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True crime can be a beautiful thing. From the perfectly executed grand heist to the well played out grift, performance art as subtle as a brush stroke on canvas or the harmonics of a finely tuned violin, the exquisite iniquity of a crime of passion, but then again what crime is without passion. Passion is what drives the criminal insane. Passion is the basis for everything in life, for purpose, spirituality, thought and beauty. So crime at its purest form is not without beauty, without style. The simple snatch and grab can have a grace and aesthetics that matches the most skillful of poets. Even the darkest of hate crimes can reveal the beauty of forgiveness, can purge society of its hidden sins and bring to light needed change. True crime can be a beautiful thing. But when you steal from The Producer… things just get plain ugly.
I am not intending to stroke your ego but if the rest of the piece is like this I don't think you'll have many issues. You may have a knack for this. Nice work.
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From what I'm seeing, it appears a literary market might want this as well as the crime one/// it's nice Posts: 690 | Registered: Oct 2008
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posted
Nice prose and a strong voice. I'd keep reading, and I'm not even a fan of crime fiction.
I have a couple quibbles from the internal editor I can't turn off. I stumbled over "well played out" because it seemed it should be "well-played" or "played out" but not both. If you go with it as is, I'd suggest hyphenating because it does modify grift. Other quibble: "Then again what crime is without passion" is a question and should probably have a question mark.
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I may have to respectfully disagree with JenniferHicks on that last part. Internal monologue often omits question marks. It seems to make those bits read faster Posts: 604 | Registered: Mar 2008
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Just a quick reply. Overall very beautiful, but on the point raised just above -- the lack of a question mark after "passion" bothered me a little too. I think it lends to the impression of sentences that end up flowing just a little bit too long - I don't mean to say that you're committing heinous run-on errors, but at times I felt as though my internal reader was running out of breath, desperate for the end of a sentence. It might help to let the reader pause:
" ...the exquisite iniquity of a crime of passion, but then again what crime is without passion"
becomes
...the exquisite iniquity of a crime of passion. But then again what crime is without passion?
Just a thought. Overall, though, I agree with the majority sentiment here -- good stuff.
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After a re-read, I may have been mistaken about the sentences feeling too long... only the second one was making me trip as I read, so to speak. Perhaps because it isn't really a sentence. Something struck me as odd, and the question mark issue stuck out -- not that punctuation is necessarily the right fix. The sentence as a whole is pretty, but it doesn't feel right. Posts: 500 | Registered: May 2008
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posted
Thank you all for the comments and critiques. I see what you mean by the question mark. My initial thought was the character is saying this as more of a statement of fact or rhetorically but alas I think you may be correct. Beside punctuation, grammar and spelling are always my weak points. So thank you to all of you editors out there your advice is always welcomed. Oh and my ego appreciates the nice comments as well. I hope everyone has a great week.
Steve
P.S. Please ignore and punctuation, grammar of spelling errors in this post as I probably did.
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