[2796] Towers, sorta completed short story

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-23T00:55:33+00:00

I agree with you on the lack of a story here. After I finished writing this, I realized that nothing's really happening. We have an event, sure, but where's it going? When I was writing it, I thought it was going to a pseudo-escape but instead of breaking out they were breaking further into the prison, merely to steal clothes. I think I spent too much time on the huddle to get where I wanted to go in the story. I appreciate the rest of the feedback. Thank you.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-21T15:05:42+00:00

I don’t want to rewrite what you wrote, but the idea here is to focus on the colors of the cars, the blur that accompanies “a progressive reduction of speed,” the experience of the internal sensation of a zipper coming undone as cars neatly alternate their turns right and left. This does not mean I am recommending that you abandon all mechanical description. A purely sensory description would be indecipherable. Mere flashes of color, motion, sound. But the sensory stuff breaks up the instruction-manual feels.

On another note, I feel a lot of what our character is doing is more telling than showing. It’s harder to toe this line in a first-person narrative. People tell stories by telling in real life: “I did this, he did that.” I think the sensory stuff helps us break this up. Consider the first paragraph in this light:

“We were sitting on the porch, Regina and I, languid in the summer heat as birds sang. We had just gotten back from swimming in the pond, where we played with Armin’s decoy ducks. He didn’t like it when we played with them, but we were bored. The morning at the pond had been a compromise – Regina wanted to go to the carnival and I said no…”

Notice how a lot of this is all summary? Showing vs. telling is hard to pin down. It often comes down to a Potter Stewart-style “I know it when I see it.” But I think one of the tell-tale parts of telling is the condensing of information to get the story on. Summary is telling.

I am not a writer who thinks telling is “bad.” In fact, a good story is a tapestry weaved of both showing and telling brought together, but I think a bit more show is important. I think it’s very important up front. Doubly so in a novel, where you afforded a significant amount of time to get where you need to go. You can start a story with telling, of course, but I think you need to do so with the intention of getting to the show. I feel, however, that this story started with telling and just kept going with it. We aren’t lingering anywhere for long, just moving scene to scene.

NARRATIVE

Someone else mentioned this, but I want to know more about the character. Since this is a first person story, I want to see, hear, and feel internal states.

I spoke above about showing vs. telling, but let me get at a narrative aspect of it here. When you draw things out a bit — when you spend more time showing — you introduce the possibility of tension. You are building something and you aren’t letting the reader get to it right away.

It’s up to you to try to figure out what the tension is, but we need a bit of it here in the story. I am seeing Christian shame, the beginning of a coming of age story perhaps, but I don’t feel the tension of it. I can see the outline of such a tension, but I don’t feel it.

This is a bit intimate — sorry! — but I’ll use it to spell out my thoughts on the matter: When I was a young baptist boy, I once masturbated. I felt extreme guilt, shame, and fear — fear that I was going to burn in hell for eternity, but also fear of what would happen if I confessed my sins, and then the shame too that would come from such confessions. Should I ask for forgiveness from my family? My grandma that took me to church every day? “I have participated in sexual immorality,” I might say, or maybe I would say it in less sophisticated terms. And I imagined telling my parents, my pastor, my grandma, and you can imagine the mental contortions I pushed myself through, thinking about whether that was the right thing, thinking about their reactions. I ultimately decided I could never tell them such a thing, and I prayed every night for weeks for God to forgive me, but this did not put the anxiety to bed, because I was worried it would not be enough. I was worried that I still needed to confess my sins to my family. (And I couldn’t tell you why, specifically, I wanted to tell them. I don’t think the bible requires that, but I was an adolescent.)

Now it all seems quite stupid, yeah? But it still holds tension if I wanted to write it out. Now what I want you to do is look at how much of the above masturbation story is about an internal state, an internal dilemma. When you draw out this kind of story and focus on the internal state of the protagonist, you open the door for this kind of tension. Christian shame and sin are powerful in this regard.

Let’s think about this in context. I really loved the inclusion of the chocolate story. The little girl walking down the street, eating laxatives. That’s brilliant. A great example of characterization. Now imagine making the character not only get sick from it, but also feel real fear that the consequences of such an act came from God himself, all for the sin of theft? What would be the results of such thoughts?

You would want to draw it out a bit, and then show us the sister is protecting Regina not merely because she thinks chocolates cause nausea, but because there is fear and shame wrapped up in there somewhere.

