Critique thread

In other words, OP is a shit writer.

It's English for 'you are bad at writing'.

All jk-ing aside, it's bad. Like face scrunching bad, like spoiled middle schooler bad, like it could be deliciously subtle trolling if it wasn't for the fucking handpicked font.

The way you describe things is entirely u original and uninteresting. The garbage between the quotation marks is genuinely eye-roll inducing. 'Night prior'? I (yes, me) don't even talk like that in my most douchey moments. The idea that you wrote it makes me shudder. Yeah I know it's not part of the dialogue.

You're still at the edge—sorry—the age where yr writing about your relationship to ciggies. Mental age, I mean.

But ok, fine, what's important is that you're working on the craft, right?

This put me in a bad mood. The kind of mood where you really get an idea of the people out there in the whorl.

Once upon a time in a clichéd, cringe-worthy writing sample, a neckbeard could not construct a proper sentence to save his life. The mechanical wind howled through the basement cave and blew Dorito snack bags carelessly off his battlestation. Cheesy crumbs cascaded into his toes as he sat down on his shit-streaked memory foam ass cushion. This place is where mommy's money comes to die. As his PC booted up, he let out a single 'kek' and spat into his fapping hand. Today was going to be another day in paradise. He was on Veeky Forums shitposting 10 minutes later. Here, people like him were the majority. Home.

You gotta go and get angry at all of my honesty
You know I try but I don't do too well with apologies
I hope I don't run out of time, could someone call a referee?
Cause I just need one more shot at forgiveness
I know you know that I made those mistakes maybe once or twice
By once or twice I mean maybe a couple a hundred times
So let me, oh let me redeem, oh redeem, oh myself tonight
Cause I just need one more shot at second chances

Yeah, is it too late now to say sorry?
Cause I'm missing more than just your body
Is it too late now to say sorry?
Yeah I know that I let you down
Is it too late to say I'm sorry now?

I'm sorry, yeah
Sorry, yeah
Sorry
Yeah I know that I let you down
Is it too late to say sorry now?

I'll take every single piece of the blame if you want me to
But you know that there is no innocent one in this game for two
I'll go, I'll go and then you go, you go out and spill the truth
Can we both say the words and forget this?

Is it too late now to say sorry?
Cause I'm missing more than just your body
Is it too late now to say sorry?
Yeah I know that I let you down
Is it too late to say I'm sorry now?

I'm not just trying to get you back on me
Cause I'm missing more than just your body
Is it too late now to say sorry?
Yeah I know that I let you down
Is it too late to say sorry now?

I'm sorry, yeah
Sorry, oh
Sorry
Yeah I know that I let you down
Is it too late to say sorry now?
I'm sorry, yeah
Sorry, oh
Sorry
Yeah I know that I let you down
Is it too late to say sorry now?

When they found the sensor it was broken, as anticipated, or rather mangled with great hands.
A perimeter established and the recruits scattered to their duties - for many it had been their first true steps outside the village, but for all it was their first breaths unweighted by stagnant heat and must, for the shuttle was old and only built for half their number. They poured out cracked and sweating like rotten eggs on the disembark

In the flurry of the toil many of the boys found themselves with rust fever, having scraped arms or ankles on loose rubble. There was only one doctor who was short on time, supplies and patience. His prescription: the two yellow pills and a half-glass of water, even less if they were able. No one died, and they were too tired to complain, but also too tired to work.

Following this setback, the Captain himself took to drilling the boys in proper fielding attire with irregular emphasis. In the end all of the boots, trousers, helmets and gloves were fitted to numbness and a shine that rivaled the greatest source of their half-seen light. Any recruit found below standard was beaten into shuddering blue.

After three days all lessons were learned, the sick were healed and found their strength. All was right, and so the long wait began.
Eh

What?

This is all mechanical exposition. You burned through probably like ten pages of story in several paragraphs. Set scene, create character, make action. This is all synopsis. Write a story, not an outline of one.

Fuck you.

disclaimer he's not me who posted the story

Fukken terrible u should feel bad

No, I'm not on the edge. If I thought I was perfect at writing, there would be no point to making the thread. That being said, I do enjoy my own writing. If I don't like something, I don't show it to anybody. Again, that doesn't mean I think I'm perfect.

I guess the feedback is pretty important, even though I didn't *learn* anything from reading that. Also: Crimson Text is my favorite font on google docs. It just bothers me when I try to write with a bad font.

I got your back brah.

to think I was so close to writing an extensive analysis with give tips on how to improve but

pastebin.com/JqKzHRkR

Why? Because im telling him that hes not writing a real piece of fiction? Fuck you for enabling poor writing that could be improved easily

NuMale replicant? Or the real dealio?

