Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29033146-20160714172050/@comment-28266772-20160715143412

I simply could not give feedback on this whole story - it's 13000 words and was not compelling enough to hook me so I have decided to give feedback on the first 1000 or so words.

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“Welcome back.”

A male voice startled me back to Earth once I noticed coffee being poured into a clean mug on my table. -> This is an awkward sentence. What is the sequence of events here? That the narrator only noticed this man’s voice after he started pouring coffee? Or did he start pouring coffee and then he spoke, and she noticed both?

I must have blanked out or had been staring into space again. -> This is implied by saying that the narrator was startled. It’s redundant information.

It took me a little time to recollect my thoughts on where I was: A diner. -> This is an unnecessary and awkward way of just saying, “I was sitting in a diner”. That’s 16 words and 1 colon to say, “I was sitting in a diner”.

I was sitting near the window in a booth with another in front and behind. -> Like all diner’s that have ever existed. As a UK citizen even I know what the classic American diner looks like, this just doesn’t need an explanation.

The city rain was drizzling on the glass surface as the sounds of the town were nearly drowned out by the soft thunder. -> A nice bit of atmosphere, but again you say things like “glass surface” when you can just say “window”.

“You okay, Clarisse? I don’t mean to be rude, but you look like hell’s been riding on your back.”

I glanced up at this full-grown male with curly, brown hair and green eyes. I can tell he had a partially muscular build under the uniform he wore. I wasn’t sure what he was playing at, or why he was even speaking with me. -> Do I need to know his hair is brown and curly? And what about the colour of his eyes? Is that plot relevant? Or in any way informative? And can’t you just say “I didn’t recognize the handsome man before me” because that’s basically what these few lines convey.

“I’m…s-sorry. What? I-I…don’t…Who are you?” I stumbled over my words, still feeling the shakiness of my restlessness. -> repetition of two ‘ness’ words, and it’s not very clear what you state you’re trying to convey. I feel like these words could be applied to a heroin addict in withdrawal, or an office worker with no sleep. It’s not very clear what state the woman is in despite you spending quite a bit of real estate on it.

He gave me a bit of stern look as though he was trying to figure me out. Or perhaps he was just disappointed that I didn’t know his name. -> There’s a lot of detail here, but as a reader I can’t help but ask, is this just set dressing?

“Greg.” He responded in such a monotone. -> Such a monotone…that? Why not just say, “in a monotone”. When you say “in such a monotone” you make it seem like another clause is due around the corner and when it doesn’t come there’s an incomplete sense of flow.

“My name is Greg. I figured you’d know that by now. You sit in the same seat, ask for the same coffee, and tip with the same money every morning.” -> I highly doubt she tips with the same money every day – perhaps she tips the same amount, is that what you mean? This is just another mindless detail that isn’t helping the plot move forward. Right now, as a reader, I’m getting antsy.

I looked down at my newly-filled coffee mug, shaking my head tiredly. -> “tiredly shaking my head” – put descriptors in early so they frame the image in the reader’s head as it forms. A late descriptor requires someone to go back and alter a visual image that has already formed. And we know the coffee mug is newly filled you’ve mentioned it twice.

My black hair was messily tied up in bun with a few loose strands hanging by my ears. My eyes were sensitive to the lighting in the diner, but it was tolerable enough to keep me in here. -> Unless those ‘loose strands’ of hair save the day I don’t need to know. And can’t you just say “I was squinting from the light”

As hard as I worked, it seemed as though I was allergic to sleep. Something I hardly remember [remembered] doing last night. “I’m s-sorry. I’m terrible with faces.” -> New speaker new line. Also… again… you seem to dance around saying the obvious. Just say “I didn’t sleep well”? It’s the same information but you take forever to say it.

“That’s not an ideal trait for a woman of your profession.” -> See, now as a reader I’m thinking, “am I going to have to read a whole conversation to work out what this woman does?”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Profession?” I questioned curiously.

<p class="MsoNormal">“Clarisse, really? The investigation thing? The victims?”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Oh! I’m sorry. Right…that.” -> like this whole exchange doesn’t achieve anything except waste time and confirms my earlier suspicions.

<p class="MsoNormal">With another thought, I remembered my freelance motives. -> I think by now I don’t even need to ask what point this sentence serves other than to tease out information that should have been established in the first paragraph.

<p class="MsoNormal">I was taking on the role of a private investigator, with researching on the mysterious abductions that were taking place in this town. -> …with…researching…on? Doesn’t sound quite right.

<p class="MsoNormal">My town: Meadowbrook. -> Her hometown?

<p class="MsoNormal">It was a small area of easygoing [easy-going] people and fair-good fun. -> fair-good fun? Might be a colloquialism I’m not familiar with but it just sounds odd.

