New Writers first submission

[Rodopi]

Hi,

I am very new to writing and being 51 years of age it has been a very long time since I have done any.

This being my first submission, I would really appreciate any comments or pointers to assist me in improving my writing.

I will except negative ones to, for while you are attacking me you are leaving someone else alone. I am too long in the tooth to be upset by it.

Thank you in advanced for your comments and assistance, the link to my story is below.

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=75075


Regards

Rodopi

 

[English Lady]

Ok well i thought i'd have a read and see if i could give you some feedback*S* I am in no way "professional" and i myself am not very good at picking up grammatical errors,but I will try my best! ok first off,I must say under normal circumstances, i wouldn't have read past the first paragraph and I shall tell you why...


Its 6:30pm on Friday 4th October 2002 and it's a warm, 72oF, fall evening. We, (My Husband and I), had decided on a camping weekend, and after a 31/2 hour drive in our RV, and with humidity at 69%, we had finally arrived at our campsite, tired and very uncomfortable.

..in this your use of facts(the exact temperature and humidity) seem redundant. you need to pull your reader in ,make them feel that it is hot and humid, not give them facts and figures to prove it,if you see what i mean. maybe this is a personal dislike and if so feel free to ignore me*L*

after saying i am not so good on the grammatical side of things i do find that i am not sure in which tense you are writing this, for example :

We both got out, throwing our arms in the air, took in a deep breath and had a real good stretch in an attempt to relieve our tired and aching muscles.

shouldn't it read "taking a deep breath and having a really good stretch"

do you use a spelling and grammar checker? if not maybe it'd be a good idea to do that,and also I find taking some time in editing helps. read over your story a loud and see if it still makes sense. Get other willing volunteers to read it through too, that usualy helps*S*



I said to Dave (my husband),

ok,here you don't to tell your reader dave is your husband because from previous things said thhey can work it out for themselves,and a reader likes to be slightly challenged(saves you some words too!) also whilst i am discussing brackets, later on in the story you use them to convey thoughtds to your reader, i personally found the brackets distracting,and i think you could convey the same points through your narrative*S*

generally i think your writing gets better as it goes along,as you seem to setlle yourself into telling your story, and i do think you have a good writing style,there are a few technical points you need toattend to but thats it.!

hope my cmments prove helpful!

 

[DarlingNikki]

Ok, I'm new at this too, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but it seems like everything that's happening is being given equal weight. The humidity, the awnings, the stretching feel like they're being presented with the same level of importance as the two boys you meet, as the shower scene, etc.

I like your use of detail in the setup - I could really picture the place, and it gave the story a nice sense of reality, but maybe if you had speeded through the description just a little bit quicker the incident with the teenagers would have stood out more and been more dramatic. But don't cut the detail altogether - it was nice to see.

That's all I can think of... I hope it helps.

 

[Rodopi]

English Lady & Darling Nikki,

Thank you both for your prompt replies.
I found them all most useful.

English Lady:

Point 1:
Your comments in regard to facts and figures, I think I have to agree with you there. I blame this on my technical background.

Point 2:
"taking in a deep breath" is indeed correct. i am very dissappointed that the Microsoft Word spelling/grammer checker didn't pick this up. This backs up your reccomendation of finding volunteers to read through your story and the importance of thoroughly editing your work.

Point 3:
Use of brackets act as a distraction. I can find no argument to support there use so will endeavour to drop them in the future.


Darling Nikki:

Your comment in regard to my characters/situations having equal weight I found very profound. I had not even considered this, and it is indeed a very important aspect of story telling.


I would like to thank you both once again for your comments.
I will definately go forward from here with a greater challenge to produce something a little better than my first story.

Regards

Rodopi

 

[cherrylips_au]

I looked over your story and other then what has been said I'll add my comments.

You leave at six thirty and arrive at ten at night in fall, how much would you really be able to see of the camp area in the dark? In summer you would have more light.

They are very open in displaying affection in the cafe yet Sam worries about passing the office in Steve's car.

Loved the picnic scenes. You describe it really well.

It is a good first submission, I would suggest finding someone to look over your next story to tighten it up. It's very easy to miss things yourself.

Keep writing.

 

[Rodopi]

Hi Cherrylips,

Many thanks for your comments.

My first sentence is clearly so badly written, it was supposed to say that the time is 6:30pm and they had just arrived at the campsite after a 3½ hour drive. My apologies.

I do take your point in regard to the cafe and the camp entrance.

Thank you also for your positive encouragement

Regards

Rodopi

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I noticed that the second part was better than the first. You seemed to relax more and the writing isn't as stiff and self-conscious, but still there are things to work on.

One thing I would try is to take a hard copy of your story, put it aside for a week or two, then go through it and cross out any sentence that isn't essential to the telling of the story. See what you end up with. I say this because you put in a lot of extraneous detail that distracts from what's important in the story, and this confuses your readers. Your husband tells you that he's having trouble with soem sort of power cord. Naturally then we expect this power cord to come in somewhere else in the story, else why would you be so specific about it? But it doesn't, and it's confusing.

Someone mentioned that everything that happens in the story seems just as important as everything else. That comes from using too much detail where you shouldn't. The way you emphasize parts of a story is with language and attention to detail. Inportant scenes have a lot of detail, les simportant scenes get more or less glossed over. Remember too that you don't have tyo tell us everything that happens. You pick and choose those things that help tell your story and discard those that don't.

You have to watch your tenses. Parts of your story are in past tense, then other parts switch to present tense. Your shower scene is in present tense, then the scene after it is in past tense.

