CRITIQUE THREAD

It was thus into a family of money which I aspired to marry, for I had, and have not still, none of my own to speak of. Rather, my Roman nose, doltish eyes, dull wits, and melancholic disposition inspired in the mercurial Eugénie ill-founded fantasias of Werther, and she declared herself an avid patron of my woes. Having been faithful to her purpose and compounded them with her Cretan tryst, she suddenly abandoned my project with a remarkable indifference—cruel, is it not, the servitude of the artist, wracked to-and-fro by the vicissitudes of the philistines? The bull appeared to her then a golden calf, and her a most willing idolater; and despite my best efforts to bring down my own commandments upon her head, the mustachioed patriarch, his paunch having outpaced the efforts of his tailor in the mending of the old uniform (he was, then, unashamed to wear it), announced to me my ruin. “You see,” he said in walrus tones, floating in a haze of pipe smoke and fingering one of the brass buttons of his aching Attila, “You, and certainly the young Vicomte, in all the world are privy to a sacred secret: my daughter’s chastity, or, rather, the lack of it. You understand, of course, that a woman of society, and all creatures of the fairer sex, are outfitted with a singular resource, one around which their grand stratagem pivots—and it is that very virtue, that vestal grace, that Eleusinian mystery, that impenetrable (pardon me) holdfast, which yourself and the good Vicomte have seen (bon, that you have seen) cloven. I cannot, father that I am, conscience such an unveiling, such an end to the masque. Custom must be given satisfaction.”

It was thus that my career as a dandy was delivered its coup de grâce, and as a young man, perhaps more akin Werther than I care to admit, I was sentenced to an eternal autumn. Horned as I was, I fled to Marseille to bury my head in the sand. My father, the owner of a glassworks near Chartres, nearly shattered at the news; my mother, waifish from birth, shrunk some degrees more, unfolding like a set of Chinese boxes. At the very least, they thought only, by way of my letters, that I had fled to the coast at the behest of some newfangled malady, in order to secret myself away in a sanatorium and to be made clean by the salt air; likewise, just as Boccaccio’s Florentines fled to their perches, Eugénie retired to her aunt’s retreat in the mountains, weathering a fit of melancholia while her valiant intended languished in the throes of the Plague. Of the young bull, the Vicomte T—, it is known that he departed to Spain to fight for the Infanta Isabella—rather appropriately, he was slain at the hand of some matador or other, in a white town outside of Valencia.

All this is going towards the forming of a frame narrative behind a hussar's story of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia (which simultaneously has another tale within it), which is told to the protag at a tavern in Marseilles and helps him get his shit back together.

Empty mansions filled with lonely children
Screaming sighs of botulism “how could you bill them?”
They’re adults now, breeding beautiful issues
Of all their own, in a silk bed of unused tissues
Prattle on with debutante delight
Feigning every single sleight
Of mind and lips and hips too
Never asking others how do they do
Who cares, I don’t even if I do
This isn’t all about me or you

It's not perfect, but I did enjoy reading this piece. I would recommend using hyphens instead of parentheses within spoken quotations though. Parentheses are better used for unspoken thoughts and self-conscious commentary within narrative.

Duly noted, will make the changes. Glad you enjoyed it user.

Thanks thats the type of loser I was going for except...
Yeah it really goes far on the edgy side doesn't it? I REALLY didn't mean for that to happen but it happened anyway. I wrote this with a vague lot, vague characters, some events I wanted to do and some ideas I wanted to express( I have never undertook a project of this scale before). As I was 20,000 words in I noticed I really wanted to punch my main character. Especially during the (and I say with the biggest "" possible) "philosophical rants". Jesus Fucking Christ, I didnt mean for those to come out the way they did it was the just the best way I knew how to get the message across, it really showed me how bad a writer I was. I dont know why I didnt realize sooner. Maybe I looked at for too long, maybe I got distracted by something, maybe it's from the narcolepsy caused by sudden surges of existential dread that keep me awake at night. Nonetheless I didnt catch my own ineptitude in time so i said fuck it lets just roll with it and thus was born the ungodly monstrosity you see before you.
So instead of making it good I at least want to know if it's interesting.
Does the intro accomplish these three things: Grab your attention, establish the character, establish the setting in an interesting and concise manner?
Do you want to keep reading?
Do the characters have unique voices that you can tell apart?
Is what I'm saying clear?
If I ever write a sequel hopefully I can take these lessons with me. (although writing this book was INCREDIBLY painful)

Also it's a fucking honor to be compares Dostoevsky. I am going that in mind and masturbate furiously until the skin starts to peel off.

hmm, to be honest man, I don't think the single words work in this case. Maybe instead of puff you could do a phrase? like "He takes a long pull" or something.

>intentioned
doesn't sound good.

>about the bench
I think you can find a better way to describe and personify the bench

>2nd paragraph
there's three sentences in this paragraph and two of them start with "he". Gotta change that.

>3rd paragraph
It seems like you're trying to develop the character but it feels bland and mediocre(using this word's actual definition, not what we usually assume it means). I think the blandness also stems from these paragraphs because they are only three or two sentences long man.

You gotta write more. You may think it's his mysteriousness or you intend for him to be vague, but at least to me, it comes off as dull.

Paragraphs 3 and 4 are the most interesting to me. You can easily build upon those two (as you would for the others, but these are more revealing of him I believe).

