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I need thoughts on my short story

  
 
Lionheart
00:32 / 17.01.04
"The Teller"

It was an early New York winter's dawn filled with a dull reddish sky and pale snow flurries which fell, down onto the dark gray concrete pavements and buildings, and, slowly, laid white blankets onto the cars parked on the sides of the street, unmoving, like beasts asleep. I sat in one of those cars, wrapped in a blanket to keep from freezing, quietly looking through the windshield at the vestibule of some ordinary apartment building. After sitting in my car for the past 2 hours my patience had finally paid off as the front door to the building had opened and, out into the elements, she walked out. She was wearing a black trenchcoat, red scarf, and a bluish wool hat pulled over her blonde hair. Fighting against the gusts of wind and snow she walked away from her building, stepped over a small pile of snow by the edge of the sidewalk and crossed the road to a small diner where she ordered a black coffee ("Not too hot, please."), a toasted raisin bagle with cream cheese, and some scrambled eggs. She then sat in her seat for the next 20 minutes, drinking, eating, and reading the New York Post. Then, at around 7:30 a.m. she stood up, paid her bill, walked out of her diner and got into her car, a red Toyota, waited for the engine to turn over, then the car to heat up, and then she drove off to work.
She took the FDR Drive north and 15 to 20 minutes later, due to the traffic, she pulled into the parking lot of a branch of Wendsworth Bank and then she, Miss Wellington, got out of the Toyota, slammed the door shut, looked around, and then hurried up the steps to the bank's front doors and went in. She would then walk into her workplace, take off her winter clothes, and get ready for her average daily job routine. Working as a bank teller. Meanwhile I have to sit in my car for a few hours, reading, listening to the radio, spending my time looking around, wasting my time, waiting for noon to come around. Time passes slowly when you've got nothing to do. It passes slowly but it passes and then my watch starts to beep and I look down at my watch already knowing that it's going to be flashing 12:00pm. I turn off the radio, put down the ragged novella which I didn't know I was reading and step out of my car. I adjust my jacket and then I close the car door and walk across the street to the parking lot, then to the stairs, the steps, leading into the bank.
It's the beginning of the lunch hour but, lucky for me, Miss Wellington's lunch break only begins at 12:30. There are 2 people in line ahead of me but Miss Wellington is the only teller on duty so I figure that I can wait. And I do. I wait.
The old lady in front of me finally figures out how to fill out a check, thanks Miss Wellington, and hurries off to her grandkids. I step up to the teller window and explain that I would like to make a withdrawal of five hundred dollars. In cash ofcourse. Why else would I be at the bank? I hand Miss Wellington the proper withdrawal slip and ask her if I could get the five hundred in the form of 3 100 dollar bills, 2 fifties, plus 5 twenties. She nods, slightly annoyed, and walks off. I wait for her, my right hand in my jacket pocket, playing with my marker pen. Soon Miss Wellington is back. She hands me the cash, I count it, thank her and bid her farewell. I then leave the bank and walk towards my car.

The Wendsworth bank account in my name had only been in existance since 2 weeks ago, its birth created with the help of the local Wendsworth branch manager working under the direct orders of the bank's board of directors. All this is done in secret, the notice of branch managers opening up large bank accounts for people unknown can attract suspicion from curious bank employees and that curiosity could tip off Miss Wellington to me. I'm here to check out what now seems to be a common complaint emanating from patrons of the bank. The complaint being that the money they had withdrawn from their accounts gets later identified, at other places of commerce, as being countefeit. Fake. Useless. Illegal. Preliminary investigation with the bank's surveillance tapes found a common thread linking all of the victims of the Wendsworth bank counterfeiter. That common link being the fact that all of the victims performed withdrawals with one specific bank teller. A Miss certain 30-year old blonde woman named Wellington. Miss Emily Wellington. And now I've been hired to gather further non-circumstantial evidence of Miss Wellington's wrong-doing and to discover how deep this pool of counterfeit dollars goes. It could all start and end with Miss Wellington or, if luck fails me, the whole case could end up being a trail leading to some of the more "famous" people present in New York City's counterfeitting racket scene. This whole scene has been boiling up lately into a dangerous bubble of impatience caused by the death, of natural causes, of one Lucky Eddie Lucienko. The most powerful numbers runner on the East Coast and New York City's own funny money kingpin. Luckie Eddie upon death named no heirs to his share of the marker and so the racket was now an open field. An open season for throwing up plays for power which were occuring more and more rapidly every week. The pot of fake greens was quickly coming to a turbulent boil and I was hoping that my digging deep into Miss Wellington's little hobby wouldn't drag me into this dangerous game where I'd fall in and end up drowned and boiled.

