with one goal – Revenge upon the Christian dogs who invaded their homeland and destroyed their way of life.

Screams of burning horses mixed with the final cries of monks as the warriors slit their throats, throwing the bodies into the chapel to fuel the growing fire. Lesser men might've put the entire place to the torch by now, but Canute's men were true to their orders, leaving the main building untouched long enough for him to find what he sought for so many years.

And now, quivering beneath his boot, he'd found it.

“Y-you may kill m-me, but you can never stop the triumphant march of C-Christ! We will be avenged a-a hundredfold upon your kith and kin!”

“And in the meantime,” The Norseman leaned in close to the abbot's terrified face, “I'll have my revenge for what you dogs put me through – One limb at a time.”

Five hours later, Canute passed out from exhaustion, and one of his men finally drove a seax between the old man's exposed ribs.

Sanguine trail is kind of redundant. Of course it's sanguine, you just said the ax was bloody.
>The pale moonlight illuminated an empty room save for a bed
You should reword this because it makes it sound like the moonlight is illuminating everything, but the bed.

Im tired, but those are the things that stand out to me.

THE LAST TISSUE

I will drink more
Wake on the floor
Lie here a while
Light fires, cry

The last tissue
Left today. I came
And lay, as ash
Flakes the fire place

>Great miasmatic releases

Come on m8 you know better than this. Only reason people use words like this is because it's considered bad taste to wear a hat that says you went to a Russell Group university.

It felt a bit overwrought, at the same time 'miasma' is a pungent concept. I've never been to uni and I don't have the score to get into any lol.

It's just a personal preference but most of my favourite writers avoided words that don't have Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French lineage. It seems like most people who abuse Latin words do so to put themselves above others.

Its fucking horrid. It's fraught with nothing but Grammar mistake and overused punctuation.The sentences read disjointed made only words by the misplaced words and incomplete sentences. The sheer amount of word choices you made is nothing short of shallow and retarded.

There is no hope of salvaging your work. Do Humanity a favor and delete it and then KYS.

Huh, I hadn't even thought of it as a 'classical' word. Made me think of 1800s Britain, medieval carryover. Gothic medicine shit. It probably wasn't an obscure and archaic word a hundred years ago. Thanks for your input user.

>see this post and panic
>check several times that it's not replying to me

Are you the one writing the Victorian England one?

Well, amongst writers it was probably quite common in the 1800s because they all came from bourgeois society and had classical educations. If you talked to ordinary people in 19th century Britain you were likely to hear a lot of dialect and far less Latin and Greek than you'd hear today.

No. unless you mean the discussion about muh miasma

Probably. I didn't make the assumption from reading old books though. Since it's related to medicine and disease it'd probably be relevant to a lot of people in industrial urban centres.

Warum so wütend?

Well, the muh miasma story is better due to him being able to salvage the story given its short length.

Nonetheless, it's still riddled with punctuation mistakes, weird word choices (I'm willing to give him a pass if he puts an exact date on the story) and improper format and some other style mistakes.

Which is yours user? It must face judgment

The miasma story, the yohann one. I'd be grateful for your criticism

>The miasma story, the yohann one. I'd be grateful for your criticism

It's salvageable, due to its short length.

Nonetheless, it's still riddled with punctuation mistakes, weird word choices (I'm willing to give you a pass until you puts an exact date on the story) and improper format and some other style mistakes.

Your post has more grammatical mistakes than that pastebin (???)

reeee

???

R8 me /lit
Rose, who was stood outside, was pretty like Sally, with a hanging purse in one hand and phone in the other. They were friends from school. But really they were friends because they were both good-looking.
She phoned Sally, waking her up. Sally sounded groggy on the phone but promised to come down to open the street door a-sap once she puts on some clothes, and so Sally did, and Rose kissed her cheeks and thanked her. Sally smelled that Rose was drunk, but neither of them cared whether girls were drunk or not. Using the lift the two girls went up to Sally's floor and once they got inside her apartment, without asking for permission, Rose began to wash her teeth with Sally's unused extra toothbrush. Rose had left the bathroom door wide open. And as she was brushing her white teeth drunkenly with mint toothpaste, Rose said loudly to Sally, loudly because Sally was not in the bathroom but in the kitchen, while looking into her own eyes in the bathroom mirror over the sink: "I just gave a blowjob."