<p class="MsoNormal">At least that’s how things used to be. Lately, during the last few days, it’s been filled to the brim with paranoid and protective townsfolk, but it’s not like I could blame them. -> You’ve switched to the present tense here.

<p class="MsoNormal">There was something covered in this place like dark wool, -> I’m not even going to say why “dark wool” isn’t an effective piece of imagery in this context.

<p class="MsoNormal">and I wanted to get to the bottom of it personally. I won’t say it was like a calling, but oddly enough, personal…is how it felt. -> present tense is the worst tense.

<p class="MsoNormal">“You good?” Greg continued to stand before me with a look of concern, and still holding the coffee pot in his hand. -> Oh shit we’re back here again, right? This endless conversation of exposition?

<p class="MsoNormal">I gazed up at him, reassuring him with a nod. “I’m fine. I just need a minute.” -> New speaker new line, plus who the fuck is Greg?

<p class="MsoNormal">“I mostly wanted to ask about the case. How is it going?”

<p class="MsoNormal">I hesitated because of his question. Even my own thoughts weren’t keeping up with me. -> You struggle to convey a clear sequence of events quite frequently throughout your use of language.

<p class="MsoNormal">“It’s going…” I stated. “I intend to cover a lot of ground this morning. Last night was--”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Yeah, I heard about it on the news early this morning before work.” Greg interrupted. -> You’re raising new questions but haven’t even answered the sort of basic questions raised by the very premise of this story such as “who the fuck is anyone and what is going in this scene?”

<p class="MsoNormal">I froze for only a brief moment of his input. -> eh? Once again the sequence of events is not super clear.

<p class="MsoNormal">My eyes were looking up to him for information. “W-What?” -> You repeat the mistake of not starting a new line for a new speaker frequently.

<p class="MsoNormal">“You didn’t hear? You gotta open your eyes Clarisse. Three people were abducted yesterday evening. They’ve been found at Peachstone Park at the crack of dawn.” -> They were found at Peachstone Park at the crack of dawn.

<p class="MsoNormal">“They…they have?” -> They were?

<p class="MsoNormal">“You’re the investigator, yet I’ve picked up a little more information than you have.” Greg chuckled at his statement, -> You don’t need to clarify that he’s laughing at his statement. No one’s going to make the mistake of thinking that he was laughing at an undescribed penguin based sex act in the corner of the diner.

<p class="MsoNormal">but only briefly due to the sensitivity of the topic. -> Dead people? Is that why?

<p class="MsoNormal">I however, hardly believed what I was hearing. “What are their names? Who are they?”

<p class="MsoNormal">Greg looks up to the ceiling with a slightly winced eye, -> not sure winced works in this context

<p class="MsoNormal">as if shuffling through his memory to answer the question. "I do recall it was a man and two teens. The teens were related, but the man was someone I didn’t recognize. All three Caucasian.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Do you recognize the teens at least?” -> But he just said he didn’t recognize the man? That implicitly states that he recognizes the teens…

<p class="MsoNormal">“Hardly. You can research the news at home and look them up I guess. It’s breaking news, so I’m sure you’ll see it again. Anyway, it’s been nice chatting, but I’ve got work to get back to. You know? More mugs to fill.” -> Never mind…

<p class="MsoNormal">Greg turns [turned] to walk off as I was left there in my booth.

<p class="MsoNormal">My head was buzzing by this point. Another returned abduction. What the hell was going on in this town? What kind of kidnapper returns their victims? And for what reason? I took out seven dollars and fifty cents and left it on the table next to my untouched coffee. I had to leave. There was more work to be done. I grabbed my short, beige-colored trench coat to put on with a plaid scarf, and took my umbrella from my booth before I walked towards the exit of the diner. -> I got to be honest here – who the fuck cares what colour her trench coat is?

<p class="MsoNormal">Meadowbrook. What used to be such a lively place, despite the rain and clouded cold weather. People were still walking the streets which was enough to prove that life still went on, despite the abductions. I opened my umbrella and started walking down the town’s sidewalk. I noticed a newspaper box on the way. Naturally out of curiosity, I opened the lid to take a paper out and read the headline: Abductor takes Again: Man and Teens Found near Park.

<p class="MsoNormal">I was certain this would help in my investigation. If I could locate those who’ve just been found, they’d have fresh information for me. Hopefully they’d be willing to talk. I walked over to the side of the diner I’ve -> I’d – wrong tense again.

<p class="MsoNormal">just exited out of to get to the parking lot where my car was. I pulled out the keys from my pocket to get in, but just as I was doing so, police sirens, accompanied by the one of a fire truck, alarmed the area out of nowhere. I nearly jumped out of my skin with a choked gasp, and dropped the paper I was holding onto the wet pavement. I hurriedly picked it up before turning my attention to see what was going on.

