Comments on: Critique #154 — Daniel Woods #3

By: Daniel Woods

Daniel Woods — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 11:55:42 +0000

Hey Kim, thanks for reading :). I’ve already e-mailed you, but I always reply to peoples’ comments on here, so I thought it only fair :p. I’ve been on holiday, so there is, I’m afraid, nothing new on this to show you, but I’ll e-mail you as soon as it’s done.

Glad you liked it,
Daniel :).

By: Kim

Kim — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 20:28:04 +0000

I like it. I actually had something similar in mind to what you say you actually have. I imagined a green (don’t know why green) blob with a few legs, maybe a few eyes dotted around and a few mouths too. Just a heap of organs and limbs, which works well for me. In all honesty though being vague is best anyway because we all think of different things. Get ten people in a room and give them the same description of something they haven’t seen before and ask them to draw it. Guaranteed every one would be different and completely different to what you originally had. It’s the way the human mind works. Many times a fellow writer has described something and I’ve thought of another thing, then they’d show me how they thought it’d look (they drew it) and it was the total opposite of what I imagined. That could/could not be related to how they put it across in the story.

Anyway.. I diverse. Keep the descriptions as they are.
Yes it is funny, no the swearing wasn’t too much for me, and yes I would read on. The reason I liked this so much was due to the sparse-ness (if that’s a word) of the descriptions. Only half way through do I learn that they’re in an office. But I loved it. The dialogue takes presedence (sp?) so use it to your advantage.

All in all I’m very impressed with this and would love to read it all. If you’ve finished writing it send it to me on: blue_girl173@hotmail.com

By: Daniel Woods

Daniel Woods — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:32:33 +0000

Haha, thanks Adam.

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:53:49 +0000

Daniel,

I shall bow to public opinion. After all that’s what it’s all about.

You may keep your multi-mouthed, improbably limbed whoodjamaflip ;).

Adam

By: Daniel Woods

Daniel Woods — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:49:20 +0000

To Miriam - glad you liked, and yep, ’scattered crumbs of detail’ is what I’m trying for. That way, there’s still a lot of wiggle room for people to create their own creature, but all the important things are covered (like the fact that it has a mouth, for example).

To Brendan - love the analogy, lol, and point taken :).

By: Brendan Podger

Brendan Podger — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:01:04 +0000

Daniel, don’t ever describe your monster. Let us be the blind men discovering an elephant for the first time.

By: miriam

miriam — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 03:57:23 +0000

I like it…I actually think it’s a strength that you don’t immediately describe the creature in its entirety. Letting slip a detail or two at a time (it has spines…its mouth is big enough to grab and toss a chair…it laughs…) is more suspenseful and funny. I imagine it going on with more scattered crumbs of detail (”…its purple tentacles writhed towards me…its six foot tongue slurped my face…) and so on, so we gradually build up the grotesque image in our heads.

By: Daniel Woods

Daniel Woods — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:18:08 +0000

Adam,

That’s true. I guess I need to lay down a few more details (a ‘template’, if you like). The creature isn’t a glamour or anything, and doesn’t change shape - it used to be a person, and is the result of a bodged spell. I just wanted to give the impression that nobody really knows what it is. If it were a three-headed dog, everyone would be able to point and say ‘look, it’s a three-headed dog’. The effect I’m going for is ‘well, it’s… erm… well, it’s got some, er, legs, and a mouth… two mouths… and, er…’ Nevertheless, you’re right, without a template, I would eventually have to tell people that they’re ‘imagining it wrong’, which is just bad description on my part.

Also, I did think about going ‘Now wait just a m-’, but I’d already done it with ‘For fuck sake Tan-’, so I wanted to avoid doing the same thing twice.

And please, pick away - every problem uncovered is something that I can then fix :).

To Beth, thanks for the advice :).

By: Beth S.

Beth S. — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 19:12:38 +0000

Daniel,

Sure, you could do that. Of the three options, I prefer ‘She gawped at me.â€™ It’s in voice and much more vivid than ’stared.’

I’d use her name instead of the pronoun, though.

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 17:44:09 +0000

Daniel,

I take your point re: the creature and the randomness, but don’t you then fall into the problem of the reader having to readjust their ideas when you ‘tell’ them that actually it’s about the size of a spider, but looks more like a dog with a head on both ends and a couple of extra limbs (I know ‘cos I was there!)?

I am not really suggesting you are lazy, but I did wonder if you wished to avoid a long description in your 13 valuable lines!

Is this creature like a glamour-like (e.g. what you fear) or something that keeps changing shape? To be honest I didn’t really get yourr direction of wanting the reader to create their own mental image of something that should be specific. It’s not a Norman castle, or something we can all imagine in our own way.

â€˜Now look here,â€™ I started.

Not the above is wrong, but it may be more effective to use:

â€˜Now look here –,â€™ I started.

If you can rephrase to cut a word in two you may not even need the speech tag.

‘Now, look here, you blo–’

Then the chair hits without any speech tag to slow it.

It’s still really good, Daniel — I am just picking!

Adam