No, I'm not pretending to be anything.

This is supposed to go somewhere close to the end. I'm afraid i'm just chasing jokes, and I'm considering abandoning the entire thing altogether. Let me know if you want to know the premise.
1/2

Don had now gone off the map entirely.

In the months prior to his disappearance Don’s work had become sporadic. He came to work two, three days at best, per week. The times he did bother to offer an explanation for his absence he’d claim illness, usually food poisoning. Sturvant had reason to believe this wasn’t simply an excuse: as part of his research Don had become an almost exclusive puddingvore. His devotion to a diet of pure pudding was adulterated only by his occasional ingestion of banana bread (for grain) and vanilla wafers (for sturdiness); as Don explained it “even Jainists eat lettuce.” He researched all kinds of pudding including chocolate and vanilla, and a few of his own creation. But of all his mistresses banana pudding was the one to whom he was most faithful. He awoke every day at five in the morning and prepared a new batch of the custard and left it sitting on his kitchen table throughout the day. At the end of the day Don would perform a number shear stress tests on the pudding to measure the amount of shear thinning that had occurred. Don executed this duty with more discipline and diligence than he’d ever applied to his duties as a janitor at Nadefco. He made his measurements at eight pm and dutifully detailed his findings in one of his research journals (Bapuddjos). In addition to raw data Don included graphs, equations, and his own personal asides like “viscosity increases logarithmically with time that -30 degree shear is applied, exponentially with 0 degree shear, cf. ketchup.” The journals began to pile up. He piled his journals next to his piles of cookbooks and newspaper clippings of custard baking competitions, which were in turn piled next to his piles of textbooks on polymer chemistry and non-Newtonian fluid mechanics. The most important force to be studied was compression, since, in Don’s mind, banana pudding mines buried underground would be exposed more often to the downward pressure of the dirt that concealed them, although conceivably an imitation custard mine (which, remember, performs quite well under shearing) could be buried sideways, although then the blasting mechanism would have to be altered so that the mine would blast orthogonal to the horizontal rather than parallel. Thus, real pudding mines should be buried right side up whereas imitation custard mines should be buried sideways.

here's my whacky/crappy/shitty sci fi story that Im somehow turning a very contained piece of (there's more than this) into a final project this semester

anyway here's some mangled bits of session 1, the first part of book one Elegy for Laindsraad IV
evernote.com/l/AhEPozdXWsJEKKnaL8cnQGtom0JNTEyvnsk

here's part from what I've written this semester, more than a year or so after that
evernote.com/l/AhFD7DmSpP5Bs5zEK6o6Sz6wFiBcOKqRWd4

and then (session 4, part 1 but part 1 of book two 'ALL STARGATES OPEN | I LOVE | I GO'
evernote.com/l/AhGWTe9X1k5JVI3i1sjQsZctsYsOtT_tqOA
and the poem thing that goes before it evernote.com/l/AhE52aHDHmVBrqKdincEErMSjypz4R9nES4

forgive me/tell me if it's alright

>evernote.com/l/AhEPozdXWsJEKKnaL8cnQGtom0JNTEyvnsk
who didnt fix all the weird paragraph separations in the transition to google docs and back fuck me

its def not supposed to be like that

2/2

Of course, Don researched more custards than just banana pudding and manipulated more variables than just angle of shearing. Temperature, altitude, and strawberry were all given due diligence. But banana pudding was the most scrutinized for the sole reason that Don found it the most likely custard to be used in Nadefco’s mines. Don concluded that banana custard was most likely because 1) bananas possess certain properties, such as high fiber content (which makes for a sturdy mine), which lend themselves to being landmine fodder that are not present in other fruits and because 2) after all, the first fake landmine that Don had ever encountered was verifiably filled with banana pudding.

On the days that Don did show up to Nadefco he worked at his own leisurely pace. The tasks he did manage to accomplish were done shoddily. For example, part of his duties as a janitor were detail in a Janitor’s Report the conditions of the corpses he found in the field. The human resources department of Nadefco felt that by considering and analyzing the wounds of a field engineer’s corpse, Nadefco could understand how the engineer had died and then speculate on the mistake he had made while defusing. Janitors were asked to note the position of the body. Had the body been projected or merely crumpled? How severe were the burns, and where was the location of the wound(s)? Don, however, had been neglecting his paperwork, and when he did take the time to fill out his report he rarely did so in sufficient detail, as Harrison from the mortuary department complained to Sturvant.

