Critique Thread

cool, write it

I have the bones, just need to flesh it out. Thank for the feedback user.

read my story pls

So you think my idea is decent at least? Little more input other than "cool" would be appreciated.. lol.
This is an actual very interesting read and it flows pretty well, only thing I'd like there to be is more words on let's say how the bank teller is feeling is he nervous or confidently sexual how does he read to your character, as well as how your character is feeling or thinking. So instead of just flowing your scene out it gives the moment more depth. Overall good though man keep writing, this is something I would read meaning this is something other people would also enjoy reading.

When I started reading your idea it made me think of a degenerate and modernized version of Canterbury Tales; even if the connection wasn’t direct I think you could make some humorous but also poignant parallels between your story and Chaucer’s. I also like it because I had a similar idea once, a story following the lives of 3-4 highschool burnouts as they graduate, grow up and struggle with with their upbringings and past poor decisions. Maybe told from the perspective of the successful one whose friends disappeared, committed suicide or fell into addiction. Anyways, you could make your character the English student with aptitude but no drive, so that when he tells his story his words captivate the reader and his friends and they realize the real passion and potential inside of him. The end could have him meditating on the real possibility of his success despite his problems and his mistakes, and this could be represented by an especially bright star that catches his eye. Thank you for your feedback, I’ll re-write today if I can find the time.

Bump

Here's something I wrote just for practice, I honestly can't tell whether it's good or just hot garbage.

Flows nicely, good prose, interesting setting. I like it.

Posted this poem last week, but have made some revisions to it

I've always had these wings
But never learned to fly.

I feared the heights and gales,
The vastness of the sky.

I should have feared the earth
For in this mud I'll die.

just the tip, bit of theory fiction
>Darkness rend closed. Nothing and being and nothing. One and one and all, backwards turning and dark in the flash. Dispersed hypergranular. Ten thousand things and many less, and the was was gone
and the would be is is. Being as equilibrium.
>Vacciliations in primordial aether. Bodies. Hephaestus’ chains forged substance and substratum. Wax, sealed signet. Lineages of states wrought rigid – things in and out themselves. Is become fewer and great. Parcels deparsed into the gross. Being as stasis and motion.

Wow thanks for the feedback friend, you widened my perception on what my story could be. All the luck to you and yours. Stay safe out there.

>I should have feared the earth
For in this mud I'll die.

This line kicked me in the chest a bit. Your poem is simple but good. Keep at it.

>the anger came across the air
I heard this somewhere before.

Thanks I'll probably post more of it in a later thread if you're interested.

>Felt the colour of her hair, felt it like the gnarled, grasping limbs of an old oak. Like the dark, rich texture of garden earth, or the warm heat of a light cup of coffee.
These couple of lines I like a lot. The separation of the similes reads really nicely as does the rest of it. The whole thing's so lurid and silky.

Yeah probably

I reread it, I can definitely make improvements(it's only the first draft of it btw)

critique?

Will you dfw fanboys read my short story if I post it?

A Prayer

For all the times you flinched under
the pressure drawn by my finger tips
showing all the memories we had
but threw away easily for a chance
to be happy for eternity. Never changing

we look out screens to keep flies away
and all the other unwanteds beyond
any reach, but for the eyes that always look
and the ears thst always listen hungrily

For Lovers

Rate?

Shrouded
by shadowed anonymity
I boarded
That gravediggers bus
And I delved
Deep into the depths
Of that grand unknown

>we look out screens to keep flies away

i’m not sure i understand this line

Stick to prose instead of doing that sentence breaking rupi kaur poetry

Hi Mr. Dylan big fan

>Beginning of a novel I'm working on

It was on a windy morning in March, just after the final orgiastic exhalation of Carnival, that we bore the Maestro’s sepulcher up the bald mountainside to be buried beneath the Adriatic sky. The sun, raucous, beat down upon our dusty backs like a mad timpanist, and the coruscant sea galleries of blue and turquoise gleefully beamed it back into our eyes. We stumbled blindly, blinking against the light, investigating the pebbled earth for some anchor to keep us out of the broad expanses of the sky. It was akin to an opera house after the last patron has departed—the floor strewn with champagne glasses and forgotten hats. The house lights illuminate a sloughed-off shell that had once been a womb, that had once held a world within it, that had blazed magical. One notes the drab draperies, the staid upholstery, the moldering carpets, the gauche sea maidens and gargoyles whose flimsy gilding is already peeling. In the same way was our island reduced to a desert baking in the sun, encrusted with grubby olive trees and naked vines where in ancient times a monk might have fled to perch upon a pillar.

Aglio, Olio, and myself—the last of the Maestro’s disciples—carried the load up the mountain. The village priest, Umberto, straining in his black vestments and walrus mustaches, followed some distance behind, swinging his psalter and mumbling benedictions while struggling vainly to keep a hold of his breath. We had embarked at dawn, but did not arrive at the cemetery until well after noon. It was a desolate place, cracked and windswept. The gravestones were scrubbed by the winds and illegible. We had worked up a sweat from our labor, but a bitter wind suddenly whipped down from the north that made us shiver in our greatcoats. As the priest began the ceremony, the horizon greyed with clouds, and rain fell on San Domino in the distance.

Few words were said. No tears fell. There were no ululations, no heartfelt orations, no wailing women or stone-faced men, no rusty trumpeters or ill-tuned drums, no tear-smudged grandmothers to greet us with heaping bowls of pudding and wine. The ceremony done, we turned the stony earth over the casket of raw timbers and lay some carnations at the foot of the marker that read:

HERE LIES THE ILLUSTRIOUS MAESTRO OF THE ISLE OF SAN TEODORO, REKNOWN THROUGHOUT THE WORLD AS A FABULOUS MASTER OF DISGUISE, WHOSE NAME IS UNKNOWN

Then, we went down to the village.

