posted
(this is what I'm working on for the Cup of Comfort. Just wondering what everyone feels about the opening. I'm not really looking for readers beyond this I'm only halfaway done.)
Dark clouds surround me. Is it getting stuffy in here? Am I going blind? I should really get that bump on my head checked, wait I don’t have a bump. How on earth can I fall down the stairs and not have a bump? * * * Did I fall down the stairs? * * * As I rushed to the stairwell where I expected to find my own broken body I realized that I was out of my chair during the time set apart for writing. I returned to my seat and watched the screen saver, a collection of my favorite pictures. There’s nothing like art to get the creative juices flowing. Sadly, then I bumped the mouse and had to face the terribly empty page.
posted
This seems like a Dali painting to me... surreal and difficult to interpret. I have NO idea what you are going for in this opener. It isn't working for me. At all.
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posted
Okay (cracking knuckles)...My first reaction was that this was a portrayal of death. In certain mystical traditions, death is often followed by confusion felt by the disembodied soul (Ouch! There's now a bump on my head! Whoa, wait, where is it? Shouldn't I have a bump?) Like in that movie with Bruce Willis, 'Sixth Sense', in which he's actually, literally deceased, yet doesn't uncover this sad fact until movie's end, though it was very strongly hinted at in the beginning when he was shot by one of his former patients. I see no such clear hints in your sample...presumably because you wish to keep such info from me for a later *surprise* ending. Only an allusion to falling down the stairs, which may or may not have happened, since you don't seem to have a bump...the whole scene of stair-falling may have been just planted in your head by some post-hynotic suggestion. (Aliens? Evil psychiatrist? Strong hallucinogens?)
Then I gathered that originally, at the beginning of the piece (serving as *backstory*), MC was at his/her writing desk, then suddenly rushed over to the bottom of stairs where his 'broken body' supposedly should be. Whoa wait, shouldn't I be writing? Where's my broken body? Didn't I fall down the damn stairs after all? So far, what hits me is that you intend to portray confusion...you intentionally wish for me to feel confused, possibly so you can keep certain key bits of interpretive story-data slyly *hidden* from me so you can pop me in the solar plexus somewhere down the pike with some kind of twist ending that might not be all that well recommended (It was all a dream! Its a virtual reality experiment! The whole thing was a story taking place in the mind of the MC {acting as de facto author-surrogate}, a story that he was in the act of writing! Haha, led you on, didn't I?)
Weirdly enough, I had a tendency connect the MC's bumping of the mouse with the mysterious (bump? no bump? Man, where is it?) on MC's (head? The broken body's head?) I was thinking, 'kay, there must be some reason he used 'bump' here, with the mouse, particularly since computer mouses aren't typically bumped, they're moved, pushed, slid or something to that effect, so I tended to think it was an intentional semantic construct meant to 'set me up for something', like, the story's theme tied into this idea of bumping...maybe that's what you ultimately intend for me, the reader, to feel when you finally open up the surprise package at story's end and I'm kertwanged as a result ('Bump-bump! Nudge-nudge, grin-grin, wink-wink...haha, you thought this was all literal somehow; man I sure had you goin', you shoulda saw your face!') Hmm, well, if you could actually see what's going on in my face as I read your 13 lines, what you'd see is not me slapping my forehead with a I-should-have-known,-silly-me open palm, but a look of, well, confusion, as other critiquers in this thread have said. And I feel that, regardless of how many fictional rules you go out of your way to intentionally break, one categorically unbreakable axiom of yours, as a writer, should be 'communicate, don't obsfucate'. Show, reveal, and try not to confuse...if you are out to confuse me, that's a bit risky since I might not be motivated to read through the rest of your story, and all the fictional tricks you had waiting in reserve for me, to bump me over, go a-wasted since I'm no longer around for you to bump me. I've since put your story down, and moved on to something else entirely. If you want to bump me, you'll have to draw me in first, seduce me however overtly or covertly, make me care about and root for your MC, so that way I'll stick around for the eventual trick-revealings ("Hey! He wasn't really dead, he was a schizo and his mom just made off with his Haldol! And plus the entire universe exists in a huge Jar O' Tang! Isn't that something!") I'm not saying necessarily here to *not pull tricks* at all, I'm saying to at least draw me in until you can get a dang chance to pull them.
quote:Sadly, then I bumped the mouse and had to face the terribly empty page.
