If you wanted to know about my sleep study, I'll show you some pictures of the room. The first picture is that of my too-soft bed:
The next picture is a picture of an old CPAP machine. They never hooked me up, and I assume that the machine is just there for show. It undoubtedly reassures the testee that if she has to wear a CPAP, the apparatus won't take up much space. I hope it's only there for display because the safety check sticker reads "03/07" as the last checked date.
(* * *)
Now, on to "Earthfall, Epiosde 1 Part 1".
You might wonder why I broke out a "Klosterman Question" two days ago. Like most of Klosterman's questions, his answers can be applied to situations other than the ones given in the question.
The situation I was actually asking about is fan fiction. Take a work of fan fiction that has a poor appearance. Grammar is poor, there are no commas, verbs are used incorrectly, there are frequent spelling errors -- but the characterization and plot are superb. Then take the opposite sort of story, where there are no violations of grammar but the story itself is awful. Which should be corrected first, the grammar or the structure of the story?
Both persons answering said, in effect, "the grammar and presentation is more important." To borrow Scissors MacGillicutty's answer, if you have a crappy story that looks good, people might think that the story has some sort of unexplored depth...or that it's a parody of bad stories. Whereas even the best stories won't be read if they are poorly presented.
"Earthfall, Episode 1 Part 1" is unfortunately poorly presented. Rather than rip the story to pieces, I want to use the story as an illustrative exercise, a sort of post-beta reading to show what should have been done.
First...paragraphs. "A paragraph is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea, or the words of an author," according to Wikipedia. However, legendeld places each sentence on a separate line, like so:
The trip to the bridge only took a handful of seconds but the sounds of her boots hitting the deck plates seem to last forever.
Smoke poured out of damaged panels as a fire control team struggled to maintain the navigation system.
“75 seconds until PSR Captain.” One of the bridge crew stated with a shaky voice.
We know that very bad things are going on aboard the Henry Global. The ship has entered a gravity well and is taking damange. Daria's hurried trip to the bridge and the sounds and sights she sees all support the same idea or point -- namely, the imminent destruction of the ship.
The trip to the bridge only took a handful of seconds but the sounds of her boots hitting the deck plates seem to last forever. Smoke poured out of damaged panels as a fire control team struggled to maintain the navigation system. “Seventy-five seconds until PSR, captain," stated one of the bridge crew with a shaky voice.
When I write, I have a hard time with paragraphs. If you have several one-sentence sub-points you wish to make that all fall in the same category, should you write one paragraph or three paragraphs? Where should one paragraph begin and another one end. Should I have included the sentence about the ship entering the gravity well, or do the sentences related to the damage belong to their own separate paragraph?
It's hard to get a cut and dried answer. All you can do is experiment, and hope that someone will point out your most egregious sins.
I changed some of the grammar. A sentence should not begin with a number if you can avoid it. If it must begin with a number, the number has to be spelled out. Relatively small numbers like "seventy-five" are okay to spell out. If the number was, say, 3,250, I might have rewritten the above sentence so that it didn't start with the number.
Since the line about PSR is being spoken by a member of the bridge crew, and we are catching him in the act of speaking it, I ended that sentence with a comma. Furthermore, since the word "captain" is only capitalized when the title is applied to a person, I put the word in lower-case. In the next sentence, Captain Meels is speaking and since we are now refering to Meels with respect to his rank, it is okay to capitalize the word.
Some more dialogue between Captain Meels and LTC Daria Morgendorffer, provided by legendeld....
“Push forward. They won’t follow us down.” Captain Meels replied.
“Captain.” Daria called out as soon as she entered the bridge.
“Finished with your little report Commander.” The captain sneered.
“Why are you entering atmo?” She demanded.
“I have no intention of allowing these buggers to hold Earth for one more day.”Meels answered.
“Our orders are to engage, assess then withdraw.” Daria responded with force.
The rewrite:
“Push forward," said Captain Meels. "They won't follow us down."
Daria centered the bridge. "Captain," she said.
“Finished with your little report, Commander?"
“Why are you entering atmo?”
“I have no intention of allowing these buggers to hold Earth for one more day.”
“Our orders are to engage, assess then withdraw," said Daria, forcefully.
“I am exercising command prerogative.”
Daria approached Captain Meels. “The Mars attack group needs this information.”
“No they don’t. The Invid will be pushed off Earth in a matter of hours.”
One problem beginning writers have is an embarrassment in using the perfectly respectable part of speech "said". Rather than just use "said" some writers want to use labored synonyms for "said" with every sentence: "answered", "responded", "replied", "stated".
It is perfectly okay to use "said"! "But CINCGREEN," you might ask, "won't this look tacky? Every one of my sentences will end with 'said'"!
