tjbond911 said:
Kpt._Rob said:
tjbond911 said:
Kpt._Rob said:
The key to writing fiction is editing until you don't think you can edit any more, and then going back and editing 5, 10, or 20 times more.
For my tastes, the narrator's tone is a little too conversational. I don't find myself particularly interested in the action movie metaphor (which is a bit of a cliche), and the reason is because it's not necessary. All I need to know is that the character is in a room with 16 dead bodies, and that he's trying to figure out what to do. That alone is an interesting enough scenario, you don't need to burden it with prosaic elements. That would really be my critique of everything here, is that the conversational tone means you're giving the reader a lot of information which doesn't help them enjoy the story.
Of course that's just my opinion, and I certainly wouldn't blame you for disagreeing. As a painter if someone looked at one of my Acrylic pieces and told me that it had too much paint and too many brush strokes in it, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves, because that's the way I wanted it. And yet here I am telling you that your story has too many words in it. So take my advice if you want. Regardless of the art form you're working in, the most important thing is that you're passionate about what you're doing, and that you're willing to defend it against people like myself who may criticize your style. If you care enough to do that, then you'll be able to make anything work.
I appreciate your opinion on it but I added the action movie reference because I thought it would add to the humor in the scene. And your right I can probably edit this a lot more but I just wrote it last night. And the conversational tone is supposed to make the story seem more personal, kinda like he's talking to the reader. I've seen it in other books (that use first person) including one of my favorites, John Dies at the End. But I do appreciate what you have to say nonetheless.
Yeah, I've read a couple books in the conversational style in my day, including some of my favorites like The Catcher in the Rye. I've also tried and failed to write in it myself. If you want my two bits, though you may very well not, I think that the conversational first person style is probably one of the hardest styles to successfully pull off. For what it's worth, I think the reason things like the action movie metaphor and the imagined conversation with Colin aren't working for me is that I've seen very similar things done before.
There are a couple things that I think could make these elements work better. The first is that the narrator/character needs a very distinctive personality and voice. Perhaps he has one and I just didn't catch it because the excerpt is so short. That said, the impression I get of the narrator right now is pretty straight forward. What I liked about the conversational style of The Catcher in the Rye is that it's very clear that we're getting Holden's point of view. We're not seeing reality, we're seeing a very subjective version of reality, colored by Holden's considerable biases and attitudes.
The narrator here, however, is a little bit too laid back about his own circumstances, and is rather objective. He's in a pretty dire situation, but he's trying to crack jokes about it to the people who are reading his thoughts. Incidentally, that's another piece of advice I'd give you, the use of subtlety in humor. A narrator who straight up tells us jokes puts you in a sticky situation, because if the joke falls flat then everyone knows it, and it creates internal dissonance. That is to say that if you try to hard to make it funny, you can end up making things exactly the opposite.
I do think that could actually be played pretty tongue in cheek for good effect though. Here we have a narrator who seems way too laid back and is cracking jokes at some pretty bad times, but there's no one to react to this fact. If you have him cracking jokes at bad times that other characters can hear and react to, then it becomes really interesting for the reader because they're in on the realization that the jokes are a part of the narrator's distortion of reality, and that they're actually somewhat more of a coping mechanism.
Of course it could just be that I've become too picky when it comes to fiction. So perhaps my opinions are overshadowed by how difficult I am to please.
No you do make a good point because you're right that I will have to establish a voice for my character. But I'm not going to have my character constantly cracking jokes because the book I'm writing does have a serious tone to it but at the same time I think it would be good to include some humor it. That being said I think the main character will probably make some humorous remarks. But in this situation the humor comes from him thinking about what hes going to do next.
Well that kind of gets back to my original point then. The largest portion of this excerpt is devoted to humor, and I think that if you want to maintain a serious tone, then this part has way too much of it. When you're trying to maintain a serious tone with occasional humorous bits, then the humor has to be quick. If you want a serious tone with little bits of humor, then this section is both unnecessary and distracting in a way that will be jarring. There are only a couple of lines here explaining the seriousness of the situation, while the vast majority is devoted to the character being funny.
That is to say that the tone here reads more like a Deadpool comic (where serious elements are meant to create a framework for humor) than it does like Hellblazer (where there's a serious tone, but the main character is occasionally funny). For serious with a hint of humor, you really want to stick to one liners as much as possible, and there definitely shouldn't be two humor bits so close together.
If you were to break this excerpt down into its component parts, you'll probably see what I'm getting at:
The first paragraph is mostly about the movie metaphor, and at the end he counts the bodies in a humorous tone.
The second paragraph starts with the character asking the audience a couple of rhetorical questions, and then dives into the bit about the imagined conversation with Colin.
The third paragraph is a single sentence long, and consists entirely of the character proposing and then quickly shooting down one solution to his problem.
Only the forth paragraph consists primarily of information we need to know about what's going on.
Paragraph one gives us one important piece of information. Paragraphs two and three only tell us about the ideas that the main character rejected after brainstorming. The forth paragraph is the only one here that really tells us anything important about what the character is going to do.
If I were your editor, and you had told me that you were going for a serious tone with occasional bits of humor, I'd tell you to tell the audience that there are bodies and skip to the part where you're actively getting rid of the evidence (instead of just thinking about how to get rid of it). This excerpt starts in medias res anyways, so it doesn't make sense to start in the boring planning phase of the scene when you can skip it and the audience will be able to fill in the blanks and know it probably happened. The scene could start while he's dragging bodies into a pile and covering them in gasoline, that's a lot more interesting, and there are plenty of places for sharp little bits of humor in such a scene.
I know that sucks to cut a whole scene, but I'm not saying this without reason. Every writing class I've ever taken, and every book on writing I've ever read... they've all said the same thing, which is that when you're writing minimalism is really important. If there's a scene or detail which the audience can just assume happened, then let them assume. You want to tell them the parts of the story they can't figure out on their own.
One of the most hilariously bad things I've ever read was the opening chapter of a vanity press book (AKA, the author paid to have it printed, no publishing house had low enough standards to publish it themselves) which described the main character running down streets and hopping over cars because he was late to work. I mention it because it's a classic example of exactly what I'm talking about. The writer filled an entire chapter with a scene about something really boring (a man being late to work) and he had to create these ridiculous action scenes of the man dodging other pedestrians and braving dangerous construction zones to spice up a boring scene. But there's a much simpler answer which would've made the book a lot better. All he had to do was cut the entire first chapter, and begin the new first chapter with the character running into work out of breath because he was late. We could have filled in how he got there if we wanted, but it's not even important.
That's my advice here, is that you should cut this scene, because it's just a scene about a guy standing around thinking about how to solve a problem which you've had to try and spice up to keep interesting. We (the audience) don't need to know
how he decided to burn down the building. It's not important, and we can easily assume that it's something he did. We just need to know
that he burned down the building. If I were you, I'd start there. That's where the interesting stuff that you won't have to try and spice up is happening.
