Story Discussion 5-28-2001: A modern Werewolf Saga by Red

[Grimfalcon]

Unfortunately, this is what happens when you take a complete story and start moving the pieces around in it to the recommendations of some one else. In the process, you have to start adding new pieces because the plot doesn’t match up any longer, and then you end up going back and changing everything around again so the old material matches with the new. In the process, the new story because of haphazard conglomeration of thrown together ideas and subplots that no longer resembles the original intent.

I started getting a weird feeling about this story around chapter 7 or so as the original plot and story line took the reader in one direction, then suddenly turn itself around 180 degrees. It started with the association of the Dark Were with the Nazis (which I still think is a cool idea) and the addition of Himmler. The problem then is I had to add in two new characters, Norman McDonald and Sofia and the fact that the government agency was actually controlled by the Dark Were. In the process, it forced me to go back and change the entire story, thus making it into a completely different story then originally intended and things kind of went downhill form there. The plot was no longer plannedo ut in advance; I was coming up with it as I wrote it, more or leass. If it sounds like I’m rambling, that’s because the story started to eventually do that as I tried to come up with a completely different plot line from a certain point on, while meshing it with pre-existing material.

As for alienating the readers, I can see that in a way now; you take them in a certain direction, get people rooting for Paula and Sep, she becomes the Matriarch, defeats the bad guys and saves the world. My twist with her betrayal, and the way things play out from there, takes that away form them, and I’m sure it left some people scratching their heads as to what the hell is going on.

Red was a good story concept, but in retrospect, I should have just left it alone and stuck with what I had. Like I said, that’s what happens when you take outside advice from someone and you try to completely change it around, when it should have been rewritten to suit the new story concept instead. Oh well, live and learn I guess.

 

[Grimfalcon]

Think this is going to be the last chapter for a while. I need to focus on a few other projects for the time being.

Chapter 10

http://www.literotica.com/s/red-ch-10

 

[Auden James]

Critique

Dear Grimfalcon,

I laud your efforts; writing a 60K words story calls for discipline and devotion. And since you've not yet finished your tale (or did you after this 10th chapter?), I guess, you're still really deep into your story, i.e. there's no distance between you and your work. That's why I don't find it easy to comment or give a critique on it. I simply don't know whether anything I want to share with you will fall on sympathetic ears; and if you're still wholly positive about your "baby", i.e. your present story, than there's not really a point in writing anything akin to criticism to you.

However, I've read all the posted first three chapters, and I don't want to keep quiet about my impressions. In advance I want to apologize for any overdone criticism on a piece by an amateur writer (for, I guess, you’re just as amateur as most everybody else here on LIT). The blame of that misbehavior on my side may be in part put on the three novels (V. and Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon, and Neuromancer by William Gibson) that are awaiting me to finally read them through. Please bear with me on this because I'm in a quagmire for, just like dr_mabeuse, “I always criticize against the highest standards I know” and, to complicate things farther, “unlike most of the people in the English-speaking world these days, I don't think there's anything wrong with honest criticism”. Hence blame it on my reading material and upbringing.

First, I want to put my 2 cents on two assumptions you stated about your own writing. Then I'll give short accounts on each respective chapter I've read and what I think may be right/wrong with it. Finally, I hope this critique will be helping you in any respect (if only in realizing that you think I'm no better than a blackguard).

After that's said, let's start taking a look on how you see your writing yourself and what I got to say about that:

I like to think outside the box as far as imagination and story telling goes, while keeping true to my own interests of mythology, history, and military settings.

Unfortunately, I must confess that what irritated me the most was the fact that your story wasn't as creative or innovative or whatever as I expected it to be after such a bold statement of yours (I may be over-interpreting it). In fact, I found Red to be a rather unimaginative take on well-known (and perhaps better) works (like Wolfen, Blade, Underworld, (the abysmal) Twilight, Red Riding Hood (2011 film), etc.) and themes (like heroic love, romantic love of life, individuals destined for greatness, unconditional loyalty, enchantment of our disenchanted world, good vs. evil, humanity at mercy of the creator/nature, etc.). Moreover, in my eyes, it failed in achieving the suspension of disbelieve: more on this in my discussions of the respective chapters.

Though it's true that your interests in mythology and in military (and probably police?) settings shine through, it may be overtaking your story: chapter 2 is pure crime stuff and chapter 3 is pure mythology.

However, I just wanted to express the incongruence of my experience of your text and your self-perception of it, though, I must admit, stated here in rather abstract terms. It may become clearer in the following, I hope.

Just a bit of warning to any sensitive readers; my writing it very 'real,' some might say graphic and violent at times. My bad guys are bad, and that's why they're villians. This isn't a romance novel for the faint of heart.

