Critique Thread

New critique thread. Post what you've written, are writing, have published, and critique the work of others.

Other urls found in this thread:

gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm
vocaroo.com/i/s0ewqFhJLTUM
pastebin.com/VXTUbFCM
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia#Reading_order
dropbox.com/s/hvu0kioe2iiqvaz/Pyrophilia.rtf?dl=0
pastebin.com/XignWvjK
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

1/2
Here's something I finally got accepted into a local magazine, after twelve or so rejection letters.

Here's a poem I wrote:

Oh, help me in my weakness
I heard the drifter say
As they carried him from the courtroom
And were taking him away
My trip hasn't been a pleasant one
And my time it isn't long
And I still do not know
What it was that I've done wrong

Well, the judge, he cast his robe aside
A tear came to his eye
You fail to understand, he said
Why must you even try
Outside, the crowd was stirring
You could hear it from the door
Inside, the judge was stepping down
While the jury cried for more

Oh, stop that cursed jury
Cried the attendant and the nurse
The trial was bad enough
But this is ten times worse
Just then a bolt of lightning
Struck the courthouse out of shape
And while everybody knelt to pray
The drifter did escape

2/2

I didn't catch much in the way of subtext, seemed pretty straightforward. I do admire that you went with structure and rhyme, a lot of moderns find that cheesy, but I find there's some beauty in trying to write in a form

Not a story. Try human conflict of some kind next time.

Nigga...
It's LITERALLY on the first page

gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm

George, Kyle and I sat in the library all huddled around the one PC at the end of the room in an effort to listen to the commotion going on next door. There was a partition that lead into the IT Department and at this moment one of our classmates, and self-styled lord of the perverts Robbie Feld was being chastised by the pea-headed Mr Turner.

We had been there on another one of our many attempts to “hack” the school’s computer system, and when this kicked off we couldn’t help but listen in.

Robbie was one of those kids who acted like a complete buffoon, but under the layers of autism and sexual deviance was a real intellectual, though he only rarely showed it. This time Robbie was being berated for wanking under the table close to the leg of Ann-Marie Chalmers. She had caught him, obviously, and had reported him for it.

We all shared a look and sniggered as the man who’s voice once broke into the lull of a black soul singer while talking about spreadsheets, went down through poor Robbie worse than I’d ever heard before. The word ‘wank’ was used a few times and every time I stifled a laugh. It’s not that teachers never swore at the school but at such a volume and frequency, Jesus Christ. Eventually there was silence, it felt like it had went on forever until finally from the corner of my eye I watched Robbie enter the library.

I motioned to the rest of the group until our eyes were all firmly locked on Robbie Feld. He walked over and took a seat at one of the computers and began to type, his fingers speeding along like he was some sort of Rain man, it was really something else. Finally we went over to see what he was doing and there on the screen was a poem, Robbie spilling his soul in beautiful words about his love for Ann-Marie. Such a poem would have made Lord Byron proud. As I said those fingers were made for more brilliant things than touching his cock. A real intellectual.

My dick was dry
My mouth was wet
If only I
Had somewhere to sit

Experimental flash fiction -

We are with Christina; her office building is not brutalist and any value it would’ve had in that regard is offset by subsequent renovations which have aimed for a more Shard-chic / glassy –behemoth type look: they’re actually glass panels, of that 8mm film-ish tint which reminds us sterile and temporally-sterile pond water, that have been whatever the architectural equivalent of stapling is on’d to the lattice of un-windowed concrete, which looks, through them, like concrete looks when it is moving very fast.
We are still with her. Christina knows nothing about architecture. Her desk is very boring and there’s basically nothing one could mention of it. Christina obviously knows this and so never mentions her desk in any great detail to anybody but she’s aware of that fact it’s bright wood coloured and probably some type of mdf or composite wood, but she’d would be hard pressed to tell you if it’s entirely square or if there’re organic curves at points where her she rarely looks. She is in here.
Christina’s boss is called Humphrey Donovan and he’s not actually her boss but her line manager, technically he’s her immediate superior although of course such terms are never mentioned and their conversations rarely take a turn where they’d need to be informed by hierarchy in any way as wasn’t already implicit in the general way they talk to one another. She never knows if this makes her feel sad or not. She doesn’t care what food she eats here because she monitors her breakfast and dinner pretty carefully.
We are looking at Christina. She feels strongly about the way she looks as she imagines most people do, but as she imagines is universal, she has trouble being objective about her looks and also worrying how morally dubious it is to spend time on how objective one’s being about the way one looks. Christina would not find this funny.
Christina has a fantasy where she goes into the bathroom and begins to cry for some unknown reason and then someone comes in and she has a very good reason. We are still with her.
Christina has other fantasies, like we have, but she never knows whether these tell her anything or whether she should feel sad about them.
At the top of Christina’s building is a large satellite, we are not with her anymore, but we’d know that she imagined once smoking a spliff with a friend while sitting in the lip of the satellite; she is not there.

