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Comments
Yeah. I feel like it's way too fucked up to show to my class. Hell, I don't know what people here will think of me now that I've shared this. ._. These possibilities just popped into my head, and I feel like they all tie into the crux of the story.
But at least the story didn't used to be this way. :') I could always use something closer to my original draft for the class, and if I'm really not comfortable with the more fucked-up version, I could use the tamer version for the school magazine submission as well. Although one of the stories that'll be in there describes a mutilated deer and it being put out of its misery, and I wonder how that would rank against a naked mannequin in a closet. The nonfiction magazine also isn't afraid to tackle stories about rape and sex shops, so there's at least some acceptance of disturbing things and overt sexuality.
Maybe if I left out the scene where the partygoers find Sallie, or not keep Sallie in the closet, or not have Sallie's name come from Jim's mom.
How did I even have these ideas? This used to just be a story about superstition and played with haunted house tropes. It still involved Lenny and Jim being estranged from each other, but . . . Come to think of it, I guess this makes my life easier. The upperclassman writing major/teaching assistant for my class liked the version I already had, and I think she just needed it to clarify a few things. But she also liked the idea where Lenny uses a mannequin to give the birds-and-bees talk, and that's sort of the root of a lot of my more recent ideas. I dunno. -shrug-
For what is worth, I really like the ideas in it and well, if you can't use your writing class to start going into fucked up places, it's gonna be harder when you start wanting to do the same and don't dare to go to a publisher with it.
Huh. I've only seen a few things from Eraserhead, and I wouldn't have guessed it was that kind of thing. I guess I'll have to look into it. (EDIT: Good God, that really is fucked up, though I'm not sensing concrete resemblances to my own idea. I should watch it some time, though, because it sounds really interesting)
I also remembered another consolation in that the class already saw a much tamer story of mine, so they know this isn't all I write.
IJBM: I submitted the story to class on time and everything, and then I submitted to the school fiction magazine. Twenty minutes after sending it to the magazine, though, I got an email saying that their deadline was extended until Wednesday, which is the day after I get workshopped. -_-
Five years ago, a transformative disease swept through the world entire, altering humanity to posthumanity. As of now, anyone - absolutely anyone - in the world may change their shapes and become a Hercules with weak bones, a ravaging man-eater, or a beast-man by night. One time, our president turned into a giant earthworm.
In spite of all that, life went on.
My name is Thomas Hawkins. I'm a private detective, a motorcycle enthusiast, and a grasshopper beast-man. I solve crimes.
Also? I'm Patient Zero of the Flux Strain. I don't what that's about. I hope I live to find out.
---
I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this.
So, I think I have the inklings of a genuinely good story to tell, but I fear that the concept will be instantly looked at as exploitative. Recently, my fears have been settled (mostly by Tarantino) but I'm still worried.
does it involve cowboys
Unfortunately, no.
then why tarantino
idk what even kind of learning institution Allnines is in, but a lot of writing classes have decency guidelines in place. It's very annoying when the teacher is a prude. I had one where stories were not allowed to feature even mild swearing. So you got things like a horror story about a 16 year old being chased by a monster where there was a lot of awkward "goshdarnit" cussing.
It depends. But normally colleges don't mind that sort of thing, considering most of the teachers work on environments where stories like those are common.
Granted, I'm in ~film school~, and one of my classmates is writing a story about a mom whose kid kills himself and uses another kid to replace him and forces him to masturbate to the dead kid's pictures so uh yeah i dunno how far can you go outside of that particular environment
I don't know offhand how old All Nines is, so I didn't know if he was in high school or college.
I don't imagine a professor would be particularly objected to it.
@AllNines: I think that you should feel free to follow the story wherever it leads you. The worst thing that you could do as a writer is leave no impression at all, and given that your story has the potential to be genuinely creepy, I don't think that will be a problem.
^^ I'm 19, and a freshman in college, which means that basically anything goes, as far as content. But I'm pretty sure this wouldn't have flown with most of my high school teachers. Then again, even I think that the story Juan's classmate is writing about goes over the top.
^ Yeah, far be it from me not to want to leave an impression.
Speaking of, reporting in: most of the class liked it and thought it was genuinely creepy and original, but the teacher "didn't buy it." He felt that the parts with Sallie, the female mannequin, put the story too far over the top (and in hindsight, I have to agree, so Sallie isn't in at the moment, though she might come back as a full-on sex doll, with new context for her presence to make it clearer that Lenny's mentally ill and explain her sexualization/objectification better), and even other people in the class felt that the boys made a big deal out of its presence. Some people were also confused because there were seven different scenes in the first draft, two of which occur in the same time frame. But the teacher felt that the way Jim gave voices to things was more "real," or genuinely creepy, and he wanted to see more of the conflict between Jim and Lenny, so that's what I'm going to focus more on in future drafts, as opposed to trying to create the tone by using ~Cain Cliff~ too much. tl;dr: Pluses for originality, language setting the tone, and interesting main characters, minuses for a lack of realism, needlessly-complicated narrative structure, and occasional melodrama.
