Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25458443-20170318124910/@comment-24101790-20170318143124

EtherBot wrote: I definitely understand your points, but for the awkwardness specifically I sort of...like the awkwardness? I kinda wanted it to feel like it was written poorly because the sort of thoughts of somebody running for their life in a grotesque dark corridor isn't really elloquent it's weird and stilted and hard to make out. But if none of that at all is conveyed then of course I'll have to try something else to get that across or abandon that theme all together..

As for like...lingering questions..I mean the kinda horror that I keep trying to tap into is just complete nonesense void of context...disparate themes can sort of allow for a weird surreality that I personally was horrified by when I was a kid and it was always by things that weren't supposed to be scary. Now that I'm older I remember that feeling of strange lilting dread of watching something I utterly didn't understand unfold in front of me and have been trying desperately to convey that feeling to other people through stories where the vital backstory is hidden...that was the crux of me writing Reflect and I still don't think I nailed it there either.

Basically I'm experimenting :/

You've used that reasoning before with "Silently" and it really comes up quite a bit in response to poetry reviews ("I meant it to be awkward/stilted") so I really don't give much credence to that approach as it tends to engender passivity in proof-reading and editing. More can be done to convey your theme than disjointed/clunky wording with mechanical errors (if this is more stream-of-consciousness, then why are there mechanical errors at all? It'd be like a transcript of a conversation using grammatically incorrect terms for spoken words.). As for better ways to approach themes/moods, take Blake's The Tiger for example whose syllabic meter mimics the beating of a heart.

The themes you're talking about in the latter message end up feeling more like the cold opening for a horror movie (random person is chased and caught/killed) that sets up the idea and then goes on to flesh it out. Here it feels just like a cold opening with little basis to continue on. Usually concepts where the horror lies in the unknown still leave enough breadcrumbs for the audience to reach their own conclusions. Here the audience is left with sparking walls, a creature that walks on ceilings, and grating noises. In essence, there needs to be more if you're teasing a hidden backstory than just a link to the previous story.