Also watch your paragraphing. You have a lot of one-sentence paragraphs. That's not bad in itself, but after awhile they get irritating.

There's anopther thing I'd like to know myself, and that's her relationship to her husband. In the second part you explain it, but i think it belongs at the start of the story. WHile she's having sex in the shower, I kept on wondering what's with her husband? Are they swingers, or is she a whore, or what?

But as I say, I think your second poart is stronger, as far as I read. So it seems like you might be getting more comfortable as you go along.

---dr.M.

 

[Rodopi]

dr_mabeuse,

Many thanks for your comments and clear guidance.

You really simplified the method on how to stop giving everything that happens in the story the same emphasis. That was very welcome and I will be trying that on my next story.

You were quite correct in detecting that I became more comfortable the more I got into the story. Just inexperience I guess.

For my own purpose and as a training exercise, I may take Day1 and rewrite this......I think Day2 just about stands on its own giving the general comments I have received.


In regard to explaining the husband's shortcomings...you are absolutely correct; I was in a mind to make that switch to the start of the story myself.
That will teach me to go with my own gut feel in future.

All in all, I think your comments were very constructive and I must thank you for your simple and clear guidance.


Regards

Rodopi

 

[susurrus]

Ro,

I've read your story, I've read the responses other people have given, and I agree with everything they've said.

To add to it:

Earlier it was asked if you used a spell/grammar checker. Spell checkers are great. They help find typos and cut down on a little bit of having to check that kind of stuff yourself. The problem with them is that they do nothing for homophones.

This has nothing to do with AT&T in gay bars. It's words that are spelled differently, but sound the same. It especially stuck out at me in many places in the second part. Unfortunately, I can't cite examples, but I do remember seeing a lot of there/their/they're errors among others. I seem to remember no actual misspellings, just improper usage.

Which is where the grammar checker may help. It'd take those usage problems and throw up a red flag to let you know something needs looking at.

Unfortunately, *my* personal experience with grammar checkers (at least the one the came packaged with Word 97) is geared toward business writing. Maybe I just don't know how to work it, but I stopped using the grammar checker when I kept getting errors about using characters' proper names.

Oh, and somebody mentioned use of parentheses. It appeared to me that a good majority of the times when you put text inside parentheses, that it was typically the character's inner thoughts. My experience with that has been, depending on the writer/printer, spoken dialogue gets double quotes ", internal dialogue gets single quotes '. I've run into books where these were switched around, but it remains pretty consistent.

Something else that may help: write something you'd want to read yourself. This is leisure reading material, of the most leisure sort. I was "talking" with another writer who was trying to make structural distinctions between a "serious" erotic story, and just a "stroke" story. The only difference should be content and context. The mechanics of the language shouldn't change.

Open almost any book, and you'll find that there's very little throwaway information. Short story writers don't have enough pages to get into every little nook and cranny of their characters' lives. BUT, some little details can make the characters more real. You just have to know when to restrain yourself and not choke the story with detail that makes the reader go, "Who the hell cares?"

Think of writing these stories in the manner of telling somebody how your day went. You skip over the stuff that doesn't further the narrative. So, most people can sum up most of an eight hour work day in about twenty minutes max, and that's if they put in what they consider at the time to be a lot of detail.

The idea of writing the story, then forgetting about it for a week or so is a good one. A longer time would be even better. You have to give yourself time to *forget* the stuff you filled in in your head, rather than writing it down. I've found some very fine writers out here in electron-land who tend to leave a little *too* much info to fill in, at times. Let's face it, when people are reading (especially this genre) the last thing they want to have to do is think real hard. Not that making them use their brains is a bad thing, it's just that you don't want to make them get so wrapped up in analyzing and filling in blanks that they lose track of what they're reading.

Yeah, I also agree with Doc Mabeuse about explaining the dynamic between Sam and Dave *a lot* earlier. As he said, I found myself there in the shower going, "Shit, she certainly wasted no time. Wonder when the husband's gonna walk in?"

In spite of all this, it's a promising story. All of us who have given you our impressions, and have pointed things out are doing so because you asked for help, and we're doing what we can to give you that.

Hope to see more from you, and am looking forward to seeing your work grow,

Susurrus

 

[Rodopi]

Susurrus

Wow! What can I say but thank you.
It will take me a wee while to fully digest all you have said here; but I do follow your general drift, and it all sounds positively good.

Your comments on grammer checkers forced me to take a look at mine.

I use WORD 2000. Clicking as follows:-

Tools/Options then clicking on the 'Spelling & Grammer' tag gives you the option to change the grammer check to various writing styles.

These are:- Casual, Standard(default), Formal, Technical and Custom.

Also there is an option to toggle 'Show Readability Statistics'
This should help when checking stories.

Lastly, it has a user friendly button for 'Rechecking Document' to allow you to evaluate your new settings or test readability.

As a new writer and new to Literotica it was with some anxiety that I placed my story on this forum to await your comments.
I need not have worried, I have had nothing but constructive criticism, positive advice, guidance and encouragement.

It also imparted a feeling of being welcome and excepted. Before this I felt like a single entity standing alone and inputting work into a vast repository never to be seen nor heard of again.

May I take this opportunity in thanking everyone for their efforts and comments. I shall make every endeavour to justify them in showing an improvement in my writing in the my stories yet to come.

For other people new to writing like myself or with those with limited experience who haven't submitted their stories to this Forum I say, "Don't miss out on this wonderful opportunity to improve your writing."

Thank you once again.

Rodopi.