>the woman yelling for help between paragraph 5 and 6

I think if you really set up the calmness of this guy smoking a cig, show a still, silent, tranquility with no bothers whatsoever, it'll make that transition much much better when the woman's purse gets stolen.

well user, hope I could help. Needs work. I'm not a fan of this style, not telling you to keep it or not. Maybe it's appealing to other user's but I think it can be shaped up, given some meat on its bones at least.

You know, I think reading Cather in the Rye will be his best bet for that.

Holden is hella angsty and it's the character that annoys you rather than the writing.

I think this would really help him

bump

Sympathise with me, indeed! Ah, no! Cast your sympathy on the chill
waves of troubled waters; fling it on the oases of futurity; dash it
against the rock of gossip; or, better still, allow it to remain within
the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn.

Such were a few remarks of Irene as she paced the beach of limited
freedom, alone and unprotected. Sympathy can wound the breast of trodden
patience,--it hath no rival to insure the feelings we possess, save that
of sorrow.

Well written but unnecessarily convoluted and overly dramatic. Its not bad but its def not my cup of tea. If I wanted this I'd read Wuthering Heights, and I fucking abhor Wuthering Heights. That being said, trek on user, keep writing. You got it in you.

"High School"

I.
In a parked car
behind a convenience store
I pass the bong
back to Nico
and attempt to explain how
the carseat angles on
my back like the inner
corner of a Pyramid
where I am
pleasantly
buried forever
eternally crammed
by every
thought and object and entity
i hold inside my heart

and he tells me i am too stoned
to go back to class
after this lunch period
is over

II.
On a school
trip to the book fair I
produce a fistful of
amphetamines
and give them out
to my friends
as well
as to one girl
named Sol
who seems
desperate to
not miss anything
that everyone else
is sinking
into

III.
Batsheva
stole her mother's
painkillers and
fell asleep
during French

When I did the same
at home, the world
was a fresh coat of Van Gogh
colors on a floating canvas
smeared to sludge with
my shaking palms
and instead of a teacher
I awoke to my mother's
black anger
staring at me
and my vomit-stained T-shirt
curled up in her
brand new bedsheets

1/2

IV.
Laura's nose
is bleeding
and my jaw
clenches so much
it should hurt but
I
can't
feel
the dredged
loud
grinding
of
my
pulsing
yellow
teeth

V.
Mario and I are
laying by a tree
and looking at a
cloud bank
slowly shifting like
dividing cells
And we giggle in
amazement
when they all assemble
into one great machine
letting us see
the clockwork of
the Universe

VI.
After gym
we circle Christian
like believers

and stretch our
t-shirts for him
to douse in
Gebauer's Ethyl

disembodied
sweaty facemarks ghostly
printed on the fabric

we stumble
back to school
laughing
dripping
our faces numb
our tongues alive
the atmosphere
closing in
to embrace us
in the blissful
newborn light

VII.
The day after
graduation
I am floating
on Camila's pool
with Albert singing
and Andrea laughing
with the stars breathing
with the air blading
its soft warm fingers
all across me

2/2

I really liked VII man. That was a pretty stanza

The last time I saw you I had popped a xanax and washed it down with a beer just to be able to talk to you. It was like speaking through a cloud. I bummed a cigarette off you even though I had quit, just to prolong our time together. Things were said--it didn’t feel like anyone was saying them with any intent. The words were just pieces of dust kicked up accidentally--careless gestures. I would keep coming back to lick your hand, sideways-glancing like an abused dog. I hadn’t been abused. I had no good excuse for being this way! I sometimes worked hard and cold and imagined I was from the North--that great expanse. You were from a wealthy suburb in New Jersey. It embarrassed and thrilled me that I knew the median income. I should have resented you for all of that, for the way you were perfectly positioned to be successful--one parent a professor, the other a corporate something-or-other, but instead I loved you, and trusted you. Now, in your life, I am a deleted file. I am a ghost.

>Veeky Forums
>don't forget to critique others
>Critique then post

Thanks man, glad you liked it. What about the rest of it? Liked it, disliked it? Thoughts?

this is pretty good. some of the enjambment could use work and is broken up too much as if to "seem poetic" but even tho it does that and is overly simple in places, not descriptive enough, it is still very evocative

Honestly, I feel like I cant give you any good feedback cuz I dont know poetry, but I know in my gut when something is good so it stands out(in regards to VII)

Would you mind critiquing mine? I'm OP

With pleasure, link me/post it my man.

Oh shit, my bad. Misread. Reading now.

ok now for my shit
hypostition.blogspot.com/2017/10/pale-god.html
short story i need hella feedback on

This is subjective but I hate your writing (at least this specific one.) The narrator is written to sound like he is from the 17 hundreds or some shit and it does nothing for me as a result.

So, right off the bat, I'm a sucker for anything related to theology and the relationship between deity and devotee, so you got me there. You have a good command of language and manage to imbue the piece with a sense of drama, devotion, passion and intensity.

There is some awkward wording here, especially relating to what I assume are intentional juxtapositions. "Unwanted, welcomed stars" is just pure oxymoron. "Say nothing adn nothing was said" is a tense shift that doesn't add much to the story.

I feel the second paragraph gets a bit overrought on its own poetic imagery, to the point where it takes away from the piece as a whole.

I'd recommend trying to reign in the themes you're trying to convey. I was confused by the intial poem-esque lyrical mediation on divinity juxtaposed with sudden drama.

Fix this up, there's potential. Hope this helps.

it feels like you took bits and pieces of a nice story with unique writing, and then forced it into tiny incoherent pieces of poetry.

There are some things that
Cannot be undone

I am not one
Of them.