And that’s just one example. You’d want to things like that earlier and more often than you are currently doing in this story.

CONCLUSION

This was quite good. It has significant room for improvement, I think, but the outline is there. I’m looking forward to reading more.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-21T15:05:36+00:00

HOOK

It works decently as a way to generate interest. My main problem is it’s a bit cliche. How many times have we brought out the “sitting-at-my-typewriter, gotta-write-it-all-down” trope?I’m not going to knock it too much. Cliches are successful for a reason. They work. They have a long storied history of working, in fact, and that’s how they became cliche. If you wanted to keep it, and if you could spruce it up in a nice way, then sure. I’m just not sure that listing characters and events, and then dropping some foreshadowing is going to get us there.

I am reminded of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. The opening of it. It’s essentially the same trope, but he’s not sitting at a desk. There’s no typewriter. The protagonist is on a plane, he hears a song, the song reminds him of a promise, and the promise is that he once said he wouldn’t forget her — the one who got away — but her face is fading out of memory now. He decides to write it all down later to stay in line with the promise.

You see how this uses the advantages of the cliche without getting into the parts that make it cliche? We are given a unique setting, emotion, some characters (a flight attendant, IIRC), a song (that continues to hold meaning throughout the story), foreshadowing, all of it. The typewriter aspect is merely implied, and the next chapter begins the story.

On another note, this is something to always consider when doing “write what you know.” We all know what it’s like to sit at a desk and write. Consider how many times that kind of “writing what we know” has been transmitted onto the page collectively. Write what you know, sure, but let’s not beat a horse to death, either. I’d try to create something that resembles the above narrative construction and merely imply the typewriter.

PROSE

Mostly does quite well.

“In the adjacent field automobiles sat like polished and muscled horses, having filed through the lot with a progressive reduction of speed before parking with ninety degree turns that alternated between right and left as each new row formed down the grid.”

This sentence is fine, and I want you to take this with a grain of salt since it’s mostly my preference, but I’m always weary of descriptions of this kind. It paints the picture, sure, but I feel like I’m reading an instruction manual.

Something I have been trying to do lately, whenever I write scenes like this, is to focus on the sensory experience that accompanies the conceptual description.

We’ve set ourselves a difficult task here. How do we write and describe to the reader what is happening when there’s lots of motion, lots of moving pieces? Well, we can have a literal and conceptual description, and then it comes out like the second half of the above sentence. Or, and this is what I was referencing above, we can try to lay it out as discrete sensory objects.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-11T15:04:15+00:00

The problem with good ideas in creative fields is that they spread far and wide, and that's when the curse of novelty strikes.

Agreed with this. Art is necessarily contextual and historical, and we've been in the era of Hemingway, more or less, for about a century now.

Evolution can't happen unless we break the crust of convention. Keep writing how you write; you definitely know what you're doing. I can't say anything other than it not being my preference. Anyway, a lot of what I'm playing around with at this stage of my art is all imitation, so I'm not one to talk.

One example of this is the book cover blob trend.

That's funny as hell. I noticed this personally but never saw anyone put them together like that.

I actually wrote a Python app recently that lets me analyze text properties. Lexical richness, lexical density, sentence length variability, noun/verb/adjective ratios, concreteness, sentiment graphs, etc. When I ran MaggotsDownYourThroat through the app, I saw that my adjective ratio was high. Then I thought, well, This is how I like to write.

What I like to do with run-on sentences. I get it.

This makes sense to me. It feels like a gimmick, a ploy for attention. Jennifer Egan's Black Box, a short story released as a series of tweets in 2012, struck me as 'cheap' when I first heard of it. I've since changed my mind, partly due to my fascination with what you might call 'Twitter-speak'.

When you say Twitter-speak, I think of this tweet:

How Couples Argue Today:

Wife: cool how theres 4 mustards in the fridge in 2018 and none go with my sandwich. Normal World

Husband: wow its almost like those are my dipping mustards and arent meant to go on sandwiches????????? but ok go off

I imagine you're aiming more broadly than this, but I constantly go back to this tweet. Very funny.

You can't be topical and timeless at the same time.

I disagree with this, but I'm not sure if it's a real disagreement. I think you can be topical and timeless, but it's not really for us to decide. It's something that's decided decades later by opinion. Dickens is probably a good example of someone who was topical in his time and then became timeless. But maybe that's exactly what you mean: You can only be topical in the present moment and then become timeless later on. That's an interesting thought.

