ITT: we post a single sentence from a work in progress and rate each other

Di gustibus no es disputare :^)

Bridget holds a joint loosely between her lips and she occasionally breathes in then lets out the smoke and I'm kind of amazed that she's able to do this while using both hands to French braid the Boca Raton girl's hair.

He goes after his problems like a child with a bad tooth, always checking if it's still there; if it still hurts. His anger at the pain is real.

Why do you make the sentence so long?

The simile feels a bit cliche. Could you elaborate why you chose that simile? I think there may be a better comparison out there.

Because I haven't written enough to get rid of Bret Easton Ellis's influence on me.

Conjunctions are nice, I like to use them as well. I've been avoiding them as of late; they become a crutch.

If you remove the 'and' between smoke and I'm, it may read better.

The "kind of" seems superfluous and pushes an extreme informal tone. Is that what you're wishing for?

I appreciate the feedback OP.

And I am going for something informal because the speaker is a seventeen year old female who feels anxious and paranoid about her virginity.

Spherical.

OP again.
fuck man really? Im doing something a lot like that, where the girl goes to the first part of her Senuor year hoping to get laid but something S U R R E A L happens when shes riding his member and she loses her ability to understand the English language.

Take that one if ya want i doubt ill do anything with it

We painted masterpieces on the backs our eyelids

Animals and plants rotted, so the people who lived there were still familiar with the concept, but human bodies never deteriorated, smelled, bloated, or bruised.

I understand what you meant to do and I'm still right that it's bad. The rhythm is very uncomfortable and the diction is cliche. It's not profound or relatable. The other one isn't nice either, it's so unoriginal and stylistically bare-bones that I wouldn't be surprised if it had already been written by another other just out of coincidence.

This is a seedling of something good but the structure and content doesn't agree with the style. You need to develop a more distinct voice. "She occasionally breathes in then lets out the smoke" is too long and could be more fluid. "Boca Raton girl" is a nice touch, and I like the choice to make it long.

This could be fleshed-out more, the simile doesn't add much to the description. I can easily understand the idea of someone who obsesses over their problems without that example, but you could make it a much richer comparison if you worked at it a bit. I don't think it needs to be a child; "He goes after his problems like a bad tooth" or "like bad teeth" would sound better. "His anger at the pain is real" is totally unnecessary, you should omit that or flesh it out more as well.

That's a great line, but whether or not it works would really depend on the context

The risen sun illuminated it alike to diamond effervescence, glittering in glowing golden harmony.

Sounds like pure exposition. Maybe you wrote an interesting story, but as far as I can tell there's nothing special in this particular sentence.

Kind of purple. "Glittering in glowing golden harmony" sounds overly familiar. Not very original.

>alike to

>He asked if it was the case. I said that it probably was but that I couldn't be sure.

You're right about it being exposition. I'm working on a sort of fairy tale and this is at the very beginning. Here's the first paragraph if you're interested:

In a distant and forgotten fold of history, there was a land where bodies did not rot. The dead remained just as they were the moment they died. Animals and plants rotted, so the people who lived there were still familiar with the concept, but human bodies never deteriorated, smelled, bloated, or bruised.

These are mostly fucking terrible. Stop trying so hard to force some affected, unnatural style because you think that's how literary writers 'should' sound.

Unless you're one of the very rare writers that can pull of some idiosyncratic style, write more naturally, otherwise it sounds forced, pretentious and painfully amateurish.

I do think that could be interesting, but that's a lot of exposition to start off with. It works for a fairy-tale-like story, but I think that might not be your best route. You could start with some kind of interesting and unexplainable event and then get your exposition in by gradually explaining what's going on. Maybe the first scene is something like garbage men crushing dead bodies into little compact cubes to dispose of them, and then you slowly reveal why this is happening. That might not be the tone you want but I think it illustrates what I mean. It's a classic technique: you hook your reader and do the exposition at the same time.

Have you read Death with Interruptions or Blindness by Jose Saramago? I haven't but you should check them out, I think they're similar to what you're trying to do

OP.

Fair enough.

What the fuck does "natural" even mean? I bet you read fucking genre fiction, where nobody can write worth a fuck.

The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.

not that poster, but aha kys

Ironically, "natural" is the opposite of what genre writers do.

It's bollocks, though. It's a nonsense word, it has no meaning because what's "natural" for one person could be totally different than what it is for someone else.

Natural means that you can say it out loud without fumbling your own words.
If you can't fluently speak your own prose then it isn't natural.

>“I can tell you to lift weights and read and write, and surely then, as you may or may not know even though I’ve told you a dozen times, and because previously you didn’t take into account the fact that you had to not only ignore the girls, but give up the video games, is that the girls will then come to you. As long as you’re actively pursuing being a better human being—a better man—a girl that you fancy will (sooner than you think, into this betterment of yours) fancy you back. But honestly, at that point, upon a balance of bettering yourself and seeing women beneath you on the line of human potential you may develop a symptom that curbs you from relationships in the sense that your trapped in a paradox and doomed to realize that love is indeed a game and hey, maybe the movies were right about something, but not everything, because not only do you have to keep up with the game until you nab her, but still, and still, and on and on, and nevertheless upon this realization your heart still flutters when you see a girl whom you feel the need to sleep with in order fulfill your right as a human being and to extend your generation (again, Venus, boy), which is, like I said, of course the purpose of life from either a God or evolutionary perspective, as you know, and as we’ll discuss later, but, inevitably, in itself, not enough to explain that sunken feeling you just explained to me before this, one that I know so well myself, driving in my car, cruising, thinking of only her, what I had could have done, what I had could have still done, but didn’t, and instead choosing to wallow in unpursued, purposely-unrequited love, choosing to spend the only time of day wherein I’m both on break from reaching my full attention, and alone, spending this time with thoughts about her, and on movies in my head of her consoling me, holding me like she’s my mother, only then for a moment every for myself thinking that this is that Joelle Van Dyne moment above the crib, and I might be destined for something, where my Midwestern pale Elizabethan is telling me it’s alright, ‘Don’t Worry, Baby…’”

