Critique Thread

An Untimely Death

The lawyer has just been told of his client’s death. The prison bus had overturned and his head had been milled against the cement in abstract art technique.

>>7644815
Is this an excerpt of something or a complete story?

At night he chews at the same barley and thinks about one of his father’s stories. And many a week ago the farmer took his wife to a doctor where she died. Direct. No happy endings in his stories. He watches the buttes standing against the brisk air and the looming blue like the survivors in Hawaii. Another one of his father’s stories. They had strapped themselves against the palm trees during a hurricane. The barley is wilted and damp and he spits it into the fire and watches as its spirit in the embers rises into the night only to be pushed away by the wind.

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Well, I reckon one oughta do unto others exactly what has been done unto him, that's what my beloved late grandpappy used to say before he kicked the bucket. Thus I gathered my guns and other useful contraptions and went out to meet that mean son of a bitch Jackson.

Imagine my surprise when I entered the fucker's porch and kicked his door open only to see him having a go at my wife, again. Lord Almighty, I told myself I won't be vengeful. I was to geld that rascal plain and straight, stuff his balls right in his mangy kisser and go about my business. Good Lord, him fucking my wife again was the last straw.

Weeks later I still pondered whether I did the right thing, see. When he and my old Nellie were getting it on, I sorta hid and watched. Seeing the glistening sweat running down my wife's back made my blood curl in a manner less and less familiar these days, since she met that bastard Jackson.

So I started jacking off nice and slow listening to their endeavours. Boy, he was good. Damn good, better than I ever were. I admired his technique and stamina as he fucked my wife, dick still in hand. Did I cum once he came? Hell yes I did.

Now I kind of rue what I did next. I entered the room with my fly still open and threatened to shoot both them rascals if she doesn't blow him right there, before my own eyes. And she did, more than eager to do so.

Did it make me mad? Son, I don't get mad. You won't get by in the prairie if you get mad at things. Now hop off and fetch me Ma, Daddy feels he has to call good mister Jackson right now.

Steve woke up, reached for his phone, browsed 4chan for an hour, got off of his bed, sat on a chair near his table, opened the computer, browsed 4chan for another hour, played video games for three hours, and returned to browsing 4chan. He heard his doorbell ring and remembered Anne said she would visit at around 2ish. He looked at his phone; it was 2ish. He threw the clothes lying around his room into a closet and dumped a week’s worth of dishes in his sink. Then, he opened the door to Anne, carrying a cake. Steve said, “Hi! Come in. Sit… Anywhere, I guess.”
There was a single table in Steve’s studio apartment. Anne placed the cake on the table and sat next to it. Steve sat opposite her. “What’s with the cake?” Steve said.
“I thought you deserved a reward for all the work you’ve been doing this week.” Anne replied. She looked upset, probably because Steve did not get her a post-finals gift as well.
“Thank you! Sorry I didn’t get you anything; I was busy finishing up the Physics textbook. You know. Engineering. How did your studying go?”
“It’s been going alright. I reread the books for all of my classes two days ago so I’ve just been looking over my notes over and over. I’m kind of worried about the Shakespeare final though; Smith is an asshole.”
“Wow, that’s awful. Can I see the cake?”
She handed the cake to him. He looked at it and smiled.

>>7644815
There's not a lot to critique here. The "abstract art technique" part seems very abrupt and out of place though.
>>7644822
That last sentence is great. That seemingly random mentioning of Hawaii seems a little out of place though.
>>7644831
Holy shit this is great lol. Keep writing my man.
>>7644832
Sounds like my life desu senpai

>>7644832
do they fuck?

OP here
This is something I wrote today.

He was walking a long road that was drawn through the land past the living green and into the death of the high country. He lived somewhere in the middle of this road and he wouldn’t have it any direction more or less than where his house already lay. The world here was a mix of green brown white and orange but that orange would soon turn to pink then blue then gray and black and with that black the whole world would turn to ink with it. It was a cold country but the earth would heat with the change of color and the man found comfort in knowing this. It was like his blood warmed in anticipation of it even with the cold air still blowing out his eye lids. So he walked the dirt and rock to get to back to his house in the green and back to his wife in this house with a fence set like a rectangle. It was when he started to think about his wife that he stopped fighting the air and let it become like legs and arms to the rest of him. The man looked forward and didn’t stop looking forward for the rest of his walk and stopped kicking stones and noticing the rest of the things placed around him. He only knew about his boots and skin and the woman waiting in the kitchen to give him whatever meal she thought of when he was away. Then he started thinking about food and meatloaf was the first food that came. Steam rising up from a pile of meat and ketchup and a spatula breaking the meat and it all slopping over the pan to make red of a white plate. This made him angry. “I bet that dumb bitch forgot about the bag of venison in the freezer”, he thought.

English is not my first language, and I'm trying to improve it by writing. What do you think?
1/2


It started in a streetfight, not by formal definitions, of course - a streetfight presupposes at least two able combatants, and there were three guys there, one combatant, not me. I got pummeled to half-death in that foul-smelling alley by a man so bald you could guess even with his hood on, and surprisingly beardless(what is it with the lack of hair?) bum bore witness, urinating judgementally in/on the vicinity. The hospital I woke up in was noisy but always in the distance, my bed shrouded in mystical silence considering it was New Year's Eve and the place was supposed to be crowded as the alley near the bar where I almost bled out, but the alley was empty then, so it all almost made sence. My head suffered a peculiar trauma reserved for botched operations, and that made bald man's fists surgical in nature, which I appreciated with ire. Trauma was also exciting for surgeons and nurses and cleaning staff alike, as I lost my primary language, and had to explain myself in the only spare one I had.

Crux of the issue was, still is: I enjoyed the language a great deal. I used to write, read, talk, think and observe in it, and the old saying of "you don't value it until you lose it" is honestly a giant flaming pile of garbage, as I didn't sing praises and prayed and remembered it in fondness every waking day, but I breathed it, the language, so this passive-agressive aesop fails miserably at educating me. With kinds of pain, the severest one is with a promise to stay; and no matter how small of an irritation it is, considering having concepts just on the tip of your tongue, barely out of reach, screaming at you to scream them out, with you failing time and time again, this for the rest of your life? The hospital was sterile and grey, numbing this feeling for the holiday days of recovery, it changed as I moved back to the apartment. My room kicked me in the balls like they have wronged her gravely. It has grown cobwebs, not in my absence, necessary, perhaps they were here before, their silk tentacles spreading over bottles and books; panorama looked distantly familiar, the house of the friend you fancy more than the friend herself. Stories filled the room, sweating dust particles, and just then I realized: they are stories in language unfamiliar, ones I could retell but not tell.

>>7644877
2/3
Shit, it doesn't fit.


I wondered again about the "you only value it when you lose it" adage. Allure of my former language was not in commonality, no one spoke it properly. The notion is absurd. If some bloke asks me how it feels to get punched in the tits, what will I answer him? Sure I could retell it, an observer's perspective, a bum urinating in the corner - even with this condition, I'll find the words. This will not be the original story of getting punched in the tits, absolutely, we fail to have a common language. It was my fifteen when by accident I realized that I don't shower, only take baths, and it seemed perfectly natural with me and still is; this is not a quirk for dating site bio, a geniune plea for help - shit, no one can relate with this, our kind's uniqueness stops all reasonable attempts of communication, same language or no. With that out of the window, I could conclude that with my hygiene routine no language can help me with proper understanding of others, but it still blows that I'm losing myself.

Kids, record your shit. Good ideas are like butterflies - you can absolutely just wait until the winter(until the bug dies of cold or hunger, dies, withers and mummyfies). Before the blunt head trauma - I was bleeding for sure, so perhaps not that blunt - the concept has nested itself somewhere deep inside my already meantioned untouched head, the concept of Writer and the Monolith. A simple story that will tear if you stretch it for more than a page. Now I can only retell it; and oh how good it sounded in original! - it will not be written, so the praise doesn't seem megalomaniac, hopefully - Remains of it only that joke you hear at the party, with lines jumbled, stuttered through, coherent but without an original purpose. It goes like this.

>>7644886
3/3

Human history is so ancient that contemporaries lack words to describe its scale; considering how fast technology advances, it must have halted and crashed before(taking humanity with it, presumably), so there is a failsafe. In some antedeluvian epoch, an empire built a Monolith, a structure with almost unlimited space that serves as a vault of human creations. During their lifetime, each person can put one thing in it, be it a sculpture, painting, but probably a text. So this girl, still in high school, writes an essay. The genious of it is so self-evident all her peers and family beg her to submit it to the Monolith. She declines, years pass, girl writes a book. Cult following springs like an unwanted boner, people start treating this manuscript as a holy relic, cries of SUBMIT IT are deafening. The girl, well, a woman declines politely and goes into a self-imposed exile. She writes and writes. New texts seem weird or terrible or childish to an outsider, the following starts turning away, and book after book everyone abandonds her. As her last sun sets, this elderly prodigy goes to a giant obelisk of Monolith looming in the distance, with a hand-written folio which is obviously an exegesis of human condition. It defines existence, the following will return, the whole medium pales in comparison. She submits the text into the Monolith, but Monolith refuses, because the same text - to the punctuation and font and ink - is already inside, put in aeons ago by somebody long forgotten.

>>7644815
Sounds like good plot for a 10-page story.

>>7644822
a little overwrought. if it's a particularly introspective passage, fine, but be careful not to go overboard with things like "looming blue" and "its spirit in the embers." you may enjoy the writing of Crumley, Ford, and McGuane; especially the latter.

>>7644831
you let your cuckhold fantasy get in the way of your prose. once he decides not to kill jackson or w/e the prose falls off completely, no longer believable.

>>7644832
you shouldn't look up to Tao Lin. this prose is awful, sterile, and repetitive. there is nothing profound about listing actions. you may as well have put this in outline form.

>>7644831
I like the writing althought I dont like the plot. So I like the style, which does not trump over the substance even if I dont like the latter.
>>7644877
The beginning was funny, it worked out well, in the second paragraph it feels like it just need to be readjusted somehow, because it does not seem to flow smoothly, I will not judge the grammar because I am not a native speaker either.
>>7644832
It kinda feel like a bland list of events, too mechanical.