“Look, all of his ‘ideas’ and ‘research’ aside, you would at least expect him to show some basic concern for human life.” Harrison held up Don’s most recent report and shook it in the air. “This guy,” he said, indicating the report “this guy could’ve been you, Don’s only friend here, one day Don might find himself cleaning up after you due to a mistake that could’ve been avoided if Don had properly documented the states of the corpses he finds.”

Sturvant, who never made mistakes but forgave Harrison’s lapse in judgement, tried to explain that Don’s mental state was very bad, that he probably wasn’t in a position to be filling out paperwork, much less performing janitorial labor. That he really shouldn’t be coming in to work at all.

“Sturvant, yeah, Don’s gone a bit crazy. But this, this is just crossing the line. Look here, look what he wrote in the conditions of the corpse section.” He handed the report to Sturvant. In a section to which half a page had been devoted Don had merely written “well-done.”

...

>evernote.com/l/AhGWTe9X1k5JVI3i1sjQsZctsYsOtT_tqOA
holy shit they all have fucked up paragraph spacing that the fuck evernote?

Well thanks guys. You're right that it reads like a summary, that's by design. I agree I can add more character to it, and perhaps a stronger sense of setting. I understand how confusing these out of context paragraphs can be.

The idea behind skimming these events was to segway us into a more significant happening that's immediately after this scene and then some, say this was something like a humorous intermission. A commercial break.

So if I at least got any sort of humor across then I'd call it a success. There's more than enough decompressed story going around in the full thing.

No, totally: genius. Best inside thread. Sets the wave length at another level entirely. Skips across different ideas fluidly. Supersmart author but with a heart of Au. Likable and fun, pleasant and friendly. Gets the laughs but there's something deeper. Words like shadows of a huge thrumming mind. Just totally blown away. Head and shoulders above books I've wasted time reading. Rewarding. Needs to be cleaned up and sent to publishers. Compile the list. Make it happen. I'm going to save this and read it again later. Post more, post all. I don't want to say genius, but damn. No holds barred. A real treat. Contemporary, Toolesque, Nabokovian, but like Wallace if if was genuine. I just want more.

This was supposed to be funny. Anyone have a giggle or did it fail completely?

where's the action and like 3 days happen in a couple sentences lol where is the pacing bruh, you should look to something that strictly paces itself better perhaps mein kampf

didn't read that one but had an absolute blast with your two part bit. I'll go back

nvrmnd wrong post sorry im stoned

>Because im telling him that hes not writing a real piece of fiction?
not sure if serious

A number of authors have used summaries like that, its not some new thing.

How is this even better than 1/2? I mean I thought I was seeing something fresh, but this here is fresher than sweet sweet freshmen. Five fucking stars. Exuberant and crowd-pleasing without being a cliche. Honest and comedic and honed. Hindsight is 20/20 but your foresight is too. Un-fucking-forgettable. Don is an inspired creation. Schematic but schematic like a V2 blueprint for codename Fuck Yes. A real personality is wriggling underneath. Do you do comedy? How'd you learn to write like this? Were you always a natural or did you study literature? Wow just wow. A real brain scorcher.

Never in a fresh, capiilary-tingling writing sample, has an member of the modern intelligentsia constructed a sentence so life affirming. The wind blew into her house playing a broken tune & symphonic wafts of her wine wandered to her, notes minor like fingers caressing the edges of her memory. The cheese platter rattled as she curled her toes under her butt, getting settled in her wingback chair. This place is where daddy's money has allowed her to bloom. And as her mind starts drifting, she lets out a single sigh and hocks a thick one into her fapping hand. Today is going to be another night in paradise. She is on Veeky Forums shitposting Mira threads 10 minutes later. Here, people will appreciate her.

Tears

upvoted

Oh boy. Wow. I always thought myself to be a writer whose prose was, well, imaginative and perhaps even scintillating. But I’ve had my doubts. Grand doubts, very grand; sometimes I can’t even get out of bed in the morning. The best writers are the most self-conscious, Wallace for example. I’m glad I discovered the courage to post here. A reviewer like you? It’s almost like you understand me, the way that I “thrumming” and “exhuberant”. Are you a female perchance? If you live in Paris (as I do) it would delight me to get coffee with you tomorrow. And, I know you find me to be a real scorcher with a really big brain--hell, I can practically taste you tintitillaing on the other side of the keyboard--but I’d be pleased to meet up with you tomorrow so that perhaps you can offer me some actual advice.

How meme is this?

you're not gonna make it bro

it made me laugh so i guess you're going somewhere, vid related

youtube.com/watch?v=gL4yePsV3R4

Reminds me of an ugly girl who sluts it up for attn. You know the girl. Heather—lol ikr.

Good last line desu

...