I can be undone like the
Top button on your blouse

The night we touched each
Other with fever for the first time

Listen, I could say. But then with
What would I follow? Nothing, but the

Dumb weight of the silence that spelled my
Inability to make anything all right.

The air chokes me with its
Blind, silver soundlessness, heavy

With lead and milk. I
Could say that I want your help.

Clearly, I’m sick. There’s a tumor
In my mind. It’s nearly red, stained

Black--it is choked on its own
Humour. But it is too late to make

Peace with it, or try to reason. I can
Only excise it with force--force too

Much for my frail body to bear. This
Is a sickness that has grown in me for

Years, in my silences, my thwarted reflexes.
I can make one last effort, take

My knife to it, uproot it, with the
Blade catching it at an angle, all of

The blind, ugly mass coming out in
One gesture. I will do that, and I will

Die. It would be the first time I had
Gotten an ending right. But this night,

I need to talk to you first. Even though my
Mind feels flush, feels like dirty

Snow, or ice, even slush. I’m
Melting, it’s true. And I heard what

She said to you, when she told you I
Shouldn’t be trusted. There was an

Irrevocable change in the space
And the silences between us, then. All

The pauses were infected. Once fouled,
A thing cannot be made pure. Every

Moment is shot through with traces of
What was once done. There are

Traces of wrong in everything, and
Sometimes we forget. Like we were

Drinking lead in milk. But now
I can’t forget. I can only make

Penance, and let my bad blood out, so
I can die pure, with what I have

Done leaking out of me,
Pooling on the sidewalk, venous red

Shot through with ugly, insectile black.

yeah i think it would be better as prose, second this crit

My only thought is "said nothing and nothing was said". Which I prefer

Actually like this a lot. Are you Spanish?

Love the beginning but after debutante delight it descends into unnecessary rhyming a mon avis

Maybe take out the "ugly" in the last line?

yeah i guess that's redundant

>The pauses were infected. Once fouled,
>A thing cannot be made pure. Every
>Moment is shot through with traces of
>What was once done.
Loved these lines

okay so I've read about the first 2 pages which was about as much I can stomach without falling asleep.
>He had been sick for a couple years, and nothing much was getting better.
With how the rest of your writing is I'm surprised this bit was more simple but I would've used stronger language here since this was the very beginning to gather more interest something like "His body had been slowly deteriorating for these last couple years with little hope of recovery.
>Feeling ‘normal,’ or not sick
you see the quotations marks already do the job, you didn't need a clarifying statement. Or what? Did you think I was thick?
> Every high was a dissociative nightmare
okay
> The narcosis always revealed the screaming dissolution of the universe
Oh god I hate shit like this. It's like when a writer uses some thing "THAT IS THE BELLOWING ROAR OF MY SOUL" it's almost always short hand for "I want to sound deep"
>Those famed synchronicities of psychedelic trips
OH GOD IT KEEPS GOING
The only thing I like is the idea in the third paragraph is the thing about being a parasite because I can relate to that. Most people at one time in there lives have felt something like that, it's something that can really be used to leverage sympathy for the character but you don't very well here. Pain and feeling like your a burden to your loved ones are both very broad and deep concepts that I wish was expanded more on. Especially the latter, that type of stuff usually gives may to extreme paranoia. The smiles of your loved ones watching you sit there on your hospital bed feel so disgustingly fake that you cant even bear making eye contact anymore.
Also the suicide thing, why the hell would he take her car? You already established that this guy doesn't want to be a burden on others yet you want him kill himself in such a way in which he is a burden to someone. Usually guys like this are constantly thinking about ways they can off themselves. which again is another think you can expand on.

>"Say nothing and nothing was said"
You don't think the tense shift doesn't add? First thanks for noticing, it was intentional lol :)

After
>nothing was said
there's
>Blank was where we were, there... in my ears
>We looked up with yearning eyes
Though it doesn't relate to noise, there's a silence in sight, by seeing darkness in a night sky (seeing darkness was introduced in the first paragraph). And that yearning implies an emptiness wanted to be filled.

>"Unwanted, welcomed stars" is just pure oxymoron.
I can see how that's awkward. I'll explain what I wanted to achieve with it and perhaps we can see a better way to convey it?
here we go:
by prompting Margot to be silent with me, I intend for the both of us to embrace that silence and have no bothers of noise. The air was cold, a lack of energy. The same goes for looking up at the sky for it is dark, black, and almost empty. We are in silence, but the sky is not completely dark. There are stars that hinder that darkness of the sky, but these stars obviously cant go away so they are welcomed. In a better sense, they are welcomed because they intrigue and might be with us in the darkness rather than take away from it.

That's the intent of that phrase.

>on second paragraph being too elaborate
Hmm, thanks for making me aware of this. It definitely stands out. I'm not sure if I out to take it out or not. Perhaps I could integrate somehow, adding parts that relate to the first and third paragraphs?

>I'd recommend trying to reign in the themes you're trying to convey
Like creating a conclusion to it? Perhaps a formulaic order in the first and third paragraphs that are parallel?

>I was confused by the intial poem-esque lyrical mediation on divinity juxtaposed with sudden drama.
You were confused by how there's that drama story in the middle of a meditation?
Thank you so much for your help user!!! I truly appreciate it and glad that you enjoyed it

thanks

Sincerity had seemed lacking for some time now. X had always felt removed from life, at some points feeling nothing, not caring if he lived for died. At other moments however, he was plunged into the deepest depths of emotion; self loathing and depression, rage and hatred, misery and despair. The only extremes he did not feel were those of happiness. At best his emotions were flat-lined.

