Here's the place for budding writers to receive judgments and constructive criticism.
Guidelines
>>15-16
Yes. Lives can be affected by stories. It alters your brain, and the brain is the seat of all your actions. So conceivably, one could decide to become a hermit because a story made it seem desirable. I myself switched political parties and to an entirely different way of thinking because of a certain work I will not mention.
>>19 It wasn't 1984, it was on the internet ;_;
I don't pretend to defend myself, but please no-one think it was motherfucking 1984 !
>>20 is Waha.06x36 and the book was Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius on the internet: http://aegis.ateneo.net/fted/tlontext.htm
As the only person smart enough to post poetry in a short story critique thread, I'd like someone to read it and actually STAY ON TOPIC. How about that.
Also, sarcasm was used in the above. Please don't get angry.
>>25
You have no control over the topic. If you want us to talk about something else post your own damn story and maybe if we're interested we'll talk about that.
lol it was not the Bible nor anything else you ever heard of so let's post some stories u fags
>>26
...I did post stuff. I'll post an actual piece of prose, though, if you'd like. Part of a story I wrote last year (the whole thing's too long for it to go on here)
______________________________________________________________
Inevitable Life
Laying down on the soft grey carpet in a patch of sun reminds you of the Garfield cartoons you like to read every Sunday.
The marker you stole from off the counter rolls easily in your fingers, and as you smooth over the paper you took from Daddy's desk, you wonder how the blue and red lines get so ingrained. If you were to lay ink on it, you’re sure you’d feel an imprint.
So you do, dyed felt to paper. You’re only nine-years-old, and the dog comes out perfectly - lopsided, out of proportion, and so friendly, it wouldn’t matter that Mom never lets you play with them, because he’d be friends with her too. And Daddy wouldn’t care, because he always said you should have one, anyway.
You push yourself up and run off to find Mom, being careful not to go too fast on the wooden floors, because you’re in your socks, and your back remembers all too clearly the ache of falling last week.
You find her in the living room, close enough to the kitchen for her to hear the buzzer for the casserole you can smell cooking, spicy and crisp. She’s reading the latest Vogue, and you pull yourself up next to her, your feet dangling over the side of the cushion. Looking at the done-up rooms, the women smiling brightly in their odd outfits, you wonder if Mom would like it if you did that one day. Instead of thinking about it too much, you push your picture in front of the blonde with the leopard print on.
Mom laughs at first, trying to catch her giggles in her hands like she does when she’s had too much to drink at one of her dinner parties. You reach up to help her, grabbing at the ones that escaped her long fingers, dripping between her pink manicured nails. She gasps then, her eyes wide on the heavy marks that the marker had left on your hands when you couldn’t quite get the curve of the dog’s ears right, or the tail that wouldn’t stop wagging.
Frowning then, she pulls you into the kitchen, where she scrubs your hands down, the pressed recycled soap rough against your skin, and you blink back tears as she scolds you for “Making a mess before dinner.”
The hot water makes your skin tingle painfully, and you cry out, your voice whiny and thin. Mom lets you go, lets you fold your arms against your torso like a bird who flew too much in one day.
“Be careful next time!” she admonishes, and you nod, hoping that your voice will change to the arch that she commands.
__________________________________________________________
I've always liked 2nd person stories, but I'm still pretty new to writing them.
> So you do,
don't fucking tell me what I did when i was nine.
I give scathing comments:
Sometimes the overly laconic writing collapses into an ad-hoc narrative, sadly right at the start:
>Laying down on the soft grey carpet in a patch of sun reminds you of the Garfield cartoons you like to read every Sunday.
^---Seems to totally float in a vacuum. Introducing the story by giving the reader a location to work with, fine! Using a small reference to spruce it up, also fine! However, that single sentence seems seperate from the rest of the narrative, and a fairly banal phrase like this won't work without a connection in my opinion.