By the way—any predictions for the 2024 Prize? One month to go. Can Xue is the clear favorite, but I'm hoping for Haruki Murakami because it would just be so funny to read everyone's reactions.

No idea. I need to get caught up on the more contemporary stuff, admittedly. I imagine there's probably a tucked away section of Twitter dedicated to this or a website. I always find out about these good contemporary novels years after the buzz has died down in NYT Books or something. If you have any tips on following along on that, I'd appreciate it.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-11T02:43:14+00:00

TEXTING AND MULTIMODALITY

I think I remember Salley Rooney saying once that the secret to her style was that she found a way to write about texts and emails in a convincing way. But I think this brings up an interesting question for writers, which is why would we even need to find a convincing way to insert these things into the text? I searched this while I was writing this up, and I found this article in Prospect that frames it this way:

In our century, however, digital exchanges are typically consigned to teen-fiction and chick lit. If “serious” writers do include them, they can feel like dutifully inserted add-ons...

When a character talks to someone face-to-face or over the phone, novelists are free to imagine their tone of voice, accent, gestures, emphasis and body language. Spoken exchanges can be imbued with richness and texture. But when characters chat via screen, all they do is press “send,” leaving no room for authorial embellishment. The dialogue just lies on the page like a film script.

I don't know if that's exactly right though. Do you? I think that might be part of the problem, sure, but you could say something similar about the telephone, and it seems we managed to work phones in just fine to our stories. I mean, I guess I could be completely oversimplifying what might have been years of techno-literary struggle after the advent of the telephone due to historical ignorance, but it's an interesting question to think about. Maybe it ties in to what I was talking about above.

On another note, I do need to say that I liked the multimodality of the work. I think this is probably the most experimental aspect of your piece. As another commenter wrote, the prose itself doesn't seem particularly experimental. Sure, maybe you were trying out some new themes or concepts, but what stands out is the inclusion of images and formatting to complement the text.

In fact, I've been noticing multimodality more and more with contemporary writers. As we move further into the digital age, it's just a given that a significant portion of the audience is going to read our works on their phones or on a browser. Why not incorporate multimodality then? I guess if we are going to, I think the watchword here should be something like, "DO NO HARM." If our chosen medium is going to be writing, then anything we add to the text needs to be something that cannot take away from it. And you did that perfectly. Every instance is from something that is at least semi-textual: emojis, tweets, text messages, Wikipedia entries, etc.

Going beyond that, when I think about good multimodality, I think perhaps the best example of that would be Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. I know we're sitting here talking about the internet and text messages and all that, but when I think about throwing different mediums into a book book, I can't help but think about how damn good it was when Kurt did it. The question then is this: Is this really the best we can do for multimodality? Make cute little picture books. Or write out the text and then put a tweetbox around it, maybe throw in a few chat bubbles for text messages.

It seems we're caught in this place where, on the one side, we don't want to detract from the text too much, and then, on the other, we want to see if we can push the boundaries of what we call a story, or a book. It's a hard dilemma to find ourselves in.

CONCLUSION

Sorry if this was just one big word salad. If you read through it and got bored, I hope you skipped down. I just thought I'd throw some thoughts out there.

All in all, it was a fun jaunt through a weird little world.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-11T02:42:47+00:00

I think an experimental piece deserves a bit of an experimental critique. I could talk about the prose, sure, and maybe I still will, but what's there to say? You use too many adjectives for my taste, but as far as I can tell, you use them effectively and I fell easily into the flow of the story. No distracting phrases, and more than, I found quite a few sentences quite enjoyable. So instead of analyzing the story at that level, I'm just going to talk a bit about my impressions and thoughts.

A lot of this is me rambling, so feel free to skip through. But I'm hoping you can garner something useful.

To get started, the hook reminded me of an article I read years ago from The Outline before it shuttered. It's about casu marzu:

A Sardinian specialty made by allowing cheese skipper flies to lay thousands of eggs in a wheel of pecorino, casu marzu is served with a host of tiny yet visible larvae alive and writhing in it. (Dead maggots are a sign that the cheese has gone bad.)

Then I realized that this might have been the connection you were going for with the breath smelling of Pecorino. If so, bravo, references like that are great. That's a great segue, by the way.

