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newtestleper posted:I thought you were going to post a short story that was criticized by your crit group for being overly moralistic? That was another guy
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Dec 17, 2014 02:54
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 18:26 |
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I read more than that, I'll post a crit later tonight.
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Dec 17, 2014 03:16
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I stopped reading herequote:ed to the headmaster -- an olive-skinned older woman well into her fifties, yet still every bit as lovely as she was when she was in her twenties due to a healthy lifestyle and generous amounts of rejuvenation treatments. She looked back, dark eyes full of concern. Arc turned to the other man in the room and his eyes widened in shock. This is not as bad as I had expected, but I didn't really want to keep reading because it was too slow and had too much exposition. It might seem strange that I got right up to the inciting incident and decided to give up then, but the choice there was because you had already used up my faith with over-description and some clunky mistakes. I always try to start my crits with where I stopped wanting to read; I think it's very helpful. STUFF YOU DID GOOD 1) While I said it was too slow, I think you actually have decent pacing once you chop out some of the more pointless mirror gazing and breakfast eating. Your protagonist strikes me as someone who is kind of sociopathic, and the comparisons to the historical philospher king/despot foreshadowed this, I think. You still did paint a character who is kind of believable, kind of likeable, and who I still kind of wanted to punch in the face. The likability gives the reader impetus to keep reading, and the sociopathy and other character flaws give him room to grow. I mostly write short fiction, but I've tried to write two novels. I always had the pacing too fast, and I think you actually have it about right here once you chop out some of the shittier/useless parts. Just do a scan of it, paragraph by paragraph, and ask yourself for each paragraph, "Can I delete this whole paragraph?" and you will find many that you can just cut out entirely. That is a really easy editing you can do right out of the gate before you fine-tooth comb it. 2) SOME of the worldbuilding was interesting. I liked the droids that get made better for doing well. The entire idea of the multi-world thing was kind of cool, but I'm still skeptical that it would pull me in enough as a concept to want to read five books about it. You explained that premise in pure, boring exposition, but some of the ideas sparked interest in me, which means if you can reveal these features of your world through plot and character, they stand a much larger chance of coming off as interesting and a reason to keep reading. 3) The main character comes across quickly. It's important to have this happen, and you erred on the side of heavyhanded, but it's better than having your character not have any defining attributes or reason to be your protagonist: the person the story revolves around. No one wants to read a story about some boring guy. I very quickly had a good idea what kind of person the protagonist was, and while he felt a bit like an anime Mary Sue at some points, I still felt like he was mostly a real person. Some fine tuning can probably fix most of the problems with this. You show attributes of Arc's personality quickly through how he deals with his classmates and teachers, and also how he chooses not to interfere, etc. Since you are "showing" us this, you can cut a lot of the tell where it is just like "he was very logical, he liked being logical, he liked how logical x was." Be a bit more subtle about it, because where you are actually more subtle it works, so don't 'show and tell.' 4) It seems coherent. I can tell right away that he's going to get plucked up to do something. From what I read, I feel like the plot of this book is going to be the protagonist likely learning about our world while dealing with whatever the antagonists are. That is a fairly coherent idea, assuming I am guessing right. STUFF YOU DID BAD 1) Cut all the exposition before anything happens. Throw us into the world and reveal it as you go. It's more challenging to write, but will be more rewarding for the reader. 2) Cut all the loving ''the young man" poo poo! Say his name when you introduce him, and then stick with it. This drove me up the wall and used up a lot of my 'good faith' that I mentioned earlier and is a large reason I was ready to stop reading when I stopped. You kept calling him "the young man" even after the bus driver droid said his name, and even after some students said his name. Holy poo poo! It is NOT interesting, at all, to go through why he prefers Kevin over Kev over Arc, just cut all that poo poo out and call him Arc from the first line, and then have people call him whatever the hell they call him within the dialogue. 3) You have what are called "said-bookisms" (google it) that you should replace with "said." Beyond that, you have a lot of: said tag + adverb (an example of this would be "he said angrily"). Cut this out whenever you can. It's not always bad, but it usually is. Think really really hard if you need that adverb, does it completely change the meaning? If not, you can probably lose it. 4) While the prose is mostly okay, there is some clunk. Sometimes when you are trying to be cute, you try too hard and it gets cheesy. The eavesdropping scene was almost right, but it came on a tad too strong and shattered the illusion of real people talking to each other. Again, it's good that you are erring on having each new character introduced immediately unique by doing stuff like this, but in this case I felt it was too much. Some of the scifi stuff you try for just reads as forced. Having an apostrophe before "droids" is a good example. This is a phrase that was used back 50's/60's scifi, putting an apostrophe there makes it look like you've never watched a scifi movie or read a book. Then you have people calling harddrives "HDs," and there are a few other things like this that irked me. We have harddrives and have had them for decades now as a thing everyday people talk about. We haven't started calling them "HDs" in spoken English, so it's unlikely that will ever happen. You could argue this is an alternate world or whatever, but it just came across as clunky and forced to me. Pick your battles of what you want to be unique words or phrasings, because if you just say "hard drive" it will be invisible and no one will notice, but every time you inject some non-standard word for a normal thing, people will notice; and if they had to take extra notice for something banal or pointless, they will get fatigued and not want to read more. 5) Over-description. I don't need to know what color skin and shirt and what shape everyone's eyebrows are. You need to trim down these descriptions considerably. Pick a really defining trait and drop that in there, then show the rest through how the characters moves or acts or talks. Like the lady that calls him out on eavesdropping; she is forward and cuts to the chase, and she is kind of witty and likable. I got that from how you introduced her, give her like one physical thing we can associate with her and let her actions speak for her. We don't need to know exactly what everyone looks like, our imaginations will fill in the blanks. As is, the pacing drags really bad when everyone has to be tediously introduced, and every scene needs to be laboriously described chair by chair. 6) The world, the whole premise, could be boring. Some of the stuff you had in the exposition sounded kind of interesting, but purely as a reader this idea in general doesn't grab me very much. Also, if you haven't already, read a summary of Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It's an awful, awful novel that I loving hated. The premise of that is very similar to your idea here. To your credit, your idea is actually more interesting than his and has more room for interesting stuff to happen, but I can't really get into alternate versions of Earth...it feels very muddled to me. I'd have to see what you did with it to really decide, but a contributing factor to why I stopped reading was that the world Arc was in didn't feel interesting enough, and so seeing him in our world and how he would react to it didn't feel like a very stark or interesting contrast to me. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 04:07
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