Discussion of "The Clarv: Year One" by dr3arms

nice work xd, your really showing some progress! i especially like the fith one you put up.

Hello, friend,

I know there's some fuss about you guys on the forums, but I've come to peek at your work strictly as a writer. This is the same stuff I would say to anyone who posted a piece like this on this site, and I intend it as helpful advice. Feel free to take it or leave it.

First off, you've got some really interesting ideas here. The base story going on has an interesting concept behind it, one that certainly has potential and promise.

I recognize from your previous forum post that you don't like to edit. I can respect that this is your chosen way of approaching writing.

However, this can cause problems if you want anyone other than your mates to read this.

Not that long ago, I hated details. Hated them with a passion. Why? They bored me. What did it matter if a building was blue or green, gabled or two storied or small or whatever? Furthermore, there are too many stories that go so overboard on details that I get bored reading them and skim those parts to get to the action.

However, this left my readers staring at a formless void, unsure of what was going on. When they couldn't get a clear picture in their head, they were lost as to what was going on in the story. I wanted them to look past the scant details and see the story itself, to use their own imaginations, but I came to realize that this just isn't how writing works.

The reader has a job, certainly. The reader's job is to suspend disbelief, to immerse him or herself into the story world being presented.

But the writer has a job, too. The writer's job is to make the reader's job as easy as possible.

I was failing at that job. I'd write about the characters getting into a car, and the reader would be left thinking, wait, there's a car here? I thought they were on the second story of a house! And so on. Every time there were jumps like that because of my lack of details, the reader got a little jolt, a hiccup, so to speak, that bumped him/her out of the story and made them focus on the words themselves rather than the story itself. They wanted to be immersed, they wanted to read the story, but they kept getting kicked out of it by these jolts.

I'm gradually learning to add more details, to flesh things out a bit so the readers can remain in the story without getting jolted out. The key is maintaining balance between too many details and too few.

I say all this so you understand where I'm coming from, and that I understood you PERFECTLY when you said that you want to reader to look past the words and see the story.

The problem is, your unedited writing is just as jolting as my lack of details was.

I read this piece, and found myself constantly going back and re-reading lines. Whether it was 'candy' spelled 'cnady,' or the lack of breaks that let me breathe (as in, your entire piece consists of only two sentences - the lack of periods keeps the reader moving on without the relief of a breather), it's difficult to read. When I read the line, "that barley hold it all together," at first I thought you were saying this was some sort of farming community that relied on the barley harvest to keep it going. I had to go back and re-read before I realized that you just misspelled 'barely'.

Again, I'm not saying this to be mean or pick on you or anything like that. I'm trying to show you that your lack of writing conventions makes it difficult for readers to be immersed in your work, to enjoy the story for what it is. I kept getting jolted out of the story, and that made it really hard for me to read, much less enjoy, what was going on.

Basically, writing is a craft, and there are basic conventions in place - things like capitalization, punctuation, syntax, grammar, etc. I know you don't like nit-pickers, and I know I've been guilty of that (though I do it more for contest entries than in general pieces on the site). But please understand that there's a big difference between someone who will get on your case because one comma is not where it should be, and those who let you know that you need to pay attention to at least the basic conventions.

Now, some things you can ignore, if you so choose, and still have a readable story. Capitalization, for instance, doesn't prevent the story from being readable (though it would make it hard to tell when you're talking about a person's name, for instance, if there are no capitalizations and you're not using names familiar to English speakers). So if you and your mates don't want to fuss with capitalization, that's certainly your choice. Just understand that if you want the other writers on the site (and agents... and publishers...) to take you seriously, then you need to show that you take writing seriously. A lack of respect for writing conventions show that you may be serious about the story, but you are not serious about writing.

As far as making your work readable, I advise writing on a word processing program that will at least help you identify most misspellings or grammar issues that might be jolting to the reader.

One final example: look at xd's title on the list of chapters following this one - 'dan jorg, evil and good pure and crystal lake.' I'll skip the issue of not knowing who or what dan jorg is (my instinct says it's a name, but the lack of capitalization... as mentioned... leaves me clueless) - but it's not too much of a worry, since most titles include unknown elements that the reader must read the story in order to learn about. But the 'evil and good pure and crystal lake' has me totally lost. Is there supposed to be a comma between 'good' and 'pure'? Or is something supposed to be 'good pure'? Is this all describing the lake - it's an evil, good pure, crystal lake? You see where I, as a reader, am totally lost. Writing conventions like capitalization and punctuation would help clarify that title so that the reader isn't totally lost.

Again, this is just my advice. Take it or leave it. If this is just something for you and your mates to enjoy, that's fine. But if you want other people to be reading it and enjoying it, then you may wish to make it easier for others to do so.

I glanced at some pieces written by your mates and noticed that they write the same way you do, so rather than me writing this whole comment four times, would you mind sharing it with them? Thanks.

Like I said, you've got some great ideas here. I just encourage you, that if you want to be taken seriously as a writer on this site, to write like a serious writer.

(By the way - if you really want other people joining in and getting involved, then I do strongly encourage being more active in the site - not in terms of putting stuff in the forum, but in terms of reading other people's work and commenting on it.)