>> 16759 my writing style

You have no writing style. All you have is pretense.

lol 5edgy10me

It's not bad, it just goes on for FAR too long. Like what others have said, the style is nothing but a gimmick, and such gimmicks should not continue for longer than a few lines at best. Once it starts getting tedious, the reader loses interest. I understand that's what you're going for in the first place, but it overshoots the mark and goes into bad writing from there.

(Like most things in writing, the key to success, here, is knowing what to REMOVE.)


>Three years ago, the very thought of killing another human being would have made you nauseous.

End it after right there, and you've made the point. Move on.

>>16753
Yes, thank you. I'm embarrassed to have made such an obvious grammatical mistake in the third line and would like to provide an excuse that this was years ago - but thanks a lot. Actually now that I reread the whole thing there are quite a few more grammatical mistakes (mostly involving commas). I guess I'll go clean that up right now.

As for 'frowned impatiently' I admit I don't really see the problem there. I'm not a master linguist but seems and reads fine to me. I could imagine someone impatiently frowning at something.

>Paul averted his eyes downcast.

This definitely needs to be changed. I'm considering a simple edit to "Paul averted his eyes." Or perhaps not; I really want to include the words downcast somewhere. I just need it to mean something like "Paul looked down" to convey he's a little ashamed and avoiding the question etc

Anyway thanks for reading over story, hope you took some time to enjoy it and not immediately look for holes.

>>16754
Nah don't worry about it. That's why people have editors anyway. You get to looking at a thing so much that it's hard to find whats really wrong with it.

As for the second issue, I suppose it might be a preference thing. I have a tendency to overcorrect so that things are more in-line with my own writing style, so I'm just suggesting things. As for why I was thinking that, to convey impatience in a frown and only in the frown is pretty impossible. Considering the frown alone, what you are really doing is giving shape to that frown, in tightness or looseness or in the wiggling/quivering that can be indicative of future tears. You don't need to worry about this of course, it can be really hard to seamlessly add this kind of stuff. Just a thought.

I was thinking the simplest change might be the best. But since you want to keep it you might just want to play around. I'm kind of drawing a blank and I'm usually good with substitutions.

No yeah keep at it, I know how hard it can be. But ah, just as a note, asking for critiques, is kind of hard to read with that in mind and not kind of hunt the off things.

>>16749
Besides the various grammatical errors already pointed out, I have a few more points.

* The description can be very clumsy at times, often conjuring up bizarre images and descending into flowery, purple prose. It can be little things, like "frowned impatiently", but also bigger things like, "Her eyes were heartbreaking - sad and flickering emerald like the deepest waves of the ocean and melancholy..." Okay, waves are at the surface of an ocean, so how can they be deep? And aren't ocean waves usually a really dark blue, not emerald? Thirdly, emerald isn't really associated with negativity or sadness, so it isn't the best colour to use. Emerald reminds me more of sunny, tropical beaches. Think very carefully about the mental image you are going to create when using more abstract metaphors or similes.

* The perspective changes between characters. In some lines, the narrator is looking inside Paul's mind and reporting his opinions, but in others, we are told what is going on inside Rachel's head. This is a common mistake among inexperienced writers. Whilst it might have been a deliberate stylistic choice on your part to have a jumping, all-seeing, third person narrator, it's best not to go down that line of writing. It will inevitably create problems down the line, when you opt to not to tell us what every single character is thinking at a given time. It removes mystery from the story, clutters the narrative, and forces the reader to manage personal rapports with multiple characters in the same scene. If Paul and Rachel had their own separate A and B plots, it wouldn't be a problem to show what they are thinking, but when one is with the other, show only one opinion throughout.

* There is an issue with redundancy:
'But as a smile cracked on his face, she knew the worst was yet to come.

“I’m very happy there.”

Those were the words she didn’t want to hear.'

That last line is useless, because the reader can figure out that "I'm very happy there" is something she didn't want to hear, from the prophetic line she gave a moment before. Similarly:
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>>16711

I really think you're missing the point of his story. The message is supposed to relieve you of fear of the future, to teach you to live in the moment. If it told him to do something it would go against that very simple message.

>>16737
>The message is supposed to relieve you of fear of the future, to teach you to live in the moment.
"It was all worth it."
It tells Henry not to worry without that unnecessary sugary coating you're trying to include. For all we know Henry could be the first President of Earth or he could be a plague-ridden and destitute homeless man. We don't know, what we do know is what happened in-between was awesome.

>>16737
But that lesson could be learnt any other way, and you can teach us it without explicitly telling us the moral of the story (which should be self-evident). The message could be all doom and hellfire, but having seen everyone else fret, the protagonist decides to throw away the note away, shrug his shoulders and go on to ask the girl what she's doing later. That would say the moral just as well.