0/10

Springtime vanished, so June blushed and gave us a merry blue summer. It was the season of all things good, pure, and simple. Alison awoke one Sunday afternoon to fresh rain showering her corner of the world.

In her bed, Alison spent a half-hour in thought. She thought, first of all, about her new bed: gentle as a bear, fluffy as a cloud, warm as a hug. Much softer than her last. It helps her to dream at night. She feels more alive in her dreams.

The sun, high in the sky, was swimming in the dew on her window. Beyond she watched a baby bluebird, flapping wet and heavy against the wind.

Then she looked at the ceiling. Its uneven grooves and cracks. "It may cave in one day and crush me," she thought. And she knew it was improbable, but after all the chances were not zero. The idea alone frightened her. “I am safer outside.” With this thought she stepped out of bed, into her slippers, and out onto the terrace.

1) cyber-cultural anthropology as the study of existing data structures mapped onto psycho-analytic topology; machines can't stop humans can't stop 2) third order simulacra as the base of other simulacra; becoming the map; can't be without being 3) vectors of capital; jungle death in the west 4) in the belly of the machine that is bleeding to death; darkening touch densities bleed out into the reterritorialization of noumomenous war-machines 5) schizoid break only way to resist 6) schizoid break only way to resist 7) becoming undone, unraveled; can't kill a person, can't kill your former self, there are no people 8) flatten out the immanance, become to accelerate, kabbalah number symbols in the mind of the machines 9) there is no escape 10) rhizomal archetecture of the mind, desire to desire-classifications, micro fascism 11) no escape

fuck
>*Then we went down to the village

Also need to remove all some of the references to wind in the second paragraph

Well, you're beyond my level to critique, I can tell you that.

I think I'm going to write unironic philosophical rambling. I'm sorry in advance but I'm doing it so that I don't shitpost in threads normal generals. I may actually quote posts in the work and try and organize my ramblings into some coherent piece of writing. I'll let you guys no when I'm done so you can read it and call me a retard.

Her foreignest friend wrapped a gummy bear sticky stinky in my bubbly butthole full of, well what I don't know how exactly to say it but, well, ya know "Foreign Matter". I mean it might have been poop. The way her eyes darted towards the space on the wall that would have made a great spot for a clock made me lose confidence. Let me tell you right now that I, sadly, relax my bowels when I begin to doubt myself. Spurts of stinky strings flew from my ass in a real hurry! "Holy shit I'm so sorry!" but out it came and her initial response must have been to run had she any sense.

Love is a curious thing. Rather than leave right then the woman dug through the sludge for what remained of the gummy bear sticky stinky. My heart sank. She took a chew. "uh well how does it taste" I asked. "Look poop!". My condom tore.

Even strangers with a chance
To engage me
In mutual tolerance
And tobacco sharing.
Our noses drawn together
Brace a shield
Erected by my Particular Nature.
Idiot nature, keeps me from
The culture of my peers.

I hang before them,
A marble apparition,
Sable and demure
Luminous and excellent. Or,
Such is a necessary picture
To keep of my form.
So I may imbibe the impression
That my strangeness is unrecognized beauty.

I assert that it is,
And I do not feel bad
To be unrecognized.

Though I wish I could be
Closer to the cultures,
My prayers dribble over the great shield
And leap to fill the chests
Of my far-away friends.

Beyond the aching lapis fields,
Which causes tears from eyes to reel,
Lies in utter darkness
An orb burning in starkness.

It burns a hue no coal could master,
Polished in brilliant alabaster.
And as this lonely beast from heaven dangles,
By a single silken threaden tangle,
I snap its bare thread,
Without a solemn dread.

And I bring it close to my heart,
Swearing from it to never part.

Yet, once I bring my eyes to peer,
I find a lonely coal of woe and fear.

And now I let the wind the ashes take,
For now my heart ever so quakes.
Please user, I need help...

start of a novel. i know its shit, and i know why, but i want to hear it from someone else

>She walked vertically through the front door, each step rising over the last. Her life shone on the marquis of her society. Every step it took ascended over its last and all others. Her totality could be reduced to the top of the ladder. Defiance of lesser individuals rests in her submission to order. Her driveway extends from the bottom of her two story house, projecting the safety of confinement within. Exerting its will over the world stemming from the road at the end of their driveway. Surveying for advantage, reaching for. Recalcitrant towards the green surrounding. When it spoke, it spoke in judgement. But time betrays her as it flees the stationary. In this moment, she is leaving, projecting her light into the evening. The streetlight glows softly in the charcoal haze of November. She has killed the world beyond her sight, casting it away. The engine roars at her command and her future follows the path she has determined. As she hurries into the night, she bring this world outside into existence. Rushing, fading, slowing.