This is what we call eclectic: I’m dosed-up on imported, yes, Holland-grade cush. But only through osmosis. Yes, it’s not like I’m a sound guy, I can’t even keep up a conversation with my best mate right here, who keeps stuffing his hands in his hair out of pepped-up drug-dealer-encounter nerves and can barely even look me in the eye when he asks for his first cigarette in what he tells me is months. That I am sceptical of, am sceptical of indeed. Only bosh, we needed it. He needed it. Trying to strain the topic of FPS computer games to breaking point with a hazed-out (on haze, I suspect, haha) ex-work colleague of mine who now sells weed to his former co-workers. I wasn’t expecting his girlfriend to look like that, I knew she was Romanian, only I wasn’t expecting her to look like that. Wasn’t a pretty sight to see. And he’d boasted back at work in the kitchen that he’d fucked her multiple times from the behind in the shower. With that. Now, now. That’s not something to be smug about.

He keeps getting up and opening the blinds to a small window and then closing them, presumably to see if his supplier has arrived but what might just also be a paranoid surveillance of his back garden in case the police show up. The druggy charades of the middle-classes. He must’ve stayed with her for the massages. In fact I thought that massage table was a dinner table when I first came in here. Just shows. Not quite sure what exactly. Ah, I’m higher than I thought. Joel is sucking on his cigarette a little too audibly. To cover the silence? Or maybe he always did that, I just haven’t seen him in a while. Always the jovial overtones with him but I know his sensitive side can be pried open without to be honest that much chemical assistance.

Latrelle walked past 5th street and saw Tyrese and his set chilling near the warehouse as they always were. Sometimes he wished Tyrese would so he could stomp Tyrese and his oreo Jordan's out, end that shitfaced grin he has all the time. Every time he walked by, Tyrese always stared at him with that same shitfaced grin. Latrelle decided that once he had enough money to get out of this fucking trap, once he knew his visits to Tyrese and his set were over, he'd give that nigga a piece of his mind. Maybe nothing physical, but at least a firm "The fuck you looking at, you greasy-ass fufu-ass nigga?" Maybe even spray paint a dick on the warehouse wall. Actually, there was a lot of shit in Rockford he wanted to do, lots of stupid-ass niggas he wanted to shut up. Ten years back when he saw that cac Taylor get busted out by Reese's set, blood and tears on the concrete, writhing, crying out, Reese's set laughing and him saying over and over again "you done fucked up now" - Then, Latrelle was only 10, but he remembered laughing too at how ridiculous Taylor looked, how, in the end, Taylor's bullshit and bravado meant fuck all. He remembered that shit every night, smiling, thinking about how he'd want to replicate that moment. $7/hour at Mr. Wong's grocery shop, his time was slow but sure to come.

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Back in school my writing, even if it was for mere, essays and not even uni, was described "baroque".
So here is what I shall do, the spoilered image, don't look at it, is a photo, I shall attempt to describe it, read it and then look at the image and see if I am being "correct", note that english is not my native language thought.

"
In this photo I see trees caught as flat and menacing, their branches, is as if they were scraping the curtains of the sky, or I could dare to say they resemble the shadows of the thunder, they make a fair presence, somehow, the paved road managed to give a fair outlook of what would might have ended as a bland meadow. In this occasion the road is what makes up the focal point without any asphalt that would have ruined the composition, instead as it lowers down, is overshadowed, making itself small and quiet, we can proceed to look at the moment captured here where the light is framed as if it was striking in the distance, giving a faint but uniform light all over the field, the light is captured just enough that we may see a faint but distinct sound of green trailing and outlining the road, the trees that cut into the hair, the bleak sky that still deliver a far but vivid blue, even the bushes contribute, by not giving anymore attention to the surrounding grass."

Now I just did this on the go and I wont re-read it because those essays had to be done with 1-1:30 hours of time so I am replicating the "on the go" thing which I am particularly bad at.

http://pastebin.com/1Rg12VKz

>>7645019
Cool words but you're not saying anything.

To be consumed or to consume. We are all commanded to eat by our bodies and to seek safety in danger. To make smoothie out of whatever we’re eating with our teeth and tongue. To fill the lobby of the body with delicious grains and vegetables and fruit, crunching and chewing and drinking the earth’s creations.
Then, to feel alone and out like a bright light in the darkness. Too weak to stay alone, you’d give in. When we have the possibility of being wrapped up in another, between their legs or inside their arm grasp, we feel the comfort of our body being consumed and covered as if in a womb.

>>7644812
I stirred awake from my troubled sleep, wincing at the orange glow of the lamp by my bed, and of the lamp post situated outside my bedroom window. It was a night like any other, the gloom of the quiet village not disturbed by anything. No drunken yelling, nor the barking or howling of a dog, nothing. I felt alone. The light pierced my eyes, translating into a searing pain in my head – I dare not however turn it off. I didn’t enjoy being in the dark. I slowly sat upright, the cheap scratchy cotton of my bedsheets clinging to my clammy flesh. It had been like this every night for some time now. I would start awake, head pounding, eyes aching – and I would not sleep again until I had a drink. Resignation. I solemnly lifted the bottle of whisky to my lips, and solemnly did I partake of it. I lay back down on the cotton bench in my plaster prison, and hoped I would not wake again that night.

>>7645209
>Too weak to stay alone, you’d give in.
Shift from "we" to "you"

>>7645196
Maybe I am like that guy in Stoner, the student I think his name was "Walker". Pompous, pretentious, just frying air.

This photo could depict the surroundings of Scotland for all I know, but I do know what I see, the dark cloud covered sky, the withered trees, the brown bushes with still vibrant green grass in my experience suggest that this landscape takes place during Autumn, there is a road, in the middle, it was probably built digging into the ground but without laying any asphalt thus keeping it somewhat natural, it seems to lead to an house, wether is a storage, an hangar a farm or what is hard to say, it could be part of a much larger complex that is being covered by those trees on the left, barely highlighted by the bright covered sun.

>>7645279
I like it, I am already curious to who, where and why, I would read more of this.

>>7644812
>A very small country where everyone knows each other in the alps
>Basically ignored into independence
>They want to be 'big'
>Force their king to become president for life
>Decide to send a team to the olympics
>it turns out their best athletes are all criminals
>send them anyways
>Diplomat visits
>turn their motel into an embassy. Each country gets a room (they'll just slide out the numbers with a plastic flag)
/Chapter 1: Belanglosland
If you were to poll people on the streets as to the smallest countries, you would mostly get strange looks. The usual answers might be Monaco, Vatican City, Liechtenstein and maybe Nauru. You would almost certainly not hear Belanglosland mentioned, unless you spoke to certain history and political professors who shouldn’t be out on their own anyways.
Belanglosland is a very small county, around 5 km2, with a population of around two thousand people. It is unlike other small countries, in that it does not have casinos, it’s bird poop is not particularly valuable, and the Pope does not live there(although they did try very hard to get him to move). It lies somewhere along the mountainous border of Austria and Germany, and, as far as they are concerned, is the other one’s problem. You see, Belanglosland lies on a small flat section of a tall mountain, making it hard to get to, for a view that’s very underwhelming, is cold most of the year and has no natural resources to speak of, making it a very unpleasant prospect for the person in charge of officially invading and annexing territories. And so it is that Belanglosland has been effectively ignored into independence.

On this particular ignored morning, the President woke up groggily, and stepped from his bed to use the washroom down the hall. It was a long hall, the longest in Belanglosland, because it was officially the Remembrance Hall. It was filled with portraits, and more recently, pictures of the previous rulers of Belanglosland. The President was currently the twelfth ruler, and the first president. Ten years ago, he had declared himself the last king, and instead titled himself ‘The President of Belanglosland”. Very modern, it was agreed all around.

Currently, the very modern President was emptying his bowels in a very modern bathroom, complete with foamy handsoaps pumps.

As every morning, his aide was standing outside the door with what had been a royal bathrobe to put over the President’s ex-royal silk pajamas.

>>7645425
Thank you. It's from my diary desu

>>7645479
This reminds me of Gogol and that's a huge accomplishment in on itself. It seems as if author has certin affection for this small state, making the irony funny and not cruel.

>>7644996
u misspelled "kush" my man

>>7645743
I can't tell if this is sarcasm, but if it isn't, then thank you. I haven't gotten around to Gogol yet.

>in on
>not "in and of "
See, that's what makes me think this is sarcasm

>>7645843
Not that guy but what you wrote is bad and you should read Gogol

>>7645479
Very Kafkaesque with hints of Gogol. Were you inspired by both?

>>7645892
I like Kafka, and have been meaning to get to Gogol but haven't yet. When I was thinking of this, I was imagining a Mel Brooks film.

>>7645907
Different anon, but it reminded me of the Mouse that Roared.

>>7645916
fuck, I had forgotten about that.
This isn't meant to be a satire though. Just something funny.

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He was walking a long road drawn through the land past the living green and into the death of the high country. He lived somewhere in the middle of this road and he wouldn’t have it any direction more or less than where his house already lay. The world here was a mix of green brown white and orange but that orange would soon turn to pink then blue then gray and black and with that black the whole world would turn to ink with it. It was a cold country but the earth would heat with the change of color and the man found comfort in knowing this. It was like his blood warmed in anticipation of it even with the cold air still blowing out his eye lids. So he walked the dirt and rock to get to his house in the green and back to his wife in this house with its fence set like a rectangle. It was when he started to think about his wife that he stopped fighting the air and let it become like legs and arms to the rest of him. The man looked forward and didn’t stop looking forward for the rest of his walk and stopped kicking stones and noticing things placed around him. He only knew about his boots and skin and the woman waiting in the kitchen to give him whatever meal she thought of when he was away. When he started thinking about food, meatloaf was the first food that came. Steam rising up from the meat and ketchup and a spatula breaking the meat and it all slopping over the pan to make red of a white plate. I bet that dumb bitch forgot we have a bag full of venison in the freezer, he thought.
Since no one replied to this I edited it and am reposting it :^)

He walked towards the large can of canola oil and hoped it would not explode. Passing by he could imagine the effects it would have. The boiling oil would graft his clothes to his body and mutilate him beyond self-love. Instead he slapped the keycard into his workplace door and tromped up the stairs. As usual he proceeded immediately to the kettle and began boiling a pot. It seemed as though two small weights were attached near his eyes. Not drooping his eyelids, but rather hooking into the bottom of his eyes and stretching then down. The thin metal pot rumbled and began to jostle on its ignition pad. He leaned in, face nearly touching the shaking steel, and stared. The kettle pinged off and he went about making his tea; black, no sugar. Things had been becoming overly dramatic of late.