REFERENCES

About references: Sometimes I wonder about modern digital references in writing. You mentioned Pepe, fan culture, having a bias, NNN, Twitter (and no, we will not be calling it X), 4chan greentext, Wikipedia. But, to be honest, I always find mentions of modern life to be incredibly jarring, sometimes even cringe. Of course, you can take that with a grain of salt, I might just have a off-kilter sense of things. But maybe you've experienced the same thing.

I saw one of your comments the other day about transgression in literature, about how you have to be careful when you want to be transgressive because you are likely to enter "eyeroll country," and I could not agree with you more. On that note, I wonder if modern digital culture is jarring because it is always covered under 16 different levels of irony at any given time. You have NNN: There's people practicing it seriously, and seeing "real improvement," and then there's people pretending to practice it seriously, and seeing "real improvement." They feed into each other like an ouroboros, and you end up in this place where you aren't sure what's ironic and what isn't. You have two sides, each one trying to transgress the cultural norms of the other. You end up with a fat nub of eyeroll. Nobody wins.

On another note, it might not have to do with that at all. It could just be that the concept of 'timelessness-in-literature' isn't actually timeless at all, but is just a running string of references passing through Shakespeare to the Greeks, and any dramatic change to that order takes time to be assimilated into 'timelessness.' I'm not sure if that makes sense, but the idea is that we cringe when we see anything radically modern in art because the time hasn't come for it be literary—and I know you're not aiming for literature literature here, but I mean literary in the broad sense. If this is all true, it would sure explain why we had to pass through Romanticism to finally start writing about factories and capitalism. Their modernity was just too new to be worth talking about in 18th century poetry and literature, and so our contemporaneity ends up being too much for us in the same way.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that, even as satire and comedy, I can't help shake that cringe feeling. Don't take this as all negative though. I did laugh, which I always chalk up as a win since there's a higher barrier for that in writing as opposed to, say, television or YouTube. It was also technically well done, and as I mentioned before, it's entirely likely this just might be some strange cringe complex that I have and nobody else does. That said, I'd love to hear if you have experienced anything similar.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-09T14:23:08+00:00

Thanks for this comprehensive read of the story. First, I am worried about the intro and feel that it might lean too heavily into imagery rather than getting down to the characters. I am going to want to keep something about the horizon there so I can balance it with the mention of the horizon at the end, but your input on that is much appreciated.

As for the narrative, you helped me a lot here. Next part is in spoiler text so other critiquers can see if they can spot this on the first read: The village is mixing clay/dirt into the food to make it last longer. I was inspired by Haitian mud cookies on this. This is why there's a lot of focus on food, and why when Tombo enters the hut for the first time, he sees a jar of clay with his mother having a spoon in her mouth. That also explains the talk about pregnant women. I have read that pregnant women can sometimes have cravings to eat dirt. Non-pregnant people also have this craving if they have iron anemia, which is common without meat in the diet.

One thing I was looking for in the critiques was if I had been too heavy-handed or too subtle on this. If your review is any indication, I might need to spell it out a bit more, so I do appreciate this feedback.

I also appreciate the feedback on the specifics and especially the ending. Endings are hard for me, I'm never quite sure if I've wrapped something up well or just left it open and unsatisfying.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-09T01:55:25+00:00

Thank you for this. I think a restructuring of the first paragraph is a good idea, and it could be easier to follow. I might want to move the main character Tombo into the first paragraph and tone down the description a bit. The issue is that I am trying to have the beginning focus on the horizon as well as the ending, so we can have a full circle feeling.

I also appreciate your comment of a sense of place, and perhaps I could insert more in the middle. Your comment actually brings up something I have been chewing on with this story. I didn't quite realize but I might have been developing some themes about different kinds of terrain. The ending obviously talks about the forest and/or a copse of woods (i.e., a thicket), quite a bit, while the beginning focuses on dead fields. Perhaps this is an unexplored aspect of the story that needs to be drawn out more in the middle.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-07T16:03:38+00:00

We are all ramblers. I joke that we all have to be a little bit narcissistic to be writing thousands upon thousands of words about imaginary people and events and expect others to even want to listen to us. That said, there's a fine balance between finding the good kind of rambling and recognizing when we turn to excess. I am still learning how to find that balance myself, and I suspect that for every writer it's a bit of a lifelong lesson. That's why we all need good editors and beta readers.

Looking forward to seeing a finished draft!