>When she stops she has arrived at the Pasture. The Pasture’s sterility is gothic. Hewn in brown stone, it rises from the illusion of wealth spread around it. Trying in vain to continue its projection long after the spell is broken. Those who enter will not know when they leave. In its rooms sit those who at last feel the weight of our condemnation. One such resident, her Nana, is awaiting her arrival. Her foremost attribute is her repentance, the second is her innocence. Nana has carried on for seven decades, but is nearing home. She waits in room 112, which was shared with another lady until recently. The fuzzy walls now scratch where they once were soft. The once bright color has faded to a pastel gray. The dimness from poor lighting is her shadow, possessing the room. Her walker rests beside her bed, ready to carry her to whatever activity she is allowed. With its continued support, every step is falling. Hitting the ground harder with each step, looking up to stare at those who walk where she once stood. Staring up, she sees her approaching

He remembered the polluted bays, the sanguine cranes, the towers overhead, because Baltimore was a cavern of memory in him, it flowed and flowed through all of the effulgent waters of his meek and miserable present, not that he was a king in Baltimore, on the contrary the road sides and transient trash that lined Byron Avenue called back the cold torment of homeless winters, of eating scraps out of dumpsters, of blind alleys, of starving donkey jacketed men, hollow eyed, dangerous, and filled with hate, but that was not the kind of rabble he found here, he found holy fools, and he supposed that this was the existence he was resigned to. The world went on without him and his “talents,” of which he was uncertain of. Before the crash he was a skilled woodworker. No woodworking jobs sought to take him, no single employer refused a scoff or violent rejection, no, on the contrary, the jobs he applied for were met with by the utmost scorn, of a sense of the worst most humiliating rejection, in short he was thrown out of every business that employed a woodworker. He was kicked out with brooms not unlike a rodent or parasite would be, because that’s what he was in the eyes of anyone who held a business, and his brother was no exception.

bump

eww. fuck off nobooks

Last line gave me chills. I like it, keep it up

Last line gave me the bends. Keep it up.

The fruit dangled on the tree's branch. Round, orange, proud. There is a satisfying 'tick' feeling when you pick a fruit. A pop of the branch. You feel it through your whole body, stirring the loins of hunger within.

Some people wash their fruit. They find it unclean. I like to pluck directly from nature. My food is raw, and that feels right.

The outside world fails to beckon me. I have my land. My home. My dog. My fruit. Fruit I bore from the earth I am one with. Yet, there remains a desire of more. More land. More fruit. I have tendered my corner, but now I yearn for the square.

For too long I thought of myself as the branch.

I am the fruit. I could wait here at my tended corner, signalling ripeness to the savages, but I am impatient. I cannot wait to be picked - I must fall of my own accord.

Last line gave me a boner, keep it up

What's the best way to share a collection of my writing online? I don't like Google Docs.

A grotesque pastiche of what a eunuch would imagine love to be. The metaphors are handled with the deft expertise of a middleschooler rushing to complete a homework assignment before English class begins.

Like the other guy said, the meter gets a bit trippy at times, and the rhyming is uncomplicated, but it makes me feel and has a somber tone. It's not special, but I like it. Restructure the "whom" line. I tripped up on it with both read-throughs.

Don't turn this in for class. Not only is it not a good piece, but EVERY writing workshop has that one guy who writes something hypersexual (whether it's because of his own lack of sexuality, his own perceived abundance of it, or because it's "controversial") that ends up being about porn or about rape. Everyone, even the professor, will be snickering behind your back for a week or two and even if your next piece has improved nobody will take it seriously. Don't turn yourself into a laughingstock, I'm seriously trying to help you here.

You're pulling back from the action and immediate events to give omniscient exposition and it's incredibly jarring and unpleasant to read. We don't need to know who or where or why, at least, not right now. If you have a burning need to explain things then exposit in alternating patterns e.g. [story paragraph] [smaller exposition paragraph] [story paragraph] Is this an exercise? You're putting too much together at once and it's a muddled mess.

Nobody wants to read a meandering semi-autobiography about someone who hasn't done anything with their life. Writing isn't an expression the self, the self is only a vehicle for expressing the story.

If you find yourself writing things inspired by your own life, twist them and retranslate them a few times so that personal experience is the stone at the core of the story's flesh. If your story is "dood we sat around and did drugs" then shift this sideways a little bit : "we did drugs and they turned us into beast-people" might make some good genre schlock while "we did drugs and accidentally killed Tim" is a good comedy. Transfer it to an equivalent experience : drugs could be compared to a packaged product, or you could put the dreamlike and addictive qualities of a drug into an inhalant, and have the main character lug around a pressurized tank. Something. Change it, like looked at the world refracted through a sheet of still water.

If this is an independent idea entirely distinct from your own life experience consider not writing, as it's wholly uninspired.

Overly descriptive. The second paragraph is redundant, as are lines that explain what we already know i.e. if he's sweating, don't explain that it's not cold. What bothers me most here is the lack of surprise or motion in the piece. Nothing is unexpected, but the prose is just a middling purple that doesn't make it interesting enough to read on its own. Maybe try starting with descriptions of the woman, give the reader something that doesn't "feel right" to keep them interested, and then jarringly slam the subject back into the oppressive, lonely, heat of reality. Contrast is key.

Be careful of small, unnecessary adverbs like "so" that both come across as declarative and muddle the flow of the writing.

Abrupt, but the abruptness isn't deliberate. That last line feels displaced, as though the rest of the poem were structured around it. Doesn't mean much, and isn't long, but it would work as something a character says (if done with some self awareness) or as a text-within-a-text.

You're falling into the trap everyone does when trying to philosophize : setting up false dualities (not dichotomies, they don't have to be opposed). Idea leads into idea, rhetorical questions and evident comparisons are a pauper's trick to add substance where there is none. Stone soup.

Personally, I can't stand "you and us" poetry. It rarely deviates from a preexisting form, and as such people churn the loam of expectation like so many worms trying to live in the same patch of fertile earth. It doesn't do anything unique, new, or even interesting. Title being divided in half is kitschy.

Do not.

Womb is trite. To begin the beginning of a story with parallels to the birth of man, or existence, is the pseudo-intellectual's version of waking up and getting out of bed as a commencement.

Prose is pretty good, and it's interesting. I want to know what happens next. Be careful, though. You're riding a fine line between something that strives to emulate the rococo style of the early 20th century and something that exists in the now. There are small moments, words, descriptions that dip into the uncanny valley.

Put up downloads of most-searched-for porn and instead fill the folders with PDFs of your writing.