It's actually good, but I don't like the last paragraph. Fails as a punchline.

Some of the dialect sounds like from half a decade ago "it was really something else". Should adopt some of the passive-aggressive vulgarity of the current time, otherwise it's just awkward.

OK. Fuck it. I'll guess we'll just run two critique threads for no fucking reason.

I don't think your sentences are long enough.

my dick is dry
my mouth no wit
spread her pussy
my cock can't fit

One bell knocked him out his nut & seven more agitated his mind back to a position of responsibility. Summer seas and another cigarette. He tied the ragged robe about himself, walked out on deck. Too much of everything, he thought. He was sinking, even if the ship wasn't, and the scotch was too watered and salted to count as a real vice. He held himself against the chill. Minutes passed before he checked himself staring down Rango Jibb.

"You're making me nervous," Said Rango, suspended high in the rigging, holding aloft one plastic trident from the Atlantic City beachfront, "Doth one mock I, Pissidon, Lord of Lemon Water, AKA King Uric of Scandinavia AKA Woodrow 'Watersports' Wilson. You got a net handy, huh?." He waved the thing about.
"Where's Croy?"
"Down below. Covered in Soy sauce. You can catch him if you're quick," And as Muller was heading over, "You blood thirsty bastard."

Well shit. Over starboard he found Croy hooked to the trawler by one ankle, the other drifting lackadaisical in the surf. Laughing all the way across the waves. His body shot red and naked over the pacific blue, nightmarish shadows threatening the queazy little life-ring, breaking and shimmering in the late afternoon. Shark attention, Muller thought at first, relieved to realize it was just trails off the sauce. The absolute madman had robbed Chico's ever limited stash. Frantically he assessed how international waters would influence some kind of truce, "Is this some kind of joke?"
"They ain't biting, chief." Croy yelled up.

He was a case from Sunnyshore Institutional Facility, MA, USA, the real crust of psychological reportage, enough so to convince Lew they still provided a national service. Telekinetics, tin caps, ghost hunters, philanthropists all featured on that register. Croy's limited release was co-engineered by a strange & illicit night, present now in rumour only, between Managing Director Ruben Bargloid & Jessica Sylvestry, Captain Sylvestry's sister, but lines of permanent marker had since blacked any windows betraying that particular affair. Croy's psychotic episodes were reported & detailed in the log mostly by himself, all referring back to just the one maudlin ingredient in his head at constitutional odds with larger society: too much honesty, with occasional lapses of judgement.

vocaroo.com/i/s0ewqFhJLTUM

There should be a new rule where you have to be older than 18 to post in critique threads. Right?

I'd because with just having no genre fiction. This shit is fucking terrible.

THE ALPHA

I plaque of blank
A unique tank of dark
No words
No sound
No where to see
The gifted mind He, God apires to be
Who knows Himself, and knows all
But He doesn't make it seem

Granted he gave the atoms he made
And it's spark began to peek
And little sounds closely shroud
But no other can hear them sing
Brought the magnitude, as more the matter grew
He watched them drown to sink

And his spark of light began to ignite
And dust blew out the rings
A star was made as bright and beige
With life poured in stream
He watched and knew
As the clouds withdrew
A comet was born engraved

the foul, maddening buzz
weighing on his head
Such a furious welcome home,
unfit for the Sovereign
who tends to his skull-sized
lonely domain
and the crass, miserly
pleasures of his palate

still entranced by
the simple joys of summertime
the bloodred lust,
the rich, luxuriant warmth of
a june morning
Oh the promise of boyhood:
the many fleeting victories
encased in glass
and sweet, ornamental jewels
taunting, flashing
her crystalline charms, flirting
with the want
straining on your bones,
nestled in the marrow
like the clay of the sculptor,
like the grief of the drunk;

prodding at those
delusional spirits
tending
to the garden of your greed,
sowing the green
and the olivine