As >>30 illustrated with utterly cunning wit, the second person, while sporting the advantage of neutralizing the main actor, slides somewhat easily into an uneasy tone that can easily be misread as demeaning. While I like how you avoided repetition (typical hammer-rhethorics of You do, You go, You say), I think you could have pushed farther and mitigated the aforementioned dilemma by emphasizing on the reader's perspective:
>You’re only nine-years-old
what 9-v-old kid would consider itself only 9 years old? Well, maybe some, but the typical stance is "I am already 9 years old". In order to maintain the "only"'s function (young age vs perfect dogpaint), I'd have rebuilt it into something such as "You're already 9 years old, so naturally the dog comes out perfect blah blah...".
Finally, (probably unintentionally), you use phrases such as "She gasps then, her eyes wide on the heavy marks", which seem overengineered and overly "literary" for the matter at hand and cause a stylistic collision with the rest of the text. I do that quite often myself, so I know how great the temptation is, but here it just doesn't work for me, really.
F I N.
sorry but i have to correct a mistake in >>8, neta just means "stuff", in the sense of stuff produced or brought, and I'm not sure it has the explicit meaning "crap".
i saw the old neomugicha thread, where the amazing post is referred to as "bus-hijacking neta on ayashii world!" i think it just means "stuff" here
i will correct this. orz
http://www.humblefool.net/Italian.doc
Sorry, but I don't have the resources to convert this from .doc right now. A humor piece for a writing magazine. Still waiting on whether I get in or not.
>>29 Second person is the worst decision you can make about a story. Period. A pain in the ass to read.
>>36 Agnes is the most sympathetic character in the entire story.
A few notes/critique points:
Agnes was a short woman, and might be described as energetic or enthusiastic, but only if she was talking; any other time, she was a dried husk of a woman. Fortunately for her, this was almost constantly.
These sentences fit together akwardly - the way it's written now makes it sound like Agnes was a dried husk constantly, not energetic.
Agnes seemed duplicit in this scheme
Wow, what? No where else do you use such high vernacular - in fact, the way you have Agnes's accent jump back and forth from being country-ish (dropping the "g's" everwhere) to city-ish makes me wonder where this scene is being set at all.
I'm guessing that's supposed to be "thought."
Jill's mind wasn't too clear on specifics. But what it did know, was that Cliff was a much better name than Tim.
No. Don't give the mind it's own being for just two lines - it comes off wrong, and is hard to read. Let Jill think what Jill's going to think. More on that now:
*Jill stared blankly, lost in thought. Tim's father's name was Cliff? *
Just previous to this, and previous to that, and, in fact, mostly the entire time, Jill's lost in thought. This little bit comes right after having a startling revelation based off of something Anges said - give us somehing different. Have Jill start at the name, or ANY action - her blankness is getting boring.
"I'd like a glass of wine. A large one. Whatever goes well with, uh," she gestured to her plate, "this." She didn't even know what she was eating anymore.
Anges just called it alfredo, and since you gave us the dialogue, I'm assuming Jill was hearing it, therefore implying that she should know what she's eating.
*She didn't have anything to do now except show up on that last day.
She wondered if Tim would notice, or, baring that, care if she didn't?*
Confusing set of sentences again. I find myself stumbling, asking "care if she didn't
what?" Clean it up a little, and that shouldn't happen.
"Why thank you. Just add it to her tab."
Who's speaking here? Speech tags are your friends.
*Jill overlooked Agnes' comment and the apparent lack of any relation between Japanese internment and grape-growing. *
Whoa, again. Just like the high vernacular, we have unnecessary comments from someone who's mind is far away on a different subject. Anges' comment holds well on its own - don't have Jill back it up with something that doesn't fit her character.
What if Tim had what?
Or - daily? Agnes might come over every day! Could she handle that?
Jill's never mentioned where the two might be living one day - why can't they just not live around Agnes? Jill's never said Tim's had a dependence on her, that he can't not live around her. Even if your character's drunk, it doesn't follow the rest of the story that she might think this. Also, it'd be funnier, and more dramatic, if the reader has to realize that Agnes might come over every day even if she has to make a two hour drive to do it, instead of just coming around the corner. Oh, and Agnes, even when talking about the pregancy earlier, never said anything about wanting Jill and Tim to have kids.
Cliff returned with the check. He smiled at them both, and asked, in his handsome, rugged way, if they had any room for desert.
"Dessert."
