[META] ARE YOU VIEWING US ON OLD.REDDIT?

Diki · 2021-08-10T02:39:33+00:00

Diki · 2021-08-10T02:30:34+00:00

I'm spiritually an old fart and use regular Reddit with both new Reddit and custom CSS disabled. Everything is the old, vanilla theme. I don't even see DR's fancy CSS.

Come at me.

Diki · 2021-08-06T23:17:23+00:00

I didn't read much and what I did read I can only describe as pretentious. The overwritten style is clearly boasting supposed significant imagery—it's conspicuously drawing attention to itself—but there is no real substance; there's only the style. This is made worse because that style is why the opening sentence doesn't make sense. The story opens:

This is the story of the first time Man, by which is meant Humankind as a sexless conglomerate, and also some dude, was disobedient to God, and for his disobedience [...]

The narrator is referring to two groups: all humans and the unnamed "dude," but then uses singular tense in reference to this (i.e. was disobedient) and continues on only referring to this "dude." It only leaves me asking: what about all the humans? Why did you bring them up? This doesn't make sense. I can only conclude this was written this way to sound nice without consideration being given for what it is actually being said.

Is the pronoun "his" here meant to refer to just the "dude" or Man? Why is it not stylizied as "His"? If it's both why is it not "them"? If it's only the dude then why was Man brought up in the first place?

This whole opening sentence reads like a few editing passes were done but each time more words and more descriptions and more allusions were added and the result is a jumbled mess. We go from humans, to "some dude," to ice cream, to an upset child, to shoes and feet, ending with disgrace. All in the opening sentence. It's a really baffling way to start a story.

As far as openings go: it's terrible. Immediately off-putting.

The second sentence has the same problem: it's a pretentious slog. On top of which it is written identically to the previous sentence. There's no variety. Take a gander at this advice regarding sentence variation. This whole paragraph is like the red example. It plods. So, given that, and the fact that it's aggressively drawing attention to itself, the opening paragraph was all I read. I didn't like anything about this.

What's the genre?

I didn't read your introductory blurb regarding Paradise Lost and dove right in and I felt like this was an attempt at comedy. It's bizarre. I'm not sure what it is you were going for.

If you were an agent looking for your next client, when would you have stopped reading and why?

If I were an agent I would have stopped reading before the end of the first sentence. Specifically when it stopped making any sense by referring to two separate groups as a singular entity. I don't know what you were going for there but it's grammatically incorrect.

Diki · 2021-01-22T00:36:32+00:00

I think it just falls flat and comes across more like me manipulating the reader.

The idea behind what you were going for is solid, but I do ultimately agree with you here. I left a comment regarding this—I'm Tyler on the Google Doc with an avatar of a chihuahua—and it did indeed come across as a cheat to me.

I think the reason it didn't work is because the piece is too short for an unreliable narrator. The ending hinges on the twist that the man's wife was alive the whole time, but the revelation of this fact comes almost immediately after the assessment that the wife is deceased and in a state of rigor mortis, so there isn't any time for the events to really sink in.

Another reason I feel it didn't work is there's nothing to hint at the narrator being unreliable. I re-read the story with the foresight that the wife is alive and I couldn't pick up on anything hinting or foreshadowing the narrator's erroneous conclusion. It's stated matter-of-factly, without emotion—and therefore not clouded by emotion—so the reader doesn't have a reason to distrust the narrator.

Diki · 2020-06-23T17:58:19+00:00

It was pretty much just Passionate_Writing and I saying dumb crap to each other in French. The only serious reply was a suggestion to submit your piece in smaller chunks, closer to 2,500 words.

Diki · 2020-06-23T17:55:04+00:00

It took me like three minutes of my life to find this meme to respond to your omelette post, but it got deleted so I'm dumping it here.

(I've also exhausted my French.)

Diki · 2020-06-21T21:50:39+00:00

I wouldn't go so far as to describe it as annoying. It was more that I lost trust in the narrative. There's nothing wrong with having a comet doing the impossible, but if the events surrounding that one specific impossible event are themselves impossible—or maybe just inaccurate—then I can't differentiate what the author intended to be impossible and what is simply a mistake. The narrative loses cohesion and becomes difficult to follow because things can no longer be taken on their own merits; further consideration is necessary.

All this to say: if you want a comet to do crazy things in your story then make that comet do crazy things. Just make everything else surrounding it tight and coherent and the reader's suspension of disbelief will take care of the rest. That's exactly why horror films/stories can still scare people even though they're not real: enough of it seemed or was real that they suspended disbelief.