I sit down in my car and take a deep, long look at the bills. They don't look fake. They don't feel fake. But they don't feel real either. They just feel brand new. Crisp and new. I smell the bills and take the marker out of my jacket pocket. It's one of those counterfeit detecting pens. I trace it along the faces of the bills, one by one. The lines I scribble don't turn out to be amber. They turn out to be black. And black marks mean that the bills are counterfeit. I've now had some fancy artwork in my hands. Artwork that would get somebody 10 years in the slammer. Now all I had to find out was where Miss Emily Wellington had gotten these made.

***

The next day, after I reported in to the Wendsworth bank's regional branch manager, I followed my usual daily routine of following Miss Emily Wellington to the bank where I made sure that she would be away at her workplace for the rest of the day and not too likely to intrude upon me in the midst of my work. After she had walked up those steps and hrough the bank doors I sped off back to her place.
The front door to the building was a snap to open. A NYPL card slipped through the door-crack popped open the latched and I stepped into the lobby of the building. It was a nice lobby, with mirrors on the sides of the red painted walls and a round fluorescent light bulb cause the gold etchings in the walls to glimmer and shine. The floor was white marble and recently washed. I had no time to admire this view so I hurried up two flights of stairs to the third floor and, no sooner nor later, arrived at Miss Wellington's apartment. 2-C. The locks on her door were both pin-tumbler deadbolts. I put on a pair of latex gloves, pulled out a diamond pick and a tension wrench and raked the locks until they popped open minutes later. I then stepped into her apartment, flipped the lightswitch, and shut and locked the door behind me.

The front door of the one bedroom apartment opened up straight into the living room. Standing there I took notice of the barreness of the room. It had no furninishings, no decorations, only a red sofa/couch and a brown television set directly opposite of the couch. Above the couch, to my right side, hung a small framed picture. It was one of those mass produced paintings of a lakeside shore that you can buy anywhere for 5 to 10 dollars. I wasn't too impressed. Mass-produced art didn't do it for me. I flipped the picture over but didn't find anything hidden behind it. I then decided to search the sofa. The plush cushions weren't hiding anything and the only thing present beneath them was a folded-up bed. It, when unfolded, wasn't hiding anything either so I put the pillows and cushions back onto the couch and walked over to the television set. It was plugged in and, after a thorough inspection, nothing was found hidden inside of it. I wrung my fingers and moved onward into the bedroom.

Perhaps I should've went into the bedroom first. Or at least I should've done a preliminary walk-through of the apartment for the whole set-up was right there in the open by Miss Wellington's bedside cabinet. Beside the cabinet, on which rested a phone, there stood a small dark green printing press. Beside it was a stack of unprinted paper and bottles of ink. After examining the printing press I found a bag filled with cash, real bills, hidden away in the cabinet. So this was it. The extent of Miss Wellington's counterfeiting scheme. Every day she would print out a couple of dozen bills of large currency denominations, 20s, 50s and 100s, and she would carry them to work with her. Concealing them probably wasn't a problem for her considering that she was only carrying a few bills at a time. She then would follow her usualy daily routine and take her place in a bank teller window. She would be just doing her job until somebody would decide to make a withdrawal which would require Miss Wellington to hand over large denominations of currency. She would take the bank's money and would pocket it, instead handing the counterfeit bills to the account holder. To prevent bank officials from noticing Miss Wellington did this sporadically, usually to every fifth person making a withdrawal or, on a slow day, to every third person. Then, at the end of her day, she would take the real bank money home and place it in a bag inside her bedside cabinet. Technically in plain view. I sighed a breath of relief. It was obviously a one person racket. I wasn;t going to have any run-ins with any of the local hot-heads trying to corner the whole fake cash building in the city. The ghost of Lucky Eddie wasn't going to end up having me strung up by the balls. I picked up Miss Emily Wellington's phone off the bedside cabinet and dialed the regional branch manager of the Wendsworth bank and told him everything that I had discovered. Then I called the police.
 
 
eddie thirteen
05:59 / 17.01.04
It's pretty brave to put your work up for anybody to read, so I think you're serious about wanting opinions, and I'll be honest.