*"Yes, there is something wrong, Agnes. I don't want to marry Tim, I'm not yet drunk enough to drown you out, and Cliff here in the most handsome person on the planet," she stated, very matter-of-factly in her mind.
"Oh. Well, if that's how you feel, Jill, I can't argue." Agnes returned to her previous topic. *
What. Did she think it, or say it? If she thought it, then she never directly talked to Agnes, and therefore Agnes has no room to reply. If she said it out loud, we need more reaction from Agnes than a polite little snippet.
She didn't want to marry Tim, she hated him. He was always right. And not in that controlling, dominating, scary way. He simply was always doing the right thing at the right time. She hated how he smiled that smug little smile of his, his little lift to his step after sex, that his name was Tim at all.
WHAT. Throughout all this, the reader's been given a very pretty picture of Tim. No where has Jill even hinted that he acted like this at all! Okay, sure, she's drunk so maybe she might be exaggerating a little bit, and maybe she's just an unreliable narrator, but if this is actually how she's felt about Tim, and how you want the reader to feel about Tim, then we need more to back it up with.
She composed herself and uncorked the second bottle or white wine as she tottered for the exit.
Uncorked it with what? Did she have a corkscrew, or was it a twist-top?
*"Jill? What's wrong? Have you been drinking?" *
Who's speaking? She calls it "Tim," but give the reader more to go on. The ending is very very rushed, though it does make me want more, which is a good thing.
_______
Otherwise, you've got something there, even if it is kind of tired. Jill needs to be set up as an original idea more, instead of just the soon-to-be-wife who has second thoughts, and Agnes needs to be less stock - a gabby mother-in-law is old hat. You need to make it new.
Since this thread is slow i'm just going to type up something here... alright, here goes.
I am curled up in the corner of my room, a little ball of shit and flesh.
From behind the wall I hear screams and panting. I hear anger and sadness, but it dissolves
in my heart.
For a while I do nothing. I concentrate on keeping my stomach down.
Finally, the moaning lapses into sweet silence. I hear crickets outside.
I sprawl out on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.
I am 14 years old. My father was divorced and married again.
His new wife had a daughter.
I was there at the wedding. It seemed nothing could go wrong.
A few days later, that woman disappeared, leaving behind only a pile of debt and my sister.
The door to my room opens. She peeks in.
Her clothes are dishevelled.
"Oniichan," she says. "Can I stay in your room?"
I sit up, but say nothing.
I hear the sound of a car starting outside. Dad is going to the pachinko parlor again.
The house is lonely.
She starts crying. Her knees collapse under her, and she slumps over me. I hug her tight.
"Oniichan. What do we do?"
"I don't know what to do."
My room has no lighting inside. My father didn't see the need for it.
The moonlight shines in from the window onto the bed, onto her face.
I will describe her for you.
Natsumi has long, dark hair covering her shoulders. Her skin is pale.
She isn't innocent any more, but her face is unblemished and her motions fragile.
She has blue eyes.
"You're older than me," she says.
"That's doesn't--"
"Oniichan, you're bigger."
"But I'm..." I'm too weak, I think to myself, but I can't say it out loud.
"Big," she says.
I stare at her. She's looking down at my pants.
I try to jump back, but she's sitting on my legs. So instead I collapse and hit my head on
the floor.
I look at her in horror, but she only smiles weakly.
"Natsumi," I say, "I'm sorry..."
"Onii."
(I wrote more but it just got cliched, you probably know the rest anyway-- it's in a torrent)
I cannot read anything with the word "oniichan" without vomitting. That was a bad choice on your part, but now you know better and will never write anything with that word again.
Way to copy and paste from a stupid incest manga.
>>44
I kopipe'd the storyline, but I wrote the story myself... I was in a sort of trance and didn't realize how awful it was.
To this day, nobody knows who the terrorists were.
That's not to say that we don't know how they did it. They left the bags of limbs behind for doctors to examine, usually in public places where everyone could see, and the victims could be suitably embarrassed. The blowtorches, tranquilizers, and anasthetic used to do the dirty work were usually disposed of in trash cans.
The FBI even found the factory in Pittsburgh that made the metal casts. The factory didn't know what they were being contracted to make, and who could blame them?