-- exultant
of the most high,
fortunes of stature
fortunes eternal
fortunes everlasting!
these familiar, sour temptations
they still buzz
purring in their sleep

cold, subdued, squandered
sunken
in the rust
of that old abundant Kingdom
throned by conceit,
and devoured

Her cunt did gape
And her tits dripped
Is this considered rape?
I just want but a sip...

stop talking about darkness and madness and alienation holy shit

There was a breeze in the forest. A man woke up abruptly to the sound of horses. He’d forgotten how he got there but knew for some reason that the sound of horses wasn’t good. He quickly got up and ran through brush but stopped short of the dirt road in front of him. A group of Mounted Imperial Guardsmen was coming along the road. His face was red with paranoid fear of getting caught as he watched them pass by. He knew that they were angry and looking for somebody. He recalled earlier in the night that he was being chased by them.

After waiting a couple minutes, he finally, cautiously got up and started to walk along the road, toward the town. When he first woke up it was still dark, but as he approached his hometown the sun seemed to be coming up. He had lost his apprenticeship the other day and was coming home hungover from getting drunk in the forest. This is what he had recalled. Finally, after coming toward what felt like a mirage he made it to his village. As soon as he walked past the first building he was approached by the village idiot, Ivan.

Ivan gave a look of appreciation for his friend’s appearance and ran up to him like a dog runs to his master when he comes home. “Hiya Andrei, where were you for the last few days” “I got lost in the forest, everything is fine” Andrei said solemnly as he remembered his lost apprenticeship. “Can I have some coins for a drink, I’m famished” Ivan said eagerly. “Sure, why not” Andrei said as he gave Ivan a small cloth bag of coins. “My life is over anyway, why should I care about my money anymore” Ivan thought as he continued walking toward his home.

There was a smell of pie as he walked into his small home. It was a pleasant reminder that his wife was home. It encouraged him to go all the way to the kitchen to see her. She gasped at him as he walked through the opening and said “Honey, you look so haggard, where have you been?” He responded with “I got lost in the forest again.” His wife, Natalie, responded with “Well, the Guard came by earlier while I was watering the garden. They were asking for you. Did something happen that you’re not telling me about?” Andre, surprised by this, quickly said “No, my dear, there is nothing I am not telling you, I think there has been a misunderstanding.” His beautiful wife, knowing this wasn’t the first, and certainly not the last time her husband would get into trouble, let out a deep sigh and said “Well, I made cherry pie if you’re hungry, can you go to the marketplace tomorrow to pick up some flowers? We need them for when the royal family passes by our street tomorrow.” Andrei had forgotten about the parade that was due to happen tomorrow. Since their village was on the outskirts of the castle, royal convoys passed through more frequently than other parts of the empire. It was customary to throw the most beautiful flowers before the royal convoy whenever it passed through a village.

"Write what you know" :^)

If I post some lyrics I wrote will I get called a fag?

>Mounted Imperial Guardsmen
Dropped.

I really want Veeky Forums to fuck off from critique threads

I never been on Veeky Forums, just sounded like a good fantasy name, GIVE ME THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

there is no point to type in the metaised (or the cyber-acrolect, as your resident techno anarchist puts it) vernacular of the internet but there is also no point in assuming stiffly connoted formality by conforming with writing conventions like applying commas subordinate clauses or other useless sh(1t. if something is serious and you want someone who doesnt like sombre grammatical phonological teleological accuracy (a sane emotionally applaudable person really to be able to jump the hurdle that is autoimposed shoehorn of the former or latter from being a f(=u)ck tard and browsing websites that have socialisation beyond the analogic formality of writing0 Dear vapid f(-u)cking balding middle aged neighbour your very lovely dog took a massive sh(-i)t on my car but i cleaned it no worries just letting you know in this very milieu there are no ulterior motives from this email by the way i like your new run of the mill in not only financial aesethetic but in every f(-u)cking possible way car which has no plausible reason to be lauded its darker gray tone really chromatically resonates with your decaying pastorale clay bricks best regards your non denizen friend
the prose has been established and has grounds for it now and the theme is to as well to an extent but there is no hint at the subject matter even in the first paragraph not even thinly veiled or maybe there is but in that case its to thinly veiled and it wont be impactful soon. hallmark of bad writing desu the connecting cute anime girl vibes nuances should be spread evenly on the bread that is not only the plot of the story but every last letter of the text including the preface acknowledgments index as well as the repeated title on the anachronistic and inconvenient cellophane dust jacket. at least thats my opinion and i think its well founded because nobody else exists i am a lockean ontologist if i am the only person that OBSERVES the fu(-)cking world and nobody else does because they are just cones and rods only my heurestically conceived ideas are valid at all so shut your thinking process the f)u-ck up^ because it l(a-i)terally wont affect me in the slightest not one bit