Also, and this is from personal experience, "live in the moment" and "don't worry about the future" aren't particularly good pieces of advice. I suppose that's a personal issue though.

>>16722
Why no?

Here are the most obvious issues for me:

*When the hell is this supposed to be set? You have terms like "scribe" and "cut purse", which lends it an old world feel, but then you have "general fucking awesomeness", which is soooo 2011. It is very hard to grasp a time or place with such inconsistent terminology.

* I'm being told far too much when I should just be shown. Don't explain to me that Dirk is being sarcastic, when I can pick up in his tone from his choice of words. Don't explain the scribe's every last thought about the prisoner, when physical actions, emotional responses and speech can indicate his opinions instead. Basically, it is more involving for readers when they are trusted to make basic deductions, rather then be told every last detail like an idiot. Show don't tell.

* Why should we give a shit about Dirk? He sounds like he's totally up his own ass, and what's worse, it feels like I'm supposed to find him compelling for that. There is no reason why I should listen to this smug boor, and I don't see why the scribe should give a shit either. Have the story open with Dirk saying something really intriguing, that will entice both the scribe and the reader to stay interested. You need a hook to keep our attention. It has to be good and it has to make us want to keep reading. The opening "I might tell you a story" is the weakest hook of all.

>>16727
"Don't tell me every detail like I'm an idiot" and "show, don't tell." Those are the two primary sins of what I see here. The first sentence, "said the prisoner to the scribe." Not only is this a SUPREMELY clunky way to assign roles, "said the _____ to the _____" is rarely ever used outside of children's literature ("In my youth," Father William replied to his son). It can be effectively used in adult literature, but here it sets a juvenile tone that persists throughout a piece pretending to be adult. Furthermore, you repeat the hell out of the words scribe and prisoner while constantly telling us who is talking. This too is a sin. If we can't tell who is speaking without constant reassurance, there is something lacking in the characters. Lastly, "interjected, proclaimed, proceeded with a sarcastic emphasis." These are all telling not showing, and beyond that, it displays an immaturity in writing that makes me believe that the author is not only not of the high school level, but is also not much of a reader. That sort of structuring is grade school material.

In short: really, really bad.

>MC gets out of bed, sneaks out of the room, goes into the closet for his winter parka and fishes in the inside pocket for the thick leather glove that hides his cigarettes (which he told his wife he throw out).
>He slips onto the deck, is promptly smacked in the face with the balmy summer heat and the noises outside, lights the cigarette, and then he begins to survey the view as seen from his back porch. For the first time, he wonders where the girl he had sex with that night is now, what sort of life she's leading, how much different that life probably was to the one that he found with his wife. There are copious street lamps scattered among the row of extinguished houses. He sees cars driving in the distance and wonders where it is they could be going at this time of night. Wildly, he begins to think about getting in his car and wander off until he finds her. And then he thinks about the fact the he needs to go to work later and then he needs to finish painting the room. He sees the full moon hanging low on the horizon, as though it's about to sink away and give in to the dawn.
>He puts out his cigarette and opens the door to go back inside. He is greeted by the low hum of the air conditioner, the ticking of the clock and the smell of fresh paint. Idly, he wonders if his wife will smell the cigarettes


End

Literature is how those plot points are written out. Plot points are not subject to literary criticism.

>>16716
Well, it's too boring to be plot driven, so I'm guessing your going for slice of life.
Slice of life works depend entirely on the execution, so a plan doesn't tell us much. That said, I can see some issues.

The most important question is why would we, the readers, want to read about some loser who cheated on his wife? Even in a slice of life story, you need a compelling hook that keeps us reading on; a mystery that the reader wants to see resolved. The manga Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, for instance, has a tremendously slow pace, but the reader can easily tolerate the banal chapters about coffee drinking because we've also been shown some really weird shit. We stay because we want to find out what the deal is. Alfred Hitchcock put it best (I paraphrase): "two old women talking in a cafe is boring, but if we are shown a ticking time bomb under their table, we pay a lot more attention to their chat." It doesn't have to be anything as drastic as that, but it does have to be something we care about to keep us invested.

>>16704
The term he's looking for... I remember reading about it combined with stuff on romantic era literature. There's a perfect word for what he's looking for... It's out there... somewhere...

>>16705
Picaresque? I know it took me like ten minutes to remember that word last time I needed it.

>>16715
You may remember the word, but you clearly don't remember the definition if you think it applies here.

>>16691
Thanks for the advice. I'm writing Jessica's description and when I finish writing it I'll post it.

>>16703
I haven't played enough text adventures to say with any authority, but I recommend keeping the descriptions as short as is necessary. Most text adventures are quick and punchy, when it comes to descriptive writing.

>>16694

And yet you expect other people to give a shit about what you're writing when you yourself don't. Interesting.