My opus

[AngeloMichael]

Hello,

I am new author and I would like to introduce myself. I have been reading the stories here for the last six months or so and there is really a lot of great talent here.

I finally completed my first story and would greatly appreciate any feedback on some or all of it.

Soul Belongings

It is rather long, but if I can be excused an author's bias, I, of course, feel it's quite good and I'm proud of it. I try to delve into my characters emotional feelings as much as the physical, and there is a great deal of both, hence the length.

I hope those of you who choose to read it enjoy it.

I just would like to say I feel very fortunate to have found a site where I can submit my work among a host of other talents, and hope it is well received.

Thanks everyone!

 

[dr_mabeuse]

It is long. It's very, very slow too, and you lost me after the first page. I skimmed some after that, and it looks to me like Julie gets into a story within-a-story, which is something I find irritating, especially when it's also very long. Meanwhile I kept on waiting for something to happen.

Getting into your characters and their psychology is commendable, assuming your characters have enough going on inside to make them interesting. I found Roger and Miranda to be straight from Literotica central casting: two earnest, attractive young people who happen to be related and who would soon go to bed together under one pretext or another and probably discover the pleasures of incest. I'm willing to bet that they do so without any psychological regrets or second thoughts too, and they have marvelous sex together.

In the mean time there's an awful lot of extraneous material in here. Do we really need a desciption of the layout of the beach house? Do we have to know what kind of food they bought? Or the lecture on drug policy and Roger's feelings about breast implants? I would say no.

You write well, but your dialogue is stilted and artifical: Roger says, “Well, Miranda is adept at business, and I’ve developed a predilection for the study of law..." People don't talk like that. at least not where I come from.

The real problem is, though, that there's just too much. It needs to be pared way down so that the story can show.

---dr.M.

 

[Rainbow Skin]

It begins very well. The writing seemed flawless: word choice, pace, rhythm and variety, characterization, everything seemed perfect.

I glanced down at the bottom: eight pages! I almost never read ones that long. But, if your style lived up to its beginning, I was prepared to with this one. Unfortunately, weaknesses did begin to creep in, and dr_mabeuse gets them all spot-on. For this reason I stopped reading at the bottom of page 2, because I knew pretty much the kind of thing I'd be getting, and it didn't seem worth reading all eight pages just in case it became different. (I seldom read an entire story here: don't take this too personally.)

The details of food etc.: Nothing wrong with lots of detail, as long as the story has hooked us and the detail is fleshing out what interests us -- characters or situations. But this is background detail, before you've established what the story is about. It's delaying the story at this point.

The rant about drugs: We'd expect anyone listening to this to be bored or embarrassed, but the siblings just accepted it and agreed. There has to be a good reason for including such a long, irrelevant speech. Without it, it sounds like not the character's but the author's rant on drugs. She's a free spirit, someone who would say such things, and someone who would do such things: granted, you establish that, but it's awkward. There needs to be more difficulty bringing the others into this violation of social convention.

Central Casting: And that, I'm afraid, is the problem with the characters. I probably decided I couldn't finish the story when I hit that word 'predilection'. This guy is prosy, as a character, but also unrealistic. They're also too much tools of the author. They just do whatever the author finds convenient for the plot, without having a sense of inner depth, of personality or individuality. All the talk about drugs and family seems superficially like it's revealing them, but it's actually just revealing their background. I don't know from that how they'll behave, except that the erotic part of the plot is going to go smoothly as we've read so many times before.

You're quite a good writer, no doubt about that. You've got most things down pat. But there are problems with the overarching point of the story, how it's moved along, and what the people are really doing in it.

 

[AngeloMichael]

dr_mabeuse and Rainbow Skin,

I want to thank you for your helpful and candid analyses of my story.

I appreciate your comments and have found them very useful.

I am sorry you both couldn't see the need in finishing the story but considering its length, I quite understand why. Thank you for taking the time to read what you did and sharing your opinions granting me the benefit of your insight.

That both of you complimented my writing skills as well, I take as very encouraging and you have my sincere gratitude for that.

I understand I can't please all the people all the time, I certainly acknowledge that this is an imperfect piece, and I value the input I've received, but I'd just like to make a few remarks about where I was coming from when I wrote certain parts of the story that came into question.

The beginning of the story I found problematic as well, I felt I just couldn't get into the flow of the writing, but once the plot advanced a bit I felt things went along much more smoothly and nicely.