>>7646011
This is really kafkaesque.

>>7646011
I like this.

>>7646011
>black, no sugar
Yeah that's what black means
>mutilate him beyond self-love
kek I like this

I would use better verbs
>tromped up the stairs
How about just walked up the stairs?
>he proceeded immediately
redundant. Just make it "he proceeded to the kettle" or something.
>It seemed as though two small weights were attached near his eyes. Not drooping his eyelids, but rather hooking into the bottom of his eyes and stretching then down.
Shorten this. They're both saying the same thing essentially.
>Things had been becoming overly dramatic of late
You don't need to include this. Show don't tell my man. You can already tell things have become dramatic by your dramatic description of things.
You're not bad though. Keep it up.

>>7646018
>>7646034
>>7646044
You can't put sugar in black tea/coffee? I thought it meant with milk

>tromped up the stairs
Just seemed to convey his trudging ascent I get what you mean by everything else though.
Thank you for your comments. I'm actually in the office right now and had that experience walking in an hour ago.

My grandfather died recently. He was a stout old man, and had lived a long, long time. From what I hear, he was lucid until the very end. When I was a kid, I had always asked him,
“Grandpa, how did you ever get so old?”
Always answering: “I ate my vegetables and never bothered my grandpa!”.
Of course, when you're a kid, even a 40 year old is an ancient man, and an age such as grandpa's, well, that would be a truly unthinkably huge number.

Grandpa, whose name was Tom, was only a modestly renowned man, and the funeral had a turnout that was indicative of that fact. The funeral gathered perhaps 15 people at most. These were mostly business partners and acquaintances. Not much family. He had outlived all of his children, and I was his only grandchild. After the service, most of the patrons approached me for handshakes and condolences. Each of them had something pleasant or humorous to say about the old man, all except for one. It was late evening, the few guests that remained were huddled together around tables, talking and reminiscing. I was ushering off one last pack of guests when he approached me. This was a man in his late 60s or early 70s. His breath had the unmistakeable smell of alcohol, and he wobbled as he eyed me with a look I can only describe as suspicion.
“You're Tom's grandson.” he said, half a statement and half a question.
“Yes.” I said.
“Hmph, well, sorry about your old man. We all have to go sometime, though your grandpa had stayed quite a while. I have trouble even believin' he's not still out there somewhere, keeping up with his old habits.”
I smiled uncomfortably. “Did you know him well?” I asked.
“Know him well?” he bleated. “I knew him like most folks knew him, knew him like people know the devil. A man like he was, you don't know from askin', you know from feeling.”
It may have been the exhaustion set on from monotonous funeral processions of the day, but while I was appalled at the mans rudeness, I was more inquisitive than anything. While the other patrons skirted around direct assertions of my grandfathers character, in favor of polite yet frivolous compliments, this man seemingly had light to shed onto his clouded persona. I had never known my grandfather very well, and had guiltily felt out of place at his funeral. After all, I was a man in his late thirties, and the next youngest person here must have been twenty years my senior. I had no other choice but to continue my questioning.

>>7646366
Sounds like something from a YA novel

>>7646134
>You can't put sugar in black tea/coffee? I thought it meant with milk
You can, he's wrong.

>>7646383
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Coffee
Nah, you're wrong.

An excerpt from this was torn apart in an earlier thread, as it might have deserved to be. I'm hoping the opening will be better received.
Two AM is no normal time to be visiting a store dealing exclusively in energy products, but there they were, their presence marked by the pneumatic hiss of plate glass door, the accompanying inrush of freeway sounds and scents.
Both late middle aged or early late-aged, both carrying distinctly dissimilar airs of steadfast resignation in their familiarity of posture vis-à-vis one another, the man and woman, neither noticeably taller than the other, approached me with their faces a veritable moonscape of creases, folds, indents, pockmarks, mole protrusions, and-one for each of them- two pink ellipses, both cut into the left cheek.
“Hello, and welcome to NRG,” I said, as I always say, as I had been told, years ago, to say. “Now You’re Drinking For Power.” It was customary for a prospective customer to return my scripted salutation, usually with a nod or half-sighed reply, but on this occasion I was met with two myopic stares. They were standing mere inches from the meticulously cleaned counter that separated us. “Would you like to try one of our newly developed in-house energy bars, available for a Limited Time Only in the color of your choosing?” The woman’s parched lips quivered as though about to be hydrated with the runoff of tears, but instead she said simply, “Oh no no we’ll have none of that, we’re just browsing.” And with that she turned and disappeared into the well-stocked alleyway of aisle one. The man faced me a second longer, and, before following the woman, contorted his face into what I presumed was an apologetic glance.
With the couple’s disappearance into that diminutive labyrinth, I was left again to a reassuring silence under which the hum of air conditioner and the sigh of a passing car-accompanied by two diffuse globules of red light through tinted glass- belied rather than challenged the times inherent taciturnity. I had devoted myself to NRG eleven years prior, and it was in moments such as these that I found myself inundated in the accumulation of stored moments. My reflection on the wiped counter- discernible in all of its minutia, such was the vigor with which I wiped it- displayed the austerely wizened face of a wise king. Indeed, I did feel a kind of hard-fought regality whilst contemplating the serpentine road that lead me, finally, to my lofty status.

>>7644812
Is there anyway to do formatting in 4chan? trailing spaces/tabs disapears

>>7645986
This is some pretty masculine prose - the lack of commas is some McCarthy shit. It's not bad I don't think, but I really would try to break your sentences up more, just so people can read it without getting exhausted. Right now it's maybe too much McCarthy. And your register is a little muddled - you have all this basic, functional language, and then "like his blood warmed" and "bitch", which both seem at odds with the rather sparse, unemotional tone.

Anyway, here's an extract from the novel I'm currently writing, a sort-of romance with some supernatural elements set in modern China.
http://pastebin.com/v9ydcDes

>>7646500
Thanks for the advice man.
Well the "bitch" part is actually the guy's thoughts. He's not the narrator. I'm gonna change that "like his blood warmed" sentence now that you mentioned it.
Is it masculine? That's awesome actually cause it's about a super masculine guy who is a bit of an asshole. I pretty much wrote it in a stream of consciousness sort of way. Didn't try to think too much while I wrote. Just pictured the scene in my head.
I haven't read McCarthy yet. Maybe I should now.
Thanks again.

>>7645479
Ignored into independence is good.

>>7646500
Great writing. This kind of style isn't usually my thing but you make it interesting. Paragraph 10 is worded a bit strangely but other than that it's good.
Would read more of this.

>>7646573
Thanks! Yeah, I think that last paragraph got a little tripped up in excess punctuation.

>>7646434
eh

http://pastebin.com/4w9MRG48
A little too long for a post I think.
Don't pull the proverbial punches.

>>7646477
literally just upload it to googledocs and share a link here. It's also much better than having slabs of big fucking text in the thread

>>7645479
Reminds me of Pale Fire

>>7646011
(Part 2)
Each stretch and sigh his manager made was a threatening move to be observed. Plans were made each day to counter potential offensives. Every person in the office was a potential informant to the external world. Total war was tiring, if only the office were empty he would have cried out ‘hiiiiiiiiiiijole’, revelling in the echoing triumph of solitude. Subversion and the absurdity of pure self-expression were his only loves and yet they screamed and tore at each other with animal hatred. They were two poles constantly spinning about his repulsive core. His manager walked over began talking about an insurance client while they held each other in an unblinking stare.

>>7646962
(Part 3)
He thought there was something sad and banal about the procedural nature of his job. There was no soul, no freedom for self-expression. He wasn't even free to perform his job correctly; his manager watched him, a vulture looking to seize an opportunity to make himself look better. I suppose that's where his manager found meaning. He felt more excited about insurance clients because they represented an element of change, an electron, like pandoras box in its capacity to change his world forever. They never did; they, like the recent episodes of The Simpsons, were generally the same throughout.

Aquella noche en que la luna pequeña brillaba en lo alto y las luces de la estación recubrían de amarillo los muros, proyectando sombras lívidas que, cual siluetas de cine en una cinta que se ha estropeado, avanzan en fases de un ritmo anormal que deja a su paso más y más de ellas. Así, rodeado de un ejército de sombras anormales, me acerque a la ventanilla para comprar un boleto. Pero debo señalar, que no fue aquella percepción lo que pudo dar forma a la escena que habría de presenciar. Algo había en el viento aquella noche, pude percibirlo mientras andaba por las escaleras, dejando a mi espalda el mundo no subterráneo. Sin embargo, puedo decir que no se trató de alguna fuga de gas la que alteró mi percepción, pues era algo más sutil e insidioso lo que aguzo mis ojos. Mucho menos, es un brote de locura.
Ni antes ni después de lo que presencie podría reducir el total de la experiencia a un cumulo de alteraciones morbosas de la mente. No hay enfermedad que altere de manera tan radical las capacidades de la cognición y que al mismo tiempo, me permita narrar con extrema lucidez aquel encuentro. No fue una transmutación de la realidad como me hubiese gustado pensar, ni lo fue de mi persona. La estación de la sexta avenida era la de siempre, con sus paredes de ladrillo naranja acarbonado y sus altas y gruesas farolas de negro metal. Cada una coronada con bombillas incandescentes. El pequeño kiosco donde se expenden los boletos, con sus tres caras de piedra en la parte baja y cristal de una sola vista en lo alto, me esperaba con las tres barandas vacías.
Caminé hasta el cristal espejo con la bandeja de metal cóncavo donde los boletos se intercambian por monedas. Mi figura, deforme y oscura bailó con suma distorsión hasta que estuvimos cara a cara. No hubo voz que me recibiera y sin demora, pedí un boleto. En respuesta un cartoncito rosado se deslizó por la bandeja de metal hasta mi lado y en silencio, una mano hizo un pase en ella buscando las monedas. Tal es la coincidencia fatal, la suma de lo improbable con su lejanía tranquilizadora, pero fatal. Mis ojos siguieron la mano, con sus uñas artificiales y su piel pálida, donde venas verdes se enroscan con las moradas, y las arrugas, dan el indicio no de la edad, más de la falsedad perversa de lo que podría ser el guante de un disfraz.