First of all, if I were you, I'd get a copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. It's a little prissy and snooty, yeah, but it'll help with things like eliminating needless words and sidestepping cliches (stuff like the "local hotheads"...usually, when it comes to stuff like that, all you need to do is ask yourself if you have ever in life heard a real person use the phrase "the local hotheads" -- and, if not, don't use it).

A story like this -- an extended monologue, without any dialogue sequences -- is very hard to pull off unless the narrator's voice is both more compelling and more conversational than what you have here. Usually, it comes out sounding more like journalism than fiction.

Overall, it feels very removed...the narrator doesn't have anything much at stake beyond the successful completion of a job, and nothing at all at stake on a personal level. Even he doesn't think the job is very exciting to do; why would it be any more fun just to read about? (The threat of reprisal from organized crime is only hinted at...it's not much of a presence in the story, and I at least never had the sense he was in danger, as we learn in the conclusion he never was.) If, let's say, you told the same story from Miss Wellington's perspective -- a counterfeiter trying to stay one step ahead of the law -- now you *do* have a compelling subject...because Miss Wellington has something to lose. Your narrator really doesn't. That's the main problem.

The writing itself is solid, with the exception of minor stylistic stuff you can get past with the help of a good book. I'd focus more on character and conflict -- your descriptive abilities, your pacing (if a little slow, but judicious editing of inessential words will speed it up), those are fine. But a good story needs more tension than this. It's kinda hard to care what happens to this guy when he doesn't even really care what happens, y'know? Even if your narrator's jaded as fuck, we need to feel how jaded he is, and understand why, and see him either work at being so disaffected that nothing gets to him, or struggle to make himself give a shit about something. Even in a procedural, like this one, we need some kind of emotional connection to the story...some reason to want to know what will happen beyond idle curiosity. So...work on character is my advice, for what that's worth. Make the guy want something. Make him want her, because his life is so deadly dull but she's kind of exciting, she's a hot young thief and all (though he knows she's bad), make him want the money for himself so he can retire to Tahiti and not have to work a job he hates (though he knows *that's* bad)...either of those are conflicts that could arise logically from the situation you've established. It's just a matter of who the character is. If he's a total paragon of virtue who just does the right thing because it's the right thing, and never even thinks about doing anything else, who cares? Y'know...make the guy a little more human. If you do, then the reader will be more interested in the story; and it'd be a shame for the reader not to be interested in your story, because it's clear that you can write.
 
 
Lionheart
06:22 / 17.01.04
Yeah, somebody else said that the pacing is kind of slow in the beginning but picks up the pace later on. I'm not sure if I want to change that because that's how I envision the story. Like drawing through instructions in a book. You draw a few circles first and then the shapes magically become, with the addition of a few lines, into vivid cartoonish characters.

I feel like I should explain why I used the detective as the narrator. He's got nothing to lose and he's just doing his job. I like that. I don't feel that the readers necessarily have to identify with a character. Nor do I feel that the main character needs to be in danger to make the story interesting. I feel that the nugget of interest in this story lies in the vagueness of its beginning. You, as the reader, want to find out why the narattor is watching the girl and, once the girl's secret is revealed, the question of "What will the detective do next?" arises. Sure the detective's got nothing to lose and he's just doing his job but I find that to be interesting. It reminds me of those forensic shows on the Discovery channel. The shows are intriguing and interesting yet there's absolutly no sense of danger nor, most of the time, any sense of deviation from common procedure. It's just another case, another day on the job. And yet it's interesting. That's what I was aiming for with the story. A simple case, an interesting scheme, and a quick resolution with as little aftershocks as possible.

Now onto the comments about the narration...:

A story like this -- an extended monologue, without any dialogue sequences -- is very hard to pull off unless the narrator's voice is both more compelling and more conversational than what you have here. Usually, it comes out sounding more like journalism than fiction.

