a story i wrote, for you to edit/criticize.....

[dinopoker]

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reads like an overly descriptive letter to a Penthouse knockoff.
Full of unneccessary description, sometimes it's best to make your point in the most succint method possible. George Orwell has some good essays on this topic.

George Orwell - Politics and the English language


ps. I am highly underqualified to critique writing, but just felt the Orwell reference would help any hopeful writer.

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so what should i do? start with a minimalist or simple hemingwayish style of prose to avoid falling into these types of traps?

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Most definately. This story went too fast, btw, 2/3 of one paragraph and it's already clear they're going to have sex. You're actually commiting two writing sins - being overly descriptive, but still rushing the story. The writer is obvioulsy getting more out of this than the reader.

[thedustbustr]

i stopped after sentence one. i don't really feel like reading your amateur erotica.

[ty2472004]

first paragraph moves way too fast. The last sentence of the first paragraph and the second paragraph, however, I like very much. If I was you I would focus on being a little more subtle. Leave a little bit up to the imagination. The reader has more fun that way.

[Wondercall]

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I stand in the doorway of Christy's room with nervous excitement like a sailboat of colonialists eager to rape and pilage a native island community.

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I thought this was hilarious.

[Dane S]

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i stopped after sentence one. i don't really feel like reading your amateur erotica.

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Does something make you think he or anyone else cares whether you feel like reading his story or not?

[Blarg]

I'd suggest trying Jayne Anne Phillips first book of short stories, "Black Tickets," for a great example of really short fiction. You might also look at the brief interludes Hemingway has between some of his short stories -- I forget the collection. Richard Brautigan has fallen way out of favor these days, but some of his super short fiction was pretty darn cool. Trout Fishing in America is what he's known for best.

A problem with really short fiction is to not make it utterly trivial. That means it has to have some sort of quick punch without being a cheap shot -- not at all easy to do. Being evocative can help. Your prose often has the feeling of being a prose poem. That kind of drunken, determined love for words is great. Just take some time -- enjoy it too! -- making every word count. It doesn't matter if you need 40 revisions and massive changes to get what you want. It's important that you love your idea enough to get it right.

By the way, I would be careful who you show your stuff to, especially before you establish a sense of yourself. A lot of people can tell you how to be the kind of writer they like best or want you to be. It's very common for friends to resent that you want to write at all. But you have to discover your own voice, independent of harmful ego interplay, and it will likely be one that appeals to some and not others. Joining a writing class is a good idea, because people on the one hand won't give a damn about you and on the other will be more open to giving help. Unless you get a class full of numbskulls. But even just one good teacher or classmate can be valuable to bounce stuff off of and make the class very worthwhile. I would be much more wary of showing stuff to family and friends, where you can either get too much approval, too little, or weird ego things going on that may well be over your head at the time and potentially really undermine your confidence and understanding.

[ZeTurd]

"the walls are lined with framed photographs of the people I wish I didn't know"

Who are these people you wish you didn't know? The definite article seems misplaced.

"She twirls strawberry blonde hair around her finger and fire runs through my body. I feel as if I am floating, my heart races faster and faster, the lower half of my body deprives my brain of blood."

This made me want to stop reading. Horribly cliched.

"the sweet scent of her fruit-flavored cvnt."

This one serves as a good example of your over-use of adjectives. And, uh, I realize this is erotica, but you might want to consider replacing that last noun there.

"There is a grand piano in the corner of the living room and a life size statue of Jesus stands next to it. He stares into the emptiness of the house."

I like this one.

"Her mattress is as soft as a bed of roses."

Bad simile. Use similes sparingly.

"My hammer scratches against the seam of my shorts."

Tacky. You have some good writing in there, then suddenly you make me feel like I'm reading a particularly bad Penthouse letter with phrases such as the one above.

There's also a few typos and grammatical errors in the story that you might want to correct.

[JP OSU]

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I stand in the doorway of Christy's room with nervous excitement like a sailboat of colonialists eager to rape and pilage a native island community.

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I didn't like this too much, your similes need to be more succint...

[Dane S]

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Unable to take it anymore, I get up and walk through the long house, past Jesus and his sad eyes, into the kitcheen where I find my little-debbie long-legged snack cake with whom I wish to share my painful secret desires and warm bodily fluids. She looks at me with a sort of nervous admiration in her ocean-grean eyes, as if I have taken some sort of mysterious role in her life. I can feel words stuck in her throat as she runs and a hand through her hair searching for a sense of control, but I do not allow her the chance to locate it or to even speak.

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Love these sentences. Love Jesus's "sad eyes". Love "I have taken some sort of mysterious role in her life". Well done... keep it going.

I think you should be more specific with what you're looking for in responses. Because of the strategy you're using to write this story, I wouldn't suggest doing much solicitation of criticism or editing yet, because you are going to end up redoing most of this anyway once the story has momentum and begins to take on a life of its own. It's possible that not one sentence will be the same by the time you've finished, and this will happen just through the natural course of your trying to preserve unity among all your segments.

If I were you I'd be asking for general reactions. Ask what particularly grabs people's attentions, what invokes emotional reactions, what descriptions evoke vivid images in people's minds. You shouldn't be looking to write 500 words, then perfect those words, then write another 500, you should be looking for good threads to run with. Once you have written a bunch of segments, you'll be amazed how easy it is to go back and revise early ones, because you'll begin to realize what fits, what doesn't. It's sooo much easier to write when you have a direction. BUT, you can't discover a direction unless you write.

You might not use ANY of this piece. It doesn't matter, it's just something to get you going. Don't treat it like a poker hand, treat it like improv or something. You're trying to get on a roll and into a rhythm. The specific details of how you accomplish this are relatively unimportant. It's not a linear process.

Keep it goin dude. Interested to see what it turns into. I think your characters have definite potential and you have some great energy and personality in your style.

How about a pottery analogy? Right now you are literally just gathering the clay you're going to eventually use to carefully fashion something formal and beautiful. There will be lots of useless mud mixed in with the clay at first, but that's okay. Getting hands muddy is a very necessary step in the process. You can't get on the wheel and start shaping your material until you have plenty of clay and mud and everything else you need to work with. Look for feedback on what attracts people about the general consistencies and pigments of the mud and clay, not the shape of the blob, which couldn't be more meaningless.

[RacersEdge]

less descriptive imagery
add some dialogue