>>7647187
La sorpresa me irguió con un sutil latigazo y levante la mirada. Tras el cristal espejo, una luz pálida y débil ilumina la taquilla apenas lo suficiente como para que pudiera ver la silueta al otro lado. Tajante era el espejo, pues hacia mi lado una mano blanca de uñas barnizadas en rojo reposa a la espera, y del otro, una sombra plana, sin profundidad, parece residir en el espejo. Con fingida calma deposité las monedas y estas desaparecieron con el arrastrar de las uñas sobre metal. Mis ojos no se movieron del punto en que supuse estaría la mirada al otro lado, y con una mano vacilante tomé el boleto; temiendo, un horror que fui incapaz de nombrar.

Haven't ever written anything before (besides stories you would have to write back in primary school). Always had the ambition to one day seriously take up writing, however, so here's 60 words I pumped out:

> We were all misfits, choking on a miasma of wasted potential and stale alcohol, drifting down a black river on some sort of sick odyssey. Malcolm, the oldest and most enterprising of our collection of broken persons, was the Odysseus of our purgatorial voyage, equally thwarting and plotting the schemes with which we maintained a sense of much needed variety.

>>7644812
>bowing low.

>>7647171
Anon how dare you

>>7647223
Good luck keeping that up for a couple thousand words. It's alright. Difficult to say anything about without any context. Narrator's a little grandiloquent to be a delinquent teenager (and the "intelligent burn-out" is a pretty used up character archetype). Yet another tale of teenage debauchery is a fairly hard sell imo. You'd have to really do something to make it stand out. This has a nice cadence to it, though.

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>>7644812

This is the introductory paragraph to a short story I'm writing. Be as harsh as you like, I personally think it's total shit not worth continuing and am only posting it here out of a vain desperation:

"It's strange to think that this is how we die, among roses never known to our motherland's desert shores. This field will drink our blood. How long until we are found? Will we be found? In that ominous notion called the "grand scheme", it makes no difference. For an immigrant, legal or otherwise, noble death can only be achieved on a battlefield. In spite of the violence which has transpired here, this is most certainly no such glorious resting place. "

>>7647223
I see you're following the /lit/ trend of using hollow words that don't actually provide the reader with any insight to the story

Fast habla gobbla talk to a cobbler and hobble across that marble floor. Scream steam mean meme cream spleen dream keen on that rap. Sap the sap fringe sap sap fringe sap. Higgle giggle pickle cycle psi-call sickle hick all nickel weirding. Searing lies wide open drives the cart. Carat heart. Desire rides the analytic movement. Cinders code. Old broken mode. Old broken mode go. Cant so. Darkenwald genesis. Severed hats. Helio-strophe malware commission. Servo-rapticol ambitions catatonic emissions. Syphilitic conjecture.

Thomasina Witwitch grew a delightful batch of tomatoes for the tangential override. Guide the hand that stays the fire. Ominous lute. Over various allusions to the contrary did he rummage discretely, incessantly, alligator toothed serrations grinding his temporal lobes. Panicked in the thought deluge. Candor. Rips of scripts drifting up at him. Tonguing the lines, the names, Cavendish. Pantomime theater. Marrow bath.

Hypnotist glistening try hard eloquences couldn't understand the nagging. Rattering tattering old clothes blathering carte blanche wandering clueless ammonia-bleach breather. Suicide kite caught in the tree. Suicide delight caught on a spree. Meaningless cackle and the dust motes hanging in sunlit windows undisturbed.

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It ended as it had started. The Roman Emperor Titus Mede II was born on the night of May 15th. The date of his birth isn’t important when compared to the events that transpired over the course of that unforgettable night. The unbearable screams of a women filled the chamber with absolute panic. The nurses tried to soak up all the blood but the destruction to the mother’s body had already done its damage on her life. The baby came screaming out of the corpse of the mother’s dead womb looking for comfort but found none from the horrified nurses. The future emperor was left to soak in the blood of his dead mother while he cursed the heavens with his newly birthed lungs. The father, when he heard word of his wife’s fate, flung himself from a guard tower. His sorrowful cries could be heard all the way until his body met the ground. The young heir to the throne had no one, even death itself didn’t want to take the child. Thus, Titus Mede the Second grew up in the company of ill-bred advisers who cared only for themselves. The boy was taught no morals nor showed any compassion except the granting of all his misinformed wishes. The young emperor grew into a cold heartless man with a lust only for power and an outlet to release the demons that grew within him. Wars across the prairies and meadows were commenced. Death was the only thing that followed Titus and his men as they marched across Europe raping women, slaughtering children, and feasting upon limbs of their own fallen enemies. Titus was feared by everyone in his vast empire, feared but never loved. His advisers, the very men who had raised this monster into an ultimate weapon of destruction no longer had any use for him now that all the realms enemies were decimated. They gathered upon Titus like creatures in the same chamber were he had entered the world. The blood sucking creatures penetrated his skin with hell fire daggers, and tore the beating heart from his chest leaving him to choke on his own blood. The grins of his yes men were the last thing he saw before his body was thrown away to rot in the city gutters. It had ended for Titus as it had started – alone.

I finished writing a novel and am having anxiety about it. Please critique the opening sentence.

The sky was clear blue and cloudless and had been persisting in that way for awhile, a summer coming and sticking and overlapping into the next summer and then the next.

>>7647463
Mate you posted this in the last thread, why don't you post something different?
Also, you've barely changed or added to any of it

>>7647482
Do people just continually repost the same shit in hopes that one day someone will say they like it?

>>7647463
This is still bad

It dispenses cocaine into your mouth. He pulls its ass and stretches it out and it retches gray drug. Soot. Some dead guy’s ashes. Belly button lint all the way from China because the insect had fucked some whore out there missionary. There’s that woman peering into my keyhole. What you want? She hands me the spoon and undresses revealing a festering set of ribs below her breasts and a low hung cock. Not even a woman. Go away. Go away. Oh Jesus.

>>7647506
What the fuck man

>>7645479
This put on a smile of my face, I like a benign sarcasm.

>>7647514
I spray the insect. Spraying it good because I hate it and it throbs up against me and harrasses me at bars where I’m downcast and trying to drink something brown with a tiny scantily-clad ice cube at the bottom. She loves me. I’m loved. I woke up with a metallic taste on my tongue from the boy and crawl up against the door listening to fat men dispensing ice and rubbing up against it to get a fix. Occasionally they’ll look at me and purr like they’re fucking cats.

>>7647506
I like it

The world is a mess full of darkness, a miasma of blackness where people are blind, not physically blind but emotionally - they are corrupt, slaves to the of of of western consumerism; advertisements do the featuring of women big breasts wearing little that gets my attention yes happy temporarily - a false, evil happiness that destroys my soul. BAD! I not like what happened of late, I, a lost soul, a soul full of morality so rare in these days; I was born in the wrong generation. This is the burden I carry. I do not know yet what I must do with my immense power.

>>7647522
Left to distinguish the woman with doleful eyes and breasts and breaths swaying against her neck were a du juor insect crawls and plants its babies. A la mode I say with my mouth open like a jackal. Hmmm. Young with his hair slicked back. Ten maybe nine. I stick it into my pocket and say I’d be a good prisoner and leave the woman to her own devices. I’d forgotten I was queer and throw the moneyed spoon into the trash that had been baked with some sort of drug that you eat with some sort of revolving communist cream. With a shiny beautiful diamond at heart I approached the boy or man I couldn’t tell with tiny buttons that stared at me like a deep sea creature in a sitcom with his wife wearing a whorish outfit and fucking other fish. You queer? I’m a fiend. I crawl on all fours using just my hands. The back of them too. I take the boy back to the cubicle and dress him in a two piece and watch him play with his cock.

>>7647532
pol was right when they called gay people degenerates

>>7647532
Read something other than Naked Lunch

>>7647547
I can share more if you like. I'm writing the same way William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. Without conscious thought. This writing is revealing a lot about me. I recommend this to everyone to learn about their true self. A degenerate and a fiend. Mine's just more vulgar.

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He gazed and pondered once more at the coffe machine, never liked coffe, tried it, then twice and some more again as time would go on, caffeine helped him more than once but it was never about that brown concoction for which he could not help but simply abhor, not out of spite mind you, it was just taste.
Yet there it was, while stirring the honey in the tea, hopeful that the water was hot enough that it would melt properly and not leave him with an overly sweet taste at the end of the cup, merely thinking thrice again about that machine.
He thought of it like his bottles of wine, some keep possession for display, he told himself this was for courtesy, after all he could never muster the spice of alcohol, another pebble that never got rid of him, but that at least he could nourish in the fact that he would never exceed, not that it kept him fed.
Raised the spoon by the tip of the fingers and calmly placed it by the side of the table, grasping the hot cup with his hands to take comfort in its warm texture, then finally as he let a sigh of melancholy he mentally noted to clean the dust off the machine while climbing upstairs home.

>>7647578
>>7647579

lmao

>>7647585
he's a troll

>>7647584
Jesus Christ just shut up

>>7647597
You are speaking as if I had been aggravating this thread with multiple posts, would you mind explaining yourself, how can I possibly make sense of your critique, if you mean any.

>>7647606
I think it just means that every word you write is complete hack garbage and that you need to stop.

why does all this stuff suck

>>7647515
>benign sarcasm
I think that's facetious.

But thanks a lot. I haven't written anything on it since I got off my meds.

>>7647616
you need to set your expectations much lower

>>7647619
I did not mean it like that, even Torquato Tasso who had a stick so far up his ass that it led him to insanity thought that literature should please the reader, thus what I mean is, that by the way you wrote it, it sounds like is highlighting the fun of the situation without demeaning it.