Story is semi-autobiographical, going to be a love story, but more from an /r9k/ perspective, a perpetual friend zone.

weepingpottery.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-exorcist-tales-what-was-never-meant.html

Your story and
Story sounds similar

Veeky Forums-inspired short story.
Forgive me.

medium.com/@PlatinumB/january-0-8964c41547e8

I posted this to that other crit thread 2 days ago, so sorry If anyone sees it as a repost, but this hread lived after all and some people here do really give decent feedback.

He had marched about for maybe an hour, quartering the area and finding neither cause to complain nor anything peculiar. It was just when he thought about turning and going back when a discolored slab of grayness showed trough the trees and caught his eye. He went on through the shrub and over lumpy ground, vaulting over a fallen tree so corrupt with rot that it collapsed under him just the istant before he landed. He half fell and the arm with which he had supported himself was caught in the dead tree’s moldy intestines and he felt the tingle of a multitude of small crawling things rushing frantically over his hand and a gooey moistness under his palm where he had crushed some of them to pulp. The image that eerily flashed up in one of those ill-lit back-chambers of his sickish mind was that of a furious deity coming down on his clueless flock, the survivors forever despairing over the unknown nature of their wrongdoings that had caused such punishment. He scrabbled around with his arm caught behind his back and the sharp splinters cut his skin but he did not feel anything but the inundating wish to get his doomed limb out of this gross hole. When he had freed himself he stood shivering with disgust, wiping his hand on leafes and bark and trousers. It was then that he found some luckier individuals scrambling back and forth on his sleeve. Pill bugs it were and his paranoid terror left him immediately with the recognization. He wiped them gently off over the hole in the tree and they rolled themselves up mid-air and made audible sounds as they thumped down amongst their buddies like small pebbles bestowed with some improbable lifeseed.

i haven't posted here before. i tried sending writing to my friends but none of them read, so it's not much use. here's my gimmicky romantic short-story: medium.com/@NonoEss/concessions-5c07cbc29048

now for some crit:

(this crit ended up sounding harsher than i planned. sorry for that. i have to go now so i dont have time to make it sound nicer)

btw there are lots of missing full-stops throughout. and you're using the same character for hyphens as you are for dashes, which becomes a little annoying to read
>The graveyard was out of the way for the suburban town so the stars were out.
this sentence seems really ambiguous in meaning. is it the lack of light pollution from the town that lets the stars be visible?
your next sentence is also of the '[clause] so [other clause]' structure. I dont think it's good to have identical sentence types next to each other, at least not at the start of a piece.
>Perhaps the grave keeper was a hardworking man or maybe my mother still visits him in her advanced age every now and again.
say 'old' instead of 'advanced'. 'every now and again' is completely unnecessary. might need a comma before the 'or'
>I laid the flowers down in front of him, now that I’m here what should I say? It’s been a very long time since I last saw him, but even now it doesn’t exactly feel real.
feels like u switch to present tense at random. if you're gonna do the thoughts in present tense then I think you need things like 'I thought' and 'I wondered' interspersed
Last sentence of the first paragraph should have a comma before 'so'. That paragraph should also maybe end with a colon instead of a period, since it segues so directly with the dialogue, but im not that sure.
'monolog' is spelt 'monologue'
>Out of the corner of the eye, I caught sight of the woman that looked at him silently her face contorted in pain.after some more small talk, he bid me farewell.
i think u just need to reread that

Bump!

7/10, read it til the end

there are lots of typos that make me think this isnt proof-read. i know this is for learning to write but how hard is it copy something into a text editor and look for red underlines?

> finding neither cause to complain nor anything peculiar
can be interpreted like u mean: 'finding neither cause to complain nor cause to anything peculiar'
> It was just when he thought about turning and going back
'turning' adds nothing
> showed through the trees and caught his eye
i think if u've specified it's showing through the trees then it's obvious that it must have caught his eye, so you can just cut from after 'trees'.
> through the shrub and over lumpy ground,
cut 'over'
>it collapsed under him just the istant before he landed
cut 'just'
>He half fell and the arm with which he had supported himself was caught in the dead tree’s moldy intestines and he felt the tingle of a multitude of small crawling things rushing frantically over his hand and a gooey moistness under his palm where he had crushed some of them to pulp.
'multitude' feels like too clunky of a word to use in a long sentence like this. idk. also the sentence should probably be split into two or three smaller sentences. i also think the descriptions are overwritten but im not sure many others would agree with me (e.g. i would probably write 'the tree's intestines' instead of 'the dead tree's moldy intestines')
> The image that eerily flashed up in one of those ill-lit back-chambers of his sickish mind was that of a furious deity coming down on his clueless flock
u shouldn't put a descriptive word in front of every noun/verb. it's clunky. It's better to get readers to focus on one or two really good images than like seven consecutive uninteresting ones (what does the deity being 'furious' add to the image of it coming down upon its flock? every reader will assume it is angry already)
> the survivors forever despairing over the unknown nature of their wrongdoings that had caused such punishment
i can't really articulate why this doesnt read well. i think it's something to do with the word 'nature' being used with that definition right after lots of descriptions of flora/fauna nature, and the fact that there are so many ways of rearranging this clause to have less words, e.g. 'the survivors forever despairing over what wrongdoing of theirs might have caused such punishment'
> He scrabbled around with his arm caught behind his back and the sharp splinters cut his skin but he did not feel anything but the inundating wish to get his doomed limb out of this gross hole.
'cut' should either be gerund or you need a period after 'back' and remove the 'and'. if you do the former, then you need a comma before 'but'.
'did not feel anything but' should become 'felt only'
and then you do the '[random adjective] + [noun]' thing again
also: bump.

