Grassroots Disc, JimHawkins 1/23/05 SDC Common queue

[jimhawkins]

Dear People
this is my story and here is the link http://english.literotica.com/stori...y.php?id=180590

Please read it then read these comments.

I tried to do something different then the pure sexual story. I wanted to develop the charectors as two people worried out of their minds by their disabled children (and I have cousins who have disabled children -its not supposed to be a hereditary condition but its affected 3 2nd cousins and I think thats just a bit much to be chance) who have lives which are pressured by all sorts of things. He was meant to be a very conservative type. a quiet provincial businessman, the sort who if he hadnot had a disabled child would be the Rotarian, perhaps a member of the city Council and if I continue (And some of the feedback has asked me to write another chapter) I hope to bring that out more. She was meant to be more outgoing and more free spirited.

I welcome comments. Penelope Street has already sent me a letter telling me she didnt like the array of statements at the beginning and suggesting a better way in future. Thanks Penny.
Now its up to you all.

Please prick my balloon gently, this is my first story ever in any forum and so far its rating 4.47 which I think isnt too bad.

this is the substitute thread see my message on the main SDC

 

[Op_Cit]

Link don't work, I think your copy paste put some dots in where words should be...

This should work: http://english.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=180590

 

[Op_Cit]

You're on the right track with structuring dialog in terms of not saying "he said/she said" when not necessary. And because some of it comes off right and natural and other parts are stilted, I think you're probably getting there/moving in the right direction.

I don't think I'm all that good, so take what you can from this feedback:

---
The first paragraph was awkward and at a minimum could be broken into two or three by shifts. Try to trim down explanation.

---
He turned off Bourke Street into a hotel. "Hmmm there's a convention for parents of intellectually disabled children. I wonder if I'll find out something that might help us with Bronwyn?" He read closer.

Too obvious sounding. Try something like:

He turned off Bourke Street into a hotel. A flyer anounced a convention for parents of intellectually disabled children and (his daughter?) Bronwyn came to mind. Then he saw the word autism and he moved on..

(or somesuch...)

---
The shift between perspectives gets awkward. Try to do it all from one perspective and indicate what other characters might be thinking by their actions. Phrases like "her eyes came up to meet his and lingered..." can indicate another's thoughts while not leaving his point of view.

---
More of the thought expressions continue to sound awkward, try to use behavior description on the focus of perspective even.

It may be easier to write in the fashion you have with respect to thoughts. As an exercise, you might try doing this as draft one and then make a second pass. In the second pass make it a goal to eliminate every thought and replace it with a describing action (or just make it gone). Then see how that sounds, then go back and add thoughts where only absolutely necessary.

(I'm no expert, have no idea how good that last advice is, but it's what I'd do.)

---
I think it's good to use dashes or elipses at certain points like:

"Well Mrs. Hale--"

"Margaret, please." She smiled warmly.

To indicate the interuption better (reader doesn't have to think "did something get left off because of lack of puctuation?")

--
"My daughter gets a health card which means the government pays for almost all her medicines. We pay a nominal $2 for each prescription. We also have a ..."

Not sure yet if these facts are pertinent to the story or an underlying message you have as an author. Layed out in this way they come off a bit as a lecture, perhaps intersperse them as dialog with the female character asking or drawing details out.

---
Vague feedback here: I think you need more prose that describes/indicates his emotional state earlier on in the story (to give me the idea he's on the edge or beat down by life).

---
Continuity problem in the next:

"I'm 48... rich... successful... a good citizen"

Doesn't jive with his earlier detail on insurance and costs: if he's rich I don't think he'd obsess over costs (or even know what the $ were.)

----
Somebody else's advice (Rumple's?): read your dialog out loud.

---
OK, the sex stuff:

I'm not good at that, but I saw some things in what you did that would be hot. It seems you want to show that the woman is a bit conservative/repressed like the man and she is transforming during the sex: becoming wilder than she ever had in the past.

If so, spend more time indicating it, building to that and having her cross that line into being more wild/vocal. That's erotic to me.

Also less dialog in this part would be good.

---

OK, that's about a penny and a half worth of feedback, hopefully you'll get some value out of it.

In general, your writing doesn't suck. By that I mean, so many people I see writing here are so very far from being passable that I don't want to send any feedback. Your writing seems to indicate that you have learned and are learning, and I think I can see where you might go.

Man that sounds pompous, hope you get what I'm really trying to say. (I think my writing is substandard).

OC
Sorry for jumping in before.

 

[Poussin]

.....

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Well, this is going to be difficult to say withot sounding insensitive. I think I understand what you were trying to do in making your characters more real by giving them real life problems, but for me at least, the combination of autism with pornography just doesn’t work, and I have to say that I read the story with growing incredulity, thinking “Oh my God! Don’t tell me these people are going to fuck!”