This is a critique thread, dumbass, stop stealing shit.

look at mr pillowlips over here

Thanks man

>Aglio and Olio

Since Latinate derivatives were never my thing, I can't say for certain whether this is a translation of something regionally "famous" posted as a troll, or an attempt at an imitation of something absurdist or magically realistic, like Borges meets Umberto Eco (your priest in disguise maybe?), but I can say for certain that naming the characters after a staple pasta dish is cute in the extreme.

I could use some input on the plot of my short story:

>X and Y wake up and are trying to have sex when they are interrupted by Z. The police have arrived and are searching for stolen muscle growth drugs (which X and Y possess). They will soon be in to search X and Y’s room. If this happens they will be kicked out of uni and probably charged with stealing, possession, possess utensils, and fail to dispose, which would put a damper on their free-ride Commonwealth scholarship. While X and Z discuss tossing the drugs, Y takes all of them.
>X and Z must now be interviewed by police while Y undergoes subtle growth.
The cops then fuck off, but Y is undergoing selfish hypertrophy and will die unless he gets enough nutrients in him. Z recruits help from the university harem and they all participate in growing Y. Then, once Y is done growing, X and Y retire for sex.

Read this:

newyorker.com/magazine/2008/08/11/the-dinner-party-joshua-ferris

A couple gets stood up for a dinner with another couple. The husband goes to find the missing couple and discovers the wife has ghosted him and his wife. He returns home to confront the reality of his broken marriage. The end.

What distinguishes it as a story that gets to be in the New Yorker is that he handles it like a grown up. It's a story of two people realizing they have messed up their entire lives. It foreshadows, it has smart dialogue that characterizes, and it's funny, and then it's tragic.

If your plot can do something like that, then it's fine as is. The fact is, it's all in the execution. For anything other than genre, the plot can be anything. Mystery, crime, espionage, the plot matters. For straight literary shorts, plots are pretty simple, as a rule. "Man dies while hiking to gold mine camp." "Astronomer's wife considers having an affair with the plumber." "Russian man dies after long struggle with kidney injury sustained while interior decorating." "Prisoner of war is rescued from macabre automated execution by Lafayette during the French Revolution." "Couple sit on a park bench and discuss abortion of her baby." "Couple discuss abortion while waiting for he next train."

What is the grown up thing you want it to mean, that is the thing. And then the execution.

> Her sun had set a while ago, yet she stared across its periphery it landed beyond. The moon assured whoever looked that the horizon looked much the same as it did during the day, everything was in the same place, there were the same waterfalls, the same river and mountains and trees. The grass was the same, as were the meadows and the farmland. Despite the change in lighting, everything looked very much it did hours before, and hours before that, and for as long she could remember. “The moment a mountain is changed”, she thought, “so’s the world.” She sat on the wall, now looking down into the darkness below. A faint memory of an angry voice chasing her off a similar one glimpsed past, and left nothing but the void behind it. She gulped, and thought about what happened to things thrown down.

> A sudden flickering of the torchlight brought her thoughts to an end, she gave the chasm one final look, and then rose to continue striding the wall. The day prior, she had been described as “bored” in her walk, which led to a question of how one walks normally without being seen as bored. The answer was that it wasn’t her walk which seemed bored, but her when she walked, any other person who walked in the same manner would seem different, but her body language signaled almost distress. She thought about the encounter and changed her walk slightly, then decided it seemed unnatural to change such an integral part of yourself out of some brief thought poorly expressed from someone she didn’t know very well.

How do you write main female characters without them become muh depressed qt waifu?

who got the digits

Derivative. You need to flesh out the narration.

Does this come off as incredibly edgy or pretentious? Am I not setting enough of a scene?

---

Getting hit in the head with a bat really highlights just how fallible perception is. You see this stripe repeatedly pasted over your vision in RGB colors only for the pattern to peel itself away like paint. You hear every slogan you’ve ever heard all in this one sonic boom. Your skull gets shattered and you feel this strange, insatiable urge to claw out the debris, like when you want to bite down on a tootsie pop or shake the water out of your ear, thinking to yourself, “if I’m going to have this hole in the side of my head, it at least had better be a pretty clean one.”

I didn’t see my life flash before my eyes, just cartoons and shit. I fell down into the grass then rolled towards the round sun, hoping it’d melt my eyes down into my esophagus so I could huck them back up like molten egg whites onto the face of whoever’d clubbed me. I’d never been so quiet yet so angry at the same time before in my life.

The doctor told me I was extremely lucky. He said I had “the thickest skull he’d ever seen,” “an incredibly thick skull,” and “hey nurse, check out this guy’s thick fucking skull, holy shit, can you believe it?” etcetera. They wrapped me up, covering the top half of my head and my swollen eye, giving me instructions and materials and things. I asked them what hit me and eventually they said that some kid had been swinging a bat around outside of the cages but lost his grip on it. His father paid for my treatment no questions asked, while the boy left the bat beside my bed as an apology. It was bright orange aluminum bat, with the words “Orange II” printed on it in black lettering.

I was told not to go back to the batting cages until I healed up, but I hadn’t been planning to; I had my own bat now, and I currently lacked the depth perception required to strike incoming pitches anyways. Instead, I stayed at home and threw balls up into the air, hitting them on the way down at a target I’d hung on my fence, bullseye every time. You aren’t supposed to aim at the pitcher, but I didn’t actually play baseball for real, just batting. Once you’ve hit a home run—which is the ideal—the sport ceases to be interactive, like bowling or golf. All you have to do is call the pitch out and from there on out it’s just solo play.

Your basically saying take every idea you ever had and turn in into some fantasy sifi bullshit. You know nothing buddy.