>dude what if VERBOSE but also GROSS!
>-- Some faggot circa 1997

that said you have the word usage to level up. Just pick a less boring conceit, jesus. Have you visited these critique threads? 9/10 stories is some fuckwit wasting his verbal IQ on trapeze acts rhapsodizing LE KEK POO POO! HEHEHE

I mean, it's set in the 1840s, not 1997.

This has already been pretty much said a million times in literature, in exactly the same way. Try to find a more original and unique angle. Read Houellebecq and see how he manages to say the exact thing in extremely original ways.

Anyway here's mine.

Heaven is cold, colder than expected. My breath appears like a cartoon bubble when I speak, and my lips remain eternally cracked. Earthly media depicts this place as a paradise, as the final frontier of all men, where immortals lounge about in leathery sandals and silky robes, as if it were an all-inclusive beach resort. My hands rub together as I stand next to the fireplace.

“Hunger and sex,” says Petra as he sits lazily on the piss stained couch we received from the Office of the Heavenly Home.
“I miss being hungry and filling my stomach to the brim. I miss fucking on a daily basis, I miss the calamities of being alive.”

I’ve been here for twenty years. Petra, my roommate, has been here for longer than he bothers to count. He died during WWII, hacked to death by Japanese soldiers. His wife, who has surely died by now, never made it here, and Petra has long waited for her. At first he was sure it was purgatory she received, just a couple of years of penitence, but as time’s gone by, his hope has become like a worn string hung on a wire. Petra claims he isn’t a talker, and some days this might be true. True that is, until he gets his hands on booze, then like Socrates who spoke best before the hemlock, so does Petra speak best after a bottle or two of wine. We opened up another bottle, our last one, and Petra’s tongue kept on doing its usual dance.

“All we do is drink all day” Petra muses, “and the worst part is we can’t even drink ourselves to death.”

I killed myself at forty two, the year 1996, leaving behind a wife. It wasn’t the bravest thing I could have done, but who ever said I was brave? Honestly I never knew why I made it up here, when my both my life and my death were about as honorable as a hyena’s

This is a fun idea, I haven’t read anything like it. How long is it/ is it planned to be? I’d read more.

Title: The Crush of Old

Too much emptiness dwells in Man –
Bartered coin births itself from stone.
Too solemn was the walk I took, slowly
Urged by the roads, horrid crowds,
Roaming upon the spheres, prostrate
Upon the rolls, moaning their pains
As though too unreal. I saw too many
Wrestling for a quip in the dirt, dribbling
Wrecks they were – the leaves fell on them
And they too became wind, blasted away
By the shore of myself that brought to call
The reasons they did what they were.

One day too, shall men understand
The tryst they consume, in all of them,
Garrulous consommé that they gargle,
Bloated upon their own ragout, perished
In their hydraulics, mad vices churning
Against gears, radios to each, hearts
Beating into the pipes, the brown ensured
To slough the stink of their being, they are
Nothing but coiled, in snaking earthiness.

Then, remembering a single linnet, held
On the branch of a thereafter, sung
The overtures. “Chrysanthemums,
Wisterias, and Rose-water, swim
Through, dripping their weights
For new attainments. Behold,
You are young like fresh stars
Birthed of heat in galaxies dispersed
Longing for a statement to your own
And wishing quiescence, dim meadows
In your eyes.” Cast itself a wing,
And flashed, a thousand hornets lit the sky –
And, O, the children of the Earth came!
One tumbling after another like dew
Wrung from the many – sired by the trees,
And soft hullabaloo came from them!
Howdee! Run-see! Did they embrace
The everything they stood, the morn
Of their life stowed in their springs! They
Lived like gems in a camouflage!
How could I not see them? Many-belled heads
Swiftly swinging their own verses, swelled
By the symphonies lit their sway,
As they crowded in gyres, dancing petty flowers,
Whisking through the days, until –
They left me, lone – and went in their song!

Did I, then, the poet’s book enflower,
Wreathed it with my pen, highlighted, closed
To itself – Romanticism stirred in me. I flew
Amongst the longing names of their dead
And far gone, their little precociousness,
Good-natured in their spirits, voices far-sung,
As they drifted upon such fantasies, swelled
Their tongues to it, martyred themselves on
The emblems they chested, muse, or soul –
Gone they were, their own roads, fellow feet
Born from the crowds they despised, derived
All their joy from the silent films, idealized
Their bloat. Eyes made service to their screen!

On the portico of their world, I stood. Beetles
Scurried with thin legs to their ends. I made
Myself scarce from the presence of myths, joined
The swarm, with one face pushed to the ground,
And sprouted eight limbs. Entered into the pitch,
And from the bustle, I ventured farther reach.

Title: Great Wheel of Myself I SIng

Water

The damsel that sings “running water, running” whilst
In my dream, and one old Symbolist come to wake
Me, their throng of movements wide and deep, through
The oceanic space, returning me to slumber. Though,
There is an arc of cold that rises after the moment
Slowly to sureness, cups were emptied meaning
Until the thing left was bare-stripped, swaying real
Till walking in circles cannot help, lend thyself to paradise.

