The Sculptor- I really think I like this one

[cantdog]

Firstly, here's the link to Chapter three:Click this baby! I believe this to be the single hottest piece of writing I've done yet. I am struttin'!

But I bet it can still be improved. I respectfully submit, therefore, The Sculptor in its entirety to this forum for critical attention. Hack it open, display its guts on the table, gentlemen and ladies all; let us see how it is put together and how its parts function.

It comprises four parts. I need to dick around a little with the "url" function, but I'll post a link to all of them.

cantdog

edited to add: Link to Chapter 1. This is the Nude Day submission
..........................Link to Chapter 2-- This one has the highest rating so far.
...........................Link to Chapter 4 -- And that's the story.

Thank you for your kind attention.

 

[Guest]

cantdog's best work

 

[dark&stormy]

 

[hiddenself]

I've been seeing your posts for a while now, so I figured you've paid your dues.

THE SCULPTOR Ch 1

The opening scene is both boring and offputting to me. Why would I be interested in annoying characters and mindless concerns? The next few scenes do not get any better. You introduce too many other characters (who's a bit player and who's a star?) and I have no clue where the whole thing is going. Had I not been doing a review, I would have stopped right there.

Then, there seems to be some progress--the plot going towards a teacher/student story between Mr. Lussac and Gina (or perhaps, Mr. Lussac and Gina's mother first).

But then you switch to an explicit sex scene between Brenda and Greg. Wow. Where did this come from? Are you trying for straight-up wanking material or a decent story? You need to decide--you're mixing and matching and it does not work for me. As for the sex scene itself, I seriously doubt that those two clueless teenagers would be able to think of (much less work out) that teacher/student fantasy game that you lay out. And the ass fucking at the end is totally gratuitous and unrealistic. Now you're walking in the land of pure delusion baby.

And so it goes, with frequent back-and-forths (too frequent, if you ask me) between scenes and characters. The whole business is sometimes unreal, sometimes boring, never exciting. What is the point anyway?

Your writing is good--very good on occasion. But it gets wasted on this aimless and thankless (lack of) plotline. And some of the writing gets too cutesy and clever for its own good. It simply ends up being annoying. Examples:

a secret agent for Chad?

Who's Chad? Just kidding. You know an American teenager who'd say that sort of thing (if she possibly knew what Chad is)?

The mental playlet with Greg and Brenda had popped like a bubble,...

That justs screams at the reader, "see here, what a witty guy your writer is."

He'd been levered up by her abasement into a state of high rut, ...

Idem.
(And I don't think 'lever' is correct as a metaphor here).

"Teaching is very time-consuming if you do it right, and I always took a lot of time away..."

This is not a real person speaking. It's a monologue thrown in as a writing device to paint the art teacher's personality for the reader.
And $100 for a half-hour posing seems a little high. After all, Gina is an amateur and a teenager. It just sounds unrealistic.

____________

I briefly scanned Ch.3 and had the same annoying experience of scenes fast switching from here to there, too many threads with no apparent reason, no real connection between the characters and me.

Looking back through the stories, I feel you are a competent writer but your choice of storyline is poor. Or, perhaps, you haven't spent enough time fleshing it out. If you could tighten up the tale, focus on what you are trying to say to the reader (I have no clue as it stands now), perhaps you might be able to capture the imagination.

 

[Guest]

 

[cantdog]

Thanks to both of you. Yeah, plot. It's a problem. I admit I was working more on doing a description without pausing to describe, and moving a character from one condition of mind to another without forcing it, at the time I wrote the thing. Do you think that sex scenes are incompatible with a plot-driven "decent story?" Should we stick to short format for sex, and reserve longer formats for non-wanking stories?

 

[cantdog]

And, that's what I came to this forum to accomplish, rhino. I actually asked for harsh! It took a little while to work up the ego for this. I am only an egg, as the fellow says, when it comes to the writing game. I need a lot of help. It ain't gonna be fun or pretty, maybe, because there's a lot to criticize.

But have at it.

The mental playlet with Greg and Brenda had popped like a bubble,...

That just screams at the reader, "see here, what a witty guy your writer is."

He'd been levered up by her abasement into a state of high rut, ...

Idem.
(And I don't think 'lever' is correct as a metaphor here).

"Teaching is very time-consuming if you do it right, and I always took a lot of time away..."

This is not a real person speaking. It's a monologue thrown in as a writing device to paint the art teacher's personality for the reader.

I may have problems about "voice"-- my voice, that is. Lever, though, came right from the gut. Sorry. I have to have lever.

I make Lussac speak in sentences, with semicolons. Part of his appeal to Brenda and to Gina's mother is his foreignness; part of it is his artistic milieu-- the way groupie scenes form around famous artists of all stripes.

