Fill for 7.03 comment meme, ta-da!

[quickreaver]

Title: As Many Times As It Took
Rating: PG, gen
Characters: Sam, Dean, Bobby, Hallucifer
Warnings: a little blood 'n cussin'
Word Count: 3,363
Summary: Prompt fill for ratherastory's kick-ass 7:03 comment meme. Based on this prompt by vail_kagami, but touched on a couple others: "Sam isn't doing nearly as well as he seems. He's still having seizures, hallucinations,

Comments

[monicawoe]

Eek!! Poor Sam!

Lucifer is just delicious in this though!

Poor Dean and Bobby too.

[quickreaver]

But did it totally suck?! I have a feeling it did. I'm just not getting the results I want from my writing, dern it. And I don't mean the comments, I mean from ME. I feel like I'm skimming the surface but afraid to get deep. Damn that "show don't tell" mantra...

Oh, but thank you SO much for reading! Whether it sucked or not. ;)

[monicawoe]

Uh no it did NOT suck.
I can point out one error you made, right at the beginning though. Check how you spelled Bobby's name the seond time. That's the only error.
The only other thing that sucks here is that Sam dropped twenty pounds of muscle
That is unacceptable! He is to be my manly mountain if muscly-manliness, dammit! ( but it does fit with where his character is in this piece, so I get it...doesn't mean I have to approve though )
I'm telling you - benchpresses can induce pain too! Pain AND muscles! : D
I included a helpful icon of muscle

[quickreaver]

D'oh! I misspelled BOBBY'S name? Oh, for...*grumble*

I promise, my next fic will involve mighty!Sam. Cross my black heart. :D

(And I SO appreciate the ego massage! I have a cold and I'm fragile. *sniff*)

[quickreaver]

I really truly should've gotten a beta but yeah, you hit the nail on the head, I wanted to post it! (And it's not that I'm afraid of criticism...I love it, actually...but I got impatient.)

Okay, just to clarify, the action should come before the setting, as a rule? I'd love you forever if you could pull out a passage as an example and just brief out how you'd improve it.

I think, in truth, "digging deep" scares me. I'm afraid I'll come off as maudlin or melodramatic or over the top. Now, if I took the time to get a beta, this could solve THAT problem as well...heh...

Thanks bunches for commenting! *highfive*

[quickreaver]

Oh, now SEE! You warmed up that passage immensely. I totally get what you did there. Now applying that observation...whole 'nother ball of wax. I love it.

I'm printing this out and sticking it by the computer as a nudge in a better direction. Helpful to the nth degree!

Utra-thank-yous!

[4422shini]

HOLY SHIT THAT'S AWESOME XD!!!!

[quickreaver]

*hugs!* (oop, html snafu...)

[zara_zee]

I enjoyed this a lot. It's a missing period of time that was just ripe for fanfic and I was delighted to get the blanks filled in. Your Hallucifer voice was awesome and Sam's desperation was just right.

You had a couple of missing letters: can where you meant cane and no on where you meant no one, minor, (and spell checker won't pick it up) but yeah, that's where a beta reader picks up what you wrote not what you meant!

The best piece of writing advice I ever got was: 'Show, don't tell' and I think it was Hemmingway who said (and I'm paraphrasing here...) 'Don't tell me it was a full moon, show me the bright moonlight reflecting off a piece of broken glass.' I have that taped to my pc! :)

Anyway, nice piece, thanks for sharing! :)

[quickreaver]

Thank you and THANK YOU!

*corrects typos, embarrassed*

Yanno, everyone knows the "show, don't tell" mantra but as soon as you mentioned the moon, I slapped my forehead and realized I "showed" very little in this fic. My fear of getting purple in my prose (because I'm an artist I tend to want to describe the hell outta things)has led me to stripping away too much, I fear. I knew my writing was lacking an intimacy and relatability, but I couldn't figure out why. I think I'm starting to glean the answer. It was there all along, but I need to be hit over the head with things sometimes!

So again, thank you!

[tesserae_]

Don't tell me it was a full moon, show me the bright moonlight reflecting off a piece of broken glass.

So, so critical! Another way I find of catching telling instead of showing when I pull beta duty for someone is that they'll drop into passive voice (Tears were shed instead of Sam broke into messy tears, for example) or pull out of a scene entirely to summarize what's going on, generally in a would tense. So, They spent three weeks at the cabin. Dean would wake up, stretch, and yell for Sammy to pour his coffee, while Bobby would.... If the writer's staying in the scene, it tends to go more like: Dean woke up and rolled over, a move that, every morning, threatened to dump him and his cast onto the floor.

Staying in the hard details of the scene and more specifically in the POV character's body is a good way to force yourself into showing instead of telling...

[quickreaver]

A lot of this fic was pretty experimental. I totally get what you're saying about the would tense. My use of it was deliberate (in that small dose) because I did want a little distance in the scene but there again, it may not have worked!

I absolutely LOVE that we're talking about the skin and bones (and muscle!) of writing here. I'm learning TONS. Keep it up!

[kassidy62]

I thought it was interesting, and the deal the devil made, that scene, was riveting. I felt so bad for Sam.

[quickreaver]

Excellent! I mean, yeah, poor Sammy... ;)