Critique Thread? Critique thread!

Can he be named Seymour Skinner?

>A SECRET LIFE
>A WONDERFUL LIFE
>WHERE IS MY WONDERFUL WIFE?
>AND HER SECRET KNIFE?

this is not my beautiful house...

Did he spend his years after the war working in advertising on Madison Avenue, drinking heavily and racking up divorces, before creating the greatest television ad of all time?

M a d
e
n

All things are nothing to me, so said the Buddha.

The universe is my will, said user

reallylike it user

Paramedics drape their backs
in black lead capes in crowds
where a human crush injured
the scores of kind, gasping for
straws that extend to the sky
where Zeus' tears pour into clouds
and the star stings heedlessly
the calloused skin of concrete
and canopy of downtrodden lilies
withered from the sulphuric soil
spread across the buttered toast
falling in unison with the dice
cast from a broken blind arm
connected at the hip to nothing
but a belt of glimmering bulbs
rattling at every nudge of the wind
intoxicated with yesterday's reminders
of a tomorrow unavailable and unmet,
and so we twirl bedraggled and smiling
in corrosive heaven's unboiled wax
to gleam for a seconds glory
and melt back into the cracks in the floor.

I am a woman

I am always admired for my beauty,
But never for my intelligence,
I am always applauded for my expertise in house chores,
But never for my expertise in a professional career,
I am always expected to raise my kids,
But never to raise my voice.

I am a woman

I deserve to be a wrestler,
I deserve to be a lead actor,
I deserve to be a racer,
I deserve to be a DJ,
I deserve to be a pilot,
I- deserve to be the woman I, want to be.

I am a woman

I am just like your father,
I am just like your brother,
I am just like your uncle,
I am just like-that male stranger.

I am a woman

I wrote pic related about a year ago. I don't remember writing it.d

10/10 if this is satire

[1/2]

When she was eight Bella's art class at school had done a pottery segment. Everybody was to learn to work with clay and make at least one presentable piece. The clay came in hard, damp bricks and needed to be softened with water. Too little water and the clay dried and cracked when she tried to mold it. Too much and it turned into a silky brown soup.

Bella had liked pottery. It let her concentrate on something. The complexity was refreshing because at last in art there was a real solution to the problem that their teacher had given them. In painting any arrangement of paint on canvas could be seen as an artwork. A lonely splotch of red in the center of a canvas was just as valid as an exhaustively painted landscape. Pottery was different. The clay had to be mixed properly. The mixed clay had to be kneaded and rolled so that the air bubbles inside were forced out. It had to be done right.

Bella had made a swan. It wasn’t very pretty, but she had liked the way the bird reared its head up at the sky, as if rejecting the notion that it had to be staring down into the water it was presumably sat upon, searching for its own reflection.

Most of the others had made dishes and pots and bowls. Simple little constructions pocked with imperfections. They worked briefly and gave into distraction before long. They pelted each other with bits of clay and drove the teacher wild.

In the middle of that Bellwether worked on her swan.

At the end of the day the teacher had taken their pieces and set them in a kiln, a heavy ceramic lined octagonal beast that looked something like a Brutalist pressure cooker. He had asked for everyone to double check their work before handing it in to be baked.

Air bubbles in particular were to be ironed out. Bella especially remembered her teacher saying that. A bubble inside of a lump of clay was like a grenade. It expanded when subjected to heat, pushing upon the surrounding clay until it all exploded.

[2/2]

Bella had looked over her swan with exquisite care. Her classmates had turned their work in and gone, happy and speckled with clay, to their next class. She had watched the tray of dishes and bowls and plates and one proud swan be lowered into the kiln. The lid had been locked down, and an orange button pressed.

That night Bella tugged stray slivers of dried clay from her hair and daydreamed about her swan. She was proud of what she had made. It wasn’t like the shaky paintings or hesitant drawings she had turned in previously. This was a physical object, three dimensional and real, entirely hers. It stood head and shoulders over the disinterested works of her classmates.

She could already see the spot it would occupy on top of her dresser.

She had practically skipped into class the next day. The kiln was cool and silent, the lid opened up and the teacher looking in, head cocked.

“Remember what I said about checking for air bubbles?” He asked sternly, eyeing his students, and reached with one hand into the kiln.

Out came one shattered half of a clay plate, knobby and rippled, like a worn record. Bella stared.