I feel that dialogue is over-rated. If the story doesn't call for it, if it doesn't need it, then I don't plan to use it. To be specific, this story didn't need any dialogue. Yes, in a way it is an "extended monologue" but so are most tales when told to you directly by somebody. It's a little job-related story so I can easily imagine some P.I. telling this stoy over a beer at some bar.

Now, please elaborate on your comments on style. I'd like more examples of "needless words and sidestepping cliches." Oh, and the whole "hot-heads" thing, yes I've heard people use those words. By putting in stuff like that one can build up on the relative age of the narrator. In this case the narrator is probably in his 40s and the whole story takes place in the early 90s. Those two facts are not relevant to the story (except, of course, in the factual sense. Large denominations of modern currency are much harder to fake now than before.) but the hinting at those facts seems to add a whole level of detail not otherwise present.
 
 
eddie thirteen
19:04 / 17.01.04
By cliche, I'm not really talking about the obvious "like a deer trapped in headlights" stuff (that isn't here) that a creative writing prof seizes on...it's more the genre-y type stuff that's a little too familiar. I'm more concerned by things like "funny money kingpin" and "pot of fake greens," that -- even if this *is* the way a real-life hardboiled PI would talk (I wouldn't know, not being, y'know, a hardboiled PI in real life) -- sounds way too much like b-movie dialogue. The more I think about it, Strunk and White may not be able to help with that, but a good book on screenwriting would. You might like Lew Hunter.

I'd also watch out for shifts in verb tense. I think the shifts into present here are deliberate (because when telling a story out loud, people often shift into present, and it works well in scenes like the PI studying the counterfeit bills), but it makes things like the PI's overview of the state of organized crime a little confusing...when he says "the whole scene has been boiling up lately," I think he's talking about crime circumstances circa the events of the story, but he could also be talking about the underworld right now, circa '04, well after the events of the story. And it's one thing to tell me directly, but it probably needs to be clearer within the story, too.

I agree that the mechanics of counterfeiting are interesting, but I maintain that fiction is more than that...at least the kind of fiction you're writing here. Someone else might bring up the tropes of meta-whatever, but I think you'd agree that you aren't trying for some kind of academic prose experiment with this story -- this is a detective story, aimed at a general mainstream reading audience, and as such, people expect some kind of emotional content. On an intellectual level, yeah, I was interested to read how one could make a counterfeiting scheme work, but you need more than that, too, in order to engage a reader the way a person who'd pick up an anthology or a crime fiction magazine expects to be entertained. I mean, this could be a very good article, were it true, but as fiction, I think it's missing something.

Technical stuff, what I mean by needless words is exactly that. "After sitting in my car for the past 2 hours my patience had finally paid off as the front door to the building had opened and, out into the elements, she walked out." First of all, we've just been told twice that she's walked outside, in the same sentence -- "out into the elements" and "she walked out." This is not a matter of a writer's personal style; it's just repeating information. Secondly, anyone who sits in his car for two hours is clearly demonstrating patience. We don't need to be told that. Your story might move faster if you were to go over it with a critical eye, find the redundancies, and streamline them out. (This is where Strunk and White comes in most handy.)

To get even more editing-happy, I advise total savagery with certain words and phrases..."out of" can often be "out," "off of" can almost always be "off," "opposite of" is completely unnecessary. The narrator's speech pattern is neither so colloquial nor so distinctive that chopping little words you just don't need would make him sound significantly different, and the little words add up.

On style, apropos of nothing but I forgot to mention it last night, numerals ("the past 2 hours," "the next 20 minutes") are only considered okay by editors in newspaper journalism (where space is at a premium). You want that to be "the next two hours," "the next twenty minutes," "three hundred-dollar bills," etc. I'm not saying this to be a cock; I'm saying it because most pro magazines would say it, and most editors would probably be irritated to see those numbers. I'm sure you can find examples of published stories that break this rule, but probably not very many. (Time, though -- "12:00 PM," etc. -- is done numerically.)

