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Honestly I don't think this story is at the point where it deserves a line by line critique. It's certainly nowhere near the point of being publishable right now. Anyway, for the record, your basic premise was kind of neat. I liked the idea of a priest trying to prove an idol is false and getting zapped to a crisp for his trouble. It's just that the actual technical details of the story are quite weak. There are almost no descriptions in this story and as a result there is no atmosphere. Other than a couple lines about the death statue there's literally no attempt at scene setting here. It almost feels like the action is taking place in an empty white void. There's also very little characterization. We have virtually no information about any of the important characters here and only the vaguest sense of their motivation. You sort of allude to the idea that people in the village have joined the cult out of desperation but this only comes up a single throwaway line. The dialogue is honestly painful. It doesn't sound remotely authentic and in some cases its incredibly cheesy. This story does have a plot of sorts but it's a really weak one. We don't know why the Dad joined the cult. We don't know anything about the cult or why it started. We don't have any context for Father Aguilar showing up all angry, or his seemingly very rash decision to storm back into the death shrine to burn it down. For that matter, we don't even have a great sense of the protagonists motivations other than a throw away line about how he misses his Dad. Then we get to the actual action, and that is honestly the worst part of all: quote:He pulled out a lighter and lit the statue. As soon as it erupted in flames, they were extinguished by some unseen force. A host of spirits appeared and enveloped Father Aguilar as he levitated in the air. "A host of spirits appeared and enveloped Father Aguilar as he levitated in the air"? What the gently caress? Up to this point the story has been grounded in the real world. Suddenly you introduce a supernatural element and you handle it in the strangest way possible, passing over it in a single line. How am I supposed to have any context for what these "spirits" would look like? When something this fantastical happens you need to have some way to keep the reader invested in the story. You could do that by actually putting us in the characters head. What is he seeing, hearing, smelling, thinking etc. What do the spirits look like? How does he even know that they are spirits? From the way you describe this and from the surprisingly muted reaction of everyone present it feels as though this dude getting levitated and set on fire isn't that much more unusual than him getting hit by a car or falling and spraining his ankle. This is such a crucial part of the story, where you transition from the mundane to the fantastical, and you brush over it in one paragraph, shattering any suspension of disbelief the reader might have had. It doesn't help that from here on out the story starts to read like some kind of Dungeons and Dragons fan fiction. So then the main character "focuses" and that somehow gives him the power to summon armor. Huh? What? Did he do that on purpose? Was he surprised when armour suddenly appeared around him? What the gently caress is going on? And he fights a dragon? Blah? What?  This is all so bizarre and out of left field.If you want a sense of how to improve then you really need to look no further than the guy you were brawling against, sebmojo, and his story "Airman Jim versus the Leviathan". It isn't perfect but it really demonstrates some of the traits that your story lacks. For instance, the opening paragraph: sebmojo posted:Jim gritted his teeth against the freezing wind and the cold metal of the eyescope. Below him the cloud sea stretched out, dominated by a single huge, drifting cumulus, drenched with peach and purple from the setting sun. Through his brass eyescope Jim could see a flyer doing a sweep, the faraway buzz of its engine like a mournful wasp. He shoved the scope back into his pocket and shut his eyes tight to stop the self-pitying tears. It’s not fair, he thought. I’m a better airman than any of the other kids. First of all he engages more of our senses than just sight. Notice how he uses the sense of touch and hearing to make the scene more evocative and draw the reader into what is happening. This first paragraph has more evocative scene setting than your entire story. It also gives us a much better sense of the protagonists motivations. Also notice how later in the story, when the action really gets going, sebmojo dedicates an appropriate amount of time to actually describing what is happening: quote:The pirate flyer was a skittish minx of a thing in the air, its engine howling anxiously at him and wanting to flip him over and dive for the cloud sea at anything harder than a twitch. With aching care he put the craft into a slow dive and grinned as he felt it firming up. Airspeed, that’s what you like, isn’t it? Jim slammed the throttle in full and howled with glee as a huge invisible fist pushed him back into his seat. Again, notice how he's describing more than just the visuals, and how that helps the reader actually envision what is happening. This is a pretty sharp contrast to your own description about some unspecified "spirits" setting a guy on fire somehow, or a none descript "dragon" suddenly appearing, or how the main character wills a none description suit of armour into existence. Sorry if this is harsh but if you're already musing about publishing your stories then you clearly need a reality check. You're nowhere near that level yet and fooling yourself into thinking otherwise is just going to make it harder for you to actually improve.
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Sep 18, 2014 18:08
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 05:38 |
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There are some notable improvements between drafts but this is still essentially an amateur story so I think you're well advised to set it aside for now. Just keep writing and you'll improve. Something else you need to do, though, is make sure you're reading a lot. You cannot be a good writer if you don't read. And whatever you do, don't exclusively read the genre you intend to write for. If you're going to write sci fi or horror stories then read some literary fiction or at least a western or a noir detective story. Make yourself branch out. Spend at least an hour or two every day reading novels or stories and make sure a lot of what you're reading is form genres you're not as familiar or comfortable with. A lot of people who think they want to be writers actually just want to make movies, and they treat writing as a cheaper way of doing that. They have a specific scene or image in their head and they try to reproduce it with prose. But it never works, because the things that make for a good film aren't the things that make for a good piece of fiction. So if you want to be a writer you need to make sure that you've developing an appreciation for the unique attributes that make prose fiction so compelling, and to do that you need to be reading as much as you are writing.
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Oct 31, 2014 20:59
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I've never heard of anyone trying to "study" the correlation between diverse reading and better writing. That just isn't the kind of information that conventional studies can capture in the first place. Writing is an art, not a science. The kind of empirical studies you are thinking of are not some kind of universally valid form of knowledge, they're a way of stylizing facts gathered in the domain of the social sciences so they can be made legible to other social science practitioners. Anyway taste in fiction is obviously going to be largely subjective but if you spend your entire life reading and writing in one genre then I'm pretty sure that I won't be interested in reading what you've written, and I think that's a sentiment a lot of people will share. If you literally cannot find any enjoyment reading anything but High Fantasy or Hard SF then that definitely would make me question your qualifications to actually tell a decent story with good characters.
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Nov 1, 2014 19:33
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