"Too much information," Sally said to her intoxicated bestfriend, who apparently had decided to crash at her place in the dead of summer Friday night. But even though Sally was a bit groggy from needing to wake up all of a sudden due to the fucking phone call, Sally asked her friend with a bright voice: "Who was it, though?"

"A boy. We just met tonight."

"Well you two didn't exactly take your time gettin' busy!"

"I wanted him to go home happy," Rose said.

Sally was no longer in her nightgown but now in her clothes and making coffee with her pink coffeemaker, the yellow lights of her one-room flat being now switched on. She said concerning the blowjob Rose had apparently given: "None of my business."

10/10

1/10

Don't use my name in any of the things you write every again

how u doin

hey

Gomenasai. I wrote that but never got around to editing it. But I edited one kindle page as a test. Even though I'm not smart I hope there's still hope for me, I find that creative writing helps with my cerebral palsy.

ok. I'm writing this novel manuscript now tho. If you Veeky Forumsitizens want to review my draft then that'd be cool. I sometimes have certain problems with my concentration so I haven't continued the novel since I farted out that piece of literature history that is 50% of my unborn novel's first ch.

May I ask why you start out with the third person in the prologue, yet switch to first person thereafter?

It's good, quite raw--definitely the first crack at a whole novel. Keep writing.

My work:
pastebin.com/AswrHzg2

write like you speak bro

Personal style.

Like a darkest dungeon intro

All I can say is human beans do not speak like this. That somewhat ruins the entire feel since I can't help but think 'who are these characters and why do they sound like pretentious hipsters'?

Mc is supposed to sound like a pretentious faggot. The old lady dialogue is just a placeholder for her real dialogue.

Fragment of what i've benn working on these last few years...

While the moon is shining over mouldy books-stacks penned by sages
Thinking takes him back through thousands upon thousands of hoar ages
To the very first, when being and non-being were nought still,
When there was but utter absence of both life-impulse and will,
When unopen there was nothing, although everything was hidden,'
When, by His own self pervaded, resting lay the Allforbidden.
Was it an abyss? a chasm? wat'ry plains without an end?
There was no estate of wisdom, nor a mind to comprehend.
For the darkness was as solid as is still the shadows' ocean,
And no eyes, had there been any, could have formed of it a notion.
Of the unmade things the shadows had not yet begun to gleam
And, with its own self-contented, peace eternal reigned supreme.
Suddenly, a dot starts moving - the primeval, lonely Other...
It becomes the father potent, of the void it makes the mother.
Weaker than a drop of water, this small dot that moves and bounds
Is the unrestricted ruler of the world's unbounded bounds.
Ever since the vasty dimness has been splitting slice by slice,
Ever since come into being earth, sun, moon, light, heat, and ice.
Ever since up to the present gallaxies of planets lost
Follow up mysterious courses, chaos-bred and chaos-tossed,
And in endlessness begotten, endless swarms of light are thronging
Towards life, for ever driven by an infinite of longing;
And in this great world, we, children of a world grotesquely small,
Raise upon our tiny planet anthills to o'ertop the All,
Lilliputian kings and peoples, soldiers, unread, erudite,
We engender generations, reckoning ourselves full bright!
One-day moths upon a mudball measeurable with the chip,
We rotate in the great vastness and forget 'twixt cup and lip
That this world is really nothing but a moment caught in light,
That behind, or else before it, all that one can see is night.
Just like whirls of dust and powder thousands of live granules play
In a glorious ray's dominion and pass over with the ray.
Thus against the never-failing night of time without a bound,
The spontaneous ray, the moment, still fails not to go the round;
When it dies, all dies - like shadows melting in the murky distance
For the universe chimeric is a dream of non-existence.