Out came a chipped bowl, its edge nicked by some flying projectile. Bella edged closer, hesitantly, like the heroine of a gothic horror novel about to peer into the casket of a vampire.

Out came a clumsy attempt at a goblet, heavy stem exploded, the bottom of its bowl gone entirely. Bella put her hands on the edge of the kiln and stood on the tips of her toes, just barely able to see down into the bottom of the kiln.

Down, strewn across the white ceramic plates they’d been baked on, lay the ruins of the class’ work. Bowls had blown apart, plates had buckled and cracked, cups and pots and heavy, blunt clay knives had splintered apart and sagged into themselves.

And…in the center of it all, like the deposed regent of some war torn kingdom, sat her swan. Decapitated.

The teacher handed it silently over. Bella regarded her poor maimed bird for a horrible moment, then burst into tears and ran from the room.

She sought refuge in the girl’s restroom, in one of the stalls, and sat in its dim confines, cradling the wrecked remains of her swan. Its sides were pitted by shrapnel, neck terminating in a jagged stump. If she hadn’t already known what it was supposed to be then Bella would have been hard pressed to assign a name to the battered hunk of baked clay she held in her hands.

She had worked so hard on it. She had molded the clay, added the right amount of water, carefully sculpted her swan and etched feathers into its sides. It had been looking up into the sky, expecting great things.

And now it was ruined.

Bella clutched the swan to her chest, shaking with silent tears. With growing anger. She had done everything right. She had worked so hard. Why was it that her work had to be ruined because of the negligence of others?

That night the spot she’d set aside on her dresser remained bare.

Whoops. It would appear that 'Bella' auto-corrected into something else entirely. And as per usual I did not catch it until it was already posted.

omebody once told me the world is gonna roll me
I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed
She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb
In the shape of an "L" on her forehead

Well, the years start coming and they don't stop coming
Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running
Didn't make sense not to live for fun
Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb

So much to do, so much to see
So what's wrong with taking the back streets?
You'll never know if you don't go
You'll never shine if you don't glow

Pajeet my friend,
Pajeet, Apu,
Pajeet can you
Poo in the loo?

Do you know where its at?
Do you know what it do?
Not in the road,
Poo in the loo!

I know it's hard
But it's true
I implore you, Pajeet
Please, Poo in the Loo.

Why are so many selfish cunts posting their shit but not giving crit?

throw enough shit at the wall and some of it will stick, esp. if it's diarrhea, but not if it's those 8.6-couric solid bricks

SIMPSONS DID IT, SIMPSONS DID IT

You say this like it matters.

USE PASTEBIN YOU INSUFFERABLE CUNT

STOP CLOGGING THE THREAD WITH THIS SHIT FUCKING WALL OF TEXT THAT COULD EASILY BE A LINK AND OF FUCKING COURSE YOU DON'T GIVE ANY CRIT YOURSELF DO YOU

THIS NOTE WAS SOOO FUCKING NECESSARY AS THOUGH ANYONE IS GOING TO BOTHER READING THIS SPRAWLING EYE SORE. "as per usual" who. the fuck.do you think you are.

fuck you don't post here again

...

Kek

Can confirm has already been done in the plot of The Dear Hunter's story in their rock opera. In particular, it's done in act three. But I believe that was during WW2 and not Vietnam.

Among the many worlds drifting in the spectral sea, there is one whose neverending legends outlast time itself. A world of champions of good and evil, of victories as well as defeats...
but most of all: of magic and adventure
Rhim is its name, and this, but one of its stories:

Let me tell you the days of high adventure!

This is a failure of a thread.

this

>pastebin.com/RjCXAJWr

I liked your choice of words to describe the spatial aspects of the scene, but I had a hard time following the sequence of events. You use a few time indicators for description that are somewhat confusing.
I really love the idea of this as a mystical, somewhat archaeological project for the scholar, sets the tone well, even if the concept is somewhat cliche

and since nobody else is worth critiquing here is something I've been working on:
pastebin.com/zbpwL3ty

and blinked thereby

It's above this thread's dismal baseline. So, there's that.

You are going for a coming of age, finding maturity, discovering wisdom and developing masculinity kind of thing, and I know this because you hit me on the nose with it several times.

The surrogation of dad's dialog to the reader can only operate if the reader identifies with the son, which I am not sure I do. And not for lack of any requisite. My great uncle handed me a .22 when I was nine and told me he'd give me a quarter for every groundhog I brought him dead. He explained the concept of "shot picture" one time, let me shoot an empty bleach bottle, and set me along with ten rounds. I made $2 that day. Greatest day ever.