the idea at hand is confusion but it is not. make of that what you will if you misinterpret it refer to my lockean dialectic above so it is your fault. not sure what other term can be used in this case. i understand the idea of suddenness. read books on suddenness. it is a simple childs CRAYON TIER explanation: retroactivity. see things from an omnipresent perspective because of a detachment because the event is over. it still hits you like a winter wind tho when you like winter winds but this particular one is bad and unwarranted because of externals.

from the writing it's pretty clear the writers don't "know" any of those things anyway

There's no good. Get some vocabulary and stop writing fantasy.

A Battle in my Fantasy Novel about Dwarves.

They're all in a cave so bare with me here. Oh and sorry if it's structured a little Dino.

Page 1 of 5

Page 2 of 5

Page 3 of 5

Page 4 of 5

Page 5 of 5

Well here I go...
pastebin.com/VXTUbFCM

A ranger-esque inspired story.

fucking shit
also TL;DR

TL;DR?

Also can you get into more detail? I wanna know what wrong senpai, hit me with your best shot!

Lots of stuff wrong with this one. You fucked up your semi-colon and there are tons of grammar things like sentence fragments and punctuation. You can say things in fewer words, too. Work on brevity.

A poem for you all to read/critique, if you so desire.

The City of Summer has Fallen.
Blood carpet and flame arches,
Your boots carry dead foliage from pavement,
Paint roadways chaos, incendiary red, orange.
Your legs slow, slow,
Stop.

Reverse

accelerate backwards, leaves gain shape as you retrace,
grow full again and lift spinning upwards! undecay!
petals remake embrace with branches, as life creeps back into nature your
new-eyes reflect new-trees, now modestly
clothed.
Innocent summer, red splashes
pulled back into brown wrists,
trees love themselves verdant, whole

Thanks senpai. So it's a grammar and word surplus problem then?

Storywise though? Did it build an image?

10/10 amazon tier erotica user. Now go out and make a fortune out of it.

Also a story I've been working on. 1/6

2/2

3/2000045

4/boredplsfuckingendmylife

5/6

6/6

Well it's not like it's going anywhere.... So go ahead... Tear it apart.

Would a work of postmodernist critique be well accepted here? I'd like someone to give me honest opinions about it before sending it to my American Literature professor

That's fine.

I'm not reading 6 pages of shitty genre fiction. Grow up and read and write real books.

Seriously people, stop with the shitty genre fiction. Go to fucking Reddit with that shit.

Who hurt you Nick Land

1/8

2/8

At first glance I can say that reading about comma usage, especially in dialogue, would help you. E.g., the first sentence should be "row faster, men." Also, using "said" for dialogue is perfectly fine. Even if you have many lines, using "said" when necessary is fine. There is no need for words like "barked" and "hissed" and "cleared" and "grunted," they are useful sometimes, but generally I advise against it. I only read the first page, because I assume the other ones will have the same weaknesses and strengths. I like how you write the dialogue, the words the characters said. Your description of certain objects are sufficient, nor too sparse nor unnecessarily detailed. Generally, you know when to end a sentence, how long or short they should be. The pacing is good.

I can see the potential in this, if you refine your writing, your grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation. And I say this as someone who is quite tired of reading fantasy, an avid fan of Narnia and Tolkien. My critique of your writing, by the way, was a contrast with Tolkien's own style—I recently read TLOTR so I have it fresh in my memory. Keep up the writing, read more, good fantasy and bad fantasy, and other genres. Though I'd say you could benefit from reading, and paying attention to how it is written.