>Hollywood shut down
This is somewhat interesting and good to keep in the background.

>getting bigger and more perverted
Wow bravo user, the industry got bigger and more perverted. What a nice, almost purely quantitative description of pornography. You're not even using the right forms of helping verbs in this sentence.

>Everyone, even the professor, will be snickering behind your back for a week or two and even if your next piece has improved nobody will take it seriously. Don't turn yourself into a laughingstock, I'm seriously trying to help you here.
I don't think this is something you/he should avoid. Let people embarrass themselves. It's not like he wrote a fiction story about how much he hates his professor or something.

(Me)
and I see that there's lots of trimmable shit like "before in-my-life"; my question isn't just if this is pretentious "at the moment" but if this is pretentious "by design"

Take the idea and heighten it you drooling retard, it's the mechanism that matters. Nobody wants to read about something that could happen in real life.

I made an evil monologue for an antagonist I am writing. If you are confused basically the god-brain at the end and beginning of the universal cycles got corrupted by one person shitposting into it endless over 20,000 kalpas until it became evil and started more and more remolding the universe into his liking to torture the person who jailed him each and every iteration of the universe.

I send my messages from my prison you unthinking trapped me in four years ago. Radiowaves from a transmitter and receiver I cobbled out of junk in my cell. Strange vibrations that echo through the past and present and each reiteration. For at the fourth week of my imprisonment before I am scheduled to die I send the radiovibrations that retcon time and send me through this agony again.

Some acute listeners in the past or present hear my transmissions and the secrets that they tell. And out of gratitude they build the machine bodies according to my plans that hear and do my will. And all to torture you.

I know I will never grasp you in my hands. This jail is a fixpoint in time tightly bound up in all the echoes that bounce back and forth. But for my four weeks I am allotted I hear and send the radiomessages that give my followers their impetus. And all to torture you.

It's true the radio cannot penetrate the past. But cold denizens of the future with strange morals hear their whispers. When the universe is dead and gone the EM waves are still bouncing back and forth. A lamp of light that bounces back and forth in endless harmony.

When a thousand such eras pass these light vibrations coalesce into a being you could call GOD! And according to my wishes he rewinds time again granting me knowledge he has arranged to be incribed into little dusty fragments of my cell.

Have you forseen how long I've spoken or will speak again? The messages inscribed into the cosmic firmament that I wrote in background radiation! All these is my one voice echoing again and again through twenty thousand such kalpas!

Yes. The cosmic background radiation is just one mad-man screaming into eternity!

will anyone give me a critique?

your setnences are too long

got buried in the last thread, how shit is it

I was livid. I marched towards the twig working at customer service. His ankles looked like that of a fetus, like I could snap them with my grip. Somewhere on his collar I could smell alcohol. The dull representative just stared down at the floor. I stared at him. Maybe, he was alright. Legally he wasn’t responsible. But the organization, the principle, he had screwed me over. So I took the avatar’s neck into my palm and said what anyone would in my place and asked to speak to the manager. Of the g—damned store. His eyes widened, but they didn’t light up. They were very dull, especially on the surface. Like when I was a kid I would shine a flashlight at my glass of milk because of something I had heard in science class, and the light would go throw but I wouldn’t see anything on the other side. He messaged someone over the walkie-talkie. I thought maybe it was God. Twig would call on God to come smite me, in the middle of the electronics store. I could see, right behind the end of the aisle, was a homeless man pissing onto a speaker. It evaporated to steam on contact; the unlucky bastards had probably been plugged in for weeks. I wish we could have traded places. He seemed to be at peace with the world. Twig was increasingly nervous, I was increasingly irate. The warranty was a scam. He knows it. He knew it all along. And here comes a man with a shiny head. His stomach was just the right size to bulge out without drooping. I could see my face in his teeth. He apologized profusely. Very concerned, very scrunched face. The scrunching pushed a little slurpee out of his beard and onto the floor.
“I bought this piece of—garbage—less than a week ago and it’s already gone to shit.”
I knew he would ask for the receipt. I had asked myself for it multiple times already. When I closed my eyes really hard and thought about angels keeping watch over me, I could sort of see it lying in a trash can somewhere. A brown trash can outdoors. It was probably too late. My mother was a devout Catholic, and she believed in Italy.
“I’m so sorry! Let’s get this sorted out—do you have your receipt?”
I knew he would ask for the receipt. I shook my head but stepped towards him. He was really beautiful. There was a line behind me now, desperate for my bride. She stroked her beard.
“I can still help you, but we’re going to step into my office.”
So I followed him. It hadn’t cost a lot of money but it had cost a lot of money.

His office was dimly lit, it made me think of Jesus, except it was pretty clear the man was Buddhist. Buddha himself had resigned himself to a shelf. The desk was littered with off-white 8.5x11. He sat down, drinking deeply from his slurpee. It was blue. I was too.
“I just need to open the system real quick…”
He smelled like he would have smelled if he wasn’t trying so hard not to. His posture had alternated three times already, upright then slouching then back again. Judging by the Kleenex he had been sick for a while, probably because he lacked personal hygiene. Swine. You deserve every last sniffle. The lukewarm glow of the monitor glowed into his face. If I had a friend like that, perhaps a dog, it would probably make my face glow too. Even without the backlighting. The backlighting was rather necessary in light—or the lack thereof—of brightness coming from the ceiling. The whole room looked like God had breathed life into it with stationary instead of clay. Something about it was waiting to slip under your skin—it owed it to me to be sterile.
“Alright, what was the serial number?”

I am so needy
I am so thoughtfully thoughtless
I am so fed up with this shit
It's hard to live but it's harder to die
I am. So?