Through all the writing courses and workshops I've taken, one thing has been hammered into me time and time again. Be descriptive! Be descriptive! Be descriptive! But I do see how some of my descriptions are superfluous and should be reduced or removed altogether.

With Julie's rant on drugs, she went through a very traumatic ordeal with her father, and her strong feelings on the subject is a prominent part of her personality. I saw no reason why she wouldn't share her view, especially with those she feels she is really forming a bond with.

As to Roger and Miranda so readily agreeing with her, it was established that they had both come to like her rather quickly, and saw her as an influential figure. I don't think it is that unlikely for them to agree with her. Maybe they had not yet formed an opinion on the subject until Julie brought it up, and when she did, they quickly saw her side of the issue.

At that point they were all in the "me too" stage of a relationship. I know that in previous relationships when I first meet someone that I have good chemistry with there is often a period of time when we are sharing our interests enthusiastically and say "me too!" whenever we find we have something in common. It is only later when the differences start making themselves more evident that disagreements can start to become more regular.

In regard to Roger's dialogue, I wanted him to come off as somewhat bombastic. He is a senior in college and preparing to go into a field where verbal acuity is a necessity. Also he was raised by pretentious parents and some of that has rubbed off on him. Futhermore, I thought it added significance to just how overwhelmed Roger was in situations where he did become tongue-tied or stymied.

The flashback:
Deciding how to handle this sequence was the most agonizing part for me. I saw this as essential to the plot, the glue to the story, I couldn't see the characters developing the feelings they had for one another without Julie conveying this account from her life in a very personal and heartfelt manner. As her story became more and more intricate, I saw that I couldn't have Julie just go on and on in dialogue form, that would have totally ruined it. I considered cutting back on the details, but again, I saw that as negating from the story's impact. For a time I considered breaking this up into two distinct stories, submit them separately, and just have Julie briefly refer to her earlier story in the subsequent one, but that wasn't going to work either.

For the story to work I needed for whoever was reading it to see how Roger and Miranda were experiencing Julie's story when she was telling it. In order for that to happen I saw a flashback as my only recourse. Then I ran into another problem, I was writing the story in limited omniscient from Roger's POV, and I liked it in that voice, but when I got to the flashback, I wanted to keep the intimacy of the moment, and the only way I saw to do that was not only switch the POV from Roger to Julie, but to switch the voice to first person past tense. I know that's frowned upon but, in my opinon, it worked well. This way I could paint a more detailed picture of what she was feeling and conscious to without it sounding unrealistic in dialogue form and still keep the aura of Julie telling this story.

The flashback is one of my favorite parts of the story. One thing I have noticed about stories involving relationships between fathers and daughters was that they always made the father come off as a predatory fiend, no matter how much the daughter may or may not have wanted the relationship. I always end up getting repulsed by the father and lose enthusiasm for the story. I felt challenged to see if it was possible to write a love relationship between a father and a daughter and have it perceived as a beautiful and acceptable thing. I don't know if I completely accomplished this, but I think I came close.

To everyone else that has sent me feedback on this story I just want to say how thankful I am to you for taking the time to tell me how you feel. The overwhelming amount of praise for the story has meant so much to me and leads me to believe I am doing something right. It has really been a boost to my confidence as a writer. I look forward to writing more stories to share with this site.

Thank you all!

 

[Rainbow Skin]

I did feel guilty later, and picked another page to read (page 6), but it did continue as I thought it would: that is, I wasn't in a whole new world of story.

All the things you say about why you wrote that way are perfectly reasonable. Individually, each decision is correct: use the flashback thus, show Julie's character by this speech, Robert's by that, paint the scene with description. I can't point to any one of those and say that's not the way to write. You have all the techniques right, individually at least, in your palette.

But when I read dr_mabeuse's critique I thought yeah, that captures exactly how I felt too. So I amplified why those things he mentioned sounded flawed to me.

I don't want to sound dismissive. My final comment was very vague: 'But there are problems with the overarching point of the story, how it's moved along, and what the people are really doing in it.' -- That's because I couldn't identify any more definite problems. With a poorer writer it would be easy to point to clear examples of bad habits or poor thinking. With you, it's not that; it's just that there's some level of construction that isn't working.

And though I can't express what it is, the fact that I agreed totally in impression with another acute reader does show that it really does come through. I wish I could help more by being more specific.