Please read the rules below before posting. We're taking turns to post text, and text posted out of turn will be hollered.
The discussion over at the "Is being Troperiffic a Bad Thing?"
thread got a few of us seriously talking about starting a full-fledged, free for all dedicated ConCrit thread. Thanks go to your friendly neighborhood Herald, chihuahua0, for giving this the go-ahead
This is how it's going to work:
- This thread is for helping people improve as writers. Please stay away from needlessly gushing or needlessly being mean when handing out criticism.
- No mentioning your own work when giving out criticism. This is to prevent "Let's talk about ME" derails.
- Feedback will be given to one person at a time. We're taking a deliberately slow pace; a person's turn to get feedback is generally supposed to last a week, but we're not ending someone's turn until they get feedback from at least five different people. On the other hand, the person getting feedback can end their own turn if they figure they're done.
- When a turn ends, we wait 12 hours to see if anyone of the people who have just given feedback wants to be up next. If they don't, we pick the person up next from the feedback request list
.
- Yes, it's okay to point out spelling and grammar errors made by the person you're giving feedback to.
- If you're unfamiliar with the original verse of a piece of Fan Fiction up for feedback, pretend it's a piece of original fiction and criticize accordingly.
- If and when you step up to receive feedback:
- Post actual writing (not world-building, concepts, layouts, character lists and so on).
- Be specific in what you are looking for, or at least mention what is troubling you the most.
- Fan Fiction is fine, but take into account that anyone not familiar with the source material will judge your piece "blind", essentially by the same standards as original fiction. This means you might get called out on flaws that fan fiction usually gets away with in practice, perhaps even justifiably so. Just like any other kind of criticism, consider it or ignore at at your discretion.
- Be ready to hear some things you probably didn't want to hear. This should go without saying, but, please: No being bitter, being sarcastic, calling people out for "going too far" or otherwise expressing disapproval of the criticism given to you. If you think people are being unfair to your writing, make your case civilly.
With that said, I suppose we can begin and see whether this goes anywhere. The first person to respond with a post to the extent of "I'll go first" will go first.
edited 17th Feb '12 5:07:01 PM by TripleElation
This site
might help.
"Show, don’t tell is a writing technique in which story and characters are related through sensory details and actions rather than exposition. It fosters a style of writing that’s more immersive for the reader, allowing them to “be in the room” with the characters.
In his most commonly repeated quoted, Chekhov said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass." "
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.Are we just going through the waitlist now? Neato. I'll start with @TheLovecraftian's Dolore Ex Machina:
I really like the plot. The rogue AI is a well-worn sci-fi archetype, but I find your take genuinely refreshing and emotionally engaging. Well done.
My critique mainly has to do with the formatting: with only timestamps and no in-text annotations, or clear indications of who's saying what, it feels like you're reading a raw, automated transcript, rather than something that's gone through processing and analysis. It's neatly atmospheric in its own way. But it can be hard to figure out who's saying what at some points. I found this part particularly tricky to parse:
>>>>20:41 – “Yes, that means Engineer Salas shouldn’t ask your trust so he can go into the kitchen. But he’s just being silly.”
>>>>20:41 – The Captain informed me several times that the Engineer’s culinary ability was “unworthy”.
>>>>20:42 – She seems to have taught you many things.
It took me a few re-reads until I figured out that the first three lines were all supposed to be spoken by PITHOS... I think? So far as I could tell, PITHOS is a pretty archetypal AI-bordering-on-sentience, with a formal, robotic demeanour, while Hastings also keeps it formal on her good-cop routine. And I feel that you could mitigate the issue a bit by giving them more distinct speaking voices.
It's your story, so it's not my place to tell you how exactly to do it — but I think an AI character with an upbeat, bubbly disposition (think Microsoft Office's Clippy) would've been more memorable and distinct than the standard stuffy kind. As for Hastings, I feel that you could try to poke a few holes into her uptight demeanour by more clearly indicating beats where she's clearly surprised or in disbelief (even if she tries to hide it).
I think the lack of annotations also makes the pacing feel... a little flat, to put it one way. I don't really pay attention to each time stamp, so at every significant Time Skip it's like "Wait, what? *looks at time stamp* Huh, okay". If you prefer to do it this way to give off the appearance of a raw, unprocessed transcript, then it's your call. But I would've liked some in-text annotation to punctuate the flow and build tension when needed.
Here's a little example I wrote up; it's rather overdone, but you can decide whether or not you agree with the idea:
[Pause in the exchange. During this time, the ship's life support system records air circulation being switched off and then back on through several adjacent rooms as the artificial intelligence appears to weigh its options. At 20:48, all life support functions on the bridge and adjacent walkway, as well as door access through the path, are back online.]