Let me say at the outset that my brother-in-law is autistic, and so I know how difficult and heart-rending autism can be and how it affects the people who’ve been touched by it. I’m sure what you were trying to do was show the healing and redemptive power of sex for people who’ve been saddled with this tragedy, but in my view this is a case where the background of the story just overwhelms the foreground and makes the sex seem almost trivial and beside the point. My real focus remained on them as struggling parents and not as lovers, and I for one couldn’t stop thinking about their kids.

I don’t think it helps that you get into a rather detailed discussion of treatment options available to them and the way the national health systems compare, which anyway you slice it is not the kind of talk that sets the scene for some hot and randy sex. In any case it hardly seems necessary to the telling of a sex story. It’s informative, but it makes the piece read like a lecture on the difficulties of caring for autistics that suddenly veers into the bedroom for no real apparent reason, and I found it very jarring. The two things just don’t go together, especially at the end, where the implication seems to be that both of them have decided to dodge the conference so they can spend time in bed together, as if suddenly their kids didn’t matter.

Content aside, I think there are some problems in the way the story’s told too. The thing that first jumped out of me is the way you change the point of view at the beginning of the story. It seems at first that the story’s going to be told from John’s point of view. We’re privvy to his thoughts and see things as he does, but suddenly we jump into Margaret’s head and start hearing her thoughts. This is what they refer to as “head-hopping” in writing, and it’s something that most authors try to avoid. It’s not unusual for a story told in third-person omniscient to reveal the thoughts of other characters to us, but in this case it seemed extreme: I mean, we were really inside their heads. It’s always better if you can convey a person’s thoughts by the way they act rather than by telling us what they’re thinking, because it puts us in the story with the main character and forces us to try and figure things out along with him. It’s a way of drawing us into the story.

There were a lot of comma problems at the start too, and a bit too much distracting detail (why not just start the story where John notices the conference? Why tell us about his business meeting if that doesn’t enter into the story?). But once the story got going and you hit your stride, most of these problems disappeared, or at least I didn’t notice them, which is good. It’s pretty common for stories to start out rough, and once past their meeting, I thoughtit flowed pretty well and you handled their growing intimacy nicely.

I did have trouble with how talky they both were when making love. I might be able to buy this kind of verbal blow-by-blow description from one of them, but having both of them talk this way just seemed like pushing it to me. I just don’t associate that kind of behavior from a conservative middle-aged businessman, and there were parts where they were obviously telling each other what they were doing solely for the reader’s benefit.

But really, all that stuff is minor. The big problem for me was the association of the autism with the wild and carefree sex. For me they just didn’t belong together, and I’m afraid that put me off the story from the start.

---dr.M.

 

[Penelope Street]

My first concern regarding 'A Weekend in Melbourne' is the opening. Both main characters are introduced in a passive fashion amid an abundance of information, most of which is either redundant or extraneous.

I was worried this pattern might continue, but once the characters get together there's some decent interaction. Some distracting bits too, like whose medical plan is better. Sure, they might discuss that, but does it really advance to the plot or characterization?

When they get around to discussing the children, there were some lines that jumped out in a good way:

"Damn it I hate crying... I hate losing my self control. It does no one any good at all. It's so pathetic..."

"No one can help... people feel embarrassed... people at St Paul's... the church we go to... say Bronwyn's improving..."

"The day she was born" he said heavily. "It was a Sunday night; Bronnie was born about 9.30 in Bendigo hospital. I was there..."

"... they haven't changed nappies on a 10 year old..."

All those were solid insights into this couple's ordeals. That last one reached inside and got me. Very touching. But it's a double-edged sword that. Just when I begin to feel for the parents and their children, I'm supposed to switch gears and enjoy an erotic scene. Not me. I couldn't imagine they would either.

Reading the sex scene separate from the conversation, I think it works to a point. I could believe two persons unfamiliar with one another might chatter like that, both to ease their anxieties and as a practical means to discover what the other one likes. Initially it also worked as an effective mechanism of conveying information to the reader, but after a while it got a bit tiresome.

I found it interesting Poussin thought sentence that begins "I hate hospitals... they make you feel so helpless..." would have been more effective cut short; I liked him rambling a bit there. On the other hand, I thought the line "Well let me be predictable and ask how do you like Australia?" was clunky, yet Poussin thought it clever. Just goes to show, as if we needed proof, how many diverse reactions you will get from individuals reading the same story.

A couple of other reviewers mentioned shifting from one character's thoughts to another. This did not bother me a bit. The amount of internal monologue in the opening section is sometimes distracting, but I consider it a valid use of third person to switch characters. That said, this appears to annoy a number of readers, including one of my regular editors.

Most noticeable among the other comments, for me at least, was that Dr. Mabeuse and I had nearly the same reaction to the shift from discussing the children to having sex. No real surprise there, as he and I tend to agree often. So much so, I'm even starting to look forward to disagreeing with him.

Still, it did lead me to wonder if anyone else experienced the same reaction. The public comments appeared, on the whole, to support the idea that two persons sharing such similar ordeals might be inclined to share more. I'd be interested to hear other's ideas regarding this issue and, if it is a stumbling block of sorts, what else might have worked.

