(Untitled)

[wearestarrdust]

The next little "segment" from my universe of The Genesis Project.
Please feel free to comment and critique as you feel you'd like too.

Title: The Girl in the Basement
Rating: PG
Story: The Genesis Project
Prompts: Rocky Road #9 "Basement", Carrot Cake #21 "Carry", and Vanilla Bean #2 "Chance"
Word Count: 510
Summary: While feeling misplaced,

Comments

[xfirefly9x]

Nice. I love the description of the girl especially. :)

A suggestion.. You could try showing a bit more, rather than telling so much..

[wearestarrdust]

Thank you. I really enjoyed writing this one.

You know what...I've been told that before - I really have no idea what that mean's or how to do it?

[xfirefly9x]

:)

Hmm'kay. Well.
Basically... telling is what you tend to do... You describe the scene and what happens and tell the reader everything up front. Example, the sentence "He was happy." is telling. Showing would be "His lips curled up in an amused grin." Does that make sense?

[wearestarrdust]

Hummm, yes that make's sense. Can you give me some examples from sentances from this peice descriptive vs showing?

[xfirefly9x]

This piece seems more of a reflective piece. You do show rather than tell in a good amount of this, but in overall what you are doing is more "this is what happened" than taking the reader through the tale in present time and showing them as the tale unravels. It's more... someone looking back on past events. Which works, but can come across as much slower than showing the reader in 'present time'. (Not to be confused with the tense you are using.)

Make sense?

[wearestarrdust]

Hummm, I don't want to sound like an idiot. I understand what your saying, but inevitably I won't be able to write it the other way :|

[xfirefly9x]

Yeah, sure. That's fine. Disregard any of my comments if you feel they don't apply. Is just suggestions.

:)

[wearestarrdust]

Oh, no. I hope you didn't misunderstand :( I didn't mean to say that. I was...uh, trying to show my confusion. Remember how I said someone had said this to me before. Well, I thought I had changed it, haha. So, I guess what I'm saying is I don't really understand how to do it, even if I understand the concept.

[xfirefly9x]

Hmm... well, you could try adding in some dialogue? That might make it feel a bit more rounded?

[wearestarrdust]

Ah, alright. I guess that's wasn't where I was going with this peice, but since I hardly ever put dialouge in I should probably start practicing that! :) Thanks :)

[xfirefly9x]

Maybe. :)
Another idea would be to experiment with different tenses. Try present tense maybe? See how you find that. *shrug*
You've already got very strong writing.. hopefully playing around with a few extra things will strengthen it even more. :)

[wearestarrdust]

Thank you.
That is another idea, I might give both of them a try in my next two stories, and you can tell me how I go :)

[xfirefly9x]

Sure, will do. :)

[xfirefly9x]

Have you read anything by Traci Harding? I've been reading one of hers, and it hit me yesterday that it's quite similar to your writing. I'm not entirely sure how to put it, but.. yeah. Here's an attempt at it.

Both your work and Harding's show, and don't tell, when you go to sentence level. But paragraph level? You both tell the story in past tense. While Harding adds in dialogue, you've not really done much with dialogue yet, which would take away some of the action and forward motion in yours that hers has, and make your pieces feel slower, even if they're not supposed to be slow.

So, yes. Basically what I said the other day. Focus on adding some dialogue, but keep the underlying style you've already got, and I think you'll be good. And if you get a chance to read Traci Harding, you can tell me if you get what I mean or if this is my brain making up weird things that have no base in logic... :)

Hopefully at least some of that makes sense/ is somewhat helpful? Kindsa tired..

[wearestarrdust]

I have not read anything by her, I think I was going to at one point though. The next few peices should have dialoug. I think I shy away from writing dialouge for a few reasons. The first is that I enjoy writing reflective peices because they flow better. And second I think is that I'm always worried they will say something out of character because I'm not 100% sure on the characters yet. Yeah, I think I know what I mean...;)