>a guys gonna fail because he contradicted some random on Veeky Forums

lets not get too full of ourselves

Good argument. How many different folders do you need to maintain to always have your reaction face titled "image"?

...

small passage from the novel I'm working on, let me know how my prose is.

However, at the dawn of the 3rd moon, she rose — not at once, born from nowhere like a firework, though also not like a tree, gradually building upon foundations laid before it. Instead, a medium, or more accurately, a combination. Like if gunpowder and fire can grow on a garden, slowly nurtured and then all at once a spectacle.

That was nice and I like it a lot (:

Thanks user! Though honestly a straightforward compliment like that coming from a place known to be cynical, it's difficult to be a hundred percent certain that you're not being sarcastic.

That was really awful. Mixed metaphors; needlessly obscure and verbose elaboration of a very simple idea.

I see what you're saying. I guess because this is supposed to be a pivotal moment in the novel I wanted to linger in it for a bit, but you're right it's too much for not much weight.

I posted some bits of my scifi story here that got fucked up in formatting but here's a bit I just wrote over the past few hours. it's revised so hopefully its not too brainfarty, and there's another third to it basically, but its some ideas
evernote.com/l/AhE-hgkehodD8r8JXhuOUntgiOaH-DRB4OM

I'm not, it was actually very nice. is an idiot.
>needlessly obscure
>needlessly verbose
>elaboration of a very simple idea
The "obscure" and "verbose" language gave your writing a voice that sounds very sincere in it's delivery. Like, you actually understand what makes this kind of writing cool. And also the "simple" "idea" was neither simple nor an idea.

it's a Veeky Forums meme

Thanks, I've actually been working on my voice a bit so that means a lot. I don't think is totally wrong though. I might alter it a bit to convey more.

The problem with these out of context sentences is that dudes will pick it apart for whatever reason, and might be valid in some cases, but they're missing your entire rational behind the whole thing, not to mention how it interacts with text surrounding.

Seems like these threads are best suited for flash fiction and poetry, full stories may be too impractical from the standpoint of a fast-moving thread, and mere snippets just beg for mishandling.

You are trying to dress up a very simple thought in an ostentatious wardrobe. The aim of good writing is to do the exact opposite.

Yeah I've noticed that from the other threads too. It's a shame because I do enjoy hearing the opinions of Veeky Forums, but I don't enjoy writing short stuff.

Yeah, I'm a textbook over-writer. I'm working on it, I've only started writing as a hobby recently.

Check out "The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose" by Robert Graves.

I'm currently reading The Elements of Style. Would you consider than apt replacement or is that book simply essential?

would you happen to have a link? running dry

"She rose the way she fell asleep: slowly, and then all at once."

-- John Green version

>hull.ac.uk/php/cetag/3igraves.htm

found that much, seems like solid stuff but there's a few things I'd like to have more clarity on. Such as using poetic devises and long sentences, they seem to be against those. I find myself shrugging since I've seen them used to good effect in modern prose.

Here's my full story: I hope you like it - I spent 3 months writing it

pastebin.com/cJU77W6h

That's just some webpage.

you wouldn't need either of those if you knew how to read

What's wrong with doing both?

I know, I think this guy just calls himself synthesizing whats in the book. I'm having a really hard time finding it unless user has a link.

I kinda agree with this, but I like studying these things for new angles of thinking and approach. I got grilled pretty hard in this thread and to be honest I'm not surprised why despite my intentiions, so I'm always open to new stuff.

i'm almost certain your math problem things are either incorrect or trivial, and for that reason i stopped reading. it seems like one of those dfw attempts to be witty with unnecessary math

amazon.com/The-Reader-over-Your-Shoulder/dp/0394506154

It's not just about abstract guidelines. He goes through passages from famous authors and shows where and how they go wrong. He then rewrites each passage into model examples.

Your first sentence is, like, incomprehensible. Too many embedded clauses frustrates me and I don't want to keep track of all of it. That persists throughout the piece. It's a turnoff to me. Also, I'm pretty sure you're ungrammatical in a few places.

Given the lack of ebooks for that one, is there any alternative you can recommend or is that one of a kind?

alright, so I went back for another shot
>Max takes a step. There are now three icosahedra around each edge, and twelve around each vertex. With another step, the tessellations shift again: four dodecahedra around each edge, each vertex surrounded by eight dodecahedra in octahedral arrangement. After the next, five around each edge, twenty per vertex. The nature of each recursion changes in relation to his three dimensional position, so there is no way of knowing when he’ll find you. This will not stop him. That wave of possibility has long since collapsed.

this is definitely some mathy shit trying to pass as witty when in reality it's just non-stimulating. The effort required for me to make sense of all this terminology heavily outweighs the payoff. Also, all that meta shit about crocodiles is hella juvenile.

