Literary Fiction S.O.S.

[Bleedyearsnixon]

So I'm struggling to write a story that would fall into a generic literary category. I'm finding it hard to figure out if the tone is right (i.e. too pessimistic) and if there is too much exposition in the story that could easily be replaced by scene. It's a careful balance and I'm not sure how I'm doing, so would one of you kind people mind reading the first few pages of this story and let me know what you think? It's not erotic, and aspires to fit into the literary genre.

It's about a roadtrip..
PM if you're up for it, and thank you in advance.

 

[CWatson]

Okay, first off: it's good forum etiquette to not just tack your story to the board. Instead, what you'd do is ask if anyone wanted to look at your piece, and then arrange with them to send it privately. Especially if the piece isn't erotic, since that's kind of our stock in trade here.

Second off: use your spell-checker. Honestly, if you can't be bothered to spend two minutes fixing things, it's hypocritical to expect us to spend even one minute reading. "Occasionally" has two L's, and "souvenirs" only one E. And that's only your first paragraph.

Third off: if you must post things here on the board itself, you'll need to account for what I'm sure you noticed after you hit "Submit": that the Internet does not support indentation, which is why we double-space paragraphs instead. You didn't, and your story looks like a huge slab of words. It is very easy to get lost in it. I was thrown off somewhere around the chainsaw: I lost my place and had to go back and figure out where I had come from. If you are going to post something here, you have to have to have to take the time to turn all your "ENTER, TAB"s into "ENTER, ENTER"s. Either that or people just won't bother reading.

I know you're thinking, "Well, none of this has anything to do with my story, and whether it has literary merit." And you're right. But that's kind of the thing: this might be the next "War And Peace", but nobody's going to bother wading through it if you don't make it easy to parse. Readers are a snotty, entitled lot, but they have the money, so you have to play by their rules.


Now, as to literary merit: aside from getting lost in the chainsaw paragraph, I thought it was pretty good. I don't see why you think it's too pessimistic; I mean, you haven't even killed off your main character yet, so you're far from the maximum of what readers are willing to put up with. Besides, from what I could tell, your narrator is kind of bummed out at the moment, fleeing the memory of something painful; it would make sense for him to be cynical.

Your mains problem are, again, technical: you're doing a lot of comma replacement, and a fair amount of tense-swerving. By which I mean, you switch back and forth between past tense, present tense and even some in-between ones. (Wish I knew what their damn names were.) You have also noticed that commas are versatile little creatures and can stand in for almost all the other punctuation mark. That's fine to a point, but sometimes it's obvious that they're trying to fill somebody else's shoes, and under those circumstances you should really go back to the original mark. Your third sentence, for instance, should have a semicolon instead.

Anyway, that's all I got. Probably enough to be going on with.

 

[Bleedyearsnixon]

Okay, first off: it's good forum etiquette to not just tack your story to the board. Instead, what you'd do is ask if anyone wanted to look at your piece, and then arrange with them to send it privately. Especially if the piece isn't erotic, since that's kind of our stock in trade here.

Sorry about that gaffe, fixed in the OP edit.

Second off: use your spell-checker. Honestly, if you can't be bothered to spend two minutes fixing things, it's hypocritical to expect us to spend even one minute reading. "Occasionally" has two L's, and "souvenirs" only one E. And that's only your first paragraph.

Again, sorry about this, I just switched over the Open Office and forgot that the spell checker was shit

Also thank you for the feedback regarding the story.