And here, I just noticed another rulebreakage...you portray an author, confronting an empty screen. The first thing that went thru my head as I read this, was to go, Whoops. Does the MC here reflect the actual author's (id est your) dilemma, him (you) staring resolutely at his own Dell flatscreen, wishing for Ms. Mighty Muse to come and French kiss his uninspired a$$ so he can start plonkin away at that keyboard? This might be, here, a form of Dischism, in which the viewpoint characters' surroundings reflect the midset of the author, which is related to the White Room Syndrome...the character finds himself in a featureless white room, which actually turns out to be a kind of unintentional metaphor illustrating the author's overall creative bankruptcy at the time when he sat down to write his piece. This, of course, might not be true in this case, but it's the first thing I thought of when I read about your MC having to "face the terribly empty page" at the end. However, the confusion established beforehand in your sample tends to suggest that you really weren't drawing a big blank on what to write, since you took pains to set up that whole "bump/no bump/where's my broken body?" situation, which happened when the MC "should have been sitting and writing". Maybe his confusing mind state was the core idea you started with, then were confused yourself on how to proceed, so you sat the MC down in front of a blank page? This is just one interpretation of the events you've sketched for us in your 13-liner, and I'm not sure it's a good overall conclusion you really wish for me to have when I read your piece.
Let me say, though, that I was intrigued at least to some degree by MC's initial and arguably macabre confusion. At least you weren't portaying some contented, droll married couple discussing mutual funds over bagels and salmon-flavored cream cheese. But take all my commentary with a grain of salt. I'm no expert.
[This message has been edited by Nietge (edited June 13, 2006).]
posted
I didn't get it at all. I asume you were aiming to confuse the reader and although it is tricky to pull off I say go ahead and try. Since you've brocken the "rule" about being obscure I would suggest you break a couple more to make it easier to read: 1) Slow down. I know your supposed to get to the pulp fast in a beginning but it's not the case here. Slow down, revel in the fact that your MC is confused. It will make ignorance attractive to the rest of us instead of making us uncomfortable. 2)Maybe, possibly: Don't start in "medias res" Stories are supposed to start right before a great scene so the reader is hooked with something strong before getting to the exposition. Think about having him sit in front of the computer, then fall-or-not-fall down the stairs, and then return to the computer. That way we'll have at least one sane paragraph before we have to deal with the rest.
[This message has been edited by Sara Genge (edited June 14, 2006).]
posted
I think I'd start with the 3rd section and weave the internal dialogue in later. Have your writer strugle to forge ahead with the writing for a few minutes, then start to wander off on a tangent, get worried, and rush off to go check on him/herself. Do this again and again, adding a little more info each time to tell the story, and cranking up the tension a notch each time.
posted
The first sentence in the last paragraph needs some commas, for clarity. "...stairwell, where I expected to find my own broken body, I realized..." The last part of that same sentence is a little cluttered, and might benefit from restructuring.
The last sentence, also, has clarity issues. I felt, "Sadly, then I..." was particularly awkward. Was he sad when he bumped the mouse? Was he sad before? Did moving the mouse make him sad? (Maybe the confusion started with me, not the writing...I'm not sure.)
On the whole, I like the surreal tone and dreamlike progression of this, but it suffers in first person. It's too hard to follow this kind of stream-of-conciousness plot in first person, and I'm not sure I'd stick with it for long. Especially as the character is still quite nebulous, and I have no reason, yet, to care whether or not his fall down the stairs was real or hallucination.
posted
Thanks everyone, I should have given the genre. It's a true* story(which I know is no excuse for the confusion) so that cuts out the possibility of aliens or the I was dead all along. (But thanks Nientge that was fun to read but I run an Acer and the 'bump' of the mouse is just an error. No snap ending either, it's supposed to be inspirational.) I'm sorry about the story about writer's block(which is really more of trying to keep my ADD adled brain on task), but it's collection of stories about writing life and this is a part of writing. Perhaps your right, I may have to start with something sane.
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