Again, I find your self-perception incommensurable with my experience. I may be wrong, but I think that I'm a sensitive reader (in the sense that I also look at details in relation to the whole of a work, and vice versa, not just touching the surface for a quick fun/stroke), and I neither found Red to be "very real" (i.e. believable) nor particularly "graphic and violent" (i.e. overstated-Michael-Bay-meets-Eli-Roth hardgore action). It was just, as Pure indicated, “miles over the top”, starting in absurdity (e.g. the preposterous 'Germanic' names, and I know because I'm German) and eventually becoming outrageously ridiculous (e.g. grandmother's talk in Ch. 3). As for the violence: It was either suppressed (e.g. the murder in Ch. 2) or simply out of place/unreasoned-for (e.g. the demolishment of the chosen girl in Ch. 1), disrupting and subverting the narrative that thus became increasingly uneven.

Chapter One
To make a long story short: It simply baffled me; and not in any positive sense, unluckily.

If you start a novel this way, the (sensitive) reader will put it back on the shelf after reading just the first few paragraphs: noncohesive, not all too eloquent stuff about an "Exalted Guardian of the Nord Amerikaner clan" (whatever kkk-successor the author might mean one muses at that point), visions of inexorable and inexplicable fate, time and the time that has come, more weird names (Jochiem, Great Mother, etc.), men's duty to father sons (especially when one's brother knows he's inexplicably going to die), puppies (no kidding?), and—at least to some—dubious talk of bloodlines, pure blood races, etc.

That's just too much. It's selling trash for an imaginative feat. (Just for the record: I have nothing against trash. For example, to me it's a real treat to watch laughable films as long as they don't take themselves too seriously. In this sense a work can be so bad it's good. But if trash is deadly serious, or even proclaiming itself to be of genuine quality [f.i. Uwe Boll thinks this way of his films], then it simply sucks.) Or, to say the least, the first chapter gave me this ill-conceived trash appeal.

Back to your first chapter. The problem with it is that it doesn't insinuate the greater whole that's to come and unfold and of which it is part of. Instead, and even more so after reading the following two chapters, it completely refutes to coalesce with your narrative (that, as indicated above, itself is already greatly uneven). It doesn't provide the (sensitive) reader with enough (if any) references that would make him think that there's a cohesive greater whole to unfold. For if the ideas presented in the first few paragraphs of a supposed epic are already as disparate and noncohesive as it's the case in Red, then the inference is likely that throughout the remainder of the narrative the remaining ideas will be presented in the same disparate and noncohesive fashion.

If done right, an epic's opening, as unrevealing of the real plot it may be, is cohesive in itself and still (conclusively) points towards a greater whole (of which it is a part) to unfold; the latter isn't implying that the insinuated whole must be the true (unfolded) whole in the end, indeed the exact opposite could just as well be the case so that everything would turn out to be different from what one was first inclined to believe, but even to make this possible the opening must have had insinuated a whole in the first place from which the true (unfolded) whole could diverge (in hindsight).

But if a narrative starts without a (clear enough) direction, seemingly waiting for one to come around later by itself, and/or if, against all odds, that direction even so comes around later, then the author (nonetheless) chose the wrong beginning. The undirected verbiage shouldn't have been kept in the narrative but should've been deleted (for its dispensability). And in a good epic there's nothing that's dispensable to it: every part is contained in the whole, and the whole is the undercurrent of every part.

Lastly, knowing that there's no sex in Ch. 3, I want to take a short look at the eroticism in Ch. 1. To my mind the first part of it is non-erotic; the hinted at 'heroic love' is only peripheral, bearing no relation whatsoever to eroticism. As for the second part, though definitely including a sex scene, it might be questionable still. No matter what potential tension n/c scenes might bear, due to the resistance that is to be overcome in them, you shed all that potential from the outset already because, in fact, there’s no resistance to be found here. The chosen girl submits seemingly willfully to the ridiculous violence of her Lord, thus there’s no tension left: he’s doing what he wants and she doesn’t seem to be bothered about it.

Chapter Two
Here you make a huge leap forward storytelling-wise, I think. You set a comprehensible scenery with clubbing, chicks and players, which nonetheless could have been rendered so much more interesting (when I say this I think about the way Pynchon pulls of the sexually intertwined “Whole Sick Crew” in V. with its anecdotes, outrageous behavior and turning of phrases), instead of stringing together more or less non-erotic descriptions of boring people of no further interest to the storyline (e.g. Mandy’s lovers or, maybe, even Mandy herself). But what’s good is how you juxtapose the outcomes of your two lines of description (Sep picking up Mandy, the corpse left after the night) so it’s the reader’s turn to draw conclusions. Hence you activate reader what’s helping to immerse him in your writing. That’s the point I liked the most about Ch. 2. That’s why I talk about a ‘huge’ leap forward. I also liked, though to a much lesser degree, how you depict your female protagonist’s working routine: aspiring for the hard-boiled detective story. Unfortunately, to my mind, here you’re relying on stereotypes though. I mean, for example, the goofy provincial policemen, Paula's subordinate to which duties are delegated, secretive feds, and Paula's investigation against the rule, etc. To my mind your tale would do better without those stereotypes because it’d make it 'fresher’, like Pure would put it, I think.