>Are these mistakes obnoxious?
I don't get what you mean by that really. Are you asking if they're obviously "formally incorrect" or something? I don't think that's what you really ought to be concerned with.

For the "a vs the" thing, the "a" sounded out of place as I read over it, then at the end of the sentence I just sorta figured out why in hindsight.

For the pole thing I immediately assumed there was maybe a six foot long metal pole in the guy's chest and had a hard time getting off of it. When the guy "climbed the pole" I imagined him clumsily going up that little six foot pole until you said "to a second story window," which caused me to warp him over to a telephone pole off to the side.

On the flipside the telephone pole was nice because it makes his death ambiguous (falling/electrocution: leaning towards the latter but considering everything is nice).

From that day the king's sorrow was magnified and as he remained inside his chamber he began to fear light itself. Every morning of his life the sun burnt his skin, so he shut his doors and drew his curtains. Such was his madness, however, that with the written word he decreed all the houses of Anonur to remain in darkness until his death, fearing the trickling of the light. The sun he feared the most, for it was so large and bright and he could not hope to comprehend it. Even the pale moon so far away was to him a searing disc which sent him cowering.

But it was not just the lights of the world outside that had his hatred. He hated also the sight of his own body and the forms of others. They had become grotesque and he was sickened by all thoughts and feelings of the flesh. Therefore, he took to wandering the halls when needs must with his eyes closed, but he found even in that darkness small patches of light still defied him. And when the even the faintest of light was a sun in itself a crack appeared in the walls of his. In contempt for himself he took a knife to his right eye and thought to carve it from its socket, but he had not the heart. First he threw the knife to the floor and then himself to the wall, clawing at it until his nails were splinters. From then his anguish at living was increased beyond all saving and he forsook even the most basic of foods.

'For to eat,' thought he, 'is to be as the crawling things in their endless ravening hunger. I shall not be as the crawling things. Nay, I shall not endure this shell overlong.'

Then the king lay down on the floor of his chamber and would not rise for days on end, for he no longer looked to the surcease of his anguish.

The bob dylan line is subject to change. I think I fixed the opening with the door without having to use the word open; it came off as a pretentious metaphor for opportunity whenever I tried using it directly.

Is it cozy, Veeky Forums?

not bad and a bit rough around the edges

In hindsight I should probably have a
>He closed the door behind her.
at the end of the first paragraph, and change the "He pulled" line to
>He used a fork to pull some of the noodles up to his face and said,

hey look out of the window she said to me while she was looking out of the window and i got up from the bed slowly feeling the blood rush through my body and being shaken in my foundations by a physical dizzyness that at the same time made the drugs kick in once more and i fell down to the bed again and laughed and said geez and laid down again and said wow this is fucking supreme i said and what i meant was that to induce a heavier kick one could willfully create this situation of blood-related dizzyness by laying down for a long period of time and then abruptly get up and make the drugs kick in again but i just said "wow" again and she looked at me with disdain and scorn written on her face and said get up and look here she said and she stared out of the window and saw the lights in the rain and a lightning man with a teuxedo and a saxophone switching from being posed with the sex to the left and the sex to the right with blurred and bleeding lights shining through the billions of raindrops and as she watched the tuxedoman she imagined listening to a saxophone which she had never heard before and she imagined it to sound like a deep roaring sound like the machines in the factories and she thought that if only she was rich she could hear a saxophone but she had seen it many times and she sees it everytime she came to his place to do drugs but most of the time they were at her place simply because he felt more free to do as he wished at his own place which often initiated tensions between the two as she valued togetherness and a more intimate experience while he when feeling free desired to shoot for the stars and reach higher echelons of intensity unknown to her. he had raised his upper body and stared at her with a tired expression he looked at her and felt feelings of hatred inside him but then was enticed to follow her command by something unknown in him but suddenly he wnated to obey and look out of the window. perhaps it was hypnosis of some sort? he thought and crawled on all fours like a damn animal to her side until he had reached her. He observed her sitting position and tried to describe it inside his head. She sits on her two feet and and then he laughed because the formulation of her legs are broken in the middle came to his head but it was a meaningless laughter and suddenly he felt the hatred again and now he looked out of the window and was facinated by all the cars which were flying left and right and across the worlds from a to z as the greeks said and the lights were bleeding furiously all across the screen and it was raining so intensely that he thought it would be nice to now leave the house and take a shower because his shower was broken. He looked at her and she finally untied her face from the glasses and looked at him and there was nothing there he felt and she felt there was nothing there. it felt profoundly and terrifyingly familiar to feel this way. He moved back to the bed and said ill take another shot and she said m

