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Edit: Removed
Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 20, 2022 22:04
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:36 |
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a friendly penguin posted:Creation I would take a look at the placement of certain things. For example, first you have "cicadas whine... with leaf blowers" and neighbors slamming shut windows. One assumes the narrator is outside already to observe this, but you have them stepping outside afterward. This nod to an omniscient view doesn't seem right with a first person narration. It also seems largely irrelevant what the neighbors are doing. I like the line "I become an anchor point for spider webs..." because it speaks to the image I think this piece is trying to convey; that the narrator is in the center of this gyre of nature. We get heavy description of this nature, but I'm not sure the wonder of the narrator is sufficiently developed. "Rats weave between my feet..." seems over the top. This leads into "the landlord announces..." but a rat infestation speaks more to the quality of the house than the wonder of the backyard. I don't know if I like the landlord being there in present tense. It's abrupt, and comes at the end of the story without much foreshadowing. The story seems to want this choice of inaction to be central, that the narrator is supposed to clean up the backyard, but doesn't want to. I think that point, and how they see that backyard, needs to be developed more. It needs to trim the parts that aren't relevant (this could actually be the neighbors or the landlord; either one can be pressuring him to clean up the yard but you only need one here) and probably remap a lot of the descriptions, keeping them more in line with two themes: That other people see them as a nuisance, and that the narrator sees them as wondrous. If a description doesn't do one or both of those, you might consider cutting it. I would focus on the less cliche descriptions that are less conventionally wondrous, like your crabgrass and peeling fences as you do that. It's the unique part of your story. Finally, I would leverage your title. This is not a moment of "Creation" (imo) and I don't see one in the story. I do see the meditations of a narrator who finds beauty in the unconventional. The title should allude to that, like "Condemned Meditations" or "HOA Sacrilege" or the like.
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Nov 23, 2022 06:35
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