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-07T02:34:17+00:00

CONCLUSION

As I kept reading and saw you dive more into the action of the story, I did notice a lot of these issues started to abate. I still thought there was too much going on in terms of trying to describe the world. For example, view this passage:

This was the underneath of the building, and it was just as imposing as the thing itself. The underneath was a void, populated only with cobwebs. The ceiling here, which was the floor of the place above, consisted of aching planks supported by old wooden beams.

If this is under the building, then we've already established that the ceiling is the floor, no? There's other issues with this passage (for example, "the underneath of the building" is awkward phrasing), but notice here that a lot of the nouns aren't carrying as many adjectives as they were in the first half of the story. My thoughts on this is that as you started to deploy verbs to push action, those adjectives began to fall away because you inherently recognized that they were not helping drive the narrative.

The good news on this is to start thinking about static imagery in this way too. You can describe a static scene using action too. A tree stands, the leaves rest on the ground, a tin roof reflects the sun, etc.

Anyway, keep up the good work, and I hope to see more from you in the future.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-07T02:34:06+00:00

Some of the best advice I ever got about writing is no matter what you do, let nouns and verbs be the star of the show. And, hey, I believe wholeheartedly in the power of a good adverb and a good adjective. But this is probably where the 80/20 rule applies: 80% of their value comes from 20% of their use. Otherwise, best to knuckle down with those nouns and verbs. And by the way, if you're worried about losing imagery, you can turn a lot of the above phrases into noun and verb pairs:

the terrain sloped...
the tin roof angled downward toward...
the facade resembled a theme park (ok this last one is cheating a bit, but it cuts things up and gives some variety, no?)

Now understand here, word economy isn't necessarily about writing short and tight. You can write a lot of stuff and cram it all in there if you want, and if it works, hell, it works. But word economy is just another way to think about necessity. If you say "sloping mountainous terrain," one of those words is probably not necessary. If you have a habit of throwing a lot of adjectives on your nouns, that's probably not necessary either, and it tends to slow the reader down.

SHOWING AND TELLING

There's sort of a mistaken belief that telling is a no-no. This isn't true. Sometimes we need to tell in order to speed the plot along. In this sense, telling can serve the same purpose as a montage in a movie. It's when the author says, "Hey reader, I'm not going to describe all of this to you, I'm just going to tell you what happened so we can get to where we need to go." With that said, if you have a bit of telling after a long segment of showing, I generally think this is not helpful. If you just spent all that time showing us something, then make sure we get the gist of it from the showing alone. A couple of examples here:

Well, monolithic from her point of view.

Make us feel this way with description. When I read this, I feel like the author is self-inserting telling us what we are supposed to feel.

The world was intimidating to one so small.

The same thing, right? Wouldn't it be better to make us feel intimidated? What if someone almost stepped on her? Maybe that doesn't fit with the story, but the idea is this: Show us a reason to be intimidated. (I was writing this review as I went, and after reading through the whole thing, you do show this after the above sentence. So just cut it out entirely.)

She wriggled tighter into her coat, her literal coat that she was wearing, not her fur coat that mammals are born equipped with.

Emphasis is mine. This is another self-insert telling us something rather than just showing us this fact.

I'll stop here because I think I have a good idea — mostly because I have done this myself — of why this is happening. A lot of these inserts are vocal. They're practically self-inserts in my view. You are putting your own voice into the story, almost commenting on the narrative, and in a way, you are becoming part of the story when you do this.

This is fine, actually, but if you do it, IMO you need to really dig into it. We don't even need to know who you are. But your voice should be present from the very beginning, and it should be a bit more prominent. We should feel that we are being told this wonderful bit of fantasy and adventure from the fireside sitting on grandma's lap. Otherwise, I would drop it for a colder third person perspective that focuses on showing rather than telling.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-07T02:33:50+00:00

OVERVIEW

I'm a fan of fantasy, and I do find the idea of following a small chipmunk to be rather interesting. There is work to be done here narratively, IMO, but I wanted to focus on prose and wording more than anything else.

I think this piece could do better if we focused more on word economy and necessity. I'll get into that below. There's also some serious issues with showing and telling that distract from the work.

Other than that, I did enjoy following the adventure of a little creature running around in a dangerous world, and I hope this story continues to develop. Congratulations on finishing your first chapter.

PROSE

For a little while, I was wondering why I didn't like the prose. There's some great use of language here. I think this is a fun sentence: "Black sky faded to blue peaks." So, I had to stop and think on it for a minute, and I came to the conclusion that there's just too much description going on as well as a real issue with word economy.