My next task is to write a better story for my next workshop. I sort of have an idea, but I feel like a part of the premise will get called out as bullshit, and I would probably need to do lots of research. And I have another idea, but I'm not sure of why it's important to tell that story yet, and the basic concept might be better left to poetry. And then I have lines from another character in my head, but I don't know their context yet. ;~;
Well, anyway. I've tried to write something, for the first time in... Fucked if I know. First time I've written something for the sake of a proper story in half a year, at least.
Rose didn’t feel anything as she killed her father.
That probably spoke terribly of her.
Her father collapsed backwards, gurgling. Blood sprayed from his throat as she pulled out her knife, shaking her hand to get the excess blood off it.
She stood, ignoring the steady drip, drip, drip of blood from the hem of her dress, and stepped over the man.
Her feet squelched as she crossed the hall, taking care not to tread on any of the bodies strewn across the floor. The copper scent of blood hung heavily in the air.
Corpses littered her way as she retraced her path through the mansion. Silence hung over the mansion, a macabre contrast to the liveliness that usually permeated the building.
The front doors to the mansion were barred, preventing anyone from getting out. Mechanically, she reached out and hit the door.
There was a pause, and the doors creaked open, revealing a familiar man standing on the other side, holding a woman bridal-style.
Rose stepped forwards, reaching for the woman. She stopped short before she could try and take the woman, settling for reaching over and brushing her sister’s cheek with her thumb. Blood streaked across the woman’s face.
Her hands dropped numbly to her sides.
“Mission accomplished, sir,” she whispered.
I'm not sure if it hits what I'm going for, though.
I'm going for a very... dissociative? perspective. Like, she's deliberately removing herself from the events and not paying attention to all the events around her, because if she thinks too hard about them, she'll break down. The only thing she pays a little attention to is her sister, and she's even trying not to think about that too hard.
I tried to do that by throwing in next to no detail, but I'm not sure if it worked.
The actual events that happened here will be expounded upon later in the story, so if you're confused as to... what's actually happening, that's okay. But I'm not sure if I got across the actual sequence of events (she kills her father, she walks through the mansion, gets out, sees her sister, reports in her success) correctly.
Any advice on those things would be greatly appreciated. I don't even mind if you tell me that the entire scene sucks and I should start over, it's only 200-odd words. :v
You did.
As far beginnings go, this is pretty great. 10/10, will actually read the whole thing.
That makes me both grateful and nervous :C
Read the whole thing.
it's bad this is bad why are you so bad >:[
Nah man, it's legit good. It's a tight little scene. I can't say if it's gonna be great or whatever, but you're off to a good start, if nothing else.
Oh. That's good :c
I'm also not sure how that will run when paired with the tone of a lot of the rest of the fic. The reason this is a prologue is that it's very different to most of the story- it's one of the darkest moments in it, which sets up the rest of the story.
So I don't know- will the next chapter being written quite differently make this one seem off, too?
It'd be off and disorienting. Considering that's your intention, I'd say that's good.
Most excellent.
Although... that leaves me with the problem of my first draft now also being my final draft. :c
That just doesn't seem right.
Get a prompt for a kid finding a sword in a ditch. Just an ordinary non magical sword. End up getting an idea about a magic mountain that forges the metals inside it to make weapons and armor. Like there are just veins of swords or helmets and shit.
I think I have missed the spirit of the prompt.
It's a relief from most of my classmates' writing, but I'll think on it while I'm still in workshop mode.
-processing, processing-
I guess my main comment is that, while the writing definitely gets the job done, it's not yet memorable aside from the opening lines; I feel like I've seen other people write this scene, with these descriptions (probably haven't read exactly similar scenes, but you probably know what I mean), but I want to see more of how you would write this scene and make it stick in my head. I get that the perspective is supposed to be detached, and that came across, but I think the narrative could be tweaked to better convey the heaviness of the moment to the reader without necessarily bringing Rose's emotions into it, or without bringing redundant adverbs like "heavily" into it.
Said redundancy is another thing; there were occasionally moments that would have stood on their own, or where the feeling would have been implied, without certain language to explain it and hold up the pace, e.g. the reader could assume on their own that corpses would make a "grisly" path, and that Rose would whisper "softly," yannow? That could be why this felt less remarkable.
I would also have to know the rest of the events in the fic to comment on whether or not this feels out of place; it could be too dark of an opening, but it might not be, and I don't know.
These are basically nitpicks, though. It's really solid even as is, and I had to go back through it to put my finger on things that could be improved.