>>7644812
>this is my first time on /lit/ but I've been writing a while and published in a few submissions
>is for a sci-fi mag
>pls don't be gentle

The crowd arked right suddenly towards a row of pre-century houses, wooden like all houses were now, but without the cross-laminate that caused the lumber boom. Their path curved like the eaves of the dilapidating porch cutting two houses ahead of Karen’s path forward. His steps faltered as he tried to find an inconspicuous way out, thinking quickly he turned off the sidewalk and onto the property of a neighbouring house. It held a degree of abandon, and he quickly slotted himself down the side of the building hoping to slip from view, like an extra stepping into and then out of the wrong scene. The second portliest of the men pulled out his stick, looked both ways, and put it to the ground as if prepping for a slapshot, not that the caution was necessary with the rest of his friends looking out as best they could. Karen wondered if they were waiting for someone to open the door as he watched through two of the body cameras he had gently tucked through the fence. The Enforcer stepped forward, fulgruming the stick off his gut and uppercutting it through the jamb like a hot knife through off-brand margarine. The man next to him kicked open the door and they flooded into the house, the front porch empty within seconds, Karen panned down the crack between the narrowly spaced houses, before he could reach the pocket sized backyards he could hear a backdoor opening and a hushed run. Running down the private alley after the action he saw under the cover of noise he saw the men much more overt now, sticks drawn and heads all balaclava clad, charging through blue moon snow. Ahead of them a yellow light above all yellow lights shone from the upscale kitchen window where a family was sitting down. And so faintly he heard a safe and incandescent laughter, over the sound of scraping sticks and boots on snow.

>>7647616
Your mom sucks. My dick. Fuck you.

>>7647641
What we got here is a failure to communicate.
I meant that I think 'benign sarcasm' is 'facetiousness'. Like, synonyms.

But thanks again, that's kind of what I was aiming for.

>>7647613
Stop writing garbage is fair if I write garbage, but I can't understand "how" is garbage, because I am oblivious to my own defects.

>>7647616
welcome to workshopping, either clip your fingernails or jog on

>>7647616
Mine's good fuck you

>>7647616
Talk shit post lit

>>7647584
this is bad writing but one day it will be okay iff you are willing to take in some harsh criticism.

Your vocabulary feels like it has inadequacy issues because you go for "intelligent" sounding words like abhor, concoction, thrice. It is fine to use these words but the words you use don't help paint a picture, or give a better understanding of abstract emotions. Use a more honest language and work your way up to these words.

The "I don't like coffee trope, but I need caffiene" trope is played out, and unoriginal. bring some nuance to it, subvert the trope, or don't use it at all.

Use periods. The more you string clauses together with an endless string of commas, the more exasperated a reader gets with bad writing.

>>7647733
It starts boring
It continues being boring
It ends, boring

>He gazed and pondered once more at the coffe machine, never liked coffe, tried it, then twice and some more again as time would go on, caffeine helped him more than once but it was never about that brown concoction for which he could not help but simply abhor, not out of spite mind you, it was just taste.

You misspell coffee. You engage in repetition that only serves to make an uninteresting section rapidly more so. The tone is pretentious ('concoction ... abhor'). What exactly is the reader meant to get out of that? That he doesn't like coffee? It's a very painful way of communicating it.

>Yet there it was, while stirring the honey in the tea, hopeful that the water was hot enough that it would melt properly and not leave him with an overly sweet taste at the end of the cup, merely thinking thrice again about that machine.
He thought of it like his bottles of wine, some keep possession for display, he told himself this was for courtesy, after all he could never muster the spice of alcohol, another pebble that never got rid of him, but that at least he could nourish in the fact that he would never exceed, not that it kept him fed.

Boring boring boring you're not communicating anything of interest and everything drags. I'm 80% sure English is your second language so I can forgive you on a lot of this.

I can't even be bothered to go over the last section. If your goal was to create an insufferable paragraph then you have achieved that.

>>7647758
Not that author, but what if >>7647584
Either continue the 'I don't like coffee..." trope, but part way through the novel discovers caffeine powder, then amphetamines, and whatnot, as kind of a recurring theme.

Or does a reversal "Caffeine intolerance, but loves coffee" and has a whole little ritual with a rinse and spit that he ends up, and failing, to hide in front of company.

The lights are buzzing and my eyes hurt. It’s late and things are blurring.

There’s music playing but I can’t tell what it is. People are screaming and talking. People are loud. They want to be heard over everyone. If they spoke quietly no one would need to yell. You can talk to people in a library. Crazy Frog is what’s playing. Popcorn is spilt and people are avoiding it with their skates but it’s hard to get around it and the buttery kernels are getting swept up by their wheels and they’re tripping with drinks in hand and sticky pop is spilling all over the kernels and they’re sinking into the colored carpet. We’re skating over the sticky carpet around the back with the rough walls to the DJ booth. I’m watching his movements to see what he’ll play next.
-How much does he get paid?
-A shit ton I bet.
-I bet my Dad makes more than him.

We’re all tired so it’s decided that we go back to Conner’s house for the rest of the night. Maybe we won’t sleep but we’ll be away from the lights and noise and the people who annoy us more than we annoy each other.
I am obsessed with the unknown. I’ve always wanted to be an engineer but it took me up until a few weeks ago to find out that an engineer isn’t the person who drives trains. Trains aren’t even driven like cars. They move around on a track without anyone telling it which way it’s supposed to go. It moves through mountains and over rivers without someone steering it. It will always move in that direction for the rest of its life. The rest of its days as a train. Maybe that’s forever.

>>7647803
I'm working on a way to transition into that "i'm obsessed with the unknown" part. I know it doesn't sound right as it is.

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>>7647781
even if you do that
>He gazed and pondered once more at the coffe machine, never liked coffe, tried it, then twice and some more again as time would go on, caffeine helped him more than once but it was never about that brown concoction for which he could not help but simply abhor, not out of spite mind you, it was just taste.
is a long sentence that shouldn't have been written. the nuance is possible but this setup drags in so much it wouldn't matter, and more that when I say nuance, it can be as simple as having the charecter's feelings towards coffee described better. a good exersize for this is pretend that every time you are asked your thoughts on coffee you would respond with that sentence. It would get tired after a while right? it doesn't feel overly clever, it feels like this is lthe first time someone has made this comment. Write like it's the 10, and you will write the same thing but with a little more self awareness that your reader has definitely heard this one before, and deserves better.

>>7647803
> took me up until a few weeks ago to find out that an engineer isn’t the person who drives trains
is your MC literally retarded? Who would actually think an engineer also drives the trains?

>>7647803
>>7647826
So many amateurs try to be deep with these contrary observations, that subvert something the MC originally held dear, but they don't stop to think that what they're saying is often illogical and doesn't make much sense at all

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This is the opening of a long prose piece I'm trying to write. Let me know if the form is interesting at all


I cut a dark grey spackled road then stretch it straight, I lay it down, and from our eye it runs straight out, then bleeds and curls into the sky. It has a yellow spine, which jumps and rolls for miles. High rises, buildings’ walls, skyscrapers rise out of the earth, then run to rim the sides and crust the rolling road. Their green tinged shoulders bulge and swell into each other, and veins of dirty grime, buried green and deep, slumber, sleep and sparkle in their concrete kneaded forms. This line that started running from our eyes is now a street. We start to trace our deep grey sheet until it the horizon meets, we’ve found again the primordial line, which stiffly shoulders wide blue skies, and right now looks shorter than the 15 meters between the buildings where we see it fit. Slightly dizzy, we turn from straight (the path) and in our turn crash the sky’s sides ways up against the wall which comes quite close to meet our face and
the box where we can tell our story has now folded almost all its edges.

>>7647826
>>7647829
I don't know why I used to think engineers were train drivers but I did
I'm sorry you think it's illogical
This isn't some super deep thing I came up with. This is a memoir of myself in middle school. These are my actual thoughts.

>>7647840
Well you're fucking autistic
What's with autists and their trains

>>7647826
>>7647829
>An engineer (American and Canadian), engine driver, train driver, train operator (British and Commonwealth English) is a person who operates a train. The engineer is in charge of and responsible for driving the engine, as well as the mechanical operation of the train, train speed, and all train handling.

>>7647840
Also can people write some actual fiction? Why does it seem like so much on here is just anon's real life?

>>7647843
>what's with autists and their trains
kekarino

>>7647850
Whenever I try to write about things that I have no experience with I write about a paragraph then struggle to come up with anything else.

>>7647844
yes exactly, train driver, train operator

In most circumstances, someone considers an engineer as a problem-solver who designs stuff.

And what you're saying just proves that he was right. That an engineer is someone who drives the train. So either way, what anon saying was wrong

>>7647850
WOW FUCK OFF GENRE PLEB WE'RE WRITING LITERATURE

>>7647857
Use your own experiences to create new fictional scenarios anon, if you can only write about your own life you're gonna turn into a worse version of Murakami

>>7647863
You mistook me...

>>7647861
That doesn't prove what I was saying wrong at all...

>>7647870
I know
I just need to keep trying I guess

>>7647874
You should probably change your piece, cause clearly an engineer does actually drive the trains

>>7647877
Okay I will change that so it makes more sense.
Is my writing okay otherwise?

>>7647850
>Why does it seem like so much on here is just anon's real life?
They're just copying what is appars their favorite authors are doing, same as all those anime fanfic kids.

>>7647873
I WALKED OUTSIDE AND USED MY JETPACK TO FLY TO MOUNT STARBUCKS WHERE I SLEW THE DRAGON EUPHORMLADY BEFORE REALISING THAT I HAD NO GF AND TURNING INTO A FROG

>>7647880
Man my favorite authors are Gaddis and Faulkner and I write nothing like them
Please stop projecting so much

>>7647879
Sorry anon. i was taking my own anger out on you

>>7647884
did you just get riled because i made the anime comparison

>>7647883
That's not what I meant at all. Literature is still at the end of the day FICTION, not necessarily genre fiction

>>7646044
>Show don't tell my man
Lol I'm not the author but it's hilarious how little you understand the author's employment.
You're a fucking retard dude, you can't even understand a snippet of some random person on the internet's reading

>>7647890
Can you at least explain what is so bad about anime fanfic?

>>7647892
/lit/ has this weird idea that prose > plot

so you get a bunch of guys twinking out but not actually telling a story

>>7647899
>he reads for plot

>>7647879
Sorry anon, I didn't find anything special about your piece. Nothing about it was especially good. I dislike cheap real-life references in literature, so i didnt like the Crazy Frog thing, but others my get a little excited about seeing something like that mentioned.
And the train-life metaphor is overdone, and nothing you said added anything worthwhile to that metaphor.
I'm sorry

>>7646366
Uninteresting

>>7647897
What is the author's employment?

>>7647897
Wew lad. You're getting a tad upset over some minor criticism.
He is essentially describing the scene which he already described. That last sentence is redundant.
Want to explain how I'm wrong instead of just throwing around meaningless pejoratives?

