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Title: the mantis' wish genre: xenofiction word count: 651 foreword: After writing this piece, I gained a lot of respect for the writing process. then again I always had but not to this degree. After doing this mod challenge perhaps I should do more short stories I guess. The story you're gonna word started a bit in the beginning but ended up getting as safe for work as possible once some tangents were removed. Thankfully the latest piece can be posted here safely. Now, I don't look to highly at my work. There's moment where I feel something is missing, or the dialogue didn't feel right and other things. It's a super common thing I must admit and I hope you guys still kinda like it despite that. And for anyone wondering why I didn't join thunderdome, I wasn't interested. I liked the prompt but I loved my avatar too much to risk getting it replaced. also for the aforementioned reasons before. thanks everyone form the writing server for helping me be my best. quote:The purpose of life to say is a very pressing matter. Most claim it’s something that happens. We barely exist before we were born and we clearly don’t exist once we’re dead. For others, they don’t care. One’s instincts are too strong to bother with the mere questions of life. To them, all that mattered was to eat, sleep, and mate. Repeat again until finally, one is no more.
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# ? May 18, 2019 13:37 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 03:51 |
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Crit: we don’t need the faux-intellectualism in the first paragraph. “Corey” is a dumb name for a mantis (or a person). You probably don’t need to give the mantis a name. “The mantis” will do just fine. There’s an interesting idea in the story of a mantis whose only hope for meaningful connection means imminent death. Follow through on that. Perhaps he finds it in the spider, only for the spider to betray him by doing what spiders do. You have some lush descriptions here. Use full sentences unless you have a really, really good reason not to, though.
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# ? May 18, 2019 17:52 |
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Saucy_Rodent posted:Crit: we don’t need the faux-intellectualism in the first paragraph. “Corey” is a dumb name for a mantis (or a person). You probably don’t need to give the mantis a name. “The mantis” will do just fine. thank you for this critique. I admit the first paragraph was a bit unnecessary and was the result of me thinking i needed 600 words for the story. now I went over that number, it's safe to rid of it next time. now for some personal bias, I don't really like calling a animal character (unless stated otherwise) their species name as that implies their the only one...okay that sounds dumb but when I wanna introduce another that's the same species, do I call them ms mantis or mantis 2? I'm not sure honestly. besides that point, I admit they introduction of the spider was half assed at best and I should have given it more weight than an afterthought.
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# ? May 18, 2019 18:11 |
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Maybe not have the mantises be named Steve and Betsy or poo poo like that?
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# ? May 18, 2019 18:27 |
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Fruity20 posted:was the result of me thinking i needed 600 words for the story "Time will tell when the next tomorrow comes." Just stop and think what it's telling the reader about the characters or the story.
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# ? May 18, 2019 19:07 |
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SelenicMartian posted:So was the very last sentence I honestly don't know how to end the story without feeling too open ended...maybe I should just rewrite this. Fruity20 fucked around with this message at 23:49 on May 18, 2019 |
# ? May 18, 2019 23:38 |
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My crits will be in bold.YOUR STORY!! YOU DID IT! posted:The purpose of life to say is a very pressing matter. Most claim it’s something that happens. We barely exist before we were born and we clearly don’t exist once we’re dead. For others, they don’t care. One’s instincts are too strong to bother with the mere questions of life. To them, all that mattered was to eat, sleep, and mate. Repeat again until finally, one is no more. Okay, starting sentence is cool, we got some intellectual voice. So, this isn't bad. It's cute but doesn't really go anywhere. It's anthromorphic protagonist has a good central idea, but you don't introduce him soon enough I think. This is a good foundation. I personally don't mind Corey the Mantis, but it sticks out because the spider didn't get a name. This is probably due to have 600 words. I think you could add onto this. Hell the spider is probably afraid of having young, since spider's young eat their mothers. Good pairing that up with the mantis. I do think you need this story to go.. somewhere. Either Corey gets over this paranoia and enters a relationship with the spider, or something else happens right?
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# ? May 19, 2019 05:12 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 03:51 |
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Okay, Fruity I know you've been posting in the Fiction Advice thread and some other people have given you some line edits, so I'm going to take this in a different direction. One, great job for finishing a story! Honestly and not sarcastically, great first step. Now that doesn't mean the story is good, but that's okay. The point is you wrote a story and you are going to learn from it. Remember that not everything you write will be salvageable but you can always take things from it, and you are always learning. It's just a matter of how much you want to invest in re-writing something that might not work in the end, or trying something new. There are some good things in your story! You have a good voice, and your descriptions tend to be effective. I hope you keep trying. So this work itself has some issues as people pointed out. I personally liked the anthropomorphic mantis and spider. But the rest of the piece doesn't support what you are going for, so I recommend you re-read the piece (or anything you write) over again without trying to edit or critique it. Then, go have a cup of coffee, go for a walk, whatever, and ponder what the piece really means. Do this before you do any more writing on it. That way, when you go edit later, you can fix all the parts that don't fit the heart/meaning/theme of the story. For example, is this piece about how someone who is down can find an unexpected friend? And it happens to be told with insects? Then maybe you play up the anthropomorphism. gently caress yeah, a Mantis named Corey, and a Spider named Fiona, and maybe some ants named Bill, Will, Phil, and Jill. Then you can go and fix up the rest, plot, conflict, etc. based on that. Or, maybe it's supposed to be a bleak life-is-hollow in a clockwork universe piece. Then you drop the human names and go for more cold, harsh reality tone. Also, based on that you can figure out what other issues you want to fix. Notice I said "want to fix." I think it was Neil Gaiman who said (or maybe he was quoting someone else) that readers' feedback is valid, but directions for how to fix it are not. Here it is Gaiman posted:Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. Some people say "Don't start with a philosophy lesson." others say "there's no conflict". These are both valid points (that I happen to agree with). But, if the point of your story is a vignette or slice of life, then there doesn't necessarily need to be overt conflict, although you break the rules of storytelling at your peril. For every storytelling rule, I can find classic and award winning stories that break it. But you have to learn the art of story construction first before you start altering the formula. I guess the short version is this: Decide if each point of a critique serves your story. If it does, consider fixing. If it doesn't, it's perfectly okay to ignore it and move on. So this is what I suggest - Read our crits over the next week or so. Then let the story sit. Start writing something else! Come back to this in a week, reread the story and crits, and then re-write it and post it here. I'm really curious to see how you would improve it. (and very mechanically, when asking for crits, resist the urge to preface with your discussion of the story, unless you specifically need feedback on a certain point. And then, I would only put it at the end. It turns people off to wade through a bunch of discussion before reading something, and then it affects the criticism. You want readers to go in cold. But maybe there's one scene that you truly can't decide if it belongs or not, and that's okay to ask as a pointed question after reading, although it's better to try it one way, and then a different way based on feedback). Doctor Zero fucked around with this message at 15:12 on May 19, 2019 |
# ? May 19, 2019 14:53 |