posted
Well here's how it all starts. Hope to hear some good criticising in earnest, folks! Don't let me down!
Near the time we both knew I would have to leave him, it was hard to tell which flashes were lighting and which came from the energy weapons of the Invisibles. A vast burst of blue-white light leapt across the sky, making an inverted landscape of the ragged cloud's undersurface and revealing through the rain the destruction all around us: the shell of a distant building, its interior scooped out by some earlier cataclysm, the tangled remains of rail pylons near the crater's lip, the fractured service pipes and tunnels the crater had exposed, and the massive, ruined body of the wrecked land destroyer lying half submerged in the pool of filthy water in the bottom of the hole.
posted
Simplify and make it more personal. The characters are what make this interesting, with their conflicts. The setting discription is wordy and confusing.
Posts: 88 | Registered: Apr 2006
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In general it is well visualised. Well done. The language is effective/correct. It does feel like it needs a break somewhere but it is not wrong.
Some nits:
quote: Near the time we both knew I would have to leave him, it was hard to tell which flashes were light[n]ing and which came from the energy weapons of the Invisibles.
Right now it seems like you could be borrowing the Final Fantasy setting.
Because you are so painstaking in the description, the reader (me - anyway) is prone to take you literally . For instance I am seeing a building with its interior literally scooped-up and taken away, maybe by these 'invisibles.'
The following two comments are embarrassingly minor nits about repetition of ideas, not necessarily bad but can be uneconomical:
quote: massive, ruined body of the wrecked land destroyer
I would lose either 'ruined' or 'wrecked' as they mean basically same thing. I would choose to keep 'wrecked' for its naval connotations in order to bolster the idea of a 'land destroyer' as a miltiary ship.
quote:shell of a distant building, its interior scooped out
We are given almost the same info twice here too.
Stray musing:
quote:Near the time we both knew I would have to leave him
Who is him and who is we?
This initially read as though it is a pair of lovers breaking-up. Like a woman describing the apparent but mutually unspoken understanding that a relationship is in trouble or, in this case, on life-support. Maybe that is the case here, or perhaps the narrator is someone having to abandon a fallen soldier, or maybe an invisible is leaving the dying body of a human they had managed to 'colonise/possess' ... I don't know.
HOWEVER: If you are trying to develop a sense of a detached narrator, one who has perhaps transcended the scenes she is describing, then you have nailed it. But I think it may be hard to sustain a narrator like this for any great length of story. Possible though, I guess.
As I said, it is great imagery but am not keen on the way it is presented as a list. That does not mean its bad or wrong.
I can't really say that I would read much of this unless I found out soon who and what the characters are. To go much farther without some clues would make me suspicious that I may be in for some trickery .
The thing I liked most about it was the line:
quote: A vast burst of blue-white light leapt across the sky, making an inverted landscape of the ragged cloud's undersurface...
but think it should be a stand-alone sentence
BTW: Right now it reads as though there is only one cloud — like a mushroom cloud. Did you mean clouds' ?
BTW2: Perhaps think about saving that first line to the end of the description. It may be a flow thing, but to me, it would read better there because you as writer are indicating in so many words 'now you have setting, I will give you characters'.
Hope some of this is useful.
BTW3: Welcome.
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited April 26, 2006).]
posted
I agree with what most of the others have said: you're withholding information from the reader. We need to know, first of all, who these characters are before we can start to care about what is going.
Your description, on the other hand is good, but, like hoptoad pointed out, there are a few redundancies (i.e. ruined/wrecked in the last sentence). Also, the last sentence feels a bit long, but that's just a nit, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. What you need to worry about right now is telling us who the characters are.
posted
Yes to all. When I knew I'd have to leave him -- tell us who, and why! We won't be disappointed; we'll be engaged.
Posts: 2830 | Registered: Dec 2004
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posted
No. Save the benefits for those who play by the rules.
But it's just a prank. If Iain Banks wants to come here and post his already published works, that's a little off point but it doesn't hurt anyone. If someone wants to pretend that they have a shot in hell of ever being Iain Banks and does the same...that's just sad, but it still isn't like anyone gets hurt.
posted
I deliberately didn't post to this thread because I thought it was pretty clear from the title that this wasn't Arnal6's own work (I've read a number of Iain Banks' novels, but not "Look To Windward", so I didn't recognise it). And there was a contribution in another thread by Arnal6 which indicated his or her dissatisfaction with the critiquing process here.
Presumably the piece was posted to elicit a bunch of critiques saying what was "wrong" with the story, before intending to reveal that it was published by one of the best-selling SF authors currently working. Now one could argue that a best-selling SF author hardly needs to capture the reader's (or editor's) attention in his first 13 lines - the vast majority of his readers will already have been captured by his name/reputation/previous work. But I am passably confiden that Arnal6 intended to use the results to "prove" his or her own conjectures about the "flawed" critiquing process here.
Of course, if someone does believe that the critiquing process here is flawed, then an alternative approach might be to just go somewhere else that he or she finds useful - indeed, perhaps even to suggest to other people where such a place mighht be and why it's "better".
That would be the courteous, polite, reasonable, decent thing to do.
posted
I don't care what anyone thinks of the critiquing process, but tricking someone into going to this trouble to help you (as hoptoad did) when your only goal is to pour contempt on that help -- in deference to the rules of the board, I won't use the language for that action that would be most appropriate.
Posts: 2830 | Registered: Dec 2004
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posted
As tchernabyelo pointed out, best-selling SF authors don't need to hook their readers with the first 13 lines because they already have track records and readers are willing to trust them and keep reading.
New writers actually need to do BETTER than established authors in order to compete with them with editors.
Perhaps, hoptoad, if you consider your efforts an exercise, you may feel better about spending all that energy on your comments. If, as I continue to assert, it truly is better to give than receive in the workshop setting, you have benefitted more than anyone here anyway.
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