>>7647898
Nothing, since I never implied it was bad.
Its just the same principle in action, that being "you are what you eat". Perceived ideas on what actually makes good writing have to do with what that anon mentioned as well. Alotta guys deliberately numb out their stories to center around mundanely so it looks more mature and whatnot.

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>tfw when you thought you were an okay writer until you posted your shit on /lit/ and realized you are complete shit
This is a good thing I think
I'm going to keep writing every day until I make something that I know for sure you guys will like

>>7647927
>think you're a shit writer
>post it on lit
>more often than not people like it

wew

>>7647935
lol. I don't believe you. Post something.

>>7647903
I know it looks like that train thing is supposed to be deep but it's not. It's just me describing what a train does. I put in Crazy Frog because they played that a lot when I was in middle school.
I appreciate your criticism though. I prefer people telling me I'm shit at writing because it makes me more determined to better myself. It's like when my dad used to get mad at me for getting Bs in school.

>>7647943
>Trains aren’t even driven like cars. They move around on a track without anyone telling it which way it’s supposed to go. It moves through mountains and over rivers without someone steering it. It will always move in that direction for the rest of its life. The rest of its days as a train. Maybe that’s forever.
I fail to see how you weren't trying to be deep with this. But whatever.
Did your dad also beat you?

>>7647938
mercwip.txt

>>7647962
>mercwip.txt
wot?

>>7647955
Because it's a child describing what a train does. I might remove the "maybe that's forever" part because I don't want to sound fake deep to my fellow /lit/izens. Even though one of you people called that part brilliant the other day.
No my dad didn't beat me.

a setting sun

as the sun descended thomas rolled his newspaper into a tight cyclinder. The front page cried the ruin of dethroned despots and ostensibly moral leaders caught in flagrante with industry's prostitutes. He shivered: multitudes of quivering nascent light from the street corners and cafes elbowed for distinction while the stars overhead seemed giddy to hasten the receding sun from supremecy. Yelps and howls spread from the periphery inward, heralding the return of the recurring internecine war: some slept and were safe yet for others any blood loosed glared as a blazing meteor across the sky to hounding nostrils and the prey's iniquities and bravery alike would hang from either the following day's front page or adorn the obituaries. Thomas thought "the night bestows bodies for the sun's judgement.

>>7647971
I fail to see how anyone could see that was brilliant.

>it's a child describing what a train does
You mean a child wouldn't say "trains are cool i wanna chase it"?

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>>7647967
/ic/ meme

Did this last year & got some laughs.

>>7647980
Great criticism. Truly.
Want to post something of yours?

>>7647986
I already criticised mate

>>7647991
I'm telling you to post something that you've written.
You do write, don't you?

>>7647982
lel

>>7647994
Y-y-yes senpai

>>7647997
Post it then

nobody doing crit anymore here?

>>7647972

>>7647972
Another case of your prose is fine but you're not actually writing about anything.

>>7647999
Yeah okay senpai, here, read and weep:

On my kitchen bench was a bag full of dozens and dozens of rolls of bread. I wasn't sure how it got there, or who we got it from. But I found myself eating a couple rolls from time to time.

>>7648008
trash

>>7647982
I don't get it

>>7648012
lol, feel better now?

>>7648012
Love how you were being all modest before when you're clearly quite upset

>>7647927
>Writing to impress /lit/

Don't do this. /lit/ is not worth impressing.

>>7648055
I said trash as a joke
He was obviously joking when he posted that bread thing
I am upset but I'm not mad at that guy for critiquing me

>>7647776
english is not my first language, but still I suppose that can't excuse the tone, guess I will have to read more.

>>7648063
this. I think this is the big reason why there's the "writing but not about anything" epidemic

>>7647776
>>7647758
Forgot to say, thanks, I just cant's seem to write in a homogeneous way.
>harsh criticism
as long as is not just "is shit, period" then is fine, because I can't learn anything from that.

>>7648071
If you're referring to the love for disembodied prose on this board, I think it's a great thing we have prose threads because it's what the participants seem really enthusiastic about. There's so much discussion of style and aesthetic on /lit/ that this board is almost not a general literature board and instead something so much more focused.

On the other hand I remember some dead fuck saying that people should stay out of writing on the grounds that the majority of writers have nothing significant to say (writing but not about anything) or something similarly entranced with originality. I can't agree with that, because I think there's room enough in written expression for anyone that finds it personally entertaining.

>>7648089
So what you're saying is that we have a bunch of guys who really just want to be poets. But even that's kinda slippery.

I'm never satisfied with my writing unless it has a clear object, you cant even get into the depths of good prose without it.

>>7647899
is funny, I thought about this and then I told myself, do I know enough about a subject to actually write about it? I thought in the span of a second about fantasy and how I could not possibly offer anything new, I thought about the marvels of an age of great discoveries and how I could not possibly do any world building, especially not in few lines, is funny, I guess your words enlightened me over my mediocrity as a person who can only rely what others have said or thought like a parrot.

>>7648094
And for the record I'm not saying you have to be super clear from the get go, writing defintiely does take time and some works you just have to feel out. Just from my own experience its always better to have some vision or idea you want to convey, without that you have no fuel.

>>7648097
Eh, it takes time and work like anything else. Drama/plot is a full craft of its own although /lit/ dosent like to acknowledge it much. I wouldnt sell yourself short on any avenue you havent explored indepth, and trust me you can find inspiration anywhere.

tfw criticism gets more replies than your actual post

>>7648112
I like the idea of refining my prose, other than for the fact that is currently crap, but because I see it as a jolly of some sort, I think with a good prose you can make anything enjoyable to read, a story, a short story, an essay, even a post on an anonymous belgan chips carving board.

>>7648094
Yeah, that might be a better way to put it. Some are going to identify as this and others that regardless, but it's good we're not a hivemind.

I am curious though, what sorts of things do you find to be the objectives of your writing? I've always tried to look at art and expression as methods to entertain and/or inform. Things like commentary, philosophy, and drama are all just aspects that different people happen to find diverting in different ways. For that reason I guess I've restricted myself to a desire to entertain.

>>7648104
That clarifies some things, and I agree completely. Most art falls somewhere into that blend of forethought and organic design.

>>7648131
To be honest I think you'd have an easier time not making a big separation between prose and the dramatic aspect. In practice anyway. Two birds with one stone.

Thats how the old school guys did it anyways.

I’m in my car. Evelyn is in the passenger seat. On the the aux I got Dirty Sprite 2 playing.
I unlocked my iphone and the paint on my fingertips chafed its shattered screen.
I call Tony, my favorite plug, and drive to QT and grab a sugarfree redbull and slide a bag of m&ms into my pocket while heading to the bathroom with a box of maximum strength robitussin and chug the syrup with the redbull while looking in the mirror. Then I go to the register and ask for pineapple white owls. I get in my civic and Evelyn’s slouched against the window with her phone away. I got in the car and tossed the rillos into the front console.
“You look pretty.” I said. Then I rocketed backwards and shut the door because I wanted to smoke a cigarette and wait for Tony. Tony pulled up in his white Ford Focus and I got in the backseat. He was the type of dealer to carry a pistol with him, and he’d get mad if you didn’t buy off him every day.
“Wassup bro.” I said.
“New pack I saved for for you. Lemon OG” He said.
I put the eighth in an empty pill bottle and gave him $40 and dapped him up in one fluid motion. Then I gathered myself and said “Peace out” and he drove off to make more plays.

“No one fucks with me.” I said.
“Does that mean in a right way, or-” She said.
“What?” I said.
“Like are you saying you’re so intimidating nobody would fuck with you?” She said.
“No I’m being real. Like in the bad way.” I said.
“Ever since me and Abel broke up.”
She went on. Metro boomin beat settles into the cabin on low volume.
“I mean ever since I let him have my virginity. Like he took advantage.”
“Yo, straight up.” -
“You’re the second bitch I ever fucked. And I can pretend it meant nothing to me. That is was just another fuck. But that was big for me? You knowmsayin?”
“Like a rebound? What the fuck? Look asshole, we were both so gone that night. You can’t-”
“ No. Hold up. I mean you can call it that. But you think I’m running around with an ego like the average dude out here? I don’t think like that. I don’t care. About anything. But nights like that. I’ll remember forever.”
“Me too.” She said.
I broke eye contact and started the car. Evelyn looked out the window.
“And she did that to you?”
“Yeah.”

I take a left onto the highway and catch a glimpse of the lights and turn my focus solely on the left line and drive back to a smoke spot near Kyle’s party.

>>7648148
Dialogues great and I like the flow. One of the best in this thread.

>>7648148
>I unlocked my iphone and the paint on my fingertips chafed its shattered screen.
I liked this sentence, although i had to reread it a few times, maybe cause im retarded, or maybe because it needs a comma or something somewhere, idk

I liked how i could tell who was talking just by the way one sounded through the dialogue.

>I call Tony, my favorite plug, and drive to QT and grab a sugarfree redbull and slide a bag of m&ms into my pocket while heading to the bathroom with a box of maximum strength robitussin and chug the syrup with the redbull while looking in the mirror.
this sentence is a bit long, could probably use with some commas or something

I didn't like the main character, but whatever.

At night, she chews barley and think of one of his father's stories. Several weeks ago, a farmer took his wife to the doctor, where he died. Specific. There is no happy ends his stories. It means, foot mound against clean air and blue appear live in Hawaii. Stories another father. They tied against trees in a hurricane. Barley wilted and humidity, and spits fire and watching as his spirit rose to embers can be done only in the evening to push the wind.

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I'm in my car. Evelyn was in the passenger seat. The aux I got to play dirty Sprite 2 online.
Unlock my iPhone and my hand brushed its shattered screen paint.
Tony and I call my favorite QT. I get my plug and the vehicle, and M & Ms to make red bull sugar in my pocket to grab a bag and slide, and the maximum power and syrup. Robitussin chugs red bull on the way to the bathroom and looks in the mirror box. Then goes to the register and asks for pineapple white owls. I have my civil and Evelyn falls against the phone away from her window. I got into the car in front of the console and rillos.
"You look beautiful." I said. Then I was taken back and the door is closed, because I wanted a cigarette and waiting tone. Tony pulled his white Ford Focus, and I got in the back seat. He was a businessman carrying a gun with him, and he bought every day and will not get mad if you turn it off.
"Wassup Bro". I said.
"I saved you a new suit. Lemon," he said.
I put eight empty pills in a bottle and gave him $ 40 and in a smooth motion dapped it. I also gathered to me and said, "Peace in the world" and it went off, to make more plays.

