First 10 or so lines:

“All right ladies and gentlemen. You are all leaders in your respective fields, from hydraulics to computers to the manipulation of genes,” the project leader, James Schultz, started. “Together, we will hopefully design the perfect, final solution to the war with the Na’muh! Our success could mean hundreds of millions…no – billions of lives saved. For the only way to end this war is to win it. You all were chosen, you all volunteered willingly, and not one of you will not put the very best you have into this effort!
“We plan on creating not just the perfect weapon, but the perfect operator as well. So, people,” he continued, quieter now, “let’s put our very best into this…for we can give no less.”

I don't have much to say about the technical aspects of your writing, but it seems to me that you're putting exposition into the mouth of a character. Everything that he says would be obvious to everyone in the room, including the speaker. That means he's only really saying it for us.

I'd either change it to true exposition, if you really have to, or I'd rewrite the introduction to be inside someone's head. She might hear some of the same things, but disagree with them. She might think that he's understating the danger if they fail. Or you might start the story in a different place, in which she's talking to her husband that night, after the project has started, and she's confessing to him that she has no idea how to accomplish her part of the task.

Just a thought, but worth what you paid for it.

I'm a little slow right now in my critiques, but if you want to send it over I'll give it a once-over.

Regards,
Oliver

quote:

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What it is, is I'm starting with this "quote" kind of as the equivalent of an attention grabber in a speech. My next paragraph begins with the "author" of the story introducing himself then he immediately delves into the background of the story itself - the history behind it. Then, after I get the history laid down, I start the story.

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I can understand that, but this _isn't_ a speech. Watching a dynamic person deliver a speech is different from reading words on a page. The latter just won't give the same thrill.

Why not? Because when you watch a speech (and, to a lesser extent, when you hear one) you get lots of cues that aren't in the text: body language, tone, emphasis, the reactions of the audience. And remember that even then, the speaker had better be pretty durned dynamic or everyone's going to yawn anyway.

So the equivalent of an attention-grabber in a speech can't be the text of a speech; it's the _scene_ of the speech, the recounting of the way your main character(s) react to it. That's why I said that if -- if -- you need to give the speech to get all those details in, you might consider viewing the speech through someone else's eyes. Give their reactions to it, their observations of the audience, their judgements about its content or the character of the speaker.

[I'm thinking now of a scene I've written in my Arthurian novel that seems flat; I think it's because I'm focusing too much on Mordred's words and not on how people respond to them. Thanks for making me think about it!]

But, as I said, you may not need to dump all this information at once anyway. Too much background and history can be problematic, slowing down your story's intro. People tend to like this type of story when it begins with some sort of action, an event rather than backstory. Fill in the details as it becomes necessary to know them.

quote:

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The whole intro is in what I call "second-person" veiw where it's one person telling the story from his perspective. The actual story itself it in what my Senior English teacher called "Third-Person (Omnipresent)".

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"Second person" means something else: the "you" form. This is in the second person:

quote:

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When you walk down the stairs, it seems like it should be familiar: crumbling red brick, windows with wrought-iron bars, a rusting handrail bolted into the wall. But it's not. There's a presence here that you've never felt before, a brooding spirit haunting the shadows, waiting for you to reach the door at the bottom of the stairs. You gingerly extend your fingers, and as they touch the door handle

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Few people actually write in the second person. It tends to be a literary sort of thing.

One person telling the story would be first person: "When I was a Lieutenant in the Grokkian army, we..."

Hopefully your teacher said you were writing in the 3rd person omniscient. Most commercial fiction is written in third person limited, which is, I think, a good choice for a beginner.

Get _Characters and Viewpoint_ by Orson Scott Card. It helps with everything I've discussed so far, and especially the differences between the different points of view -- their uses, their dangers, etc.

Regards,
Oliver

quote:

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I'm starting with this "quote" kind of as the equivalent of an attention grabber in a speech. My next paragraph begins with the "author" of the story introducing himself then he immediately delves into the background of the story itself - the history behind it. Then, after I get the history laid down, I start the story.

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If you want to start with your first-person character, you can put every bit of data into his discussion instead of the speech. (You practically did anyway, which makes the speech redundant.) Now it's all filtered through his eyes, which means we're seeing something about his character -- you get the benefit of _both_ getting the data _and_ getting to know the character. I think you can definitely kill the speech.

That said, I think you overdid the infodump in the first-person character's discussion, too. I'm hearing about stuff that happened once upon a time instead of something that the main character can do something about.

Normally, I'd say that you want to get into someone's head as quickly as possible and show us what his problem is, why it's a problem, and what he's doing about it. In this case, your first-person narrator's _not_ doing anything about it, since he's telling a history himself.

Then, when you move to an audio recording (which will have to be done really well to work, I think), I'm not sure how you want to tackle it -- I'm afraid that if I give too much advice, it might be wrong for your story. The first-person MC is the only character we care about so far, but we don't know what role he has in the audio recordings, so the whole setup is very distant. Do you plan on using audio recordings throughout? What other perspectives will you use? Will you augment the recordings with the thoughts of characters, or with an omniscient narrator?

What you're trying to do looks very tricky to me. I re-recommend that you read _Characters & Viewpoint_ -- not to discourage you from trying what you're trying, but to make sure that you understand the issues involved and can compensate for them if you continue down this path.

One last thought: don't think of it as a "skim" of the history. Think of every word that the reader has to get through in order for your story to start is a number in a combination for a safe that holds the story. The more numbers, the more they have to turn, the more they have to think and remember sequences, the more likely it is that they'll turn to another story that's just sitting on a shelf next to them, opened to the first page. You can include every element of detail you have so far -- but do it elsewhere. By analogy, think of putting the history of the Terminators into what's-his-name's mouth after he has already saved Sarah Connor twice. The backstory may be important, but it doesn't need to be first.

Best of luck,
Oliver

Pretty much, the whole story is planned on being from the omniscient viewpoint, compiled from all of those "documents" that the narrator from the intro put together. Thinking on it, I think that I could get rid of that entire part there at the end about the box of files and just end with something like "And so, for the Real version of History" or something. Basically, the story in and of itself is events that have already happened, just told from a veiwpoint where you don't know what the specifics will be, you just know the generalities - the war is won by Man, but we don't know how; "Nine" was somehow involoved as well as the rest, but again, we don't know how...and so on.

And go ahead, give as much advice as you'd like. This is all helping me get this shaped up and prepared for when I finally get around to continuing my writing. I'm trying to make what I've got already good, then move on the the next bit of writing and make that good, and just do this step by step.

I'm also helping myself a little bit by writing a short story for a contest here where I live where the setting is the same as this story I'm writing here, just AFTER the war when the UCE is embroiled in a civil war.

But I'll definitely go work on this some tonight after I'm done refereeing my soccer games.

Thanks all!

[deleted]

And if it's not allowed, feel free to delete this post Ms. Administrator-Whose-Name-I-Seem-To-Have-Forgotten.

Thanks all again for all the tips and help.

[This message has been edited by starsin (edited October 21, 2006).]

Thanks again all!