The work necessary for an act of this amount of planning, of these proportions, is mind-boggling.
Some think it was aliens. Some believe there was an enormous, secret brainwashing cult, and pointed fingers to Scientologists.
The dogs think it was an act of God.
I use the word "dog" because it's short, and accurate, however horribly.
It's obviously what the terrorists had in mind. The President, that fake-ass cardboard cutout, called it an act of "mass senseless violence." But there was sense behind it, all right. It's been almost a year since the attacks of January 15th, and the intricate details of their plan have only been made more clear to me as the time passes.
Someone, somehow, wanted to carry out the largest social experiment in human history.
The setting was perfect: eight hundred college campuses around the country. Places that were purposefully cut off from major cities and secluded in their own little dorms, fields, and dining halls.
The students were being led by professors who would have given them instructions and guidance. But this was contrary to the terrorists' cause. The professors, staff, and security guards were killed silently as they slept.
The time of the attacks was also perfect: 4:30AM on the East Coast, 1:30AM on the West, on a school night. A small number of people recall being drugged and passing out, but that's all. Nobody saw a single terrorist.
The students slept peacefully. There were no cries.
And when they awoke, they were limbless.
The steel casts attested to the psychotic logic and planning. Where one's arms had been, the steel cover was flat; where the legs had been, the casts were rounded. There was no other option than to walk on all fours, for if you tried to stand up, you would fall on your ass. You were forced to walk, eat, and shit like a dog.
Some of the amputees, the richest one percent, ran back home to their parents and lived in luxury, being spoon-fed every meal and carted to and from every social event. They were unanimously viewed as traitors. The terrorists had tapped into and appealed perfectly to human nature.
The terrorists had thought through the initial chaos, too. And this is where the most obvious theories, of people coming from the outside, had to be ruled out. There exists at every college a small group of outcasts, loners, Aspies, and nerds who would never fit in with regular society. The terrorists somehow knew who these people were and treated them specially. These outcasts were not amputated. Their tongues were cut out of their throats, and they awoke mute.
Why did they have to mutilate these people as well? I believe this was part of the plan. It gave the mutes a sense of solidarity with the dogs, so that rather than running away, or killing themselves as they might have done if they had been amputated alongside them, they felt they had to cooperate. It was not the police or doctors who began to rebuild the colleges; it was the mutes, working day and night with their hands to do what the dogs told them.
(continued)
a story I'm currently writing, I'm just on chapter 2 tho, trying to make the best of my crappy literature skills
In a world of demons where they call themselves Riyadhs, there resides a special man named Lagos who holds such power that even the King himself desires. But Lagos sides with neither the demons, humans and the angels. What will become of him as he escapes the grasp of those who desires his powers?
It was a strange sort of relationship. The dogs, of course, could not use sign language. But they all learned how to read it. The empathy of the two groups for each other, again, appealed perfectly to human nature. The mutes had to prepare all the food and make proper facilities for the dogs, but this task didn't seem to burden them too much. For many of them, the dogs were people they knew. If they were friends, they only wanted to help them; if they were enemies, they must have felt smug satisfaction at being desparately needed by the people who had rejected them.
As I said above, the terrorists knew which people belonged in which group. I have a theory. It might seem a bit radical, but then again those who refuse to analyze their motives have probably already dismissed me as being on their side. My theory is that there must have been at least one plant at every college. I don't think it was among the professors and staff who died-- the plants must have wanted to see the results of their experiments. And it obviously couldn't have been the dogs. I think it was some of the mutes, a group of outcasts willing to silence themselves in order to do something bizarre and nearly inhuman. I wonder which ones?
I haven't yet explained where I fit into this. I was in a group of around thirty people who were on a study abroad trip in Japan when the attacks happened. We flew back home immediately, but most of my peers were revolted by what had happened and could hardly even look at their old friends. They left after a couple of days, touring the network circuits with fake sob stories and never looking back on the people they abandoned. Really, I can't blame them-- it is pretty gruesome. But I guess there's a little bit of Quentin Tarantino in me, because I felt the opposite effect. I loved my friends more than ever, both mutes and dogs. I immediately got to work for them.