But and so. At this far remove from the Nick Adams stories, a straight through-line approach, even if perfectly executed, seems wanting when set against the complicated background of the current market. If I were attempting this, I would be thinking about devices that allow me to bring the exposition to life. Somehow.

For example, only to illustrate what I mean by device, the dad describes the rifle in terms of its flaws: "see that scratch on the stock? That's where I dropped her climbing over Baker's barb wire fence. See that ding by the chamber? Your grandpa tried to clear a jammed round with a screwdriver."

Some kind of narrative device that allows dad to convey the feel of history, rather than spelling out "this rifle runs deep," which, well.

The "laugh at their pain" school of parenting is also familiar and the black eye is a clever illustration. I would be seriously evaluating every line of dialog here against the test of whether it sounds like interesting and stylized speech, as compared perhaps to the dialog of a an after-school special. Loose versus tight, for example:

“Good,” He paused. “I want you to recognize that this is not just a weapon. I want you to start thinking about this thing as your companion. She’ll bring you food and protect you if you treat her well. Do you understand what I mean by this?”

“Good,” He paused. “Think of her as your companion. She’ll bring you food and protect you if you treat her well. You understand?”

I want to like them. Think about how many steps from field to table: find, stalk, shoot, retrieve, field clean, kitchen clean, food prep, cook, serve, eat. It's a development process.

This piece is somewhere between shoot and retrieve. Skin it. Soak it in milk to get the blood out. Carve it up and cook it.

Damn, thank you so much for the in depth critique. Appreciate it.
Also, I want to add that it is a work in progress, you probably know that, but I couldn't tell from your critique if you did.
Worth mentioning too that masculinity is probably the main focus of this, not necessarily how it develops but how it is transmitted and how it motivates, which I realize isn't very clear at this point

No

APPRECIATE IT

Here is something I wrote pastebin.com/2UGpR4mN

I'll (You) this message with some criticism of my own.

Criticize my writing here Not bad. Keep writing.

I think you need to work on your style/viewpoint though. On the one hand the prose is almost childishly simple, like all the sentences that start with Bella this and Bella that, on the other hand you have similes such as "like the heroine of a gothic horror novel about to peer into the casket of a vampire" and grown-up phrases like "exhaustively painted landscape". What you probably want to do, like most modern writers, is to stick to subjective 3rd person. In other words never phrase something in a way in which the character you are following wouldn't. Try to stick to only things Bella would notice and in describing them, words she would use.

Another thing you should probably do is to try to pull us more viscerally into your story. Things like passively saying "Bella had made a swan," and then explaining is it something you should have let us live through instead, from one moment to the next.

Though you show some flair for similes in particular, one description sticks out as much more "high-resolution" than any of the others. It's when you say, "That night Bella tugged stray slivers of dried clay from her hair and daydreamed about her swan." Her tugging dried clay from her hair is something that instantly creates so many images and gives us so much information about her. Try to do more of these exploding descriptions. As Anton Chekhov says, "Don't TELL me the light is shining, SHOW me the glint of light on a broken glass."

>excruciatingly
dropped. it's 2k17, we don't have time for adverbs. from the second sentence i knew the entire piece was gonna be full of fluff

In other words you would also have dropped Neil Gaiman, J. K. Rowling etc. after a few pages. Honestly I don't mind. You're clearly not my audience. Thanks for trying at least.

Wait, I think I just got trolled ... I mean even fucking Ian McEwan uses adverbs. The "no-adverb" thing is just some weird Stephen King OCD.

>gayman
>rowling
i legit can't tell if this nigga trollin or not

Who wouldn't drop those """""""""authors"""""""""?

...

>The first thing I did when I got my superpowers was to murder my fucking bitch of a best friend.
But "excruciatingly" is what made you drop it?

Also Tolstoi used adverbs all the time.

I don't really see the problem in asking for criticism for genre fiction intended to reach as many people as possible. And I've actually been on Veeky Forums since like 2005. But whatever.

>obessed with an idea for over a year
>started writing it six months ago
>poured more passion and drive into than any story I've ever written before
>showed it to my parents
>they hated it
>took their input and built on it, re-writing the beginning four times to get it right
>finally build up the courage to show them again
>they still hate it

I don't know what to do anymore /sffg/ I don't know if I can keep writing if this my own parents tell me it's shit

Do your parents like the kind of movies, books, etc. you like? Show it to someone else.