3/8

The Myth of Victoria Bay

The classical historian Lamentarchus wrote of a tribe who lived in an abandoned settlement left by an earlier race. Disease spread like wildfire near their land, and in an effort to keep his people safe, the King blockaded the gates of the town. Tribes from neighboring lands died waiting to enter, but the settlement remained unscathed.

Yet soon, with no supplies from outside their walls, the King’s tribe began to starve. He consulted the elders, but they were no help. Worried about his people, the King couldn’t sleep. He cried into the smoke of his fire, “What should be done?” As he sat in anguish, a beetle crawled from the flames. “Are you here to help?” the King asked. The beetle spoke, “The only way they will survive is for two of your strongest tribesmen to guard the gate, letting pass the needed supplies and turning away the sick.”

When sunrise came, the King ordered the men to stand sentry. They turned many away, but let through a young woman carrying a basket of grapes. That evening, the townspeople danced and rejoiced in celebration. They ate every last piece of fruit . But the grapes, as they waited at the gates for inspection, had been infected. The King’s tribe began to die the next morning.

The disease moved quickly, and many perished. One of the elders fell ill, and in an attempt to seek treatment, ordered the gates opened. As the sick poured in, the King felt all was lost. But his young grandchild, more hopeful than he, grasped his hand and cried, “Oh grandfather! I know a way out; we can leave this place and start again.”

The King followed the girl and her parents to a small hole she had made in the wall of the settlement. They pressed through and out to the other side. Alone, they walked for five days and nights until they came to water. There they settled, unprotected in the midst of chaos, but alive on Victoria Bay.

Stop sperging out for a moment and please calmly define "real books" for me, my good man.

This is a Critique thread, either criticize the work (grammar, word structure, plot, characters) or don't criticize it at all. No one's forcing you to do anything. But if you prefer to sperg out... That's up to you.

4/8

5/8

6/8

g e n r e tier.

isn't good either. You could try marketing it to 11 year olds and hope for the best, though

7/8

ivan thinks his life is over? or andrei? it was fine, didn't really like it. felt nerdy and sad.

8/8

I've excluded part of the bibliography but that's not important right?

see
and
Your shit is fucking terrible; it's not real literature. Fuck off back to Retard land if you want to write shitty supernatural evil teen werewolf bullshit.

>I've excluded part of the bibliography but that's not important right?
It's the most important part.

Thanks man

Guess I'll just read some more fantasy, eh? Get acquainted a little bit more with the genre. I've read the Hobbit, so I know Tolkein's pretty cool. Haven't had the time for Lord of the Rings though, just starting out with Sanderson, Mistborn to be exact.

then have the rest:

- Un posto nella mente - Il nuovo romanzo americano 1962-1982, Franco La Polla
- Irony's Edge, Linda Hutcheon
- A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon
- A New Literary History of America, Greil Marcus/Werner Sollors
- Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
- Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges
- Il costante concetto di ironia in riferimento a Socrate, Soren Kierkegaard

How do I add soul to my writing? A uni teacher gave me this comment on an article I've written before.

>It is a beautiful showcase of the writer's gift to produce an eloquent bouquet of words, but ultimately lacks soul and ability of evoking any emotion to the reader

I'm too fucking ashamed to share my work. But generally, how do you write something emotional but not come off as pretentious?

Pic unrelated

I never said my work was in the brilliant lines of Lolita or The Great Gatsby; simply that I wish to have my writing critiqued. Critique. That's an important word there.But if you do not wish to critique it... Why are you still replying?

Guess you didn't hear me the first time, huh? Continue on sperging out, my good man :)

anyone want to check this out? it's pretty simple.

I suggest you read, perhaps in this order, The Lord of the Rings, Narnia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia#Reading_order in publication order,last two optional), and Eoin Colfer. I have very strong and even more strongly mixed opinion about Colfer: his premises are solid, his main characters are well developed, but his writing, his style, feels bland at times. After reading Tolkien and Lewis you'll see what I mean. But he has a great way of creating tension. I like some parts of his writing so much I am not ashamed to admit I read him. You might want to read JK Rowling too, but mostly for the writing style, her plot fails at times and especially after the third book.

There's a series of a Spanish author, called Memorias de Idhún, most likely translated to English (I am a fluent Spanish speaker, read them in Spanish). It has a love triangle that resolves in a non-conventional manner, the prose is verysolid at times and world building is acceptable. ;Some scenes and chacaters are very memorable/

0sorryfor the messof this post. Took a high dose of xanax after my first reply and I can't quite control my train of thought or my fingers. I hope this will be legible?