For the art to be good enough for even small-time groupie status, I have to tell you he's become suddenly successful, he's going full-time, he's quitting his day job and making more money than ever.

To express his exotic flavor, I refuse to use a written-out accent, like Uncle Remus or Huckleberry, and I wouldn't believe he could be talking in broken or halting English and deal with the Boston T and many roomfuls of adolescents.

But I need him to sound foreign. I used the locutions of a man I once knew who was Albanian. He sounded like a textbook all the time. He was most precise and even his colloquialisms were correct.

You are just meeting him here, and you notice he doesn't sound real. But after about his third speech I tell you he is not a native speaker. I hinted at it earlier with the unusual hand gestures.

That conversation in the wind is too long, the one with him and Gina. But I want the artist to be seen as a man whose career is taking off.

I can tone down my cleverness as the narrator, I suppose. I see what you mean, and your examples stand for many more such things.

I still like lever, but if I'm leaving out the sex, what is there? The story is not about WW II, it's about sex.

If I'm writing a sex story, should I skip characterizations, and sketch enough for the reader's prejudices to fill it in, as "a priest, a rabbi, and a Baptist preacher walk into a bar"?

 

[cantdog]

Cantdog,
found time to read the first chapter. Very well written!

bravo!


I will vote now (as i had downloaded to read at a later time)
D&S

This is very gratifying! Thanks for doing that. (Go right for three, there are two hot scenes in that one that I'm 'way too fond of!)

You make me feel good!

cantdog

 

[hiddenself]

What I meant

If I'm writing a sex story, should I skip characterizations, and sketch enough for the reader's prejudices to fill it in, as "a priest, a rabbi, and a Baptist preacher walk into a bar"?

If you're writing a stroke story, yes. Skip me the characterizations and just give me straight hard sex. I really don't care how many people you involve and what their connections are--stop pussyfooting about it, give me the sex and be done with it.
But if you're writing erotica, flesh the story out (it's flailing as is), tell a tale. Sex is sex after all--it's the psychological context and play that distinguishes crap from genius.
That's what I meant.

 

[cantdog]

Gotcha.


Let me think on it.

c

 

[hiddenself]

And clean out that Mailbox.

 

[cantdog]

My bad. Only three messages, though.

Weird. Gone now.

 

[dark&stormy]

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I read the chapter you mentioned. I thought the sex scene was good, and I was reallyimpressed with your dialogue, which was very good, especially when it was teenagers talking (at least I assume they were teenagers).

The story itself confused me though. There were too many characters for me to keep track of. Of course, I was coming in in the middle of the story, so I went to Chaper 1 to have a look, and I didn't do much better there.

The idea of splitting the story up between different characters and their adventures is a good one, but i think it's harder to pull off then it looks. I get confused pretty easily when I read, and Chapter 1 introduced me to too many characters and even characters talking about other characters I didn't know yet, and I immediately got lost.

I think you write very well, but I think you maybe tried to do too much at one time in this one. I couldn't follow it. I'd really like to see what you could do with just two or three characters instead of jumping back and forth.

---dr.M.

 

[cantdog]

I read the chapter you mentioned. I thought the sex scene was good, and I was reallyimpressed with your dialogue, which was very good, especially when it was teenagers talking (at least I assume they were teenagers).

The story itself confused me though. There were too many characters for me to keep track of. Of course, I was coming in in the middle of the story, so I went to Chaper 1 to have a look, and I didn't do much better there.

The idea of splitting the story up between different characters and their adventures is a good one, but i think it's harder to pull off then it looks. I get confused pretty easily when I read, and Chapter 1 introduced me to too many characters and even characters talking about other characters I didn't know yet, and I immediately got lost.

I think you write very well, but I think you maybe tried to do too much at one time in this one. I couldn't follow it. I'd really like to see what you could do with just two or three characters instead of jumping back and forth.

---dr.M.

Zoot,

I enjoy dialogue. My stories occur to me in the form of dialogue. Thanks for that comment; it sounds authentic to me, but it's good to hear that someone else hears it that way.

Hiddenself points out, though, that there isn't, in the end, all that much I'm trying to do. The story is an inventory of the interplay of love and sex. I have sex as pure exploitation with Bill, sex as sport and play, sex for manipulation, sex as an expression of love, and so on. I contrast it to love without sex in the scenes with young Tony.

But there isn't a real plot, only some subplot resolutions-- and conclusions, or at least I intend there to be some conclusions, in the mind of the reader about the nature of sex by the artful contrast of various little stories.

So it is no novel, but a novella-like exploratory essay-in-fiction.

It may suffer, more than I ever thought it did, from having too much of a welter of characters. You aren't the only person to report confusion, and I have to take that seriously.