Mm. I actually tried this.
The thing is, there's two ways I could go about it; I could go for a more flowery horror-esque feel, implying a lot of the carnage she caused, or I could bulk it out with descriptions, which would allow me to build the entire scene up more in the reader's mind.
Either of those would definitely make the scene memorable, I think. But there's problems with each.
The problem with the first method is that it... focuses on the violence. Rose did kill a lot of people that night- nearly three hundred. Many of them did not die quick and easy deaths.
The tone of such a chapter would clash very badly with the tone of later chapters. More than that, though, focusing on the horror of such a night would immediately turn the reader against Rose- which is bad, because a lot of the story kind of depends on the reader feeling some level of empathy/sympathy for Rose for what she has been forced to do.
The problem with the second angle is that it's a more personal version of Rose's thoughts. The chapter is from Rose's point of view, after all; everything that the reader is told comes from Rose's perception of events, unless it's the narrator pointing something out, which breaks the flow of the story.
But focusing on descriptions implies that Rose is seeing these things, and she's not, really. She's trying really hard not to, and while she can't ignore some things- the smell of blood, the sound of her footsteps in it, where the corpses are- she can stop thinking about them, noting that they exist then automatically turning away.
I... I dunno. I guess, the thing is, anything that could be done to make it feel more... mine, would also make it feel more heavy-handed. And I didn't want it to be heavy-handed.
That is a good point, though. I'll go back through and edit some of the unnecessary language out.
Uh,'absently', 'heavy', 'grisly', 'softly' have all been dropped. I also dropped the first 'path' in the 'Corpses littered a path as she retraced her path through the mansion' sentence, replacing it with 'way' instead to get rid of the repetitive language, and changed 'a' to 'her'.
I think it flows a little better, but I'm not sure ._.
Thanks for the encouragement though!
And thanks for taking the time to offer up what comments you could!
I also wonder if the corpses line could just be, "Corpses retraced her path through the mansion." Hell, you might then be able to merge it with the following sentence then and make the pacing even smoother (unless you'd rather rewrite so as to make these sensations linger. The scene is kinda brief as is, I think, and I don't really have enough time for the details to sink under my skin)
And no problem. I mean, I'm still surprised that I'm coherent considering that I woke up at 4:30 and am running on half a liter of Mt. Dew.
Um... this is one of those hard-to-express things, because the story is... well, it relies on a magic system that has some quite odd elements. Those elements kinda influence Rose's personality and mindset, and thus this particular scene. Would you mind if I PM'd you regarding that? It's sorta one of those elements of the story that I'm not particularly comfortable sharing on the open board.
"Retraced", as a verb, means "to go back over", or something similar. That wouldn't work.
I could write it as "Corpses littered her path through the mansion", but... I dunno. I'm trying to work on not reducing the scene any further, because the shorter it is, the less time it'll have to impact the reader. :V
I want to rewrite it, but I don't know where I'd take the scene then, as... this kind of covers everything that I can cover.
Hmm. I guess I was thinking of trace having a slightly different meaning, more like just showing the path, or the outline of the path, and if there's a more matter-of-fact, non-distracting word that matches the definition, "oulining a path again," I'd go for it. But that passage still feels dragged out, rather than extended for effect, or extended to its proper length, and I think it's because "littered" isn't working for me either. I dunno; I feel like it's too flashy and needlessly dramatic, like it's trying to pull too much weight on its own or something. It's also imprecise enough that you had to extend the sentence. I don't know if that's a problem, especially since the scene already felt short, but I stand by the first point. But writing grisly scenes shouldn't be easy. Just keep thinking on it and working at it.
Feel free to PM me. At this point, I'm probably gonna wait till later today to respond cuz typing from a phone is a pain, if you don't mind.
EDIT: Okay, looking at the sentence again, I have to correct myself a bit, because the sentence is already pretty short. But I'd still use a word besides "littered," personally. I also don't know if this scene actually has to be that long. I dunno. It seems like a lot of the lines are really short (though for good reason), which doesn't lend itself to dramatic immersion without prior build-up.
Neither "traced" nor "retraced" work, unfortunately. Partially because both refer to the physical act of doing it, rather than being a descriptive term for what something is doing, but also because both carry different connotations- "traced" is usually used to mean "followed", as in "he traced the path backwards", and "retraced" means "to trace again" or "to trace back".
I'm trying to think of a term that means sort of the same, though. Like... I dunno. "Corpses lay scattered on the floor as she retraced her path", or "Corpses cluttered the halls as she retraced her path", or something.
I dunno. I can't think of any words to properly convey the image there- of dozens of corpses laying strewn across her path where she'd killed them on her way in.
Alright. It's kinda late here anyway, so I don't mind.
I'll shoot it your way soon, just gimme some time to type it out. :v