Writing Works

bebarce

I'm hoping to write a few stories that I will eventually tie together. The stories revolve around 5 characters each offered power by an unknown entity. 4 choose to use this power, while the 5th rejects it. Each character has a radically different background.

I wanted to get your opinion on what i've written for 1 of my characters.

tapeslinger

Well, this is an interesting character study/vignette.

I think I would need a little more context to really pick out what this is for, but I can appreciate this as an exercise.

ElJeffe

What she said. Also, I hate the name "Mandy Jo".

As to the writing, you need to trim a lot of fat. For example:

Regardless of this fact however, Mandy Jo drunk down the brew in greedy gulps.

The first five words are all kinds of redundant. Just make it "Regardless" or "However" or even go minimalist and use "But."

bebarce

Thank you for the advise! I'm definitely going to expand on each character as the story continues, I just posted this bit to see if my writing has improved since my last attempt.

Mandy Jo is a somewhat intentionally irritating nick name for Miranda Josephine ________. I'm purposely holding off on describing the husband in any intimate detail this early in the game. Mandy Jo is a name tacked onto her by her roommates. The shedding of it, will hopefully subtly play into the transformation she is to take. I hate describing this as somewhat of an adult variation of a Cinderella story, but the start of it at least is for this character.

I suffer from verbal vomit in anything I write. Thank you for pointing that out. I need to work on streamlining my thoughts.

Enc

If she looks like she is 50 and smells or urine and sweat, why would someone want to pay to sleep with her? If they are the ones selling her body, why are they disgusted and repulsed by the customer? Depraved folk aside, it doesn't seem to jive with the rest of the setting.

bebarce

My reasoning? The reasons will probably vary based on the customer, but the most likely options are that it's cheap, it's discreet, it's local, and there is a fetishist unorthodox fascination that probably ties to domination, humiliation, or outright curiosity. From the description that some of my friends have given me of terrible strip joints they've visited, she's actually not too far off the mark.

As for the the the elderly women. Diane has a general disgust for everything. She treats every person she encounters with contempt unless it is a person she needs to associate with in order to maintain their current situation. To Mandy's husband, and to the counselors that visit, she's a darling grandmother.

Phillus simply doesn't feel. She indulges in whatever small comforts she finds, and has no concern over the treatment of Mandy so long as the cigarettes, bourbon, and pastries keep flowing.

The house is one of those state run mental care homes. Rather than institutionalize patients, nonviolent or sometimes less violent patients are placed in houses like these. To that point, with the exception of their actions, and mandy jo herself, both the setting and the other two characters are based off of real people.

Enc

I'm not saying these things aren't possible as things that exist, but insofar as things that exist here. To rephrase my earlier statement: In the scope of your narrative, they don't come across as reasonable or coherent entities within the world you are painting. Those questions are evident in my reading of the text and the clues listed within your story just don't answer them satisfactorily to me.

Everything you explain there isn't in the text, so can't really be used to answer it. You have to make it plausible within the text, and right now I'm not seeing it. With some work, it could be really dark, edgy and sickening but you'll probably need a draft or two more focusing on making it a bit more internally coherent.

Enc

Or, in a shorter answer:

If she looks like she is 50 and smells or urine and sweat, why would someone want to pay to sleep with her? If they are the ones selling her body, why are they disgusted and repulsed by the customer? Depraved folk aside, it doesn't seem to jive with the rest of the setting.

Answer these somewhere in your text: by clues, dialog, posture, narration, or however.
Or cut/change/retool them.

bebarce

I hope to expound on that as I continue the story. Again, I was possibly in error by posting such a small segment. I figured that was the general practice. I didn't want to bombard the board with a single heavy post. This is about 1/3 of the chapter that I've written, but the remaining 2/3rd is still incredibly rough. I picked a point to stop because it is a pause before the story jumps to after the john finishes.

I cleaned up that first part as much as I thought might be presentable, but still have to wade through the rest of what I've written in order to make it consumable.

Unless what you mean is that by this far into the narrative, I should have already answered those questions?

Enc

Not necessarily, if keeping those details serves some deliberate purpose. But if you are trying to portray people as horrid human beings, doing these things with no justification and for no apparent reason is going to be jarring to your reader.

Even antagonists should have consistency when kicking the dog (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KickTheDog ). Your audience will have a set of expectations, and for an American audience typically dignified old men in dressy clothes don't pay cheap money for ugly, dirty, mentally unbalanced whores- they pay for a pretty naive/professional thing somewhere. A drug addict or poor, depraved trucker might and be believable, conversely. Those are the expectations the Audience will bring with them from reality and other media. For example, think about Kill Bill. Would the "My name is Buck, and I like to Fuck" scene have worked if the Buck was portrayed Gene Hackman dressed in a nice jacket and fedora?

That said, there is no reason that the old man wouldn't do so in the course of your story, given some sort of motivation but you would need to add that to the work as it defies common logic.

As it's an except, it's hard to gauge on a larger scale. If the old man and Diane's actions are not specifically relevant to Mandy Jo outside of showing her as being in a horrible place, then I wouldn't be very satisfied with consistency after reading. If the old man were someone very relevant and his raping of her were personal or motivated in some terrible fashion, then it would make the horror all the more real. But that would need to be specified somewhere.

So it all depends on what you are going for and what else you are including in the story. You can do all sorts of things with this scene, and a good place to start as a whole.

ElJeffe

To expand on what Enc said, the information that is missing isn't information that can be simply added down the road because the issue with not making sense is present now. You don't need to describe every aspect of her being in the first 500 words, but you need to make sure that the reader is certain that answers are forthcoming rather than you just not knowing the answer or not bothering to tell them.

As it stands, you paint a picture of this fat, ugly, aged-looking, reeking beast of a woman and then nonchalantly describe some guy paying money to have sex with her. That is not a thing that happens normally, and yet you give no indication that you realize this is the case (in the writing, I mean).

bebarce

So I wrote a poem for my wife for Valentine's Day. I was curious as to whether or not it's a decent poem, since regardless of her opinion, she would tell me she liked it.

Steadily she rows,
Through storm tossed seas,
Against bitter winds,
She pushes her craft forward,
Inch by inch,
And her beauty shines through because of it.

Muscles aching, arms flexed,
She rows,
Determined, undaunted, unflinching.
Though body weak, and breath be ragged,
She is not moved from her course.
She is not lost,
And her beauty shines through because of it.

And land. Sweet promise of home,
A dream barely whispered in the fury of the storm,
Of life not lived, unseen, unfelt.
And yet she rows,
And her beauty shines through because of it.

bebarce

A while ago I wrote a children's story and then narrated an audiobook version of it. A friend of mine will potentially illustrate it. Could you tell me what you think?

http://www.firstaudiobooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Once-More-Round-the-Apple-Tree.wav