>I occasionally stroke his back with my gloved hand, to which he unwaveringly responds with a short tail wag, and a chuff between breaths.

try

I occasionally stroke his back with my gloved hand, to which he responds with a wag of his tail and a chuff between breaths.

try to define where you do and don't need some of these one-two adjective combos (low, combusting roar - low, muffled, huff - sharp, penetrating pain - for example).

don't feel you have to include the dog 'replying with a muffled huff' (hufflepuff?) or whatever, I don't think it adds much and kind of interrupts the reveal of the jackrabbit.

don't say 'jackrabbit' again when the dog is carrying the 'mangled' corpse (carcass? I don't know these terms). we already know it's a jackrabbit. also, the dog trots back 'with enthusiasm' can probably be cut down. we know he's enthusiastic already, I posit.

'lifelessly and black' should read 'lifeless and black' in order to make sense, I believe

I like your dialogue and your careful use of tense. nicely done.

it's terrible. it doesn't make sense. seriously, I can't make sense of it. you need to read it from the perspective of someone who found it in the street and see just how impossible it is to decipher the run-on sentences and bizarre pacing. the other user is also right, it's got way too much fluff. you're a great one to quote Chekhov on 'show, don't tell' when you cram fluff into every sentence you can. yikes.

do you like it? it's okay to be passionate about a project that doesn't work out well. that said, why not share it here? they do say six months is the usual timeframe for a good short story, so don't pretend that's some outrageously long time to have slaved away on it.

this is a piece I'm working on.

pastebin.com/5m7mkTTB

I'm posting it, but I dont know if this first part is enough to go off of

pastebin.com/QhWtLAWh

>they do say six months is the usual timeframe for a good short story, so don't pretend that's some outrageously long time to have slaved away on it.

I'm not pretending it's a brobdingnagian effort, but it's more times than I've ever spent on one story in my life. I normally don't have the attention span to do anything but what just barely qualifies as a short story. I do like it, otherwise I wouldn't stick with it this long, but I'm worried that even if I finish it it might be hated, or worse, unpublishable

I read your excerpt. it's well written and direct, but maybe a bit too so. The speech patterns make it seem like the narrator isn't comfortable with their english, but you obviously are.

My mom's taste is slightly similar, but she doesn't seem to like the settings I do. I have no idea what my dad reads, if anything

>"You witch!" I saw her bright red, little lips mouth. There was no sound as the pressure I was applying to her wind pipe with my flat hand held up a few feet away from her allowed none of the necessary air to pass. Hadn't we been over this phenomenon in biology just a few weeks ago?

This one paragraph is holding you back. it's jumbled and out of context the dialogue sounds oh-so-obviously censored. The addition of hard edge makes it all the more jarring, like saying someone is "a gosh darned cunt, god bless him"

Can you give an example of fluff? I've never gotten that before. I'd say my style is pretty concise ... I guess I can see some of the sentences being difficult and the pace unusual, but I didn't think it was that bad??

Well in the first sentence we're told a murder is at stake. In the second paragraph you learn that her best friend is slow and that one of the good things of this is that she stays the longest in the wardrobe ... and at that we're back in the action, she's murdering her. Is that what's confusing people? And anyway that character simply isn't the type to swear, even if the narrator is.

And the significance of her being the last in wardrobe is of course that the main character gets to be with her alone to do what she's doing ...

>pastebin.com/RjCXAJWr
this is beautiful, and quite honestly, it might have given me an idea for how to re-write the beginning of my story one more time

>he had a hunch it had something to do with those astrology books she always spent her money on (or was it astronomy?)
I like this. dunno if it was your intention, but from this I intuit not only his passion for his daughter and her interests, but also an inevitable, all too human disjunction between their inner-worlds, a disjunction for which one symptom is his lack of certainty what *exactly* it is that his daughter is interested in. Yet, despite the persistent, unpassable gap between their inner worlds doesn't prevent him at all from caring for her.

>but the whump and ruffle of toppled paper stacks was certainly a new one. With a sigh he opened the door, and found the room in complete disarray.
>The carpet was littered with scratch papers and charts, bare patches were stained deep with dribbles of ink.
Nice. Setting up mystery and the Big Question. This keeps a reader's interest.