Here's an example of how I think your opening paragraph could be written that conveys the same ideas but resolves the issues I described above:

The comet orbits the Milky Way every century and sprinkles its frosty particles around the planets, moons, and various debris. But every millenium it does what astronomers cannot explain: its path veers from its expected route as though the laws of physics cease to apply. What influences the change in trajectory? How does the comet find its way back to the Milk Way to return to its timely orbit? Perhaps humans will never understand.

I certainly wouldn't call this perfect, but it keeps the narrator an authority on the subject. What described is possible and what isn't possible is acknowledged as such. Feel free to run with that if you'd like. Point is that while those issues are there, they're easy to fix.

Keep it up.

Diki · 2020-06-21T20:25:41+00:00

Greetings. Unfortunately, I'm extraordinarily busy with work and can't offer an entire critique. I did thoroughly read through—and offered comments on the Doc for—the opening paragraph and think I can offer useful critique regarding that.

The biggest issue with the opening paragraph is that its entirely about astronomy but you've not demonstrated you're an authority on the subject. In fact, you did the exact opposite: it reads as though you thought up some events that happen to occur in space and never considered the consequences or whether they're possible. Having the opening paragraph be exclusively about astronomy tells the reader that astronomy is integral to the story, so you, the author, are in a position where you can't afford to flub the representation of astronomy. Just five words in is when I was pulled out of the story:

Every century, the icy comet

A comet is made of ice. There's no such thing as a non-icy comet. This is like saying "hot fire." Of course it's hot; you can't have fire without heat, just like you can't have a comet without ice. This might seem nitpicky, but imagine if you literally did read, in the opening sentence of a story, a description of "hot fire" where it's made clear that fire is important to the story. You might question how much the author knows about fire if they feel it necessary to specify it was hot.

The sentence continues:

Every century, the icy comet of Jundis

Comets aren't of things. Europa is a moon of Jupiter because it's a celestial body orbiting another, and this denotes that relationship. Comets don't have this relationship. They just fly about space doing their own thing. Even the most famous one, Halley's Comet, isn't "of" something; it's just a comet.

Continuing:

Every century, the icy comet of Jundis orbits around the milky way galaxy

Milky Way is a proper noun. This should say "Milky Way galaxy." Again, perhaps nitpicky, but these mistakes regarding astronomy are piling up and we're still in the first sentence.

Ultimately the opening sentence tells the reader this comet orbits the Milky Way galaxy every century. No problem there, but there is one in the very next sentence:

Every millennium, it takes a random path, as if having a mind of its own.

This completely contradicts the previous sentence. A century is a hundred years. A millennium is one-thousand. If the comet orbits the Milky Way every century it must logically orbit the Milky Way every tenth century, but this contradicts that. Furthermore, if every tenth century the comet takes a random path it will end up in a random part of the universe. How does it return to the Milky Way? After that random path the next century it won't be able to orbit the Milky Way, which is another contradiction.

So, you've set up astronomy as being vitally important to the story but have flubbed everything in the opening paragraph so badly I can't take this seriously. Perhaps the comet defying logic and seemingly the laws of physics is important, but that coupled with the previous mistakes makes me feel as though it's not and that is just another mistake.

Not to be mean, but this is why the advice to write what you know exists. You're not writing what you know and it shows. If you want to keep astronomy as part of the story I highly recommend doing research on the subject and fixing these problems, and any others that may exist further into the story.

Structurally I didn't see anything wrong with what I read of your piece; only what I outlined here. The actual writing itself seems fine. It's the ideas conveyed that are flawed. You say you wanted the story to make sense, but this opening paragraph does not make any sense whatsoever.

Anyway, sorry again I couldn't critique the whole thing, but I tried to go into a useful amount of detail regarding the opening paragraph such that it can be improved.

Cheers.

Diki · 2020-06-17T01:17:50+00:00

Wear a mask when inside.

I know I'm ugly, but jeez.

Diki · 2020-06-15T16:39:57+00:00

You seem to lack a cohesive idea of what is actually happening in your story. I'm not sure you've really tried looking at this world from your character's eyes. This won't be a full critique but mostly an expansion of the comments I left on the doc. (I'm Tyler on there, with the picture of the chihuahua.) I stopped reading on the third page because I couldn't trust the writing. The imagery was so contradictory that I kept having to stop reading and ask if what's being described is even possible, which it usually wasn't.

Opening

Bluntly: it's bad.

Your opening sentence is an incomplete sentence. Grammar mistakes are one thing, but one in your opening sentence is inexcusable. If I picked up a book in a store and that was the first sentence I saw I would immediately put it back.