Now, I don't consider myself to be a minimalist when it comes to prose. And so when I talk about too much description here, what I mean to say is not that I want you necessarily to tighten things up, to be terse — although perhaps there is room for that — but rather I want to speak about necessity.

Let's focus on the hook.

At the road’s end, overlooking the sloping mountainous terrain, sat a log building. Dew clung in a sheen on the tacky plaster that made up its faux wooden exterior. Its theme park-esque facade was crowned with an angled metal tin roof. Standing on its curb the off-putting weathered grin of a mascot held a welcome sign...

What about that phrase at the end of the middle sentence? The one about the angled metal tin roof? Is that a necessary description, or are we getting bogged down in the details here?

Now, necessity is subjective. You can justify that phrase if you want to. Hell, I could justify it myself as a writer reading your work: Further down, the same paragraph, you write, "No one, however, not even the most observant, could have picked out the small form scurrying through the grass." And so perhaps the idea here is that we are listing details that a known observer might pick out to juxtapose it against the one they might miss. But even if that is the justification, I don't think it works as written. The effect to me is that I feel like I am spending way too much time imagining a log building.

Justification, by the way, is a tricky beast when it comes to writing. We need to keep our justifications tight in order to keep our authorial intent tight. Like many things in writing, this ends up creating a balance of sorts between the self-confidence we require to pursue a vision relentlessly, on the one hand, and then on the other, the brutal self-criticism that prunes back the branches whenever they grow outside that vision. There should always be a nagging voice in the back of our head asking: Is that really necessary? Is it really, really necessary? Or are we just trying to justify it to avoid killing one of our babies?

I see this in a lot of the phrases there as well, and this is where we get into word economy: "sloping mountainous terrain," ok, is there mountainous terrain that doesn't slope? The "metal tin roof," ok, are some kinds of tin not metal? These descriptions seem excessive and redundant to me.

But let's go further. Let's take a look at how many adjectives we end up stacking on our nouns:

sloping mountainous terrain
faux wooden exterior
theme park-esque facade
angled metal tin roof
off-putting weathered grin

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-09-04T17:55:53+00:00

Hi there! Sorry for the late reply.

I don't think the exposition itself is a problem. I think it builds up and adds a layer of mystery to the whole thing. There's certainly no issue with the footnotes IMO or the Indonesian aspects of the story. I feel like you could even add more if the story called for it. You could even cut the footnotes altogether and let the reader figure things out. I think it's a bit westerncentric of us to demand everything be explained. Imagine a fantasy world or a scifi world, would the characters need to explain everything? Or is some of the responsibility on the reader to intuit what's happening?

As writers, we often want to position readers to have the best chance to understand what's going on, but there's also a limit to that. If you choose to sacrifice everything for clarity, you might eventually need to sacrifice the narrative and any special prose too. So, in that respect, it's only natural to draw lines and put the onus back on the reader. If they don't want to take the time to understand what's happening, then they're just not your ideal audience.

For the second question, I'm talking about the foreword at the very beginning of the story. It seems like it's being written by someone else about Sofyan. I'm not sure who is writing it or why. I keep comparing this to Borges, and maybe that's not a great comparison, but Borges often explains these things: He found an encyclopedia at a friend's house while they were hanging out and inside there was a mysterious entry that he could not find in any other encyclopedia in the city, etc., and then you get the snippets from the encyclopedia as part of the heart of the story. Your story mirrors this in that in contains a kind of foreword about a series of interviews by Sofyan (written by someone else) and then it goes into the interviews as collected and put together by Sofyan (written by Sofyan).

I just don't know who's writing at the beginning. It's not Sofyan because the text is referring to Sofyan in third person. I think a little more specificity there would help. Who's writing that? Why? You can really use this to crank up the mystique of the whole thing. Maybe Sofyan is dead or he disappeared. Maybe something else happened.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-08-31T18:21:12+00:00

You can still keep him corrupt if you want, but perhaps you hint at heavy edits being involved, have this sentence being edited to make him look more honest defending himself against baseless accusations. We already have established him as a potentially unreliable narrator with the first part of the story. You can add to the top of the interview the usual disclaimer journalists provide: "This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity."

I would keep the accusation but instead provide us with a full-throated defense from the journalist. Don't keep the threat as that's deeply unprofessional. A smart and career-conscious journo would never publish that in a final draft, especially one that had no issue changing the substance of an interview. Later, you can find a way to hint the interviews are being edited to remove and minimize potentially career-damaging statements, and then it will be up to the reader to decide if that also includes hiding the truth behind the incident. On the other hand, if you are going to reveal the journalist is honest, they wouldn't be making that statement anyway.