I have to take exception to your reading of the story's opening, though I like what it sounds like you were going for. Maybe it's just because I've read enough crime fiction to know early on and with only a few clues what I'm in for, but I knew from the moment the narrator mentioned sitting in his car and waiting forever and a day that this was a detective. He certainly sounded way too bored and methodical to be, for instance, Miss Wellington's stalker/potential kidnapper. Now it may be that I'm an exception as a reader (I kinda doubt it, though; it's nice to think I'm special, sure, but probably I'm not), but if you think in terms of who your logical audience is -- which is to say, where you would try to sell the story -- chances are it would appear in a collection of crime/detective fiction. And your readers know all this stuff by heart. So, in all likelihood, they'll know he's a PI from the first paragraph, too.

It's one of the old saws of any CW workshop, but something that gets drilled into your head after even a week of one is, "What makes this day different?" Or, put another way, if your PI does these jobs routinely, why he is sitting around a bar telling his friends about *this* one? I mean, yes, this would not be a routine day for me, but it is for him. And you get that feeling, reading the story. So why is he telling it? I don't have a sense of that. And I don't mean to harp on it, but I really, really think determining that would prove the difference between a kinda interesting procedural and a completely engaging story.
 
 
Lionheart
21:27 / 17.01.04
Well, the whole "telling a story during a round of beer" was just an explanation of how I see the narrative being read. As in I "see" it being read in that tone of voice.

To me the point of writing this story is the fact that a lot of detective fiction (the pieces that I've read) deal with what you've said. They deal with the question "What makes this day different?" Instead of the usual divorce case the case they take up leads them into murder and intrigue and stuff. That gets old fast. Imagine a monthly comic book in which every month the world is threatened and the superhero saves it. I can't bear to watch those extreme, usually uncommon, events happen to the superhero every month. I'd rather have the superhero deal with some common down-to-earth problems every once in a while. That's my whole inspiration for writing this story. A detective job that turns out to be easy and "procedural" (though it isn't really procedural cause P.I.s don't usually deal with counterfeiters.) That's why I'm unwilling to change the events of the story or the narrator's/detective's view on the events around him. I want to convey the feeling of no real danger and a relative ease of the case.

Now a small comment bout the way he talks. In my previous post I didn't mean that he talks like that cause he's a P.I. I meant that he talks like that cause that's how he talks. I've met people, living in New York, who speak like the detective without any exageration. So the narrative dialogue is written like those people would talk.

The narrator being a detective isn't really meant to be any big revelation. In my previous post I was just trying to show reasons for interest in the story. I know that it's not a big suprise though I do have to comment that you can't say that the narrator couldn't be a kidnapper because he remained too calm. The narrator here isn't opening his heart to the world. We don't really know what he's feeling other than what he tells us. So if he was a nervous kidnapper you wouldn't necesarrily know due to the fact that he might not choose to tell you, the audience, his state of mind. And, anyways, why do kidnappers have to be nervous?

I also have to completly disagree with your following point:

I advise total savagery with certain words and phrases..."out of" can often be "out," "off of" can almost always be "off," "opposite of" is completely unnecessary.

You just can't do that grammatically. In real life you never say "I stepped out the car" or "I walked out the house". You have to say "out of".

Now "opposite" instead of "opposite of" can work but it doesn't fit with the speech patern. Just like, I believe, Brits don't say "Yeah" instead they say "Yes" it's a speech pattern. The character would say "opposite of" cause that's how he talks.

I also have to disagree with this:

First of all, we've just been told twice that she's walked outside, in the same sentence -- "out into the elements" and "she walked out."

"Out into the elements" doesn't, by itself, mean that she walked outside. But I see your point. What would you suggest I put in its place?

Oh, and what would you recommend as a replacement for ". After sitting in my car for the past 2 hours my patience had finally paid off as the front door to the building had opened and, out into the elements, she walked out."? I don't see how the sentence would work without "my patience."
 
 
eddie thirteen
07:04 / 18.01.04
Well, clearly you can't *always* drop "of." Logic tells you where you need it and where you don't. In the case of "opposite of," it sounds clunky. If you're trying to establish a voice for a character, that's fine; but what you have here sounds less like a distinctive speech pattern than a narrative that would read more or less the same if you shifted it to third person. I'm not saying that you should rewrite the story into some overwrought attempt at dialect or something -- it's just that his voice isn't so idiosyncratic that the reader is likely to say, "Oh...that's just how the guy talks." Which isn't bad, but does mean that style that sounds off is more likely to read like writing that's off than it is to read like you're capturing a unique voice.