"Fucks with no one to kill." I said.
"This means that the right way, the organization," he said.
"What I said.
"Just as you say, there is no one, so fuck you is intimidating?" He said.
"No, I'm just real. Like a bad way." I said.
"I think that because apart and Abel." He said.
I fixed low volume Metro on boomin points in the cockpit.
"I mean, I let my virginity he took advantage of. Like it."
"Yo, straight up." -
"The second you bitch I've ever fucked. And I can say that it means nothing to me. It was just another phase. But it was me? You knowmsayin?
"A break? What? Look, Dick, so we both were lost in the night. You can't-"
"I was for a minute. I mean, you have it. You can say that. But I think the average person around here has ego? I do not think I do not care. Will do everything. But the night. I will never forget . "
"I am." He said.
I broke eye contact and started the car. Evelyn looked out the window.
"And the fact that you?"
"Yes."

I go back on the smoke-free area near Kyle's party and my focus is only on the left line and catch a glimpse of the lights and turn left on the highway.

Then he looked over a coffee, twice, then a coffee do not want to, and a little more time, and caffeine had more than once helped him, but help to add water of brown, he said, but simply an abomination, even though I thought out, it was the only flavor.

But there it is, honey, stirring tea, water, think again three times in a computer, not exactly my cup of sweet made melted final hot enough to be expected to go.

Alcohol, spices, he can not move pebble stones after all, but at least they had some presented, and bottles of wine that he can feed as they thought, never think that this aid, he never exceeded the federal bank to the right.

Above finger spoon quietly with a cup of warm hands to find any downside to the warm nature of the surface, keep the following table, he finally crossed the upper floor of the house in his mind as a machine to determine the melancholy story clean soil.

Thoughts?

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It ended like this. Born on the night of May 15, the Roman Emperor Titus Mede II. His date of birth, this is not significant when compared with the memorable events of the night. A woman cried of unbearable panic in a room. Nurses tried to absorb all the blood, but the damage already devastated life in the mother's body. Easy to growl, it came looking for the body of a dead mother's womb, but was seized by a nurse found. The future emperor's new gaming heaven with his lungs were allowed to settle in the blood of a dead mother and a curse. He heard about the fate of his wife, Anne. A tower fell. A painful wail was heard all the way to where the body was found in the soil. The new heir to the throne who did not want to take the baby, and even death. Titus, the Monday after, only measured the increased raw consultants to take care of them. I wish to know each child taught spirituality and showed no mercy. The young emperor, only the desire for power and the source of the release of his demons in the framework of a very cold man's heart. War between the meadows and pastures. They celebrate the end of the enemies of the murdered children were killed and women raped by such forward following the death of Tito and his men. Titus, the fear of the fear of a great empire by anyone, but never loved. His advisers, weapons ultimate enemies of all the kingdoms of the men who built this beast, now he no longer had any use for it. It has been innovative in the world, they met for Tito. Suck blood into the skin with knives will drown in the blood, and he tore the heart. The smiles of men, and he said his body was removed from the decay of the city of candy was the last thing he saw before. And only - it is just as Tito.

My grandfather recently passed away. He was a man of vision who lived a long time. From what I heard, it was clear at the end. When I was a kid, I always said to him:
"Father that I ever was so old?"
They always say, 'I'll eat vegetables me and my father did not care!".
Of course, when you're a kid, even 40-year-old Adam Kadmon, and grandfather age, well, that would be a really big deal. Unbelievable.

Saba named Tom, a simple man who is famous, and was present at the funeral, which indicates the fact. Funerals collect maybe 15 people at most. Mostly business contacts and relations. Not many families. She outlived her children and a grandchild. After the service, most visitors come to pay their respects and make negotiations. Each of them has something fun or funny to say to an man old, all except one. It was late in the afternoon, some permanent guests gathered around a table, talking and remembering. It featured a guest package when she turned to me. The man is in late 60s or early 70s. Bald, breath smells of alcohol and wobbled as he looked at me. I can only describe it as suspicious.
"You son Tom." According to him, while half of the half-question.
"Yes." He said.
"Um, well, I'm sorry your father. We all have to go sometime, though his grandfather lived for a time. I have a problem when you think it's not even out, contact old habits you them. "
Ark smiled. "You know him?" I asked.
"You know very well?" It began. "I know him as most people are familiar to him than the devil you know. A guy like him, you do not know Askin ', you know the feeling."
It would be a boring day for a television funeral. Tired, but I was surprised by an obscene man, I was more curious than anything else. While other customers bypassed around the direct approval of the character conversion, in favor of more trivial compliments of a kind, this man can not seem to shed light on the personality of the branches. I could never turn well. I trusted in the sense of the funeral. After all, I have a man's late thirties, and young people come here to be more than twenty years. There is no other choice but to follow me.

>>7648470
>>7648482
give up

>>7646792
Wont people find out my google account if I do so?

All these ideas in my head and no connection between any of them. It is a detriment because I currently have nothing saved on my laptop. Not one word.

How do you handle this? I have a great idea for an ending but I have no idea how to attach an entire story before it. Same with a script I am thinking of. Lots of good ideas for different scenes but little connection between them.

What are your thoughts on the use of violence?

People like McCarthy obviously use it to shocking, sometimes beautiful effect, but it can go so horribly wrong. What makes it work for you and when do you think it fails?

I want to open my book with a disgusting, brutal act of violence but it just comes across as edgy shit aimed at teenagers. I've tried the Hemingway approach and made it as blunt and devoid of excessive description as possible and it it makes it better but still seems like I'm trying too hard.

Perhaps I just need to think of a different way of describing it. Perhaps rather than describe the violence, have it described by an eye-witness or as somebody reading about it in a newspaper.

>>7649428
I do that a lot
I'll come up with some cool sounding dialogue or sentences but I won't know how to go off of it
Just get rid of it. If you focus your entire story around a few scenes it's going to end up being shit. You could just pick one scene and write off of it. See where it takes you.

>>7649516
Yeah, it's just a shame when you have nothing, have a good idea and then realise it's as good as nothing.

>>7648013
There isn't anything to get on purpose. You could call it absurdist, the swindler doesn't realize that he ended up getting swindled but I wouldn't think too hard about it

>In response to a bitch I know, her newspaper, and her article:

Reading this newspaper is an exercise in scatology. Badly employed punctuation separates needlessly long words that convey no meaning; words that wallow in their own repulsive ink on the printed page pleading beyond hope to be replaced by sensible counterparts. Vomitous platitudes displayed shamelessly by empty-headed writers writing slave-like for university credit. Opinions stolen and regurgitated onto wasted paper. Failure and bastardisation.

>>7649516
>>7649542
So what if instead of having one sentence, say you have a 20 or 50. Completely unrelated yet. Could you take a couple of them as starting point and then build a story around the rest of them?

What's your experience of reverse engineering like this? I am going to try this tonight.

>>7649647
>slams the author for using needlessly long words
>vomitous
>regurgitated

You really couldn't be happy with 'Nauseating' and 'vomited'? Vomit is a great word - it sounds like what it means. The action of speaking the word 'vomit' is, in itself, like throwing up. That's a great word, a power word. Don't throw that away.

>>7649773
Thanks :) I didn't consider regurgitated needlessly long, but I guess I was wrong.

>>7649767
>Could you take a couple of them as starting point and then build a story around the rest of them?
Yes. This is what I do.

>>7649858
mind posting a sample?

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Some bullshit I wrote....

The Absurd Day Of Mr.Engels

He waddled down the path on his way to the pisshouse, never thinking about his little prick and the stall he would enter. Damnit! There's no door on this stall, no way I'm going to risk that humiliation. He walked on further, feeling the tingle in his little dingy, there was pressure building on his no-no hole too, it's a hard solid loaf. There were trees and mud all around, but no brown bowl anywhere, "Have the brown bowls all ran off?", he said to himself. An idea came to him and shocked him to his core, "ADULT DIAPERS!!", but that was too absurd, too wild, too convenient? No no no no no no! An image of a diaper was tormenting him, the idea could never work, "I'm a bowl man", he said, there was hesitation in his words. Could a diaper, not a baby diaper, but an adult diaper, really hold all his dirty produce? Brown bowls have become obsolete, or they're all on protest, the bowls are gone. There was no alternative, no matter how absurd, the diapers were his new brown bowl, how humiliating it will be to acquire these things, degrading.

>>7646011
Nice

>>7649511
I think violence can be useful and interesting if done right, similar to (and not entirely the opposite of) sex. However, if you just think, "I want something violent here," it's probably not going to work, because you're forcing it. I don't think that opening with violence is ever a good idea. To me, violence has to either completely match or contrast with what's around it, and if you open with it, there is nothing for it to match or contrast with yet.

>>7649511
just have some buildup to it, stuff like that out of nowhere will turn heads but may also turn off alotta readers

>>7647676

whats up with the sticks? Some imagery invokes a very clear understanding of the setting, other parts are vague, if this is part of something larger that helps the parts the part with the crowd, the sticks wielding people, the enforcers and such make a bit more sense. Otherwise it could make no sense as a beginning of something and more exposition could follow. I'm not the best judge of style but this didn't hurt my eyes or seem as sophomoric or pretentious as other prose is. So thats a good thing maybe? I'm shit at this.