>“Eve,” he chided, “you're fifteen. What could possibly make you think it's okay to be drawing on the walls like this?”
>...
>“Do you have any idea how much this is going to cost to fix?”
I read into this Angelo's first flaw: overshadowing his care for his daughter is the presence of social conditioning, the need to punish and shape the young impressionable mind of the child which is still absolutely free, in a Kierkegaardian sense, where the imagination is still soaring with possibilty -- makes me feel a little tragic, honestly, knowing that with fatherly love comes a freedom-constricting grip as well. Keep this dynamic up.

>He saw her biting her lip and sighed. Fatherhood was a different job from rum-running, he reminded himself, sometimes it was just better to let things be.
Ahh, second guessing himself, coming dialectically to a better decision. Keep these character-inner-doubt dynamics up. It reflects the human condition, and I like that. It's these little things.

>Her depth perception flattened, then stretch once again in a direction distinct from the ones most were aware of.
Nice imagery, but the second half takes a little bit more effort to decipher, which is not bad in and of itself -- it's just that it's out of place. Where you've got easy, fluid prose with nothing intentionally challenging, there comes up this rogue phrasing anomaly. Only a slight bump. But enough to notice. It's mainly "a direction distinct from the ones most were aware of". That's my problem phrase. I get too much of a technical vibe from the phrasing.

>She followed the traces to a dusty rail yard lit by ropy signal lights from days past
I'm not entirely sure what 'ropy signal lights' would look like? I've never seen that word used that way, and can't imagine how it could, either.

>Bevitore thought took it in for a moment and then started thinking out loud.
Just a typo: "thought took".

>cont.

>She admired the weaving path the patty wagon took as it careened off into the distance driven by a majestic and smelly-looking hobo, a new bottle of gin clutched in one dirty hand.
Nice, tight little description, each word loud enough to do a little bit more than its quota. Keep this formula up when evoking images, and you should be fine.

__

That first section ends nicely, on a little minor tragic note, the father leaving with priorities unfortunately higher than his own family. Could illuminate the dilemma of the laboring individual, here.

Overall, nice. Has a touching note you could draw out. The only criticism I can think to give right now is that I wish there were more instances of those tight descriptive lines like the one I greentexted about the hobo speeding off in the cop car. There's a lot of things packed into the one sentence. comparitively, all the other lines lack something of its compressed flair. Does that even make sense? I can only use abstractions, because I'm shit. Words fail my mind most of the time.

I will now post my own content.

Now, here's mine.
>pastebin.com/QhW3Tz8g

I'm I've been writing for years and usually people have good things to say about my story, so I'm really wondering what I messed up here.

The beginning may have been a little bit too abrupt so I've tried to fix it a little as well as trying to make the rest of the story easier to read pastebin.com/MwDM4AEZ

Since I wonder if that could have anything to do with the negative reception, I also want to warn that this is shameless, childish genre fiction. It's also in the first person, attempted written in the voice of an extremely obnoxious character.

Thanks a lot. glad you enjoyed it. Care to elaborate on the idea it gave you ?

>pastebin.com/QhWtLAWh
Don't be afraid to use said. Flow could be a little better - some semicolons were a little awkward, and you switched tenses in the middle. Nice little vignette, though.

Here's something of mine. A small intro - I have about 25 pages of this story outlined and written, but hey, here's the first few hundred words

pastebin.com/4iG69MCj

Should I stop writing? Wrote this weeks ago. My first short story.

pastebin.com/21Ym1HS3

Thats a lot of fucking commas and semi colons

Wrote this a couple days ago right after sadwanking my jimmy to the remembrance of a beautiful girl I see in the bus every week. Just in case some of you understand Spanish.

Contémplote en el bus todos los martes
Desde hace dos semanas; y te juro
Que cada martes mi dolor maduro
Y cultivo como el resto de mis artes,

Las cuales, hace ya unas dos semanas,
Estériles tornaron, y sospecho
Que aquellas tus verdugas y tiranas
Miradas, aquel tu exultante pecho,

Son quienes me castraron de talentos.
Pues mi genio, sublime y diligente
Antes de que llegaran los tormentos

Que hicieran tal despojo de mi mente,
Era jardín; es hoy yermo sin cuento
Que cría sólo cuanto a ti te miente.