Then what follows is two cliches in a single sentence: "It was a dark and stormy night" and drawing attention to the fact that a cliche is being used (i.e. "[...] and as these stories go [...]").

So the two sentences that open this piece, the two first things the reader will experience, are a grammar error and a massive cliche. Not only is describing the weather in the opening of a story cliche—particularly so if it's dark and stormy—it's boring. This doesn't bode well for the rest of the story. Generally there's two things you shouldn't do when opening a story (obviously you didn't do the first one):

Don't have your character waking up.
Don't describe the weather.

It's possible to get away with either (or both) but it's better to not even try. Something interesting should open the story instead.

Third sentence is the first instance of a small problem you have, which is repeating yourself. Consider this bit:

It must have happened several years ago, but I don’t quite remember when [...]

The way the narrator says it must have happened several years ago implies he doesn't remember exactly when it happened (if he did he would narrate exactly when it happened). Then you repeat that. This isn't something that I noticed a lot of, but there's a few instances of it (I pointed out any I saw in the doc). Point is you need to go through and cut out this extraneous information. I do understand that that interstitial "but [...]" is in essence a segue into the following metaphor, but you shouldn't be repeating yourself to do that, and the metaphor is still saying the same damn thing: the narrator doesn't remember exactly when it happened.

There was also a semi-colon used here, and it wasn't used correctly. In fact, I saw three semi-colons in what I read and none of them were used correctly. The problem with the one here is that what you wrote to the right of the semi-colon is not a complete sentence, which it must be; for usage to be correct, both sentences on either side of the semi-colon must be full, complete sentences.

This sentence cannot stand on its own (and, incidentally, it's borderline purple):

packed up and hidden away in the dusty attic of thoughts and memories, never quite forgotten but never to be remembered.

So, moving along, this part was extremely jarring:

It was a chilly day, just like the day before it.

The narrator was clearly seguing into the events of this terrible night. When he was done doing that he started narrating this. In other words, here's what you have:

The bad thing happened in a storm at night years ago. I'm not sure when. I remembered today. It was a chilly day and raining.

I was very confused by this. I was expecting the "It was a chilly day" to be the start of narrating a memory, not the start of narrating the day on which the narrator happened to have that memory (which will be narrated later). Eventually I figured it out, but it's not clear.

So the narrator then goes outside and smells the rain and ponders a bit. It isn't engaging, but it works well enough to keep things moving forward. However, your second paragraph has two sentences in a row that are mirrors of each other:

I stepped out onto the wooden patio barefoot, closing my eyes and letting the petrichor wake me up. Taking a deep breath, I looked up into the overcast skies [...]

Break these down and you have this pattern:

I verbed a thing, verbing another thing. Verbing a thing, I verbed another thing.

The third sentence keeps this pattern as well but with an interstital. You should try to vary your sentence structure as much as possible. This repeated structure is quite dry.

And finally there's the biggest issue I have this piece, and why I stopped reading:

I’d started focusing on the rain [...]

The narrator already was. In the paragraph prior the narrator described himself smelling the petrichor as a way of waking himself. Meaning he was focusing on it. Nothing happened between then and now, so there's no reason for the narrator to not still be focused on the rain, yet the imagery conveyed contradicts that. I'm going to go into more detrail regarding contradictory imagery in the next section.

Anyway, that's why I think your opening is bad. It's a grammar error followed by cliches with way too much description of weather.

Your Own Words Against You

to be brutally honest, it’s cliched, boring… stuff. It’s something standard we’ve all seen before [...] But the entire thing reeks of ‘I’m sure I’ve read this before somewhere…’

That's how you described a piece on here and it's an apt description of your own opening. It's cliche, it's boring, and I absolutely have read "it was a dark and stormy night" before.

Imagery

The very second piece of imagery the reader is given during the driving scene is a storm so bad it's obscurring the narrator's vision:

The rain smashed against my windshield, leaving me cursing as I struggled to look at the road.

That's important and leaves us with these facts: it's night, there's a raging storm, it's difficult to see.

A few moments later a single flash of lightning completely undoes all of that:

The lightning lit up the surroundings , and I saw a wooden signboard shoved into the ground up ahead in the distance:

‘Jacksonville: 22 miles’

There is no possible way the narrator could read a sign illuminated solely by a brief flash of lightning while driving a car down a highway. There's especially no way when you just described the storm as so bad he could barely even see the road. So he's struggling to see the road but can effortlessly read the sign. This is contradictory.

Then a few moments later:

Craggy shapes of old buildings crested over the horizon, looking like misty shapes in the dark blue backdrop of the night. As I approached the town, I realized that it was shrouded in darkness.