That's all the fantasy I can recommend tht I can say I've read more than once since I was a child. But just read what you can find. What appeals to you, either the world or the themes or the characters or the prose. Learn from it. Learn what to not do, and put it together in your own style.

again sorry for the mess of a reply and if I came off as rude, but you'll be sr=prised at how bad what you wrote now will seem in two years.

Can you share what you got this on? i m interested in reading it.

Again, fucking thank you bro! I'll keep these names listed down and be out on the lookout for their stuff. Thanks a ton!

An excerpt of the article I written a few years back

> The children suffered from poverty, a chain reaction affecting generation after generation in a wheel of agony with little light of salvation—they were The Last, The Lost and The Least. To me, hunger was always just a slight inconvenience, my exclamations of starvation merely signified a lack of food appealing to my spoiled palates; however, to the children it is a ceaseless battlefield on the border of life and death, a merciless struggle against the reaper. Malnutrition has robbed their years away, impairing their growth and beset them with medical conditions. The stark dichotomy between our lives came to me as a revulsion, to think that a week ago I was complaining about five meals a day being too much for me, how heavy my sins must have weighed on my back—I, a glutton, should live as a preta for my repulsive hedonism!

To Veeky Forums it is very clichéd writing. Is this excerpt passable?

The proceeding paragraph

> While the feeding session proceeded, I gulped back tears lest they see the repugnant emotional outburst of a sinned man. I wished with fervour to protect their smiles for just a moment longer, to be able to help them more than just simple games and dances; alas, time was blind to my pleas. No matter how tight I clasped, grains of sand crept through my fingers to the abyss—all that I could do was cherish our moments together, fleeting yet sweet, like dusts of sugar on the tongue. It was before lunch that our time ended with a final colouring session, the whole session lasting no longer than three hours.

Xanax user so beware of a a train of thought that's fallibg apart on every curve and confuing = with backspce because new keyboard

The first sentence is pretty solid, but there is a disjointed jump, goingfrom a psychological descriptio of anguish of those who were the 3 Big L. Then it suddenl jumps into me, a "me" who is not bothered by it. IT'S NOT a contrast, it is simply going from A to C.what you are missing, and I quote
>but ultimately lacks soul and ability of evoking any emotion to the reader
aYou need a B. I sense to emotional link, I don't feel why dh==should I care about the Last and co. Their sufferings are an inconvenience to you. You need to establish an emotional link etwwen you (THE Narrator, not you the author) with the ones who suffer more emotionally. You describ =e dispassionately their plight but I can't relte to them t all, or how they are related to you beyond being i the same space (temporal or physical)> =

It is passable but it is missing something. perhaps detail how the last, lost, etc suffer. A child starving, whipped by a particularly violent master, even fighting pigeons for scraps of bread. How it impacts you (the narrator, not the author), how "I did not feel their hunger, I did not feel their physical suffering, but I was fully aware of their desperation slowly turning despair, a flame that was dying in this metaphorical winter, just as an old an abandoned prson would perish in a crowded and filthy hospital, just another number and another empty bead to clean by a nameless nurse"

Thisis borderline nonsense, but i hope you get what i SAY, yes? I might post a draft if encouraged to do so

Thank you user, I got what you said, that has been very helpful. I didn't realize that missing B was a very vital component.

I would love to see your draft. Are there any methods to overcome the problem of missing links?

Here is my draft. Wrote over half of it (everything fter 2,) tonight, though fortunately whi;e still sober. Exxcept the last paragraph. dropbox.com/s/hvu0kioe2iiqvaz/Pyrophilia.rtf?dl=0 work in progress, no revisions at all except touching up some sentences a couple times.

I suggest reading authors who write stories similar to yours. Find a way to tie a scene happening to a third person to yours, even if it's the protagonist describing something happening, and then reflecting upon it. Tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, I'll e able to tell you more coherently what I mean

I'd have to read the piece. Without context her statement is largely meaningless.

I want to live in a world where you've killed yourself for writing shitty genre fiction. Seriously. Kill yourself.

it's not amazing, but what genre would you say that shit is

Thank you, that was quite a beautiful piece of work.