Here, try this one. It is better organized now.

pastebin.com/Ffr27BVR

My fantasy story starts off a little boring and I was thinking about doing it in media res but I couldn't decide where to start. You gave me the idea to start the story by simply describing a compelling and mystical environment: a labyrinth of subway tunnels where the walls between worlds are as thin as those of a cheap motel. the heroine walking through can hear the sounds of a dozen other times and places, and one of those is the opening scene of the story

nice

Read this. It's short enough. Read it now.

eldritchpress.org/ac/jr/147.htm

I do not care about length. Given 100 words or more, the greats can do just about anything.

What I care about is why I care about any of it.

Why is Varka there? He shows us.
Why is Varka miserable? He shows us.
Why won't the baby shut up? He shows us.
What is the attitude of the shopkeepers toward Varka? He shows us.
Why do they hold that attitude? It's in there.

The explanations for the action and motives and agencies and agents and settings - it's all in there. We /get/ why Varka kills the baby. We /get/ what it feels like to be an oppressed indentured servant denied a basic human requirement of life who becomes deranged by dint of abuse, and who, free of criminal malice aforethought, commits a homicide.

Because there is just enough, and not one smidge too much or too little context for us to get it.

Get it?

Now look at yours again. Why? How? For what reason? What does it tell us?

"Sleepy" tells me: 19th century Russia consisted mostly of a pious and ignorant peasantry who held human life in variable value based on status, and who, following from their flawed world view, were capable of inflicting brutal cruelty, often resulting in exactly the kind of tragic backfire they most feared. Kicker - the conclusion at which these people, as shown, are least likely ever to arrive is that they brought the tragedy on themselves.

Why does the last line describe Varka's sleep as "of the dead?"

>Because when she next wakes up, it will be for the last time before the Big Sleep.

Now go try again.

you're showing the wrong people. if you want to write for kids then show kids.

No

Surprised no one has responded to this, it seems pretty decent. You have a pretty unique writing style, lots of interesting references and clever vocabulary. I liked it.

Is Bella's swan a Twilight reference? I think the plot of this story is good, interesting reference. I agree with the other guy that responded though that sometimes the prose is clunky.

> Why was it that her work had to be ruined because of the negligence of others?

But there are some other lines that are really good. I think it just needs a little revision.

>was unusual and famous for its insipid architecture; as old as it looked, it was astoundingly creepy,
>He was at least 6 feet tall; he had a pale complexion; and as the
>Yousuf was his leverage, his support; people would laud this kid
>The olds came and paid their homage to the child and wept; their tears froze in the snowy winter.

Why are you using semicolons so weirdly? All of these could be periods or commas. Overuse of semicolons makes writing flow very awkwardly.

The story is an interesting idea but it felt like there was not really enough buildup to make me really enjoy it.

Pic related is my writing, pls crit. I'm really just trying to learn at this point.

why would you care what they think about your writing? especially since you said your dad doesnt read
interesting. I guess the lack of punctuation is intentional?

some1 r8 mine

It was more my mom, My dad more just confirmed it.

My mom is the kind of person who praises my creations no matter how shitty they are. Whenever I cook a shitty tasteless meal she tells me it's good. Whenever I doodle something that looks like an autistic 13-year-old on deviantart she tells me it's great. If she tells me she doesn't like something I made, it means to me that it was so shitty she couldn't even lie about it

If he's writing childrens books he should be showing it to parents

>Someone buy me EU4 and I'll host
>Supporting Paradox and their shitty business practices
Just pirate it user really.

maybe she just doesnt get it, man

But I don't know if anyone else will either

1. 'Comely' is an adjective, but you seem to be attempting to use it as an adverb. I suggest you change it.

2. Some of it seems pretty meaningless to me and should be scrapped - "her words were like feathers / her actions like daggers". Also it's very unclear who or what you are referring to there. The Sun? Some unnamed person? A lack of clarity is often a way of covering up some insecurity about what you've written.

3. "I shed but a single tear" is a line that should not appear in any poem except, perhaps, a pastiche of bad poetry. Drop it.

4. There are, however, two lines I rather like: "The eastern seaboard shouts back to the men on the deck" (consider getting rid of that last 'the' - spoils the rhythm). Also: "beneath a spot where the Sun never threatens to set". Remember: the image, the thrilling combination of words - these are what make good poetry.

Keep working at it.

thanks, I really appreciate this

poem is about a grill

No problem

I had died or so I thought before I knew there was no death. In the corporeal world there is much said about death almost none of which is true. In the previous world, bereft, I shot myself in the head and "died" quickly only to awake in this place which I can only assume is hell or some ill conceived purgatory.