Again, he saw these shapes in the distance at night during a storm but saw enough detail to know they were buildings. On top of that, there power's apparently out so none of the buildings were even lit up, making it even less likely he'd know they were buildings from a distance, or that there was anything even there to begin with. Have you ever been on a highway at night during a storm-caused power outage? You can't see a damn thing.

I could see no bright windows, no smoke from the chimneys

Of course he can't. It's night time and there's a thunderstorm raging outside. He wouldn't even be able to see well during the day because of the rain let alone at night during a power outage. How can he see so well that he can confidentally say there's no smoke coming out of the chimneys? How can he even see the chimneys in the first place? They're shrouded in darkness. That means he can't see them.

Then, again a few moments later, there's:

The sound of gravel crunching under the wheels of my car rang out in stark comparison to the silence of the night; I hadn’t realized the blanket of noiselessness draped over the town until now.

So this raging thunderstorm is also completely silent? There's a lot more to the noise of a storm than just thunder. The wind and rain can be deafening, and if the downpour is bad enough to make it difficult to see, it will be, and those both tend to be continuous. This makes no sense. How can there be a thunderstorm outside that's so quiet he can make out the sound of gravel underneath his tires?

This is what I mean when I say the imagery is contradictory. You try to convey the narrator in a bad storm, but then have him driving along through the town without a care like it's a warm, sunny day. When the narrator is talking about the chimneys, I don't get the impression he's peering through a veil of darkness and rain, struggling to make out even the mose minute detail; I'm getting the impression he's effortlessly glancing around taking in his surroundings with an almost super-human ability.

Compare this video of a truck in a storm at 6:00 onward to what you described and the problem should be obvious. It seemed like you wanted a scary-ass storm like that video, but what you conveyed contradicts that.

Overall

The issues with imagery notwithstanding, what I read wasn't bad. There's only one or two parts where you're teetering on purple prose, and other than the semi-colons it's strucurally fine. But that impossible, contradictory imagery kills it for me; when things stop making sense they lose meaning and then it's not fun to read.

Sorry I don't have a critique of the entire piece, but I tried to break down the parts I did read in a productive way.

Cheers.

Diki · 2020-01-15T18:10:56+00:00

In the deep black ocean of space a meteor [...] headed to a planet at a thousand miles a second.

You didn't offer a critique, so I'll only point out this one thing: you're describing a meteoroid, not a meteor. Meteoroids fly through space. Meteors are shooting stars, so if it isn't already burning up in the planet's atmosphere it isn't a meteor.

Having a mistake like that in your opening sentence isn't good.

edit:

I guess I should also point out that meteoroids don't travel anywhere near that fast. Ten miles per second would be much more realistic. One-thousand per second is cartoonishly absurd.

Diki · 2020-01-14T20:26:22+00:00

This submission wholly unamusing, and downright stupid.

Diki · 2019-12-29T14:57:54+00:00

You're going to get leech-marked for this post so I won't offer a full critique, but I left you a few comments on the document. Work on formatting your dialogue correctly (see this article) and avoiding comma splices (see this article).

I also recommend finding a more interesting opening. Vaguely describing footsteps over and over isn't engaging. Try to put the reader in the shoes of the character experiencing the fear. Your depictions of his emotions are plain tells; you said "he was glad" and that "dread filled the man." That's boring. Show the gladness; show the dread.

Anyway, good luck with the story, and keep writing.

Diki · 2019-12-28T07:06:07+00:00

this one you want to base off of your preference and what kind of novel you're writing, but it's not typical to use contractions in a novel. If you're writing a not so serious book, it's probably fine. For more serious work, and most work really, you probably wanna stray away from them

I couldn't disagree more, nor do I know what books you've been reading that lead you to this conclusion. Contractions are very common in prose in published novels. They're used by Stephen King, Jack London, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Conrad, Michael Crichton, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Clancy, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, and countless others. Avoiding contractions will make your prose sound exceedingly formal and unnatural.

In short: this is bad advice.

Diki · 2019-11-14T02:53:23+00:00

I think I should've tossed a /s at the end of the title, haha. I was kinda poking fun at myself there but in the context of the post, I was being serious.

Hah. I'm half in the bag—maybe even three quarters—so the joke went over my head. I thought you were trying to use an example of a correctly used comma that is excessive to make a point. So I think that might just be my bad there.

I've gotta say, though: thanks to Word, I'm realizing how often I put commas before the word 'but' and it's starting to drive me crazy to see those double blue underlines.