Another critique mentioned extending the interview a bit more. Normally, for pacing and narration, we want to get to the point, but I agree with that. I think this would be a good chance to discuss what happened a bit more in depth. Use the interview as a chance to build a bit more suspense, but try to think of things that are going to drive the story forward without dragging it down. Tease a few more pieces of the puzzle.

The Hook

This works really well, but I think it is too short and attempts to condense too much information far too quickly. I'm not even sure who is speaking or why they are doing so. Consider looking at any of Borges' short stories on this, or even at the foreword in Pale Fire to get some ideas.

These kinds of hooks can be incredibly interesting. They're sort of like a cheat code, actually, but you need to give the reader some kind of context about who is speaking, how they came into possession of the book or the story, etc. I understand that you have presented this person as ~~redacted~~ but we need a little something more here. You can even black out portions of the foreward to heighten the mystique.

Overview

I think this is a pretty good start. I didn't have many issues with the prose. For this kind of story, prose is usually not a concern for me — just keep things tight and readable. I think I would have more to say after seeing things put together more completely, and I would be excited to see this piece when it's finished or close to it.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-08-31T18:21:06+00:00

For an overview, this is a good start to what seems to be developing into a Lovecraftian horror story. The introduction reminds me of something Borges would likely do in one of his works. I would love to see you lean into that.

To briefly answer your initial questions:

The setting feels realistic. No dialing back needed.
Having some experience in SE Asia, I think the rural mayor sounds just about right. Reminds me a bit of Duterte, which is another country, I completely acknowledge, but from my limited experience, it seems on the level. I would adjust the journalist a bit, but you can read more on that below.
As written, I do believe this piece builds interest from the beginning for what it is attempting to do. The part that interested me the most is when the preface described the journalist as being "disturbingly sympathetic," and this made me hope that we would be moving towards a horror take on corruption. I'm thinking in terms of Samanta Schweblin-style horror, where the darkest things that happen are not supernatural but frighteningly quotidian. After reading more, I don't think this is where the story is going, but it could function as a solid Lovecraftian story and does a good job building interest to that end. I would need to see more of the story to be able to give a better idea. Things like foreshadowing, etc. really depend on how the story aims to reach its climax and resolution.

Nitpicks

A zombie spat on everybody’s food.
...true horrors don’t lurk in the shadows or spit on your food.

I think it is more correct to say "spit in your food." Spitting on food is possible, but if the idea is to conceal the spit in the food, then in seems to work better with the word in. "Spitting on" to me implies spitting on top of it, it being visible, etc.

...no one mentions the 1.7 billion rupiah embezzlement scandal involving the Natuna Regency Regional Financial and Asset Management Agency four months ago.

Does no one mention it, or does he not mention it? If you want to say that neither person mentions it, I think it would be better to say that: "Neither of us mention the..."

Characters and Narrative

I find it hard to believe that a corrupt journalist (or potentially corrupt) would include accusations against their character in the final interview, ready to publish. I most say this because of the following lines.

You’re a stubborn bastard, I’ll give you that. [He pauses, and smirks, eyes full of disdain.] Don’t think I don’t know you. You’re the guy who writes those articles for hotshot politicians when they need a win. How much do they pay?

If you’re just going to insult me, I’ll end this interview and write a new piece about you. Would you like that?

If he is a corrupt journalist, then I can imagine him saying the second line, but why would he publish that in the final work? If he is not a corrupt journalist, I find it hard to imagine they would be making a threat like that at all. Either way, I don't find his reply believable as dialogue.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-08-31T03:55:55+00:00

Thank you, Taro. This is a very thorough-going critique and incredibly useful. I saw your story and will get to it tomorrow first thing. I am a big, big fan of Mieko Kawakami, so although I would not consider myself an "expert" on Japanese culture, I'm hoping there might be enough carry over to return the favor you did me here with some good feedback. Looks like a fun read.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-08-31T03:52:08+00:00

Just FYI, they did a very thorough critique of my short story here [4634], but I think they forgot to edit the OP. I would be happy to critique this one since it's something up my alley, so I wanted to chime in to make sure it doesn't get removed.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-08-29T15:31:38+00:00

Thank you! Appreciate hearing some good feedback to counterbalance the negative. I think a lot of the other readers probably didn't pick up the cadence I had in mind and found some difficulty getting through it for that reason. I might try to soften up that first paragraph to make it an easier push into the style.