Anyway, one major problem of Ch. 1 isn’t truly eliminated in Ch. 2. It’s the missing eroticism, for me. Though you’re hinting at some fling between Sep and Mandy, that’s never really the vanishing point of this line of your narrative. It’s the mythological search of Sep for his ‘love of life’ (who isn't Mandy). And that search is too metaphysical in the first place to really be connected to eroticism. Besides you seem to have realized this yourself, since you rightly spare the reader of a superfluous description of the mating between Sep and Mandy. What’s interesting is why it’s superfluous. I think it’s like this because from the first line of the clubbing scenery it’s clear that it’s not the erotic that’s important here, you don’t focus on the erotic quality of, for example, dancing with a female or watching her dance or eye fucking her or whatever. You make it clear that Sep is looking for something offside of eroticism. Here: his predestined ‘love of life’.

Chapter Three
To put it bluntly, after a short high in Ch. 2, this Chapter was a real let-down for me. And that’s for several, more or less, simple reasons:

a) The missing eroticism. Still, after 6 LIT pages, I’m waiting for real ‘erotica’ here, for the 4th chapter is again a chapter that’s most certainly bare of anything akin to eroticism because the talk Paula and grandma do is solely about your story's metaphysical and mythological backbone, not about its erotic themes.

b) The mythological and metaphysical backbone of your tale, which ol’ grandma is providing in this chapter, is so confused that any try to gather it together into a coherent whole is lost on me. That’s a real negative, I think, if you leave the reader in puzzlement of what's the point of that stuff, for example, the time-overpowering curse or whatever.

c) The way you reveal all that stuff all at once in a quasi monologue of grandma isn’t the most effective way to pull it off. For me (the main?) part of the fun of reading detective/mystery stuff like, for example, Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg is in making inferences towards what’s ‘really’ behind all that which is happening, making conjectures and reading on to see how these conjectures turn out. If, to stay with Hjortsberg’s example, one would make to Falling Angel the one simple adjustment of letting Louis Cyphre’s attorney reveal to Harold Angel on page 7 the ‘real’ identity of his client and what he (his client) ‘really’ wants Angel to do, then (apart from the prose itself) there would be no longer any point in reading the following 281 pages. The fun would be taken out of the whole narrative. And to my mind you’re committing just that fault here in Ch. 3. After quasi eliminating the eroticism you’re also eliminating the mystery. So what’s left?

d) Storytelling-wise your revelation also fails because there’s no genuine dialogue between grandma and Paula. Rather grandma simply lets loose, for no comprehensible reason, and lets off all the steam pent-up in her long life about not being allowed/able, for no comprehensible reason, to tell her grand-child of the ‘real’ mystery behind the more or less bizarre course of action of her (Paula’s) life.

*
That’s it from my side for now.

This critique is written only with the best of intentions: to provoke thought on how to (possibly) improve the text. I’m no native speaker. Thus please excuse my English and therefore inevitable errors of spelling and diction.

I wish you only the best!

–AJ

 

[Grimfalcon]

Even though I'm anxious to bite, I'm not going to take the bait.

I will answer one of you’re questions, though. It was finished as a workable story and plot line long before your comment, and if you’d bothered to read my posts above regarding it, instead of striving to show everyone what a literary expert you think you are, you would have know that already.

My reply is written only with the best of intentions: to provoke thought on how to possibly improve you’re methods of critiquing an author and his work, without it being necessary to have a Mod edit it for insulting material.

All the Best,
Grim

 

[Auden James]

Insult

I will answer one of you’re questions, though. It was finished as a workable story and plot line long before your comment, and if you’d bothered to read my posts above regarding it, instead of striving to show everyone what a literary expert you think you are, you would have know that already.

No offense taken.
Besides I did read your posts above right before submitting my comment (and I tried to reflect them in my comment).
Anyway, the main meat of my comment was finished last week already but I simply didn't find the time to submit it then--and your prolific publishing action somehow intimidated me.

Though I'm somehow confused because your statement that the 10th chapter "is going to be the last chapter for a while" doesn't necessarily imply, at least to my mind, that this 'while' will never end; I thought to catch a glimpse of your intention to--maybe in the far future--explore your tale again and farther.

And I must apologize if my comment, as your reply indicates, made you think that I did in any sense bait anyone.

All the best,
AJ