Fire

Thy open windows swing of God, permutated through dream,
And the lust for thy symbol clinging seams, soothed in eyes
Till one spark, stone upon stone, derived itself from within
Ignited, my own scars alighting, burning me, forage
In the very act that becomes. O it becomes, becomes!
All formations of the night sky, constellated for-ever
Swelled in the pit of the stomach, gaseous burning frenzy,
Into the hovering angel, Seraphim of the flung flame,
That told of trees, grottoes, and the fruit men should know.

Wind

Towards the East, there is a temple standing bolted to ground,
Whereby monks orate their positions, the emptiness there
Upon which, in the aftermath of my ashen lip, scorched with words
Comes the sheer embrace of the never-never, lacked in enmity,
And aggression persists denying the sacred, anti-totems there
Coagulate to form remnants of noise, bellowed in fools forment
Towards antithetical miasmas, adrift in aporias that swim
In their furious apologia, towards life, the endless hurricane
Swiftly unfurls its empty bellows, belting fish-heads from the sky,
While the women in the market yawn, and count their empty hands.

Earth

Then, there is peace. Wrestling with the ground. Who knew it then,
That the apples were mountained here? Nor the orchard stone
Gave regard to my breath. All I could do was wait. Stare,
At the gardeners picking themselves in the fruits they wear,
To which some, bruised in the baking sun, came down the branches
Swelled with juice despite the flaws, merging a realm of their own,
Into soft hands that delighted. The future grew from here,
And there... the way one man stares at possibility, perishes himself
Into infinite seas of opportune, limned with swabs of the wave,
Towards which, the morning rises, horizons sweep, and dawn
Rotates itself in the gossamer of these eyes – that, blanketed
Me in adrift. I sought the mermaid’s crackle. And wrapped
Myself in the coral, shells, and the parts which knew no end.

pastebin.com/VrT8rU4e

The morning demimonde puts on
Her glowing autumn gown,
While all around a sighing comes
From stars she has turned down.

M-make sure y-you critique b-before you p-p-ost...

What did you like about it, user? I haven't written in a while.

The prose is actually good, but the narrative makes no sense. The first paragraph sounds like something a newcomer to Heaven would think to himself, not a 20 years veteran. The dialogue suffers this too, third paragraph makes it clear that the narrator and Petra are long-time pals, yet I'm supposed to believe that they never spoke about hunger and fucking?
Also, delet this:
>then like Socrates who spoke best before the hemlock, so does Petra speak best after a bottle or two of wine
its horrible. I dislike some other bits too:
>my hands rub together
You mean "I rub my hands together"?
>Petra muses
He doesn't

I'm confused, the characters feel no hunger yet can get drunk??

NO

Too many big words, almost impossible to read without a dictionary. Use more clear, easy to follow words.

New to this. No bully.

"There's always tomorrow". Fifteen years later and time was out.

Atlas didn't know why he even considered Samuel's suicide his own problem. The letter from whoever was brief. He also hadn't heard from him in a decade or so since their falling out in the military academy. Yet, sitting at his desk in his room in the guard house staring out into the home town where he and Samuel were raised, he wept. Maybe it was the children playing outside in the bright happy sunlight. Maybe he dread cleaning up the scattered unfinished, non-attempted letters addressed to Samuel. Every day it became harder to write after the falling out, but each day tomorrow seemed to be better. Maybe it took him back to a time when he and Samuel dreamed to go become heroes, slay dragons and save some princesses. Now his grandparents were dead and his parents on their way out and he was in a dead end guard job for some town that only trouble passed through. Maybe if Atlas wasn't such an idiot, he could've saved a life. His best friend's life.

Why did Samuel kill himself?

Hey man, thanks for the effort, I really appreciate this. Sorry about all the typos too, that was just ignorant of me.

I never knew I suffered such adjective diarrhea until you pointed it out. Gross. I'll try to fix this but it sure will take me some time. I fixed most of the things you found but felt like keeping that long sentence the .way it was.

Here's the next bit of it.

Liam went on toward the incongruous patch of gray before him. He gauged it to be maybe two hundred yards away but it was hard to tell with all that forest obscuring the view. As he moved on row upon row of trees fell back behind him and a deep black blotch appeared within the slab in front. By now Liam thought he knew what it was. Gradually, as he stumbled through the terrain with his eyes fixed on his target, the block became dimensional and he could make out the wall of rock that formed the pale gray backdrop. He saw that it curved to the left and adjusted his course so that he came out of the woods facing the structure head-on.
The cave rose from the ground like some obscene orifice, a giant, ruptured pustule on earth’s skin that caused in him both aversion and a daring eagerness. A limestone vault and underneath a black gaping maw perhaps eight feet high and twice as long. There was a deep-green strip of treeless, mossy soil that isolated the forest from the cave. Liam looked for a moment and then went slowly on towards the entrance. The scarce light that found its way inside was swallowed up swiftly by the gorge but he could make out some grotesque rock formations, stone corroded like a carious tooth. He went some steps inside and peered. At once a damp, stony coolness embraced him; the sound of his steps ran inside the pitch-dark cavern like something lightweight going down a slide.
“I ought to ’ve brought my goddam flashlight,” he told himself.

the only reason people r gonna bully you is cos you posted without critiquing

Add valuable critique or stfu.

People! This does not work! All you do is enforce shit-ass posts that try desperately to look as if the author has actually read anything. This does not help anyone, least of all the guy seeking feedback.

People who are willing, and, most importantly, able, to critique do so.

but i gave u the most valuable critique of all. look at all the posts above you that have no responses. how are these threads gonna sustain themselves if all anyone does is post their own shit? ive done two crits in this thread and no one has critiqued mine.

i think layman's crit still has some level of helpfulness in it, though only in broader strokes like 'this story isnt interesting', 'that character name is stupid', etc.