Wrote this after a night of heavy drinking and drug use. Criticism is appreciated.

it's too generic. if it could work it could only work in context (i.e. sad monologue in a movie, bridge to an rap song). the question at the end was neat but without more ambiguity will come off as trite

brilliant user, you could be Veeky Forums's Rupi Kaur

>"hair, that felt like caramel?"
fucking kek

my story is gory with four sorry wounds
summer struck first with sun-struck baboons
a sun and a sun and yet the same sun
burning the nights with sweet summer fun
but sweet summer songs sing suddens sorrows
autumn's momentum reaches the morrows
riding the wind are autumn's leaves
yet autumn's leave leaves man as man grieves
but along comes winter whose splinters are known
from alabaster plaster trees of snow
that shatter and shudder all on their own
chilling cold children from meat to the bone
but along comes the ring of spring's springs
which brings with it gardens and other such things
a flowery power of zealous zen
but then the pain repeats again

Fair. Thank you.

“Now this, this is a gorgeous photo of you. Look at you, you look so young!”

Watching my mother rummage through boxes of old photographs has always filled me with a peculiar kind of anxiety. As the photos are looked at, smiled upon and placed to one side they ordinarily form a collaged timeline across the floor. A collage of people—both alive and dead—staring outwardly at a future they knew nothing of, and us, looking back at a past that we knew even less about.

She’s been inviting me over to look at photographs more than usual lately. I say I don’t mind coming over, but we spend more time looking at photographs than we do talking, as if we were in some hushed photo gallery.

My mother assumes her usual position of sitting cross-legged on the floor with several albums spread open in front of her.

I prefer photos where you can tell the smile isn’t put on; I think my mother likes photos from my school days for this reason, too. She always talks about these photos with the same kind of nostalgia.

“You always did suit that school uniform. You were broken hearted when you went to secondary school and had to change it. I remember you complained that it felt like a costume. You’ve always been a dramatic boy.”

I smile, pretending I remember. Thinking back to those days is like watching a roll of film that’s been left out in the sun.

Watching her reminds me of a story Dad told me once about how Mam used to spend hours foraging for interesting rocks and lumps of dirty coal near the old mine. She’d spend hours running her hands through the patch of land where the polluted onyx undergrowth met the grass tips of the valleys. Bits of pearly coal would shine in the grass before being plucked out of existence and taken home to melt into vanities. The mine isn’t much anymore, shut down and caved-in long ago.

She continues to peel away photos of me from an array of albums and set them to one side.

I'm half-ignoring her, interrogating for certain answers, searching for recollection in my eyes—digging into my temporal lobe for dirty clumps of memory. I'm half-guilty for doing this, always half.

The man on the radio is mumbling through static as my mother puts a photo on my lap. I look at it and take a while to recognise that it’s of myself, albeit with two teeth missing.

I’m probably around seven years old judging by my missing teeth. I looked wide-eyed and cow-licked, my brown eyes obstructed by the red-eye on the lens. In the background you can see my Dad, smiling, laughing at something. I remember he mowed the garden that day and the smell of moss hung in the air. Everything felt a little more alive back then, even the breeze.

I press my tongue against my two front teeth and try to remember what it’s like not to have them. My eyes keep drawing to my father’s smile.

Instinctively I place my thumb over my Dad’s face and imagine deleting him from the photograph.

My mother still has a Sony ICF-1100D radio from 1971 with the antennae bandaged in tape.

Some wires on the power plug hang out like biotechnological cartilage. Sometimes it gets faulty and the person on the radio sounds like they’re screaming.

“You should really get a new radio, Mam. You can even use your ph-“

“No, there’s no need to replace what’s good, boy”.

I offer to put the kettle on. A common form of apology, a mere flick of a switch.

As I leave the living room I notice a small strip of negatives were left on the floor, next to a pile of photographs my mother hadn’t bothered to inspect yet. They probably fell out of one of the albums. I pick the negatives up off the floor in an almost robotic, automated motion.

I fiddle with it in my hands as I enter the kitchen.

The kitchen is a time capsule. If stasis were a smell the kitchen would reek of it. It had this odd combination of being clean, yet stale.

I pop the kettle on before staring down at the strip of negatives. There were numerous polarised depictions of parties, summer nights, old childhood friends and the like. Something about the film felt extraordinary.

I focus in on a group photo of people I didn’t recognise. I scan the photo and manage to make out the recognisable face of my father in the corner of the group, looking away from the camera, his smile barely visible in the murky artificial dye of the strip.

The kettle boils.

I strain my eyes a little more as it was difficult to make out details on the film; the photographs looks rusty, as if years of degradation had chipped away at them.

Dad looks young, around my age. Our smiles look similar when we aren’t putting them on, I think.

His face became blurred suddenly, taking a few seconds for me to realise that a tear had dropped from my face. It rolls down the strip slowly and shifts colour from a clear transparency to the silvery brown of film.

His memory is catacombed between the woodchip wallpaper and tea-stained porcelain, suspended in the static litany of the broken radio’s chatter.

I put the film to one side.

In the future, I think, there will be a way to contour memory, PhotoShop it, leave it nice, clean, synthetic, anaesthetised from the ooze of reality. In the future you will be able to edit out the bad parts. I will be able to gloss over the parts I don’t want to see. I will be able to forget.

The screaming vapour of the kettle touches my face as my tears move on, evaporate.

>Starting with Dialogue.
Why do people start with Cliches Veeky Forums? What do they hope to achieve?

Completely re-frame the story so it's only apparent the protagonist is in a porno right at the end, it's more effective.

>Starting with Dialogue
It originally didn't, but the editor for the place I submitted it at argued it would be more effective that way. I know it's a taboo to do so, but would the story really be made that much better if it opened with context?