>>>>20:48 – There will be a terminal directly to your left once you enter the bridge. It will have everything you need. Access only that terminal, please.
[Another pause. The system records several vocal exclamations made by C. Hastings on the way to the bridge, which have been omitted for the sake of brevity.]
>>>>21:14 – There. You can close the bridge again, PITHOS.
>>>>21:14 – You did not touch the other terminals, nor the bodies of the crew. Thank you, C. Hastings.
>>>>21:15 – As promised. Do you trust me a little more now, PITHOS?
>>>>21:15 – Yes. I do.
Final bit of technical nitpick: a meteor is a smallish space rock that falls into the Earth's atmosphere. When still in outer space, we call it a meteoroid. Hope you'll find some of this crit useful, and keep up the good work!
Edited by eagleoftheninth on Jan 17th 2021 at 4:03:18 AM
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.I think that @DiscworldFan is no longer working on their fic or active on this forum? If they're not seeking a crit anymore, it miiight be better to take it off the list for clarity.
Anyway, moving on to A Door to the Mists—Intro Cutscene by @Ars:
As aspiring writers, we all have our home genres. Yours, I figured, would be old-school adventure games in the vein of Myst, which... I have zero familiarity with. So I hope you won't mind if I approach this from a complete layperson's perspective.
I love the writing, overall. I really like the imagery you picked to describe the place, and I enjoy the way the narrative jumps straight into the protagonist's head. As someone who didn't grow up with that generation of games, though, I'd probably tweak the presentation by breaking up the paragraph-long text boxes into multiple successive ones, if only to make the narrative feel a bit more dynamic.
Try to imagine how it'd feel to read these through multiple text boxes, instead of just two:
It's the place where magic comes from.
A place of thick blue mist, blazing stars and impossible terrain.
What would it be like to [go on an] adventure there?
What would I find, see and hear?
For as long as I can remember, I've yearned to explore its depths.
Next up, I'd recommend tweaking this passage to give it... a better flow, I would say?
It burned in my blood the day I was born.
It's what calls me into the mists.
I'm a bit lost on what's supposed to follow. I feel like there's supposed to be a passage connecting it to "And yet... I cannot give up on this dream. I cannot give up on finding a way into the mists.". Because otherwise, it's not exactly clear what's stopping our dashing protag from doing just that. If it's the magic bit, then you might want to switch around the order and put that after the whole "adventure" bit; otherwise, the protag's soliloquy kind of takes the weight off it a bit.
This is a promising start to the story. As you work on the setting, you might want to consider revisiting this cutscene and putting in more glimpses of the world waiting ahead, because that's going to be the story's main draw and you'll want to get your player hooked as soon as possible. Looking forward to see how this project turns out.
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.Oh shit, please, don't read my short story! I'm currently rewritting it,and i just found out that it registers every changes i make, but it's not finished, so please, don't read it!
What should i do? Should i delete it from the feedback list while i'm rewriting it?
Edited by kinnikuniverse on Jan 17th 2021 at 12:46:42 PM
Ah, sorry for not replying earlier! I completely overlooked this thread for quite some time, I fear. (And then had a tired few days after I did realise that my entry had been critiqued.) ^^;;
First of all, thank you, both DeMarquis and eagleoftheninth, for your critiques! They're much appreciated! ^_^
Well, it looks like I have some rewriting to do on that intro, indeed!
To respond to both of you:
@DeMarquis:
Respectively, by giving it up (i.e. no longer engaging in it) and by taking it up again.
So in this case, sacrificing the path of adventuring would mean no longer adventuring.
Exactly, yes: it's a "known fact" in the setting that only magic users have access to the mist-world.
The former:
Her reason for entering the mist-world is that she wants to adventure there. But in order to become a magic-user so that she could get there, she would have to give up adventuring—it's the price that magic would demand.
As a result, she would have access to the mist-world, but be barred from engaging in her reason for wanting that access.
Hmm... That's an interesting thought.
I suppose that I've implicitly been taking the view that, by the time that most players see this intro they already have the game, and thus are already somewhat interested in playing it.
For enthusing players to pick up the game at all, I have trailers and the like, which do lean primarily on showing gameplay.
I think that I might then go and examine a few of the better intro cutscenes from other games (e.g. Thief: The Dark Project)—see what they did.
Indeed, I do recall that Thief, while it didn't show actual gameplay, did show a representation of things done in gameplay.
Uh, no, actually. Nothing like that. ^^;;
Well, there are often multiple routes within a level, but it's often quite possible to explore all routes. If you played the above-mentioned Thief: The Dark Project (or its first two sequels) then think of that sort of exploration, I suppose.