Let me pick apart some of your writing.
>Here in the Void, I have built a machine. The base and foundation are lapis lazuli; the rest of the frame is made of ivory, adorned with fractals plated in gold. Rare stones of vibrant hue festoon the lateral beams in rows. A triangle erects from each side, and a beam connects them at the apex. Centered in this beam is a massive lever of polished titanium.
"lapis lazuli" is obscure
"fractals" is not evocative
"vibrant hue" is cliche
"erects" is used intransitively and therefore incorrectly
"massive" unnecessary and boring adj

in general you use "void" too much--16 times. Void is an abstraction. I like it in this paragraph, but dislike it practically everywhere else.

... Then burning sunlight raced through his veins. He had got his fix. Who could get off the stuff when it could make you feel this good? To kick the habit would be to bring him back down to earth with all the rest who pretend to be content in their mundane little lives. Fuck that. This was living. Stretching his hands out in front of him towards the ceiling, he took a deep breath in and let it out in an icy whoosh. His lips and fingers tingled numbly and he rose from his bed. He strode over to the window, still naked, and peered out onto the city below. The cars and busses blatted fussily about, but it seemed that most of the morning rush had passed. He had called out last night because he had not wanted any more trouble with the boss who had been hard-pressed as it was with sales being down the past few years. There was a chance, although unlikely, that he could be fired for any spur-of-the-moment sick days. He was a junkie, but by no means stupid. His small window didn't allow a great view, but he could see for miles and miles all around anyways. There could be no doubt that his little morning ritual played a major role in boosting his sense of vision. Most times, he usually had to wear glasses, but not now. And he could even hear Ms. Ruddworth's morning tea kettle whistle from two stories down. He was a long way from jumpy, but his senses were on high alert. Something seemed off today, but he was unsure of what. He moved to the big city to get away from the notoriety he had back out west. He just hoped today wouldn't be when they would finally connect his two identities and make the bust of a lifetime. That would ruin everything. He had a life here now, a place of his own and even a girlfriend. Louis wouldn't stand to be with him if- His thought was broken off as something exploded 20 blocks down. Three of these automatic gunshots went off before he was fully dressed and soaring back towards the now opened window. The fourth shot ricocheted off his chest and hit the bank vault. The feeling of uneasiness was more certain than ever because Lex was out there, planning something big. Just then, the lead-lined vault creaked open and green light flooded the room.
>when did you figure it out?

The "1 = 0.999…" thing is pure cringe. It's a trivial result, and over-discussed in the general public. It has nothing to do with the theme of 'singularity' any more than '1/2 = 2/4' does.

> I spent 3 months writing it
How much of that was spent on the 'crocodile' garbage?

Holy shit that was really good. Good weed you had there

9/10

i can't tell if you're samefagging all the metaironic replies to your story, and the replies to those replies. nonetheless, here's my input: quite funny in small doses, but the dialogue (at this point) just can't compare. your powers of description, building the scene, and inserting little interjections make for highly amusing stuff. your brand of absurdism is titillating. i hope you keep your pieces small. it's extremely difficult to keep the humor going for novel / novella-length stories because it has to be constantly fresh or the reader will get tired.

>I am not a crocodile
Keked out of this world m8. Good shit

A little short story I did. Can you guess what Liz is?

Life support system for a cunt?

ayy

She sounds like a vampire

If you came here to get your dick sucked, just shell out for a prostitute instead.

Anything she wrote would be better than what you posted.

>Frank the Peach-man

Here's the last one I downloaded like two weeks ago.

...

i think you should read your dialogue out loud and really picture the characters as you describe them, talking as you are making them talk. it's a little awkward. like the part about living with deadbeats. just move that part down below the description of his actions to make it seem like a pause, like one would in real life. first the mundane description of water being shut off and someone owing you money. then as you go about the room you muse on the generality of it and go ...thats what you get for living with deadbeats... not really addressed or expecting reaction, just as something to say while doing other things. same with the girl saying her mouth tastes like half dust. when you're half awake like that she would probably just moan out something about dust, not that coherent declarative "my mouth tastes like it's half dust"
just my quick thoughts, try to envision your scenes as you move through them, not just as a still image.

well opened the thread and saw people had already said this so ignore this post i guess

Well done. You got me to read the whole thing.

Veeky Forums I am having an impasse. I want to write a prologue for my book, but I feel if I write the prologue it would clash with the first few chapters since it would just detail the protagonist life before getting into the story

>another user using evernote

back the fuck of?

they loved her when they named her

>I'd took my time

nigga