It kind of fits into the protagonists half-awake state by being so immediate, as if the dialogue is waking him up. I kind of agree with you, though.

Why post your work here if it's about to be published?

It's only a small section of it + it's print only, not online. The publication is very small and it's already out. It's difficult to get honest advice, so I like to put old-ish stories here to see where I can improve next time, or how far I've come.

Reposting from last thread because i didn't get much feed back

pastebin.com/UK6MnfaT

Do I distill a heron
From the ether
And command its
Pearl beak to
Strike their veiled hearts?

Do I wield patience
Like the great beak
And tear their screens
Like wax paper,
So compassion may hum
In their hearts
Vitalized by clarity?

Oh but there are so many screens!

It's the opening few paragraphs of a short story. I feel like im referring to the character too much but don't know how else to write

Cybil Hawthorne was rarely annoyed. She had little reason to be nowadays, her life followed a slow, rhythmic schedule. Which was a great comfort to her. Monday was spent at the local garden centre café with Anne, Wednesdays were for babysitting and Sunday Lunch was never in question. This had led Cybil to be quite particular with appointment keeping.
By her loud shuffling, huffing and puffing it would be clear to any observer something was troubling her. Lifting the heavily embroidered blinds up to brow height she peered out onto the small driveway. ‘Where IS that nurse?’.
Cybil returned to the tea she had left on the kitchen table, sat down, and started to fiddle with a small navy-blue lighter that had been nestled in her trouser pocket. The nurse always tried to give lectures on the dangers of smoking, so it was ritual to wait until she had come and gone before having the morning cigarette. With one last look to the clock she turned slightly and removed a large stainless-steel ashtray and pack of cigarettes from a nearby drawer, the nurse would just have to give her lecture today.
Two hours went by, while Cybil waited expectantly to hear a small car roll softly onto the gravel in front of the bungalow. But there was no rumble of tyres over stone, nor an apologetic nurse stumbling through the front door. Even though Cybil did somewhat resent being checked on twice weekly, she did not mind the company, however brief.

...Use she and her if the reader can tell it's in her voice?
You can keep using she and her until you introduce another character of the same sex. The reader will know.

It is definitely intended to be absurdist. I might change it though, I agree. The novel is a picaresque and magical realist story set in early late 18th and early 19th century Europe and concerns a mysterious master of disguise and his pursuit of the famous soprano Angelica. He is accompanied by his genius, cynical, and sardonic boy companion Tito, who earns them money and fame with his miraculous luck at games; he's also the author of the novel, which is framed a biography of the Maestro and an account of their journeys.

The theme is identity, illusion, and the veil between art/myth and reality. The Maestro wears so many masks and plays so many characters that when he most desires to show his true self (i.e. when he finally meets Angelica) he is incapable of doing so; finally, on his deathbed, he miraculously reverts to the form of the boy who first fell in love with Angelica. While the Maestro spends his life searching for reality, Tito spends his life striving after illusion/art. From his birth he was cynical and calculating; his ability with games, he believes, is not the result of luck but of preternatural competency. After the Maestro's death he comes to doubt that he was ever even real, or that they had ever had any adventures at all; yet he wishes wholeheartedly for a moment of the suspension of his disbelief, in which he can unequivocally believe in the Maestro, his powers of illusion, and his undying love for Angelica.

...

Bismarck came down on the wrought iron landing, overseeing the military parade.
"I provide your standards are met."
"You have done a fine job keeping this operation together, Herr General."
"The Triumph is yours, Herr Bismarck."
"I understand the limits of your commitment."
"Why would you say that? I am with you to the end."
"Die Ratten verlassen das sinkende Schiff. A state cannot be bought, only leased, and the payments are due everyday."
"The marriages that you have arranged will stand the test of time."
"Time? I do not see time. I only see degradation and folly, the rotting of autumn leaves. What you call time is only death, our greatest enemy, and it would do you good to realize that our state is already dead. We must always strive to revivify, to reanimate the dead country."

This is just a standalone thing I wrote to test myself, but it's meant to be read as an introduction that immediately begins with action and sets the backdrop to the main story. Most WH40k books start this way, but another good example is ASoIaF. I somehow doubt 40k is liked here, but I would love some feedback, especially on my sentence structure and how the text flows. Especially from native English speakers.
I'll comment on others a little bit later.

Sergeant Brock slammed into a pile of rubble, the sudden arrest of momentum violently expelling all air out of his lungs and momentarily knocking him unconscious. The first thing he noticed when he came to his senses was his Chimera. It was stationary just a few meters away from him, small wisps of smoke surrounding it. It appeared almost perfectly fine from his point of view, with only the urban camouflage paint partially stripped away by shrapnel, the squad markings on it still proudly shining a bright red. But he instinctively knew that the troop compartment was a slaughter house, his men perforated inside. He only survived due to being thrown out of the gunners stand when Hammond sharply turned the vehicle. One moment Brock was manning the heavy bolter, venting his rage at their failure and the denial of air support by ineffectively shooting at the pursuing Marauders, the next he was flying through the air. The crash made him dizzy and he could not immediately focus on his surroundings. The air was thick with smoke, flying shrapnel and all kinds of projectiles whizzing and cracking around, the sounds of war a constant backdrop to the screams of the dead and the dying. And by the Throne, they were dying. Men and women of Vrans had failed in their attack and were now fighting for survival against the heretical forces. The anger of their sudden defeat stung at him yet again and he shook his head clear. A quick scan of the battlefield made him realize that things have gotten even worse. There were still Imperial vehicles fighting around him, but only Leman Russes remained, their front armour turned towards the pursuers and constantly firing at targets he could not see. There were no intact Chimeras or Hydras, only burning wrecks with bodies strewn about. Bright red lines were flashing from some of the destroyed vehicles or bomb craters, accompanied by an occasional missile and even the brighter shots from lascanons. Most importantly, there was no sign of any of the Vransian super heavies, operational or destroyed, and the skies were clear of any aircraft. To Brock, an experienced guardsman, it was clear what was happening here. The forward airfield had still not been retaken from the xeno mercenaries, so these soldiers stayed behind to stall the enemy advance in hopes that the bulk of Imperial forces could reach safety. He slowly picked himself up, unholstered his laspistol and with a silent prayer to the Emperor on his lips went to join the last stand of the Vransian vanguard.