I'm afraid I still can't agree with you on the whole deliberately-telling-an-everyday-story tip, but now that I've read your rationale for it, I do start to see what I think may be of help. It is true that in genre fiction the conflicts you encounter as a reader tend to be of the big, melodramatic quality. And I agree that's not necessarily something to be desired, and it's definitely not something you need for this story. The low-key tone of it is fine. But conflict can be low-key, too. It can be entirely internal. If you reread the earlier stuff I wrote, you'll note I didn't say he *had* to take the money, want the girl, etc. ...I just said that if he were tempted, then you'd have a stronger story. This isn't the only way into a stronger story, now, it's just the first thing that crosses my mind. Temptation resisted (or not) is a conflict. The actual plot could remain completely unchanged, but the story would be changed if the detective had a choice to make. And we'd be interested to see what he chose.

The main thing here, though, is that while "conflict" is a word that sounds like Captain America vs. Baron Zemo or some similarly over-the-top shit, that's not what it means at all. It can mean that, yeah. Doesn't have to. It just means you need two forces in opposition. Those forces can be warring impulses inside one person. You don't need explosions or gunfights or screaming girls hanging from helicopters for that.

The "what makes this day different?" standby is not a formula for genre fiction; it's a formula for all fiction. You can apply it to pretty much any story ever written that anyone has ever published, anywhere. It doesn't have to mean "and that was the day aliens landed in my yard"...it can just as easily mean "and that was the day I realized my dad was a complete and total asshole."

Anyway, my point is, it's fine to show that the tension doesn't come from the danger of the case or the detective's struggle to solve it, but the tension does have to come from somewhere. I mean, we feel tension every day. A story without tension isn't a bad detective story -- it's just not a very realistic story. I feel more tension trying to make myself put down a DVD I know I can't afford than this guy does sending a woman to prison for the rest of her life! I totally, totally understand your desire to move away from cheesy genre expectations (hell, I think that's admirable) but there are other ways to tell a story with conflict.

And, no, I can't say that the narrator wasn't a kidnapper because he was too calm, but I can (think I did) say the narrator probably isn't a kidnapper because he's so bored. One could be a sociopath and prepare to abduct a young woman for nefarious purposes with nary a heart palpitation, sure. But a sociopath lacks the capacity for boredom. And I'm pretty sure most people who -- for whatever reason -- found themselves preparing to steal someone off the street would feel at least a little anxiety. There's the fear of getting caught, if nothing else.

I'd try, "I'd been sitting in my car two hours when the front door finally opened and out she stepped, into the elements." or "I'd been sitting in my car two hours when the door opened and out she stepped, *finally,* into the elements." "Two hours" lets us know he's been sitting there forever; "finally" lets us know it's been a drag (but he's been patient...I mean, obviously, or he'd be someplace else).
 
 
Icicle
12:34 / 25.01.04
There seemed to me to be an underlying sexiness to the story, it seemed very slight, and may just be a product of my own mind, but I find the idea of the man watching the woman quite sexy. I found myself wanting the narrator to have a sort of unconscious sexual attraction to the woman, I wonder if you emphasised this a bit more, then this would create more conflict in the story, which I do think is necessary. A conflict between the man trying to be ‘good’ and do his job and get Miss Wellington arrested and being ‘bad’ and desiring her. And the more he watches her perhaps the more he gets turned on!
I know that you wanted to tell an ‘everyday’ story, and I think in an everyday situation, if Miss Wellington was attractive, then a bored detective who was watching her everyday would be very likely to find her sexy.
 
 
Lionheart
15:01 / 26.01.04
I don't know. I don't think that adding an subconcious sexual attraction would create any conflict. In fact it'll be pointless considering that within the story's parameters there can be no resolution to the attraction. I'm forced to ask "So he feels a subconcious sexual attraction, so what?" Ading it won't really do anything to the story.