>Goodbye Gutom, a campaign committed to poverty eradication in the Philippines, is one of the experiences that struck me the most. When I first arrived at the hall near an in-city resettlement project, I was greeted by a group of children, no less than a hundred if my memory serves correctly. They surged with brazen zeal, unafraid to welcome our group that was assigned to them—how exuberant they were to see us! As we began introducing ourselves to them, their eyes lit up, anticipation quivering with sanguine smiles melting the heart even of the coldest steel, but only we knew how callously unfitting their expressions were. Under their cheerful masquerades were pallid complexions, malnourished and cadaverous bodies of sheer skin and bone with brittle nails discoloured by anaemia without mercy. Their faces may have told a story of happiness, but their frail bodies bellowed otherwise; the juxtaposition of the two images was a needle through the sullen heart, a silver dagger piercing the diaphanous mist of a fragile illusion.

>The children suffered from poverty, a chain reaction affecting generation after generation in a wheel of agony with little light of salvation—they were The Last, The Lost and The Least. To me, hunger was always just a slight inconvenience, my exclamations of starvation merely signified a lack of food appealing to my spoiled palates; however, to the children it is a ceaseless battlefield on the border of life and death, a merciless struggle against the reaper. Malnutrition has robbed their years away, impairing their growth and beset them with medical conditions. The stark dichotomy between our lives came to me as a revulsion, to think that a week ago I was complaining about five meals a day being too much for me, how heavy my sins must have weighed on my back—I, a glutton, should live as a preta for my repulsive hedonism!

>While the feeding session proceeded, I gulped back tears lest they see the repugnant emotional outburst of a sinned man. I wished with fervour to protect their smiles for just a moment longer, to be able to help them more than just simple games and dances; alas, time was blind to my pleas. No matter how tight I clasped, grains of sand crept through my fingers to the abyss—all that I could do was cherish our moments together, fleeting yet sweet, like dusts of sugar on the tongue. It was before lunch that our time ended with a final colouring session, the whole session lasting no longer than three hours.

>As the children walked away bidding us “Paalam”, I closed my eyes, endeavouring to keep a mental image of them, vowing to never relinquish my memory. Three weeks may have elapsed, my sorrow lacerates just as intense as it did before. Perhaps they have forgotten me by now, and I would never blame them for that; after all, I am just a passer-by in their lives. Even though their features evanesce by the day, the realization of my sinful indulgence will forever be as haunting as an apparition stalking the night.

I'm glad you enjoyed what I wrote. surely tomorrow ehen I'm sober I'll find mny mistakes and then fix them. good night. hope you hve a good one

Good night to you too.

I'm trying to write up a summary of my thinking from the past year or so; I'd like to know if it's comprehensible/the slightest bit illuminating.
I feel like I need to elaborate on some of the points I make but idk how to do that without losing the direction. I think it kind of comes together at the end, but you can judge.

pastebin.com/XignWvjK

>pastebin.com/XignWvjK
Few minor typo mistakes, btw. Not bad. I don't care much for academic style writing so I won't be a fair critic if I go over the whole thing.

>Few minor typo mistakes, btw
Ah cheers. I do need to rephrase a bit as well.
>I don't care much for academic style writing so I won't be a fair critic if I go over the whole thing.
Fair enough. I'm doing this mostly to cohere my head's jumble so that I can attempt something a bit more lively. It is so much easier to write thoughts straight down than to illustrate them (which I eventually want to do).

agreed, this is how i write - just need to make sure it's completely coherent and without extra baggage to start, so that as it expands it doesn't lose the thread.

bumping this thread

Fuck you.
This thread is shit.
All genre bullshit or grimdark edge.
Sage'd.

Struck nerve did I?

Calm down, sperg

Please tell me if this is shit or not, already posted it in two threads and got no replies in almost 2 days.

Counting vertebra
Flying shoulder blades
Snuck out of the skin of corporeal neon

Swept by fumes
From a musky rib
Nails dug into ether, unhinged, unpainful

I am blotched art
On your dreamy palette
In this blue even your vermillion is gone

Paint me tonight
With one color
The others left the door ajar

Pic inspired me

You struck his nerve by bumping the thread?

it's bad, but how bad is it?