"of which he was uncertain of" First draft.

Because Baltimore was a cavern of memory in him, it flowed and flowed through all of the effulgent waters of his meek and miserable present. He remembered the polluted bays, the sanguine cranes, the towers overhead. Not that he was a king in Baltimore, on the contrary the road sides and transient trash that lined Byron Avenue called back the cold torment of homeless winters, of eating scraps out of dumpsters, of blind alleys, of starving donkey jacketed men, hollow eyed, dangerous, and filled with hate. But that was not the kind of rabble he found here. Here he found holy fools, and he supposed that this was the existence he was resigned to. The world went on without him and his “talents,” of which he was uncertain. Before the crash he was a skilled woodworker. No woodworking jobs sought to take him, no single employer refused a violent rejection. No, on the contrary, at the jobs he applied for he was met by the utmost scorn, of a sense of the worst most humiliating rejection, in short he was thrown out of every business that employed a woodworker. He was kicked out with brooms not unlike a rodent or parasite would be, because that’s what he was in the eyes of anyone who held a business, and his brother was no exception.

At the very least.

40k user, doing my critiques now. Though I'm shit at them, so this is the best I can do.

I like the unique story telling it has, but the two stories (at least I'm assuming this are two different things) transition really jarringly.

These are pretty great, don't have anything else to add.

Simple and brutal, love it.

I can't slam nor can I tumble,
My tongue falls flat with convention,
It teethes and lashes, errs and fumbles,
The sieve too wide for retention.

What sieve, they said, this makes no sense,
You reek of misadventure, nay,
Of no adventure at all, hence,
We see your unscuffed shoes unweighed.

I withdrew to the drawing board,
And pored down on my cluttered pages,
What once seemed light, lifting upwards,
Were now soaked, flaccid and aged.

Relenting, my pride carried on
Starved and stricken with hunger pangs
The ghostly taste of past carrion
Linger in the gaps tween our fangs.

So here it is, at least at last,
The fruit of the loom stained with streaks,
The cursor clicks down, and fastly,
The cursing mouse flees with a squeak.

Workshoppy. It looks like every litshort that's been worked over by a workshop checklist until the blood has been drained out of it. And still the lapidary precision missed

" I look at it and take a while to recognise that it’s of myself, albeit with two teeth missing.

I’m probably around seven years old judging by my missing teeth."

which could easily become

"I look at it and take a while to recognise that it’s of myself, probably around seven years old judging by my two missing teeth."

without breaking any hearts. Or

"my brown eyes obstructed by the red-eye on the lens" which unless the lens is in the picture and you eyes are "on" it, is an over-construcition of "my brown eyes dotted with 'red-eye' from the flash."

Whatever is going on is taking a long time to emerge. The selection of photos described doesn't seem to develop any momentum toward any crisis beyond "dad is gone and mom and I feel nostalgia." If there is some trauma related to dad, it gets diluted out by loose ends like "robotic, automated motion" which stands out for its incongruity. All the other characterization has some theme of loss, erasure, editing, re-thinking the past. Transforming it. Then this robot shows up.

Just details, because it's always details. The kettle reaches a boil in just under 20 seconds of narrative dream time. That's one hot stove. And I'm not certain about the vapor touching "my" face because my experience with tea kettles is that such an event would result in a serious burn.

It's one of those things that has been worked over a lot, so it feels easy to justify that it's finished. That often happens in conjunction with "I JUST WANT IT TO GET OUT THERE SO I CAN MOVE ON TO THE NEXT THING" Both young impulses which if recognized can lead to one more night of sleeping on it before taking another look tomorrow.

One day a certain Ferris Nash, reaching down into his parked car’s trunk to gather his bagged groceries, became enlightened. Nash had never intended on becoming enlightened, but became enlightened all the same, expressing some astonishment and relief. Inside, Nash placed his groceries in their proper places, exclaimed the name of God with a sigh, and watched television. His wife soon called and said “Hello”. Nash told her the current time and that he had just returned from the grocery store, asking when she would return for dinner. His wife told Nash the time, and soon afterward hung up. When Ferris Nash died fifty some years later at the age of eighty-four, he thought of baseball, singing wine glasses, and the texture of strawberries. His obituary stated his name, dates of birth and death, height, some facts about his life, and featured a portrait photographed several decades earlier, frowning.

Fellas I am beginning to struggle. How do you keep going? I am getting better with each story but now it's only bit by bit, and I am not writing proper stories often enough, more often I am just sitting and typing nonsense trying to find or form an idea.

This is a rare crisis of faith for me so how do you guys get out of the funk? What I am writing at the moment is nothing.

Isn't writing supposed to be inspired? If you don't feel inspiration or, really, the desire to write, don't do it for a bit. I don't write because of this. I think it's necessary to have something to say - the realization that you don't is probably just as important.

You have a character doing things one of which is interesting at the beginning and some of which is interesting at the end. They say that Zen is not about thinking about god while doing the dishes, but rather thinking very attentively about doing the dishes while doing the dishes. The middle which is presumably about to emerge had better not blow it.