>though only in broader strokes like 'this story isnt interesting', 'that character name is stupid', etc.

that is not critique, that is stating one's opinion. Fuck this. What am I going to do with the information that some fucker who didn't want to comment on my piece firsthand does not think it is interesting? Not shit. There will be plenty people who don't like my stuff. I'm looking for those who do and are able to tell me what parts bothered them and why.

Don't know what the other guy's problem is

I don't know enough to critique

>I don't know enough to critique
Then you don't know enough to write.

fuck it. here u go. im pretty barebones in my writing so i might advocate more cuts than a lot of other readers

>Fifteen years later and time was out.
time was up?
>Atlas didn't know why he even considered Samuel's suicide his own problem.
cut 'even' (or, maybe, cut 'own' - i think they add the same meaning but im not so sure)
>The letter from whoever was brief.
can be initially misinterpreted as like: ' '. I think you could write 'The anonymous letter was brief' or 'The letter, from whoever, was brief' to avoid that
>He also hadn't heard from him in a decade or so since their falling out in the military academy.
should definitely be 'the decade'. This section is told exclusively from Atlas' perspective, so it's weird that he refers to 'the military academy' rather than the place's actual name. Like, when you think about your highschool, do mentally refer to it as 'the highschool', or by its name? i think it would sound best if u referred to it with whatever colloquialism they've developed for it within the academy

Next sentence is really nice. I think you can cut 'in his room' since you've already specified that it's 'his desk', so the reader will fill in the blank themselves.

>Maybe it was the children playing outside in the bright happy sunlight.
i dont like 'bright happy'. i would either think of something more original, or just write 'sunlight'
>Maybe he dread cleaning up the scattered unfinished, non-attempted letters addressed to Samuel.
'dreaded' obviously. also 'unattempted'. btw 'unfinished' kinda covers 'unattempted' so it's a bit reduntant. idk

>Every day it...
this sentence is based on a really good idea but it's appallingly written. try some completely different ways of writing it. i would at least rearrange the first clause, add some more commas, and use a different word instead of 'better'

> dreamed to go become heroes, slay dragons and save some princesses.
'dreamed of becoming heroes, slaying dragons, and saving some princesses'
or maybe:
'dreamed of heroism: slaying dragons and saving princesses'

>Now his grandparents were dead and his parents on their way out and he was in a dead end guard job for some town that only trouble passed through.
'a' instead of 'some'. also the 'trouble passed through' thing is cliche af

sentence after that: either cut 'maybe' or change 'could've' to 'would've'. 'maybe' and 'could' are adding the same meaning.

I will pick up a grammar book as I don't pick up these problems when reading aloud. Thanks user.

bump

Stop bumping this thread nobody is critiquing my story so let it die.

Your poem makes no sense in both description and story. Don't just take the style of Song of Myself if you're going to build on it but figure out why it works. Figure out a point to your poem and be coherent.

what do u want critiqued u passive-aggressive motherfucker

This

>The last time I saw you I had popped a xanax and washed it down with a beer just to be able to talk to you.
yours is acceptable but i think it's better like this:
The last time I saw you I had to pop a xanax and wash it down with a beer just to talk.

next two sentences are nice

>Things were said--it didn’t feel like anyone was saying them with any intent.
i think you can cut 'with any intent'
>The words were just pieces of dust kicked up accidentally--careless gestures.
definitely cut 'just' -- overuse of words like 'just', 'even', 'quite', and 'only' are *just* a really common pitfall cos it's *just* hard to use them incorrectly, so people often *just* stick 'em wherever. i think it's weird to say 'pieces' of dust. maybe 'dust particles', or even simply 'dust'
>I would keep coming back to lick your hand, sideways-glancing like an abused dog.
why wouldnt u write 'glancing sideways'?
>I had no good excuse for being this way!
i dont know if it's my 21st century myopia of ironic detachment, but the exclamation mark makes this seem sarcastic, or at least like an angry tweet written by a middle-aged woman. also, describing the excuse as 'good' seems a bit tautological, in this context at least. im not sure tho.
> I sometimes worked hard and cold and imagined I was from the North--that great expanse.
in this one paragraph this is your third sentence of the '[sentence]--[descriptive addendum]' structure. vary more.
>It embarrassed and thrilled me that I knew the median income.
isn't that kinda an exaggerated outcome for him knowing a random fact re. her? he is 'thrilled' by knowing the median income for the population of NJ? idk, maybe it makes more sense with the rest of the story.
>...to be successful--one parent a professor, the other a corporate something-or-other, but instead I loved you, and trusted you.
definitely should be:
...to be successful--one parent a professor, the other a corporate something-or-other--but instead I loved you, and trusted you.

rest is fine. might be nicer to write 'to you' instead of 'in your life'

this is my fourth crit in this thread so, because I'm an entitled conceited millenial masked in anonymity, im gonna bump mine: medium.com/@NonoEss/concessions-5c07cbc29048
if you dont want to crit it I'd appreciate basic opinions on it too. outside of school, ive never received feedback on my writing before. also, if this doesnt work im gonna send it to the girls in my book club. pls save me from that.

>also, if this doesnt work im gonna send it to the girls in my book club. pls save me from that.

looool

>She was looking up and around like a sunflower.
Make this stand out more. I like the idea of it.