Really bad. Like I'd literally kill myself if I ever wrote something that bad. Like if I wrote that, and went back to read it right after I wrote it I would stand up, walk into the bathroom, look into the mirror, then just start stabbing myself in the chest with my toothbrush until it went clear through the muscle on my ribs and into my heart. I would twist it as well to inflict as much pain as possible. All to ensure that I would never release the shit that is my existence onto even the lowest animal of this universe.

lol well then. thanks for the laff m8

When you're writing numbers into a story then it's usually better to write them out (put 'nine' instead of '9').

Other than that, the exposition is sort of confused. You're talking about this Scandinavian type world and how harsh it is, but then you mention Jaakoppi raising a flag...only to abandon him for more exposition. Try to section it off.

Perhaps have the opening scene be Jaakoppi raising the flag, then give him a companion that he can chat to about seal hunting or the weather or whatever. Dole out this information about your world in a more interesting fashion than just flat out telling the reader.

>I wrote this a while ago. It's about some gulag prisoners wandering through the USSR in the immediate aftermath of an asteroid impact
>Probably not any good

[1/2]

At first Kohl wasn’t sure what it was. The odd feeling that prickled distractedly across the back of his neck. Like a rash. He half turned, looking through the icy grayness of the landscape behind him, what little of it he could see anyways, and squinted. Yet there was nothing but a softly falling skein of ash, raining out of a featureless sky.

They had passed a tree earlier in the afternoon, its wood bleached bone white and not yet grimed into the same lifeless gray as everything else. Kohl tried to look for it and after a while spotted its skeletal form, at the bottom of a little rise. It was blurred and indistinct, yet gave Kohl something of a frame of reference. If he’d had to guess then he would have said that the tree was two hundred meters away.

Not far at all on an ordinary day.

Yet...

Now he stopped, squinting around him, breath fogging the lenses of the aviator’s goggles that he had pilfered from the armory at Balakhna. They were grimy, smeared with something that he hadn’t quite been able to wash away, and so lent the world a slightly distorted image. Hardly worse than what everything already looked like, he supposed. Then paused.

Something had moved. Even through the skeins of smoke and ash he was sure of it. The prickly paranoia that caressed the back of his neck, urging hair that had long since evolved away to rise up in fright, now seemed solid and definite. Like he could scramble up it, rising away into the ash clouded sky, feet supported by nothing at all.

Pulling at the cloth that covered his mouth he turned back around, to where the others were picking their way up the shattered hillside.

“We’re being followed.” Kohl said urgently, voice rough. All movement ceased. Alexei, the Hiwi, took a lunging step back down the hillside, scattering dusty soil. With the checkered cloth wound around the lower half of his head, and the fuzzy ushanka and scientist’s goggles covering the rest he looked positively anarchic.

[2/2]

“Are you sure?” The Hiwi asked him, hunching down slightly, like he expected to come under fire at any moment. And perhaps they would. Kohl didn’t know who was out there.

“Down there,” Kohl pointed, to a spot where the hillside folded in upon itself. The stumps of shattered trees pointed haphazardly from that area in all directions. Like broken but still stubbornly accusing fingers. Alexei stared, expression behind his goggles impossible to read. His breath steamed out through the checkered face cloth.

“I don’t see anyone.” He said, but even as the words came out Kohl could tell that he wasn’t sure that what he was saying was true.

The view was simply too obscured, interrupted by flickering bits of ash, by a numb sort of terror that pulsed within them all.

“Wolff.” Kohl said, cocking his head up the slope, to where the Oberscharfuhrer stood, Soviet rifle clutched in gray, ash grimed hands. Though his face was covered, same as the others, same as himself, Kohl could tell that he was frightened. Not that that made him feel any better.

“We need to get over this hill,” Wolff said, voice toneless with fright, “we’re too exposed out here.” Kohl had no disagreements with this assessment, and neither, so it seemed, did Alexei. They moved, soil crumbling beneath them as they moved, kicking up little puffs of ashy dust.

And though Kohl kept an eye out behind him, he didn’t see anything more. By the time they reached the top of the hill, what seemed like an eternity later, he was beginning to question whether he’d seen anything at all.

They huddled down in a little hollow a few meters from the top of the hill, just close enough to peek over and see if anyone was following them. But each time someone got up the courage to take a look they saw nothing but the same dead, blasted landscape that they had just spent some hours trudging over.

No life. No plants. Nothing.