Post by rorschalk on Jun 16, 2024 20:26:42 GMT
Dear Mr. VC,
Good first try, but lack of context and POV has done you in according to my man on the Floor Rockefeller. His full critique is below. Thanks for the submission. Best of luck in the days ahead!
*
So I just took a crack and a quarter at Grayuson's Our Sector is Inhabited cap. Not bad for a professedly first ever attempt at writing fiction. I made it most of the way through page 3 before skimming a little, and almost to page 6 before throwing in the towel. Biggest problem is there's no narrative. Except for the first introductory sentence/paragraph, it's entirely transparently expository dialog. No speech tags even, but which, given, there're only two speakers, probably doesn't matter much. But, dude, you need to look around a little. Climb into one of your character's heads, establish a point of view. All talk with no observation or setting detail, or, even worse, pacing is so wrong as to almost be radical in a "I'm good enough to break the rules with impunity" sort of way. But which you are not. Not yet anyway. From a strictly sci-fi standpoint, I wondered a little how we managed to cross and communicate across so many lightyears with the materials and manpower necessary to colonize these various other worlds... though in all fairness it might have been explained further on in their lengthy conversation.
I more or less stopped creative writing after Lightspeed Magazine kill-contracted an accepted and paid for submission of mine to their Person's of Colo(u)r Destroy SF anthology because I'd told one of the editors I was white (which I'd foolishly thought was a color). It was my first serious brush with wokeness, and it almost cured me of creative reading too. To replace writing, I took up electric guitar (after a 40 year hiatus from classical). I've only been practicing about an hour a day for a few years now, but would not dream of performing for an audience. So your submitting your very first fiction piece for publication is pretty ballsy, I think. Keep it up.
Finally, and as an ornery personal aside, I hate the Shunn format. For me it always made submitting as a writer and reading as an editor a total pain in the ass. So much pointless formatting and unnecessary scrolling. Even in my senescence I can remember your name and the cap's title without seeing it atop every fucking page. So, you get no points for that here.
Good first try, but lack of context and POV has done you in according to my man on the Floor Rockefeller. His full critique is below. Thanks for the submission. Best of luck in the days ahead!
*
So I just took a crack and a quarter at Grayuson's Our Sector is Inhabited cap. Not bad for a professedly first ever attempt at writing fiction. I made it most of the way through page 3 before skimming a little, and almost to page 6 before throwing in the towel. Biggest problem is there's no narrative. Except for the first introductory sentence/paragraph, it's entirely transparently expository dialog. No speech tags even, but which, given, there're only two speakers, probably doesn't matter much. But, dude, you need to look around a little. Climb into one of your character's heads, establish a point of view. All talk with no observation or setting detail, or, even worse, pacing is so wrong as to almost be radical in a "I'm good enough to break the rules with impunity" sort of way. But which you are not. Not yet anyway. From a strictly sci-fi standpoint, I wondered a little how we managed to cross and communicate across so many lightyears with the materials and manpower necessary to colonize these various other worlds... though in all fairness it might have been explained further on in their lengthy conversation.
I more or less stopped creative writing after Lightspeed Magazine kill-contracted an accepted and paid for submission of mine to their Person's of Colo(u)r Destroy SF anthology because I'd told one of the editors I was white (which I'd foolishly thought was a color). It was my first serious brush with wokeness, and it almost cured me of creative reading too. To replace writing, I took up electric guitar (after a 40 year hiatus from classical). I've only been practicing about an hour a day for a few years now, but would not dream of performing for an audience. So your submitting your very first fiction piece for publication is pretty ballsy, I think. Keep it up.
Finally, and as an ornery personal aside, I hate the Shunn format. For me it always made submitting as a writer and reading as an editor a total pain in the ass. So much pointless formatting and unnecessary scrolling. Even in my senescence I can remember your name and the cap's title without seeing it atop every fucking page. So, you get no points for that here.
