Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-33904527-20190828230926/@comment-33904527-20190905204419

ChristianWallis wrote: “Mom, look!”

“Not now, you little shit, Mommy’s watching the baseball.”

George’s mother slouched half-drunk on the living room armchair; her unshaved legs splayed outwards onto the stained coffee table. A glass of cheap wine lay idle in her hand, though [<-should be ‘and’] her breath stunk [do a bit more research, but my understanding is that “stunk” is the past participle, and the past tense of stink is “stank”.] of alcohol as it wafted between her yellowish '[<-maybe come up with a specific colour, or something else to add to the “yellowish”. Maybe her teeth are mustard coloured, or nicotine-stained. You get the idea] 'teeth. Last night’s baseball game was still playing on the ancient television set, barely visible through the thick cigarette smoke that floated through the room.

“But Mom, it’s important!”

She sighed deeply. Taking another long drag of her cigarette, she tilted her head back and moaned silently to herself '[it’s not good to word things in a way that readers need to “correct” their mental image. In this case, you’re asking us to imagine a verbal cue (moaning) and then asking us to re-imagine it as a silent moan (silently to herself) in an order that requires us to back-track]'. Small piles of ash began to sprinkle onto her unwashed bathrobe.

[Consider alternate wording: “She took another long drag of her cigarette before tilting her head back and letting out a silent moan, sprinkling ash over her unwashed bathrobe.”]

“Fuckin hangover…” She muttered sleepily. “Alright, bring it here if it’s so damn important.”

George rushed into the room, carrying a large cake in his arms. He smiled warmly as his mother’s glassy eyes stared him up and down. Errant strands of rapidly greying hair were stuck to her face with smeared make-up.

“Happy Mother’s Day! I made it just for you! It’s your favourite: black forest cake with cream, dark chocolate icing, and cherries on top. Here, try a slice!”

George held up a small plate of cake as his mother looked down at him with a disdainful expression.

“Whoever heard of a Mother’s Day cake?” She cackled, letting a brief smile spread over her face. With the last drag of her cigarette, she blew smoke in George’s face, before extinguishing it in the cake’s icing.

“Nice try, kiddo.” [I’d lose the “whoever heard of a…” completely and instead have the story go:

“Nice try kiddo.” She cackled, letting a brief smile etc. etc.]

George kept his head low as he moped '[head low/moped are redundant. They both say the same thing]' back to the kitchen, cake still in hand.

“She’s too smart for me…” He remarked '[<- there are better words. “remarked” feels tonally out of place. Chandler makes remarks when Rachel gives him the wrong coffee. In my head, this kid is grumbling or mumbling or moaning or complaining, etc.]' as he scraped it into the wastebin, along with the empty bottle of rat poison.

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Mechanical issues: Nout.

Style issues: So you still occasionally slip into purple prose but it’s nothing compared to before and there are some things you really nail. You’ve got great imagery, creative wording, good flow. It really works. The style of this story is its best asset. My only criticism, and it’s a minor one, is that you tend to maybe go into over-kill. You don’t need to guide your reader so meticulously from point to point. Try to avoid tilting heads, moans, sighs, etc. I do this all the time myself. I’m really bad for people turning and looking at things. But it doesn’t contribute anything outside of style. And if you do your job right, all these little touches will be there in the reader’s head without you having to go over every laborious detail. For example, where the mother tilts her head back, rather than describing her physical movements in order you could just say something along the lines of:

She took a long drag of her cigarette and groaned.

It’s got so much less detail, but the funny thing is you’d find that most people might not even notice! Details like her ashing over herself can be squeezed in elsewhere (it is a good detail).

Like I said, these are minor issues. You have a lot of fun with language and your readers will have fun with you, but you do go a bit overboard with detail and spelling every little thing out.

Plot issues – What plot? Consider writing a few of these. You could have a string of connected scenes where the kid keeps trying to kill his surprisingly wily mother and failing. Sounds like a good way to mine black comedy and it’s not like they’d need to be long. Four or five of these scenes could come in under 3000 words and be a lot of fun to read.

But if you want to keep this as a micropasta then you need to understand that micropastas are, basically, jokes. They have a set up, and a reveal. You botch your reveal with the name and the over-the-top styling that immediately tells the audience to be on the look-out (the mother is so evil, the kid so nice, there aren’t a lot of moving parts here. A smart reader will piece them together in the first line or two). If you really want to stick to a short format, you need to give us a set up that provokes a set of expectations and then have a reveal at the end that utterly shatters those very expectations. To do that, the set up needs to be sincere or else the misdirection won’t work: the audience will be ahead of you, trying to guess what clever thing you’re up to.

A story can play its own premise straight and have a good chance of actually surprising a reader. Or it can go a different route, like yours, and telegraph everything with fun, well-written stylistic representations of over-the-top characters. But you can’t really pull the wool over anyone’s eyes with the latter. And, given that the only point of a micropasta is to shock audiences, it means that the end-result kind of feels like self-sabotage. Does this story want me to have fun? Or does it want to surprise me? It’s like that friend who pulls a prank, but they find their prank so funny they spend the entire set up laughing and giving it away, so that by the time the bucket full of water finally falls, everyone has seen it coming and no one but the pranker laughs.

Overall, great writing. You can do a lot with this. I just don’t think it suits the micropasta format, and would be more enjoyable if we got a few more entries showing similar scenes. (Hey mom I dropped my favourite toy down the garbage disposal! Hey mom I think there’s a stray kitten under the car! Hey mom, stand here under this innocent rube Goldberg-esque device involving a bowling ball, gasoline, and a honey badger I stole from the zoo!). Thanks for the review. I wanted to reply to this much sooner, but I just got back from Portugal where the Wi-Fi is about as reliable as my dad's decade-old Toyota.

You've given me some really useful tips here, and I now have a much better vision for what I want to do with this pasta going forwards. Purple prose is an issue I have with a ton of my pastas and I would consider it one of my biggest writing flaws.

So yeah, once again, thanks for the tips, and I'll be putting out Draft 2 at some later date.