The business of paths is more a narrative thing: part of the obstacle that prevents the character from just immediately getting what she wants.
@eagleoftheninth:
Hah, in a sense you're both right and wrong!
I do have a great fondness for old-school adventures, Myst included. And indeed, A Door to the Mists does have gameplay drawn from them. It's not Myst-style "strange machine" gameplay for the most part, but it's definitely point-and-click adventure gameplay.
However, the game isn't that alone: It has strong traversal elements (heavily inspired by the aforementioned Thief: The Dark Project, as I recall), and even some sparsely-appearing melee combat.
Thank you very much! That is quite heartening to read! ^_^
Interesting—and probably a good idea, indeed. I think that I may do that.
I'll want to think on this change a bit, but it is well-noted.
Between your feedback, that of DeMarquis, and other that I received previously, I am indeed starting to lean that way, indeed. Start with the declaration of her path, then perhaps her desire to enter the mists, and only then go on to the obstacle to it. Something like that.
Thank you again. ^_^
Ah, that's an interesting idea. I have a number of locations—and showing glimpses of them might fit with the idea of adventuring, after all.
Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jan 19th 2021 at 7:19:56 PM
My Games and Asset PacksIf I may ask, should I remove my entry from the list at this point? (I believe that I have enough feedback to work with now.)
I'm not sure of whether it's intended that we remove our own entries, or leave them to be removed by a maintainer... ^^;
My Games and Asset Packs@eagleoftheninth - The formatting was indeed supposed to make it look like raw transcript (or, rather, as if you were reading the screen as the logs come in), and PITHOS and Hastings' personalities were intended to be very similar to further blur the archetypes. That said, I didn't mean to make them hard to follow, so I'll be taking your advice to heart and try to find a middle ground between both things.
The idea there was that, with PITHOS being an already sentient AI pretending to not be sentient, and Hastings being the more stoic human, they'd sort of swap places by the end, leading to the final line being either ominous or hopeful depending on reader interpretation.
That said, the lack of annotations is deliberate. Like I mentioned, I wanted the style to deliberately mimic the idea of reading the conversation as it comes onscreen, as well as not give the readers any directions on how either character is feeling or acting aside from what they state. I suppose I could use some formatting to make the timestamps a bit more eye-catching, I'd have to play with that.
As for the meteor/meteorite thing, I genuinely did not know that.
Thanks for the feedback!
Hah, fair enough! In that case, I've removed my entry to make way for others. ^_^
Hi guys!
So i'm currently re-writing my short story "Wicked Witch of the Pitch", and i've basically evolved it into two separate short stories: the first one about Eleanor's life as a Courrier in the city, the second being the new draft of "Wicked Witch of the Pitch".
When i'm done writing and i go to put it back on the feedback list, should i absolutely put them as separate entries, or can i make a big document containing both stories?
Edited by kinnikuniverse on Jan 22nd 2021 at 12:43:57 PM
Bear in mind that the longer the work, the less likely people will be to read the whole thing. I myself seldom read past 5-6 pages, unless the story is especially compelling.
But given that you are undertaking a major re-write, do you want us to skip over the current entry?
Edited by DeMarquis on Jan 22nd 2021 at 6:45:51 AM
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.Next up would be "Ignacia and Deluge", but I do not critique outlines, only finished passages (that's because I do not know what criteria to apply to an outline, and the author didn't ask for any specific feedback—at least not in the request list).
Someone else may wish to review that one, though, so I will hold off on doing the next item after that for a few days.
Edited by DeMarquis on Jan 22nd 2021 at 6:54:29 AM
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.
For reference, it's The Cavern
, an exercise in screenwriting. Anyone up to critique the screenwriting exercise?
Hi, guys! I finished the first draft of my new short story, "The life and times of Eleanor", which evolved from my other short story, "the wicked witch of the pitch", into its own. I'm doing a new version of "wicked witch" separately.
So yeah, i'm gonna put in on the list.
Edited by kinnikuniverse on Jan 29th 2021 at 12:28:01 PM
Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker.
So I have several notes for "The Cavern." Keep in mind that my notes do tend to be blunt, but in no way do I mean to say the writing is "bad" — I'm just pointing things out for you to pay attention to. This list isn't exhaustive, but I hope it helps!
- Character names in dialogue tags should be as short as they can be. "Diego" instead of "Diego Garcia"
- Page numbers go on the top right
- If you expect a line in a foreign language to have subtitles, use the parenthetical "(in [language])" and type the dialogue itself in the script's main language.
- You've got a lot of redundant lines and "process" — Why ask "You want me to wake the kids up?" when she goes ahead and wakes the kids up anyway? Beatriz becomes a more active character by taking that initiative.