Fuck this Duke Lacrosse shit
Not guilty fuck innocent

Don't believe those fuckers
Those lying black-out drunk motherfuckers
Those "let me tell you like two weeks later" fuckers
I don't care who they tell

You're telling me I should prove it
Fuck your kangaroo courts
I don't owe you shit
Not guilty fuck innocent
I don't need any friends
I don't need believers
These fucking leeches aint loyal
Fuck you bitch you can keep em
I don't need any rhymes
I don't need any shit
I got myself out here
not guilty fuck innocent
I don't need this shit
Bitch fuck your lease
I don't need your car
bitch fuck your keys
Now I'm rhyming like 14
back when I was so young
Fuck should I trust your memory for
you're always on drugs
I mean shit I was too
But I can handle my weed
You were out of your mind
Who the fuck should I believe
Bitch fuck your housing
Bitch fuck your stomach
Bitch fuck your judgment
Bitch I don't even want it
I'm too fucked to rhyme competent
On that old school shit
Fuck your threesomes
These Linda Trippin bitches can eat shit
But fuck that sounds bad
Cause Bill actually did it
This is more like the mattress girl
Or those Duke Lacrosse kids
And they don't need no evidence
Bitch fuck your diary
Fuck you for having the nerve to come here and lie to me
Fuck your drug selling boyfriend tryna tell the police
Tell em what? That your girlfriend left you to run after me
Fuck these guilty ass bitches
Damn my conscience is clear
I don't have no apologies
Fuck your whole damn career
I don't need any witnesses
bitch I'm the accused
Fuck your alibi cause pal of mine
my story is true

Lie to my face
Tell me I'm wrong
I think I remember
My own goddamn songs

>>7650862
Spit faya boi.

How to Behave in the Cold

"Your eyes never close when you sleep," she says, half-holding my head up on her lap, in a blue room with fogged glass. Sunlight, unstoppable, stretches its thin arms through the curtain from the window to the wall. She takes and wraps her hair, now a black messy palm tree over her skull. "That means you're stressed", she continues. Freckles stain her face, bring out the green in her eyes. I stretch and shiver. Take my phone from the night-table with me to the bathroom, and stare at the empty call register, the signal dead, and I feel every single piece of matter around me dig into my space. But I’m okay. I come out and she sits still, leaned against the window by the bed. I approach her and the light behind, dragging my feet like we’ve trekked through a swamp. Without loosening her smile, she takes the remote and the news materialize. 6 A.M.

We use the noise to cover the empty air, the kind of air that makes her want to cry, when her head hurts from trying so hard to sleep. She’s right. A small gap between my eyelids stays every time I go to bed. Makes me look like a zombie, she often says. At least, however, my eyes rest. Hers are low and the skin around them looks like the sky when it rains. I climb on the bed, and take her by the hand. It’s stiff, but she gives, and lays her head on my chest. The morning hasn’t killed the cold yet. She moves and whispers “I can hear you breathe.” Under the bedsheet, ignoring hunger, feeling her heat. Lines of wetness begin in her eyes and end on my shirt. There’s the stress.

Ellie stopped sleeping in November, or so. She came for help on the eightieth hour of being awake. “I’m so fucking scared,” she said in a cracked voice, as I held her to keep her from shaking. “Since September”, she replied when I asked when the insomnia started. I gave her a blanket and some tea. I placed downers in her hand. In my bedroom she sat and her pupils became dots, and she cried her fear out on my shoulder. I tucked her into bed and brought her breakfast next morning, but the nausea wouldn’t let her eat. Her parents took her to a doctor, and when she stopped going to school I would bring her books, and burgers and our friends. Sometimes videogames too. We got used to seeing her in pajamas. When it got to her we would take walks, and down on the grass of her yard we sang Elliott Smith and Ray Charles, and I’d kiss her forehead and her nose. Ellie rested, but Ellie wouldn’t dream. She faced her window, watching the kids in the park get older and taller the darker it got. Soon the meds weren’t enough to tranquilize her. Only sometimes did they help to keep her paranoia in check.

>(Cont.)

r8 cringe/10 pls (how many times did you cringe? my goal is that the people who read this don't kill themselves on the spot)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IsOjYh60ToEssOofKDrhqSWipgmzj43KMXfiNrU6Mhs/pub

>7650782

thanks for the criticism, the sticks are hockey sticks, this is part of something larger but I didn't want to shitpost. the description does go from setting good imagery to being unclear a lot though

>>7644812
Posted this in another thread to no response, hoping to get a critique in this one. Thanks.

--

“I’m ah, not some kind of a—ah—ah, a stealer! Ah, ah—ah—ah—ah—a, a thief!” So the guy at the front is shouting at the cashier. I take a look around and don’t even register the details and I know he’s homeless, I don’t know why I looked but like, as I was just starting to move to look, before I even saw him, I just knew he was. So I try to turn around before I get a glimpse, a little quicker and more haphazardly than I would have if I didn’t want to actively avoid acknowledging him like you learn to do with them on the East side, making me hit my head on the rack next to the conveyor for groceries, (you know, with all the trashy magazines that you can’t help but glance at because they say, in big bold sexual symbols, both/either human and/or orthographical, “SEX”,) loud enough that some people look over and then everybody looks over and the incident sort of dissolves, he stops shouting and just looks at me and, and I’m not kidding, then he takes this half-eaten chocolate bar out of his pocket and throws it on the floor and yells “THANKS FOR NOTHIN” (yeah, like that, without the G, but also as if the G were never there, thus “NOTHIN” r/t “NOTHIN’”) loud enough that the whole store hears. Huh? Ah, yeah, the chocolate broke into a bunch of pieces on the floor, it was awesome.

>>7651296
I like it :)

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I arrived at the parking lot at exactly 9 AM, exhausted and professionally bitter; the coffee had done nothing for me. As usual, my parking work was awful: crooked and offensive - Upon my return, I expected to see rows in the metallic soil of my door ploughed with keys. The air was lukewarm and thin, as is it always is in the middle of August, and the sky had little lone clouds separated from each other at great distances. Since I was late and didn’t want to become completely dishevelled, I took the longest strides one could take without breaking into a jog. The elevator was under construction but the stairs were fully functional. I was happy to avoid the possibility of an elevator ride with someone else; The moment where both riders have to tell the other what floor they will be going to, where both riders have to suffocate in that thick, unspoken agreement, where an arm will shoot out in front of you and press the button, almost punching you in the penis, is completely unbearable. Last week I had the privilege of listening to Darrel Weddlebrooke’s day trading lecture; I was his student – captive - for a good twenty floors.

I snuck into the meeting room at 9:05 AM; not bad, but the coffee still had done nothing for the morning drag. The representative had already begun speaking, but by the sound of his voice, lack of charisma, and glib face, I knew I had missed nothing. I took the only open chair out of the seven circular tables with four people seated at each. When I sat down, The other men at the table had not noticed me at all; their eyes were fixated upon the rep with incredible rigidity. Were they dead? In some fatal corporate paralysis? I tried to join them in their fixation but quickly came to return to my original judgement: this was simply another pointless representative who had no information a short DVD or trite email couldn’t convey, perhaps with even more efficiency and charisma; at this point, a punch in the penis would be preferable. I began to examine the other men at the table. They were certainly from the data processing department; they all had those little, desiccated hands that are so apt for keyboard fiddling. The one directly across from me was a portly fellow with a crew cut and the nose that was strikingly similar to that cute girl at the Starbucks off 2nd Northway, a nose certainly not suited for a man but innocently seductive on a woman. The other two were of no noticeable characteristic, completely generic faces that conveyed no interest in anything; I imagined that they lived in some sort of complex where the rooms are small, upright boxes that only allow for you to stand upright in a fixed position. They would stare at the blank wall that was inches from their face, subsist off of a viscous and tasteless mixture of nutrients that was fed in through a tube, and once they became tired enough, fall asleep only to be woken up seven hours later by their programmed instinct.Was my life really any different?

>>7644866
Too much like Cormac McCarthy. Also, Flannery O'Connor has a similar way of describing the world turning from green to white in her book The Violent Bear it Away. I like the part about the blood warming in anticipation.

I’ve fallen into a terrible coma and I am visited by grandchildren of some lost deity that died long ago, forgotten to time and pitied by masked orphans that stand about wandering the countryside. They know of the secrets I keep from my poor sickly wife - she is dying a horrid death and an illness pollutes her fragile form. I think tonight I will end her suffering and smother her with the pillow she embroidered for me long ago when we were in school together. She looked so happy then...so wonderful. I miss that smile. My father once told me that only strong men can do what it takes to protect the happiness of their loved ones and I understand now that I am not a strong man. No, not a strong man, but a weak man made of paper and falling apart all soggy soaked with tears and how sad how very sad. I dreamt of a great ocean that extended far across the sky, and from the sea a gentle voice spoke to me. It did not sound human, not one bit, but it was calming nonetheless. At first I could not understand it’s alien sounds and I was frightened and I wanted to die but then I soon fell in love with it’s presence and it said to me “Release her".

>>7651331
Thanks anon, would you mind going into detail on what you liked? What stood out, what made you keep reading, etc.?

>>7650862
Is there more to this? Or is it just you ranting about not being a rapist?

>>7650750
>>7650760
Thanks.

I intended for it to be at the end of the opening chapter, which serves to describe the lawlessness of the setting. It's not going to be a paragraph of gore, just two or three sentences. I almost want the reader to feel apathetic towards it because that's how the population feels towards it.

Perhaps I'll ditch it then. If nothing else this can prove to be an exercise in creativity.

>>7651492
If its at the end of the chapter then you might be fine. Its only if the serious shit is in the very first paragraph that you might get some negations.

Take Berserk for example, alotta people got turn off just from the very first pages.

>>7651126
On the bad nights I’d hold her and her throat would dry and close from screaming. I could hear the grinding of her teeth. And then the night-terrors made her bite her fingers until she woke up all hazy and covered in blood. “They want to kill me they want to kill me they want to kill me” she whimpered, but not to me. The cuts stayed but she had a glow in her, so they were covered in tattoos of flowers, and symbols, and doodles. She did what memories do on her skin, piling the beautiful and tender over the rough scars. This was how she healed. But it wasn’t enough. Nothing could be enough, no matter how hard she wanted it to be. “It’s Monday,” I replied for the fifth time, as the sun disappeared into night. She’d forgotten about calendars and hours. She felt sick. She became a little lesser, every day. And I felt her heavy, with all the guilt I could keep, surrounded by pictures of life in the room. But we are not there anymore.

We are here, in this hostel a million miles from home, in a bed at eight in the morning. The news give way to cooking shows. Her hand crawls into my shirt, and her lips look up for mine. Since we left she’s made it her mission to feel as much as she can before the time comes to meet our plans. I feel her hand on my crotch, and she bites her dry lips; giggles. I force my mind to keep quiet while I look for the places that make her twitch. We undress, and I know this body so I make her eyes go white and she says thank you and then does her best so that I’ll breathe faster. “Please stay inside me a little longer.” We burrow into each other once again, the cold still gnawing at our toes.