has potential. "Climax of nerves," hell, just "climax" kills it. So does the last clause. The God knows how long is a good phrase, but it's clunky where it's at.
sick platitude
I like the first sentence. Second not so much. I need more to judge
Fuck I can't tell if this is good or pretentious.
"hold" makes it seem that she's holding it with her hand. Is that what she's doing? It reads like you're about to cross the threshold into becoming a good writer. Continue for 2 or 3 more years.
nope. Jesus, boys.

All in all, this:

Yeah but there are accepted conventions which most people just understand without intellectualizing it: that's how communication works. We have a certain collective, contemporary idea of what "natural" writing is, even if that idea isn't totally concrete. But the most obvious way of explaining it is to say that to write "naturally", you should just write the way you think or talk, and you shouldn't try to puff up your style or do any of the gymastics that skilled writers with really ideosyncratic prose styles do. If you do that, and it still doesn't seem "nautral" to other people, the most likely explaination is that you think you're writing "naturally", but you actually aren't. The second most likely explaination is that what is genuinely "natural" to you simply doesn't seem "natural" to other people, in which case, provided that the "unnatural" writing you produce isn't good either, you're probably never going to be a good writer at all. Keep in mind that most people are not good writers and could never be good writers, and it's overwhelmingly likely that you are one of those people regardless of how much you read, or how passionate you are about writing, etc. I dont want to be mean, but you have to realize, it's not possible to negotiate your way into being a good writer by arguing with your critics.

It just seems like such a lazy critique. It's not precise.

Chill sinks heavy down through trees, evergreen whoosh. whips back of neck.

why harmony? get rid of the glittering crap, if not necessary. I already know a diamond glitters

I really like several parts of this, but you use a lot of cliches as well, and IMO it's very easy to write something that's appealing in the specific way that this is appealing. This excerpt might be considered good in a non-literary context (YA fiction or a TV script?), but you have to mature out of your desire to write about this kind of extremely conventional subject matter if you want to be taken seriously.

It is, in the same way that "those special effects in that movie did not look real" is a lazy critique. It only seems imprecise because it's obvious: it's very easy to identify "natural" vs. "unnatural"-seeming writing on site without thinking about it, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.

It seemed the natural laws that imposed themselves on adolescence were oblivious as to my existence.

nigga i took my sentence out of Araby by james fartsniffer joyce and it got the worst review out of all of us.

machines broken

Something touched Lauren’s shoulder and she yelped, turning to see a startled Emily holding candy out to her.

It's a young adult fiction. Don't hate.

“I know hes russian because he looks like he doesnt like me.”

is this an uncertain teen saying this?? cause if not, it seemed can go. Why "imposed"? You can cut this sentence down, and develop a voice of who's saying this

A) It's not the worst review of anyone by far, I really liked certain aspects of it so much that I'm not surprised you didn't write it, and B) I don't care that it's Joyce. It's not the 1910s anymore, not to mention the fact that you changed a bunch of the words which would have made the whole aesthetic seem inconsistent. I love Nathaniel Hawthorne, but if you took a passage out of The Scarlet Letter and told me you wrote it yesterday I would probably tell you to kill yourself.

idgaf what it is, this a boring ass sentence. If Lauren a jumpy ass hoe, i need to experience that

wait which one do you think it is?

If I had a dollar for every dirty thought I'd had, I could bring the U.S. out of debt.

What? Can you restate that question?

which sentence did you think was mine, which i wrote (or retwrote) for the thread

o shit, I thought yours was the giant greentext that started "I can tell you to lift weights..."

Yours was "the cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed"? I swear to god I was going to say I really liked that one, I just didn't want to get derailed from all my other arguments. I'm not by the way, in case that's not clear.

this is a great definition but I would clarify it by saying you do this the first time you read your work aloud.

because if you practice enough, you can recite purple prose without fumbling your own words.

With his pink tongue out, sitting obediently at the tip of my toes was the funny little dog I met this morning.

if you're order for this sentence is 123 then i think it would read better as 321.

unless "pink tongue" means something important elsewhere in the text

He bought the Rubix cube on a whim, hoping that now in his adulthood he’d be able to solve it.

Rubik's. It's named for its creator, Hungarian architect Ernő Rubik.

Thanks, man.

Tonight he will laugh as he doesn't want to be who he wants to be.

I don't really like ending the sentence with "with his pink tongue out" and I just really want to create this image of a dog sitting in front of your feet with his tongue hanging out looking very friendly and obedient, like dogs usually do.