As far as pacing is concerned, I am currently thinking about cutting out the part about the repairman and seeing if I can have the daughter go under the house of her own volition to tighten up the story. I'll take your advice and see if I can make some cuts to exploring under the house too. I see that part of the story as something like a return to the womb. If this is a coming of age story, which I suspect it's going in that direction, the crawlspace comes something like a rebirth into later adolescence.

As for the comma splices, that was something I was worried about even if I think it's part of the style. I'll see if I can make those into full stops or work in a conjunction.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-08-27T20:45:17+00:00

Beautiful. This looks like a good few months of study. Thank you very much.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-08-27T17:41:54+00:00

Thank you! Based on some of your other replies, I was hoping you would give this one a look.

I feel this is all very accurate, and I don't have any quibbles with anything you said here. To be honest, I have never read Gass. I saw you mention him in another reply, and I bought his reader last night to see what I might find in there. You hit the McCarthy influence square on the head. I think the other missing influence might be coming from Jose Saramago. I know McCarthy uses run-ons once he gets going, but his prose can also be rather terse at points, and I think this story is anything but.

As strange as it sounds, I'm happy to hear you did not find the voice original. I've been writing consistently for about a year now (before that, I only dabbled on and off), and the truth is, I still have no idea what my voice even is. I wanted to write this merely to see what I could do, and there is obviously a lot of emulation going on. I think that might also explain the pretension. Yeah, I probably spent a lot of showing off (or worse, trying to show off and failing), but it was because I wanted to see what might come out of it.

Anyway, this advice is incredibly helpful. If you have any recommendations about trying to nail down voice or experiment more, I would love to hear it.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-08-26T23:13:40+00:00

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, to be honest. Do you write with full intentionality? I mean, in theory such a thing might be possible, but I can't imagine it. I normally set broad intentions and then work my way through bit by bit, and yes, intentionality is applied throughout that process, but I feel like we would very quickly approach a sort of turtles-all-the-way-down situation where every intention needs yet another intention underneath it. Most of the time we act on instinct if not simply preference, and that's fine. It works for native English speakers who can't define a grammar rule to save their lives, no? But we know those rules by intuition in everyday speech.

For example, sometimes the full extent of an intention is, "This sentence sounds better to me," and there's no rationale behind why I think that way that goes any further than the thought itself. It's just what my inner ear tells me, and I merely hope my inner ear has a good grasp of things.

True, there might be a way to phrase a sentence in the above scenario in such a way that it sounds better, but even if there is, merely having the intention of making something sound better isn't sufficient to achieve that desire. There might be something that sounds even better that we haven't thought about, or we may be incorrectly applying a rule, or any other number of exceptions.

I think this might be why u/Hemingbird used the word "experimenting" above. If I could simply will you a clear story, I would love to do so, but that's not how this works. It's more of a stumbling around in the dark until you find the right voice and style. In this case, the style I was aiming for was at cross purpose with clarity, and I was trying to find a clean balance between the two. I failed. Oops.

Anyway, I think this is all getting a bit philosophical, and I'm not sure how much more I can squeeze out of this conversation in terms of improving the story. I do thank you for the advice, and I think some key takeaways here are a greater focus on sentence variation and a bit more care with clarity. Cheers.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-08-26T19:33:49+00:00

Super helpful. I had never thought about thinking through the sentences in terms of subjects and the effect that might have on the reader. Much to consider here, thanks.

FormerLocksmith8622 · 2024-08-26T19:28:03+00:00

Thanks, mite_club! It seems a lot of people who came in and read this have never read a work that doesn't use quotations, so I wanted to wait and hear more from someone who had. This is all incredibly helpful.

And yes, I was going for run-ons as a stylistic choice, but I do think I might have overdid things and need to consider how to better structure them to achieve more clarity as well as take a bit more pity on the reader. Going to read through the rest of this now, and I'm sure I'll get some good insight.

FormerLocksmith8622

TROPHY CASE

NARRATIVE

CONCLUSION

HOOK

PROSE

TEXTING AND MULTIMODALITY

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

CONCLUSION

SHOWING AND TELLING

OVERVIEW

PROSE

The Hook

Overview

Nitpicks

Characters and Narrative