How about I just make my next story a porno detective story? About a Private detective who lovescats and carries a kitten in his handbag? and his specialty is porno crime cause the porno producers in L.A. don't want to introduce any police presence into their world cause they just don't like cops. I'll call the story "The Private Dick and the Pussy". The pussy being the P.I.'s cat.
 
 
Ender
15:28 / 26.01.04
Lionheart I would love to read the story about the private dick and the pussy, I can see it now on top of the new yorks best sellers list.
That was a witty retort.

But why are you so critical of criticism?

Your story was good, and it was well written, it was. Take heart and confidence that you are an awesome writer. Then remember that you asked people for their opinions on what YOU wrote. So, first remember, that what I say doesn't mean damn thing, who the hell am I?
(but I did say that you are a fantastic writer didn't I?)
Second, what does it matter what any says here? Unless you agree with them, or you let their words in, for better or worse.

Worse is, when someone says stupid or mean things about your story, or even worse when someone doesn't like your story and tries to psychoanalyze you as the writer, and say things like your mother must have touched you in special places when you were a child... Those critics and their stupid and uncalled for wit and self love can go to hell, we don't need that to be better writers.

The better is, when someone reads what you wrote and has enough faith in you to take the time to think of and write a reply to show you the respect that they have for you and your craft. A writer has got to open his heart, and bare those balls buddy, because your words have got to grow, and I know my mine have a long way to grow still.
So don't pay me to me to much mind. I liked your story.
 
 
Lionheart
16:50 / 26.01.04
eh..do I really come off sounding extremely critical of criticism?

I'm not being critical. I'm just explaining why I did something that certain way and stuff. I'm actually accepting all the criticism but I'm not necessarily agreeing with all of it so I give out the reasons why I don't agree with a certain criticism.

By the way, do you think that the first sentence matches the tone and voice of the rest of the story?
 
 
Whisky Priestess
14:06 / 06.02.04
Sorry Lion-o, but you really do come off as being very defensive and unwilling to accept criticism without a damn good fight.

The correct response to eddie thirteen's intelligent points and seemingly infinite patience is to grovel in gratitude for the fact that a sensitive and literate reader has chosen to give you honest, relevant and helpful criticism. As they say in the police ads: "I couldn't".

Which is why I'm simply going to point out that your technical mistakes alone mitigate against your being a "fantastic writer" as someone above says. My advice, FWIW, is to try and sort out the very basics of the *way* you say things (i.e. correct use of grammar, spelling, punctuation) before you say them in front of professional editors, writers and publishers, or they will probably throw out your manuscript after the first paragraph.

There are a lot of good things in your story, but it is not, in the generally accepted sense of the term, well-written; and you need to address that problem.

Not trying to piss on your bonfire, just saying that at this stage you can't afford to reject the good advice that eddie is giving you. Well, not till you sell your first novel and can afford to laugh in our faces, anyway.
 
 
Jack Fear
14:45 / 06.02.04
Agreed.

And the "I was just trying to explain..." thing is bullshit. You're notgoing to be able to stand over an editor's shoulder and "explain" your work as s/he reads it--the work must explain itself.

And frankly, it's a poor defense to say "I meant to do that." If it was a choice, then it was a poor one.

Your job, when receiving criticism, is to shut up, smile, and nod. The reader is telling you what s/he experienced--and in that, the reader is not--by definition cannot be--wrong.

That doesn't mean, however, that you have to take to heart everything that every reader says. A good rule of thumb is this:

Show your story to ten people. If the ten of them all complain about different things, your story is probably okay. If four or more complain about the same thing, you've got a problem.
 
 
eddie thirteen
17:56 / 06.02.04
Awwwwww, man...thanks, Whisky Priestess....

And yeah, I would agree with Jack. Although I wouldn't show my story to those several people until I was good and ready. I recently made the mistake of showing part of a story-in-progress to friends I was sure would tell me nice stuff that would help me find the confidence to finish it, and every last one of them seized on the same things I was doing wrong; in the long run, sure, it was probably good, but that was probably the worst moment to hear things that'd make me panic. So definitely seeking out honest criticism from as many trustworthy sources as possible is a good idea, but...yeah, pick the moment when you feel secure enough about what you've done to actually receive that criticism (not that anyone here needs me to say that, of course...).
 
  
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