For me, what might have worked better: The man has to leave in a hurry to catch the next train; the couple quickly arranges to meet again. During the second meeting, they discuss their relationships or their dreams, anything except the children. Focusing more on one another, an attraction develops. I think I would have been more prepared to believe that scenario.

It must I think be noted that a weak effort cannot generate this kind of reaction. If Dick and Jane meet, say "Hi", then go off and hump like bunnies, well, who is to say they would or wouldn't behave that way? A protagonist has to have character before they can be out of character, right?

I sent a PM addressing some of the more mundane issues such as punctuation.

Take Care,
Penny

 

[jimhawkins]

Dear people
thanks for your comments. Can I answer Dr Mabese please? I drew the basics of the male charector from one of my cousins. As I wrote in my intial post there is some odd quirk in my family in that 3 of my second cousins (they are all descended from my grandmothers sister) each have a child with hydrocephalous. This is not supposed to be an inherited disability... but 3 out of about 30 is a big number when HS is only found in 0.03% population. Another 2 cousins of my generation and my sister have epilepsy which is often associated with HS. These cousins are scattered all over the globe... Australia NZ and Canada... and when they get together (As they did in a family reunion last year) they talk about medical things (treatments costs health systems) till the rest of the family switches off. That bit of dialogue was drawn almost from my memory of the cousin who I drew on. He is very religous...upright (And uptight too) and lives in a country city in Australia but not Bendigo. I am sure he has never never even considered having an affair.

Thanks for the comments too about the transistion and how it didnt work and how a slower approach might have worked. I shall bear that in mind if I write again.

But thanks most of all for the comments about the charectors being ...well sort of believeable and realistic enough to say they shouldn't "hump like bunnies".That is most encouraging.

Thank you all for your help.

By the way the rating is still currently 4.47 after 55 votes not I hope too bad for a first effort.

 

[Penelope Street]

So the male character in the story is based on a real life person? And this man (the real one) would never, in the author's opinion, have an affair. I know it's something akin to comparing apples and oranges, but is it nonetheless interesting that some readers thought it worthy of a raised eyebrow when fictional man broke his wedding vows?

As for the section where the characters discuss health coverages, sure that might happen. I think it maybe seems less realistic because they don't discuss it in more depth. When my love and I visit family in Canada, we have on occasion discussed various economic and social differences, including medical plans. But just because ordinary persons discuss these types of things doesn't mean I think it makes good dialogue in a story. And I love lots of dialogue.

I know I mentioned the summary paragraphs in the introduction as possible weaknesses, but I think a summary paragraph to cover the "boring" parts of a conversation works just fine. Something along the lines of:
"... what resources you have in Australia?"
"Oh," John began. "I can't fault our health care system, I think it's the best in the world."
The two proceeded to discuss the various merits and shortcomings of health care in each country, delving into such details as prescriptions costs and waiting lists. In spite of the dry topic, both found the exchange stimulating. So engrossed were they in the conversation that the passage of time wholly slipped their minds, until John looked at his watch.

Also on the subject of realism, just because a reader finds a story unrealistic, doesn't necessarily mean it's a poor story. When you think about it, most Lit stories are well beyond the realm of credible. For example, CharleyH's 'Midnight Tango' contains, from my perspective, some far-fetched moments. It also has a modest rating with the voters. Yet I remember it months later. I think that says it has more to offer than some more realistic, and perhaps higher rated, stories.

I try not to place too much faith in the rating according to voters. The scoring is hardly scientific and even if there may be some logic behind it, one has no idea who the voters are and what caused any one of them to vote a given way. There are many stories carrying 4.7+ scores that don't even pretend to be anything other than gratuitous tripe; while one can find other stories with less than 4.5 scores that are true gems.

A better yardstick than score is how the story was received by the target audience. Which begs the question, who did that author intend to reach with this tale?

 

[Pure]

bump

 

[jimhawkins]

bump? does this mean I have done something wrong? Or what is being bumped?

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

bump? does this mean I have done something wrong? Or what is being bumped?

Jim,

All "bump" means is Pure made a post to your thread just to get it back near the top of the list; he, "bumped it up."

Now about your story. First of all, congratulations of a fine first effort. I will not, under threat of death or worse, let anyone see mine.

Reading the story, it was obvious this was personal. Most writers begin that way. Almost w/o fail, it's a mistake. We simply have too much invested in the story to view it with complete objectivity. As a result, the RL incidents have a tendency to overwhelm good fiction.

As you probably know, the fact something "really" happened, does not mean it will make for a good element in a story. The first German artillery shell to land inside Leningrad, is supposed to have killed the zoo's only elephant. Try working that into a story and have anyone believe you.

My advice would be to not give up on this story, but to put it aside for the time being. Continue to write while working on mastering the techniques of fiction. Then whenever you get the urge, go back and see if there's anything you'd do differently with this story.

Good luck with your writing. I hope to see more of your work here at the SDC.

Rumple Foreskin