There was a particular friend of mine who was finding her new life very hard to deal with. During that initial week, she was coming to me every day, looking so helpless and lost. She would talk to me about stupid things, little scraps of small talk that were so irrelevant now she almost choked on them. I was still kind of a shy person but I knew I had to do something. At last, I took her aside and asked her what was wrong.
She had been babied by her parents all her life. She had expected that, going to college, she would become an independent person and make a life for herself. But now that would never happen. Either she would live the rest of her life spoon-fed from a wheelchair, or she'd be making a life for herself in a totally different kind of place than she wanted.
We moved off campus into an apartment in town, and I tried to build a life for her where she could act independent. It was hard because of those steel casts, built specifically so that she couldn't pick up anything. I saw on the news what happened to people who tried to get them removed-- usually death. So, my little changes were stupid, limited to buttons she could press or a slider in the shower made specifically for moving with her cast.
I couldn't leave her inside during the day. There was little for her to do while I worked but watch TV, and all the networks were gruesomely fascinated by the January 15th attacks, to the point where she would cry when she saw the news. But going outside was a problem. She didn't want to be carried, and she didn't want a wheelchair. The one thing she was good at was walking like a dog, but she was mortified of being seen like that. I had to work her through it. That first walk down the hall to the elevator was a gut-wrenching experience. I could tell she was nearly having a heart attack. A couple days later we were in the lobby, and then we were outside. We would always walk together, and if someone stared at her I'd give them a sharp look back. She never really got over her embarrassment, and that's why we went back to campus eventually. But those days in between, well...
(continued)
Here's my story
harry leened over and kissed the girl her name was Silver Anna Marie Coral James and she was 14 and harry was 15. he was harry potter and he was famous in the wizarding world cause he went to hogwarts the wizard school. Silver kissed him back and they kissed a lot for the next few minutes "why did you kiss me" silver said "i didnt know you liked me like that" "i do" said harry "and i'm going with dumbldore to find voldmorts horcruz and if i dont come back i want to have kissed you first" Silver blushed "oh harry come on youll come back because im waiting for you" harry shrugged "i hope i do"
are you kidding?
>>50
I'm scared.
I'm going to rebelliously post poetry in a short story thread. You gotta admire my dedication to anarchy.
She said she was an expert in criminal astrology
And it could have been love, or just terminology
But Venus moved- or maybe Pluto
Bricked up in a wall, with the lengths we’ll go to
To save our faces and airs and graces
And make ourselves feel like we’re doing something right.
In, out, in, out, all about the house.
I probably owe her some sort of apology
For the excessively embarrassing theory of theology
Which I forced upon her, thanks to Tradition
Under the floorboards, pass my ammunition
So I can save my life and gun and knife
Will convince me I’m doing something right.
You niggers, stop molesting definite articulation. You're supposed to tell a story, not point out a bunch of props and persons, expecting the reader to make up his own context.
NUMBERS
Mackenzie Allison
1, 2, 3,... open your eyes
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,... don’t you dare stop now, get up!
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,... Get UP!
It didn’t start with numbers, and it didn’t end with them, but numbers are what gets everyone through life. Some pretend that they don’t see this, the truth is though that everyone comes to some point in their life when they realize that the numbers are there and that they are out of them.
Man does the impossible,they count to infinity. Most don’t realize that the impossible happens all around them everyday. But a few do, and those people are the ones who see the numbers. They don’t see things like you or I, they see something for what it truly is and it is though people that dictate how the numbers function. Without them the world would fall to chaos.This is a story of a son, his father is called by their village as a walker. He sees the numbers, and knows how to bend them, and change them to what he wills. Amos also is a walker, but he doesn’t see the numbers yet. Becoming a walker is a decision not to be made lightly and truthfully most never know that they have a different path they could be on. The tread a path so beaten and worn out that you can see the road for miles. When just a few feet away lies another trail. one that winds and turns and twists. A thin veil of miss obscures it, hiding it and the tress and brush that make up this way. Walkers take this path, never knowing where they are headed but always prepared for the adventure.just the beginning... any good or should i stop here?
My short story is interactive. I don't like agency a lot.