That's the first paragraph of what I'm working on.

this reminds me of something david foster wallace wrote about college students "trying a bit too hard is all" in the broom of the system.

Reposting, since it got buried.
>pastebin.com/QhW3Tz8g

Branches cut our path. He broke his way. Beyond reach, I walked by the river, waiting for his eyes.

'It’s almost dark,’ he said. He forged ahead.

My gaze fell to the water. Rocks emerged, tips glistening. I let myself fall. I am swept along. From the very edge, I looked back for him. It was already dark. I shone my torch.

The way led into the forest.

I said nothing. There was no reply. I listened as my light died.

I listened to the river.

I posted a while ago when I'd only done 1 or 2 paragraphs. I've written another, and now I've got ~150 words to end it. I'm planning to finish it with him crying over his dead father, but I'm not sure if that would be too abrupt.

I'm aiming to capture the feeling of rural England in the 18/19th century, and have had images such as pic related in my mind as I've been writing.

pastebin.com/MbWR2DFg

Personally I felt this was too description heavy, felt like a chore having to read about how everything in the scene looked, and the descriptions themselves felt basic and YA-like at parts.

I like the scenario though, feels quite dreamlike and vague, reminds me of Keats in a way.

Didn't read it all sorry, but really enjoyed the first few paragraphs. Felt fresh and modern without sounding pretentious and cheap, although I don't like the use of words such as 'millennial' - makes it feel like I'm reading a Veeky Forums post at points.

Overall, 8/10.

>pastebin.com/21Ym1HS3

I have literally no idea what's going on lad.

Gave yours a read and it's pretty clear to see that's in a first draft. Which isn't a snide comment or anything, just that there's a lot of good stuff in their that I'm sure you'll be able to polish out ( I'll point some examples out in a bit). Other than that, I like the way you set the scene it's paints a good picture and the concept is good too.

Anyway here's a few small things that I'm sure you'll noticed when redrafting it but I might as well point them out before hand

>crumbling edition of the King James Bible
>a crumbling King James Bible

you repeat it twice in the same paragraph, there's really no need to list it with the rest of the inheritance since you've already said that.

paragraph 7. It's just a lot of

>John Y
>John X
> John Z

Also I fully understand if this is a stylistic choice and if so you can ignore this but, I did find the long Faulkner-esqe sentences rather unpleasant to read. Idk call me a pleb fag but when I'm reading i like to take a piece of information and then have brief interlude of (.) to quickly digest it before moving on.

Hope this helps and be sure to post a redraft, i'll look forward to reading it.

Thanks for the tips, hadn't spotted the repetition of 'crumbling' so I'll take that out quickly.

I can see where you're coming from with the overbearing focus on John, I'll see if I can thin it out a bit.

The entire thing is supposed to be replicating a style of writing, and at the moment I'm trying to reflect Gogol's style. That's the main reason for the long sentences, bracketed sentences and other little bits here and there, so mainly it is entirely stylistic.

Thanks for the help user

>don't reply to people who don't critique

Everyone better put on a trip then, or this threads going downhill fast.

Care to elaborate?

Are you saying its too... Uh I'm not sure what you mean.

>EU4
>not literally any other Paradox game

pastebin.com/WYpZB4db

I'm not from England, so it's hard for me to conjure the hills. I can see the snow clearly, but not at all what the snow covers.
I need an image to grasp onto. It's an OK hook and States the problem pretty clearly, but try to do it with a visual image. Like a cocoon frozen by winter or some shit

Whoa, pretty cool. Think there's more poem there?

>when she was eight
Start us in the present with a scene. Starting where we're not is no fun.

>had liked
Uck yeah because of this. If you MUST start here, put us fully in the scene.

I do like the rest of the scene. The image of the swan..
.This is really cool. It sets her up as a character, and I'm interested to see the broader conflict. But, setting it in a memory is HArD.

Forgive me my past transgressions,
my heart was not used to love.
Now my mind is filled with questions,
of what I was once part of.

Will my humor ever recover?
and restore it's former lively state.
Or will I in this darkness take cover,
and to heartbreak capitulate.

I hope I can pick up the pieces,
and try to find love again.
Hopefully my spirit increases,
and my love of life, I will retain.

>Will my humor ever recover?
>and restore it's former lively state.
I dont like the second line

maybe take out "lively"

the rest is good, I really liked it personally

It sounds like a mix between a bad love song and a bad love poem written by someone who has never read contemporary poetry