<p class="MsoNormal">-

<p class="MsoNormal">Dialogue: Everyone wants to be David Mamet but let’s clear something straight up. Realistic dialogue sucks – it makes for a deeply unpleasant read that is stunted and uncomfortable and deeply confusing. If you’re writing a treaty on the difficulty of language and exploring it in the setting of a power struggle yeah sure roll on, but if the language itself isn’t the topic don’t waste your reader’s time making it unnecessarily difficult to read. Constant ellipses, breaks, hyphens, stutters, and pauses, may help you feel like you’ve properly translated the scene in your head into the written word but for the reader it will just piss them off. Everyone says the same thing – “I use ellipses to make my dialogue realistic”, but it doesn’t mean a damned thing to the poor bastard who’s expected to trudge through 13000 words of the stuff.

<p class="MsoNormal">Economical writing: Below are Kurt Vonnegut’s rules of writing:

<p class="MsoNormal">Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

<p class="MsoNormal">Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

<p class="MsoNormal">Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

<p class="MsoNormal">Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

<p class="MsoNormal">Start as close to the end as possible.

<p class="MsoNormal">Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

<p class="MsoNormal">Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

<p class="MsoNormal">'''Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages'''.

<p class="MsoNormal">-

<p class="MsoNormal">So above are Kurt Vonnegut’s rules for writing – they’re not absolute golden tenets that cannot be broken but they’re still bloody useful, and the ones I’ve highlighted in bold are the ones you flaunt wantonly. You’ve written a 13000 word story and a novel can be anywhere from 60,000+ words in length. You’re asking people to commit to a ¼ of a full novel but what do you do to convince us to stay? You spend 1000 words describing the following,

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1">-<span style="font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:7pt;line-height:normal;font-family:"TimesNewRoman";">          A woman sits in a diner

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1">-<span style="font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:7pt;line-height:normal;font-family:"TimesNewRoman";">          She is startled by a good looking man

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1">-<span style="font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:7pt;line-height:normal;font-family:"TimesNewRoman";">          The woman is a PI investigating abductions

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1">-<span style="font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:7pt;line-height:normal;font-family:"TimesNewRoman";">          The man makes it clear that a fresh lead has come up in the form of three alive victims who have been returned

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1">-<span style="font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:7pt;line-height:normal;font-family:"TimesNewRoman";">          The woman leaves to find the victims and continue her investigation

<p class="MsoNormal">You need to be more economical, there is no rational reason to make us trawl through so much to find out the above.

<p class="MsoNormal">Writing not Directing: So this is my ultimate piece of advice. You are writing a story, not directing a film. You have written this like it’s the first scene of a David Fincher movie, but when you write you don’t need to convey as much detail as a movie scene conveys. People will automatically construct an image with nothing more than a single word like, “diner”. When you reach in and try to exert an unreasonable level of control the reader is going to feel like the flow is constantly being stopped and started just so they can rewrite this initial image to conform to your expectations – unless it’s immediately obvious why then it’s going to piss them off. If you tell them that the building in a zombie story only has one exit then they’ll instantly know why you’re telling them that and you will elicit a set of expectations that you, as a writer, can either fulfil or subvert for an intended purpose. A major thing you’ll notice in writing is that a story will only give fleeting descriptions of a character’s appearance. Consider Hermione’s description from Harry Potter and what it tells us about her character.

<p class="MsoNormal">“lots of bushy brown hair, and rather large front teeth” -> Why is this important? It’s congruent with her geeky character and tells us how she’s likely to act and feel in a certain situation. She geeky, goofy, and probably not typically attractive (books not movies). She isn’t going to saunter into a room and have every boy drooling over her. And when you learn how she lives in the library and constantly reads, you start to get a pretty consistent, and functional, sense of who she is, as a female character, in contrast to say, Jessica Rabbit or Natasha Romanov.

<p class="MsoNormal">This is not the same as the way many writers feel the need to detail a character’s physical appearance just for the sake of filling us, the reader, in on an image that the author has in their head. Your job isn’t to give us your image, it’s to give us our image and you need to let go of your tendency to try and exert as much control as possible. You’ll probably find that with a deep rinse this story could easily be half the length that it currently is.

<p class="MsoNormal">Also admins won’t delete a story for a single issue – they delete for numerous issues that can’t be edited out. They would not have deleted this story for capitalization reasons (because they can just be edited out) but would have instead considered storyline and mechanical issues together. Considering that I noticed frequent problems with how you present dialogue (new speaker new line), switch tenses, and drag the story down with totally unnecessary details that just converge on pretty clichéd ideas anyway, I would bet that the admins deleted it for not meeting quality standards in general.

<p class="MsoNormal">