we watched the robots dance. we watched them how they made rounds and held hands high of each other and did a 1-2-3 step and then swerve left swerve right and 1-2-3 and we laughed at these robots who were dancing withou tany music and we imitated it. i then grabbed the hand of lamosella and imitated the man and she started imitating the woman but we weren't laughingbut looked at each other with a sudden and surpised seriousness and i felt something rising inside my stomach and then we both had to smile because i think she also felt it and we both were afraid a little for a moment and then we stopped and looked at the robots again and she asked what kind of music are they dancing too she asked us and i looked at the others if they were going to speond but they weren't so i said that i think it must be something with a saxophone and she said that she didn't know what that was and i imitated a saxophone player and made some noises even though i had never heard one but i said that the folks from above had a lots of peoples who played the saxophone and they would meet in large buildings and the saxophone player would play his music and they'd all dance like the robots here in big halls and take drugs. And my friend One-Eyed Jasper said that i was talking bullshit and that i was making things up and i said i wasn't because it wasn't my stories but i had heard them in the taverns many times by elder man who had been above and if he didn't believe me i even could show him what a saxophone looked like and he didn't respond anymore but said it's all just bullshit anyway and walked away and i said Bye One-Eyed Jasper and he waved his hand and smiled and said: Bye, Geordi. and i also smiled.

then i looked lamosella and smiled and said that One-Eyed Jaspers would retrieve his sister now and that he had been thinking baout having to leave for several minutes and that i somehow had also developed a sense when he had to go because a certain restlessness would be expressed in his bodily motions and i smiled and she smiled and said: I had thought he was angry because you fucked him up with your knowledge on saxophones and smiled. And i smiled and said: Were you afraid? and moved closer to her and she said: Yeah a little bit and i'm always anxious when people are starting to fight and she thought of her brother beeing beaten to death by strangers and smiled and i said: You don't need to be afraid because i'm a man and i will protect you if you are my girlfriend and i said i would like you to be my girlfriend and she said okay and smiled and i extended my hand to her and said ok i will show you now what a saxophone looks like and she said but are we going upstairs bu she was smiling and i said no but there is a man in a tuxedo with a saxophone at night who is attached to a building and he's got a saxophone you will be surprised i said because it looks like a long horn i said and we both smiled and she said a long horn? and i nodded and we walked hand in hands thr