- In general, your script seems to run for twice as long as it needs to. As an exercise, try and see how much you can cut before it starts to lose meaning. You'll be surprised with what you can get away with.
- It's a good idea, especially in scripts, to give each of your characters a distinct personality. You hint at this really well with the kids' introductions, but you can take it further. Especially pay attention to your word choice in dialogue: as it stands right now, the kids sound like overly-verbose adults.
- Make sure character names are consistent in the action lines. "Maria and Javier notice their mother" would be fine in literature, but it helps to clarify with "Maria and Javier notice Beatriz" instead.
- When describing what happens, avoid anything that just tells us what emotion a character feels. "Beatriz is irked by her children's habitual use of their phones" is less effective than, for example, "Beatriz flares her nostrils at the sight of her children on their phones."
- Parentheticals should only be used if the text of the line is ambiguous, like "(sarcastic)". If you do need to telegraph an emotion, you'll be better off indicating that a character does something related to it. Infuriated people stomp their feet. Annoyed people roll their eyes.
- Skimming through the first 10 pages, I don't get a sense of what the story is about or why I'm supposed to care about this family. Sure, you've got a conflict between some parents and their kids playing on phones, but that's a scene, not a story.
- Consider these questions: "Who is the main character? What does this person want? What gets in the way of them getting what they want? How do they change as they get closer to what they want?" You don't necessarily need to have anything Deep or Profound, but you should at least give them something.
- Generally, it's a good idea to hook your reader within the first 3 pages. Preferably on page 1.
As far as your formatting goes, MS Word is fine for beginners. But if you want to take screenwriting seriously and get the formatting down perfectly (without all the hassle of manually setting margins and fonts!) I highly recommend using a tool that automatically does that for you. Fountain
is great because it's plain text that converts to a screenplay format. I personally use Highland
(built on top of Fountain) but it's platform-specific so YMMV.
On a general cleanup note, is there any plan to remove old entries from Sandbox.Con Crit Thread? I see we've powered through a huge chunk of that page now.
Actual Filmmaker trying to earn a Creator page. Gleahan and the Knaves of Industry — available now on streaming and blu-ray.I dont have much to add to Aw Sam Weston's critique. I read all the way through it, so I know that the opening scenes are intended to lead up to a sci-fi/fantasy scenario. Actually, I remember you working on this setting over in Worldbuilding. So in general I would say that the opening takes too long, and builds too little drama. for example, I think you spend too much time illustrating the characters of the parents, esp. if they aren't going to be part of the story after the siblings find the cave. You can establish the family/sibling relationship with half the scenes you do, or even less, and a little foreshadowing on page one would go a long way toward hooking the reader and keeping them interested. Perhaps you could have some sightings reported on the radio, which no one pays attention to.
It's a good story idea, you just need to tighten your writing style somewhat and you should be good to go with the rest of it.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.
Fantasy writer turned Filmmaker.
Yeah, I had no idea this was a sci-fi story based on the first 10 pages. That's a promise you as a writer have to make on page 1, or very close to it. I thought it was just going to be some kind of intergenerational Hispanic family drama.
Edited by AwSamWeston on Feb 7th 2021 at 3:07:14 AM
Actual Filmmaker trying to earn a Creator page. Gleahan and the Knaves of Industry — available now on streaming and blu-ray.Read through The Cavern by @AdeptGaderius.
I think this script has a lot in common with your previous submission. The story is good. I really like the modern-day fairy tale atmosphere, the pang of Adult Fear it gives when it becomes apparent that monsters do exist and the little ones are none too wise about it.
But your dialogue reads a bit like Wikipedia articles. Your characters use big thesaurus words and turns of phrases that make their speech feels stilted and unnatural, and the fact that all of them speak that way makes the script a bit exhausting for me to read through at times. Compared to your previous works, though, I think that there's a definite improvement in the overall emotiveness of the dialogue. I don't really know what kind of specific advices to offer right now, but I suggest that you keep working on it and look up more resources on how to write dialogue well.
Back to the story: I like what I'm seeing, and that cliffhanger definitely left me wanting more (though I imagine it could work perfectly well as a standalone short). One thing I'd suggest is to hint from the start that something's off at this beach. Maybe put up a sign warning about the tides for the characters to see, or a radio broadcast talking about people going missing there. Or emphasise the beach's geography in the script directions from the start, noting how some of its features look off and not-quite-natural, or how the rocky shore in the distance seems full of caves that look like they'd be perfect for hiding something.
(Also, just to make sure: nobody's submission got skipped, right?)
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.

Yeah. Obviously, i understand the concept of show, don't tell in movies and other visual medium, but writing??? Isn't it, like, impossible, since these are words we're talking about, here, not images?
Anyways, thanks. I'll see what i can to do...