You can't cover too broad a range without taking more time and space to do it, and really buckling down to the business of making the cast of characters breathe.

It could be a novel if I did that, even without a plot. Lots of them don't have any more plot than The Sculptor. But, at this length, and with the sex in focus like it is, presented for play, maybe I should have limited it to just a few people.

Leave Bill and Irene out, to start with, give them their own story.

cantdog

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I might be sensitive to this kind of “quick-cut” style of writing because it’s now become so de rigeur in best-seller fiction that it’s become a stock gimmick. Pick up any modern “page-turner” (“The Da Vinci Code” comes to mind, but last time I looked all of them were doing it) and all of them use the device of cutting back and forth between two or three parallel lines of action as a way of keeping the tension up.

Yours is really not like that, but I’m afraid I still get kind of annoyed when I see that kind of whipsaw quick-cutting. I guess I just like stories that I can kind of sink into without having to worry that on the next page I’m going to find myself someplace else surounded by new characters I don't even know just when I was getting comfortable where I was.

---dr.M.

 

[cantdog]

Well, it really isn't like that. The separator lines were put in to alert the reader to a change in venue. Chapter 2 has the most of them; I take the cast through their Wednesday.

It does seem that the lines come thickly. But I tried it without them, and the changes were annoying in the extreme. Especially the one where the next scene begins with something like: her voice shook with every stroke of Bills cock in her ass when we were following a 'phone conversation a second ago.

I get annoyed with quick-cuts because I feel manipulated, and too obviously.

cantdog

 

[cantdog]

from Hiddenself:The opening scene is both boring and offputting to me. Why would I be interested in annoying characters and mindless concerns? The next few scenes do not get any better. You introduce too many other characters (who's a bit player and who's a star?) and I have no clue where the whole thing is going. Had I not been doing a review, I would have stopped right there.

I need to trim Greg out. If I do that, Brenda seems less amoral, but what the hell, she says straight out she's sport fucking. That ought to be enough for us to believe her.

Having trimmed Greg out, the opening scene vanishes. We can start in Art class, and first encounter Brenda in the wind in front of the high school, when Lussac asks Gina to work for him.

We can trim Sean out, maybe. He introduces the band, but we can give Bill and Irene a separate story. It's probably a better band with no Sean in it anyhow . So what else does Sean do for us? That two or three paragraphs of the first date and the dialogue with Sean right after English are weak and can go.

We won't know Gina anywhere near as well, but Gina never fucks anyone, except Sean, and we have decided to do without Sean. Gina becomes a mere foil, a tool to bridge Lussac to her mother.

Her scene with the panties is unnecessary, since nothing has to trigger her, any more, to decide to fuck Sean, because we don't have Sean. Thus, the scene of her modeling can be simply to set up the paragraph where we see her mother developing an interest in Lussac, vicariously, through debriefing her daughter about the modeling sessions.

The scene where she and her mother mutually reveal that they are falling in love is a problem if we've never met Sean. But screw it, we don't care about Gina. Skip that scene. Something along the lines of the paragraphs which depict Hannah going through her nursing day singing and speculating about the sculptor will suffice to drive it in that she is honestly attracted to Lussac.

We can use Gina in the hallway peeking in at the sex. We can retain Tony and the squirrels, for now, to add some depth to Hannah and to ripen the relationship of Hannah and Lussac.

The bulk of Chapter Three, the paint party, is gone to some other story.

Chapter four is nearly all Brenda. Brenda, without her high schooler boyfriend Greg, becomes much more of a pure groupie. She takes on Six and then seduces Lussac en revanche.

The contrast will be entirely between Hannah and Brenda. Gina barely appears. Both Hannah and Brenda are with Lussac, so now we have to worry about resolving Lussac's dilemma, and what Lussac does forms the only plot.

Can't end it there, then. It'll need to continue, have Brenda be perceived, maybe, as too much temptation for the sculptor to handle honorably, and he can abandon the series of sexy nudes in resin of Brenda's lush body that he had in mind. Good project, but he can't keep seeing the model without fucking her.

He manipulates her to refocus her on Six, and either is or is not discovered by Hannah. Resolve that, and end.

It won't be any longer, since we've cut so much out. The cast is far smaller.

Of course, the opening scene problem is still there. The Art class. would that have the same effect as the two-girls-at-their-lockers which put Hiddenself off in the current version?

It can be written to cause more strongly a suspicion in the reader that if only things were different, Gina might be involved with her teacher. We can tell about the Boston trip Gina made when she saw the exhibition which changed Lussac's career. That will shorten the scene in the wind.

I'll write that and submit it.

But first, has anyone any further ideas about the new story?

cantdog