I'm a little confused on the way you switch narrators, you know the "I, him" "I, her"

I'd give you critique of dialogue but I feel as though I can't offer a lot on that. It does somewhat read like a script though which is interesting

Third guy you critiqued here. I'll try, but again I don't know much. I don't much enjoy romances, but I think you could condense the dialogue and add in body language. I think you don't need the thought process at the beginning on how you're breaking the rules, I think it can come from the dialogue. I don't follow the I,her / I,him thing except that they're in a union through sex, but I don't think it's really necessary.

I felt mildly uncomfortable and I think the girls would as well, but fuck em.

>The last hours before the very first day of January. No, not that number, that thing before one. Yes, zero.
Huh? I mean, I get it, but I don't get the point. Might be okay that way, writing as I go.

>I put all of my weight against the backrest of the new leather chair my mom bought for me.
I would have liked it if the mom part was it's own sentence so that I could fully relax before getting the punchline.

>all these comments
I just get this feeling you're trying to cover bases. If the end joke is that all of the posters are the same person then you got me, but if not then there's a certain forcedness to it. A random sample of a website shouldn't be organized like a beer sampler.

>The aura of a crowd makes me incredibly uneasy, with the way their body heat mixes up together to form a mishmash of a signal saying “interact with me, please!”.
I feel like this line could be broken up too. If you just ended on "with the way their body heat mixes up together" I'd be asking "How?" and then move onto the next line for the answer. "up together" also sounds extraneous.

>Strangely enough, however, being with a bunch of strangers on the internet while constantly spouting whatever is in our minds could be oddly comforting.
"can be"? "seems"? Why that tense shift? I thought he was already doing all that.

>I sink lower into my leather chair and pick up a piece of paper next to my keyboard.
"grab" instead of pick up? I see a guy bending over to pick something up when I hear that phrase, and while that might just be me, I think most people would at least say it doesn't sound very slouched.

>This is the last piece of paper I’ll ever hold.
"It's" instead of "this is" would make it immediately clear I was getting more about the paper. "This is" could be talking about other things. I get that you have another sentence that starts similarly later, but I wouldn't have found it too repetitive. You could also fiddle with the other line if you wanted.

>The thread is moving faster.
Maybe I don't get this because I never autoupdate but it feels cuttable. The line after it does enough.

>People write more inane things.
If you'd said something like "people write the most inane things," it would have looked more clearly opinionated and I'd have seen the speaker squinting into the screen himself instead of just trying to imagine the thread on my own.

>I use the wheels of my chair to move myself to the drawer where the newspaper clippings and articles I printed about the event.
I get that my other comments have been pedantic and shit, but this part here is just bad. When I hear someone say "I use the wheels of my car to-" I'm gonna be seeing detached wheels. I'm seeing your character trying to pull some kind of MacGyver shit and then all of the sudden he's running over his fingers. I get that you gotta to show us that he's in a rolly chair but this is not the way to do it my dude.

1/X

>Hey, that’s not nice. Don’t you think we all should spread some cheer now that “it” is about to happen?
I don't feel like anyone would type "it" in quotations like in response to someone who did the """""""quotations""""""" meme. Feels overly egoless I guess. Something like that.

>comments
All of the dialogue feels overly convenient and ritualized. Try writing something like this using an actual thread as a sample. Especially with how Veeky Forums replies work, the timing all feels off. It sounds more like an actual conversation in real life where people take turns and stuff.

>How long have I been in this forum?
Don't people say "on"? "In this thread" sounds normal, but for some reason I want to say "on" this forum. It becomes more obvious if you say something like "I'm in Veeky Forums right now."

>Thread’s moving faster now, gaining a lot more traction.
I hated this the first time I read it and I still at least dislike it. "show don't tell" etc. I can kinda get an image of the thread scrolling across his eyes but it doesn't seem to mirror the dialogue and also has this hollywood-hackerman feel to it that I'm really not too sure about.

>New people are coming in, expressing their desires for death, some just saying whatever random shit that pops into their heads, most simply discussing what their lives have been.
Say this out loud. It's just not very pretty. Breaking it up might help, or you could just trim it down.

>that was lame… reported
I don't think anyone would use the "..." when you could just indent

>The thread moved on, but I was growing increasingly anxious.
Why "but"? I kinda get it, but it sounds like you're talking about two things increasing. Some rewording would help, anywhere really.

>The clock appeared to
just get rid of the appeared etc

>Perhaps this is
why present tense here? I get it the next paragraphs but it looked like a mistake at first. I'd at least restrict your paragraphs to one tense each here, but you might be able to make a better transition on your own.

>Christ, must be the event catching up to me.
Really, huh? You think so? This is a real "no shit dude," I'd just cut it.

A little soapy at the end. In general it was alright. I liked how the painting speculation and the thread just ran side by side at the end, suggesting the speaker wasn't looking at the screen anymore.

2/2

>accidentally pasted something into the name section
not on purpose but funny anyway I guess

...

Too pretentious.

Why is it so challenging to write clearly when confronted by complexity? What makes a writer choose vacuous or vacillating phrases where a practical statement would suffice?

This is great.
I like the origami theme.

It's not "pretentious," It's very warming and precise

crit for crit, anyone?

Yeah I liked this too. Not what I prefer to read but it's a nice take on a style I'm mostly unfamiliar with

What a retarded post

Explain to me the meaning of

I didn't like hearing the second and third "crane"

>Why is it so challenging to write clearly when confronted by complexity? What makes a writer choose vacuous or vacillating phrases where a practical statement would suffice?
Because they don't see the irony in their own posts kudos if that was the joke though.

Hey, I remember this. I'm the ramen noodle guy, I'll probably read this tomorrow or later tonight.