have you head the news of the political uprisings i asked my naked pal who was sitting on a bar chair and was drinking his beer and he looked at me with a flaccid expression and said whats this nonsense of a political uprising you are talking about and shook his head and took 2 sips of his beer and i watched his big belly moving heavily with each breath in and out and his inverted smile and looking at nothing particular at the wall that was various metres away from his head behind the bar and i said: There are rebels fighting with the government now i told him and i said they have killed atleast 50 soldiers! and my eyes were widneing from excitement and i realized i held up 5 fingers to intensify the effect of the number fifty but then realized that five did not equal fifty and withdrew my hands and my friend slowly moved his head to face me and said: This is all nonsense that you are talking about. and took 2 sips from his beer and moved back to his default position and i took hold of a love handle o fhis and said you are a grumpy old man my friend and i shook the love handle and caused waves of fat to moved up and down the ocean of his fatness and he looked at my hand touching has love handle and saw me smiling with a cunning and cheeky expression and said stop with that nonsense and moved back to his default position and i stopped the nonsene but i smiled and he took 2 sips of his beers and i looked and felt really exhilirated because so much energy was flowing through me and despite me also being naked i started shouting from happyness and made sounds of being in love with life and climbed on the bar stool and from there jumped on the bar table and threw my limbs around and danced and screamed and laughed like a mad man and felt so energy driven that i felt that the energy would extend beyond my body and rip it into shreds and i wanted to throw myself into the wall that was covered with botthes of alcoholic beverages but instead i hammered with my hand on the table in a crouching position and made rghhh rghhh rghhh noises with every hit and my friend looked at me with a flaccid expression and said: stop with this nonsense about throwing your limbs around and being filled with so much energy that you feel that you could burst and hitting the table to get rid of the excess energy. i felt deflated and moved down the table and sat on my stool and looked at my friend who was calm as ever and i got up from the stool and i hugged my friend very tightly and was very sensual of the touch of our bodies and his hairs touching my hairs and this lovely and fulfilling warmth that this body extended to mine and this surprising but very comfortable softness of his skin and i felt not at all negatively about my friends fatness but rather a loving desire to be even closer to him to feel even more of him and endorse all o fhis body and i looked at his privates and was terribly touched and then he moved his head to look at mine. i wanted to kiss him but he said

...

go to bed Timothy

Ah a nice sip of water now would that not be splending? i think i'm dying of thirst. I think my body is dehydrated to the point of me being close to death, very close indeed. Not an atom of irony is being expressed through my words. Nothing but water. Water is all i desire. Will you give me some whater please. Water is up here he said and motioned his hands up into the sky and no water is down here he said and touched the floor. I smirked and said: We are earthbound people, you loser. And me and my gang moved beyond the beggar who was standing with the masked expression of a frantic at the side of the narrow street that me and my gang was passing but his eyes betrayed his mask and it was all too clear to me and my friends that this was the lost soul of a deranged creature. My friend turned around, having shared similiar thoughts and said: Your soul is doomed, you failure, and turned back around and walked in unison with me and the other gang members. One of our members had a weapon-sized pipe in his hand and said. This is the third starving idiot of the night, if i meet one more i will spill some blood. The gang leader revealed a condescending smile and splendidly white teeth as he turned his head around and said: Keep your composure, you big baby. What, a bunch of freaks unsettles you? Hey, Baby boy: We are heading for the stars. Man up. and he turned around and weaponized-pipe gang member gulped and wanted to disappear into the earth as to escape such a thorough humiliation. The nerd sidekick of our gang who held in his hand a notebook and was scribbling like a mad man whenever something happened said with the excitement of nerds who feel good because they absorbed some new information that the structure of our gang was very similiar to that of a genuine wolf pack and said that the foundation of these wolf packs was the distinction between alpha males, beta males and- but before he could finish weaponized-pipe boy had hit the pipe at the notebook and it flew like a wild tornado into some water and made a big splash which wet my shoes and i said. hey watch out but weaponized-pipe crew member said: hey punk, do you think your smart or something and the punk said: it's you're, not your. but he was intimidated and was shaking from fear of physical abuse. "I'll show you what it means to be a WOLF." the weaponized-pipe crew member said and laughed at his joke and was ready to storm at the nerd but the gang leader intervened by grabbing weaponized-pipe crew member by his neck. With a kenjudo move he smashed the guys face into the ground where a loud knack emerged and it seems that the guys face was broken. There was blood rolling down the earth and we smiled in unison. Recover your vital intelligence documents said the gang leader and we moved on. As we strolled through the streets we marauded various stores and spit in the face of woman who wore expensive clothes. At 6 PM we were to meet our contact from the militia at Raudeleighstreet ninetynine but