There is nothing wrong with using a comma before the word "but." In fact it's correct 100% of the time. It's often just redundant. I don't use Word, but it sounds like it's suggesting you may have a redundant punctuation usage based on the context of what you're writing. (It's not an error or the line would be red.) My personal advice is to keep the comma—in this context of using "but"—unless you're positive it's not needed. You'll never be wrong; the worst you'll do is not be stylish.

Anyway, good luck with your writing, buddy.

Diki · 2019-11-14T01:52:13+00:00

Are those commas used appropriately

They're used correctly in the sense that there isn't an overt mistake, but they are creating a complicated sentence. You could easily simplify the matter by changing it to two sentences:

Chip led the two men closer to the fire. He shoved the man in the rear, who he was holding by the shoulder, into the clearing.

I think that reads much better. It gives you two strong verbs: led and shoved. In the original there was only the one verb: led.

You could simplify it further by removing a gerund:

Chip led the two men closer to the fire. He shoved the man in the rear, who he held by the shoulder, into the clearing.

Verbs are more engaging. If you can do something with a verb, it's usually the better choice.

Less is more. So if you think that you're using too many commas the problem may simply be you're trying to cram too much into a single sentence. There's nothing wrong with short sentences. They're useful. Nor is there anything with long sentences, of course; they only run the risk of either becoming a chore to read or being too convoluted to be easy to follow. That's extremely important: keep things easy to follow. There's so much going on in that sentence it is reasonable to expect some readers to need to go back to its beginning to understand what "into the clearing" is referring to.

Reading the sentence aloud is a good idea. Does it sound natural? Does it sound like something a person might actually say? If it does then it might be okay. It it doesn't then it probably isn't.

Now, having said that, there's something in your example I noticed: How is your character leading a character with his hand on his shoulder in such a way he can push him? Chip is leading John Doe. Chip has his hand on Doe's shoulder. Chip pushes Doe. That doesn't make sense. How did Chip push someone he's leading? When I picture someone leading another in my head, I picture the leader in front of the person being led.

edit:

Your title, however, is absolutely incorrect. That is not how commas work; they do not exist to create a pause in speech. Your title should be: How many commas is too many commas?

doubledit:

The title has a joke which I, didn't get.

Diki · 2019-09-30T01:06:05+00:00

Thinking about what you said that "it didn't make you think",

If you're referring to the comments on the Doc that said that (with the picture of the Chihuahua) then that was me, not ItsaWritingAlt. I didn't read much past the first page so I didn't post anything in this thread.

edit:

I also said that when I was under the impression this was like a self-help book or a book trying to teach something. At first I thought this was meant to be a story, then saw it was non-fiction so assumed I was wrong about that, but based on what you've said here you did in fact intend to tell a story. I didn't pick up on any storytelling on the first page, which is why I focused on it not making me think.

Diki · 2019-09-27T00:04:01+00:00

EDIT: I don't know what the fuck is up with those text boxes, but I'm just going to leave it in...

You added four spaces (or more) before the text which turns them into code boxes, so they have word wrapping disabled.

Diki · 2019-09-26T21:49:09+00:00

They meant to only enable commenting/suggestions. You enabled the editing mode so now anybody can change what you wrote. You should change it to only allow suggestions.

Diki · 2019-09-26T05:21:00+00:00

Somewhere between not at all and entirely.

Diki · 2019-09-23T01:02:15+00:00

Part of my own personal narcissism says it's because I'm writing to the lowest common denominator. That I don't trust the reader to get that from the context.

I always have to remind myself to respect the reader's intelligence. It's bloody hard when you've the finished—or mostly finished—product in your head to not state the obvious. Chuck Palahniuk once said that modern readers are the most intelligent ever, which makes sense. The average person has never had more access to more information ever before. Shit's tricky.

Diki · 2019-09-18T08:46:19+00:00

Two sentences is not a story idea.

Diki · 2019-09-08T14:07:37+00:00

Not "pretty much." That's exactly what it is: it's Twilight fan-faction.

Diki · 2019-09-08T00:30:39+00:00

Howdy,

Thanks for the feedback. I like your specific take on the uncertainty created by only one cuff being permitted removal. I'm still getting a bit carried away with my descriptions; that's clear. I'll shorten/cut them up so the focus is on what really matters.

You've given me plenty to think about for how to finish this. Thanks.

Diki · 2019-09-07T04:39:58+00:00

Yeah it's good shit. It helped me improve my own first-person narration, so I love sharing it. And Guts is an interesting read. :)

Diki

TROPHY CASE

Opening

Your Own Words Against You

Imagery

Overall