The solution is that if only two people are talking, you don't have to write "he said" or "she said". You can simply write what they say. Every now and then you might want to throw in a 'said' so that people don't lose track of who is speaking.
In long novels, you can find entire pages which are nothing more than quoted sentences or paragraphs. What makes things more confusing is that a simple declarative statement or response is a paragraph, and therefore deserves its own line. An example:
"...and Mrs. Calabash," said the district attorney, "isn't it true that you always hated Mr. Durante? Isn't it true that you stalked him for days? Isn't it true that you broke into his house to gain his bank accounts? Isn't it t---!"
"--I object!"
The courtroom went silent. District Attorney Hamilton turned to Perry Mason. "You can't object!"
"I just did!"
"No you didn't!"
"Yes, I did, and it's perfectly legal!"
"Your momma is legal!"
"That's what your momma told me last night when I was on her back!"
"Oh yeah? Well your momma -- !"
"--SILENCE!!" It was Judge Carver, who had had enough.
In short, "Earthfall" needs a lot of cleaning up. That's where a beta-reader comes in. In its present state, "Earthfall" is hard to read and even harder to follow. I hope legendeld can work the kinks out of it; he's already written several stories and I think as soon as he can get the grammar problems fixed, he'll get the increase in readership that prolific writers deserve.
5 comments:
I just got word that someone reviewed my work and honestly I expected a bad one and I wasn't disappointed.
I have to admit that the person's criticism is fair but I can't call in constructive because that would of required him to send it to me or let me know that it happened.
I do have one small problem. I think it's rather arrogant and rude to take my work, rewrite and then publish it to his own site. His review stands well without this act.
Maybe this is a nit to pick but I think it's mine to do.
I am requesting without any authority to force him to do so and without a threat of any kind, to please remove the rewrites from his site.
So does anyone have an opinion on this?
Without regard to the truth of either side, I wonder if it's better to simply remove the review.
Normally, I wouldn't remove a review on request, but there's an exception for everything and I think that in this case, maybe an exception should be made. (*Why* I'm making the exception is entirely a personal matter.)
legendeld, I hope that you change your mind about this, though.
Maybe the only opinion that matters here is that of the author's, but it seems to me that the "rewriting" here is well within the fair use allowed for reviews and the like. There's no arrogance here, just pointed commentary (the kind you aren't likely to get over at PPMB).
Okay. This is Brother Grimace, speaking. Testing, testing.
I was under the impression that someone had taken your work in its entirety and posted it upon their web site without asking - a rude thing, to be sure. However, this is a reviewer taking excerpts of the stated author's work and using them as part of a review - a different thing entirely.
Also - what he is doing is not anywhere within the boundaries of unreasonable; at worst (if one wants to see in that way), it is the work of an independent reviewer offering his unsolicited and unprejudiced opinions on how the work in question could be cleared up of the grammatical and thematic problems that said reviewer has found in said work. Use of those excerpts does not in any way reach the level of actionable cause, nor (by the admission of the fic's author himself) is the criticism unfair - a de facto admission that said criticisms are and or could be considered viable in the creative development of said fic in any future chapters.
I was speaking under the earlier belief that plagiarism, or unwanted posting of the work in its entirety was the cause of action; that is not the case. As someone who has had his work critiqued by CINCGREEN before (and went deep, deep underground because I was expecting Tsar Bomba-level criticism - this was back when people trembled upon hearing that they were receiving a CG review), I have to say that having someone like him is a good thing. Yes, we write for fun, and I wouldn't write for any other reason (okay, money's a GOOD reason, too) - but knowing that there's someone out there to keep up honest about our work and trying to keep up our skills - this is a good thing, too.
Why do you think that I'm glad smk does my beta reading now? She lets me get away with very little - in fact; I just went back and took out the ellipses in this post. She has a problem with the way I use that punctuation a touch too much - and because she makes me aware of it, I start to watch out for those errors myself.
That's what critics do. They make us aware of our errors, and we then have the option of accepting or setting aside their review of our works. In performing this service, there is no animus in the use of those excerpts or of 'rewriting' them to demonstrate how improvements can be made; I myself have done this on numerous occasions. (I was an absolute pain-in-the-ASS in the early days of Legion of Lawndale Heroes, in submitting actual whole scenes that I felt were better representative of how things should or could go - hell, go to SFMB and look at my VERY opinionated posts on the serial!)
Legendeld - there was no malice involved in this at all, and I have to apologize for my earlier comments to CINCGREEN.
By the way, that's Strike Two for me in the eternally dumb game of lobbing nukes at Fortress CINCGREEN. To be fair to myself, though - if Legendeld had revealed the whole story, I'd have made these comments beforehand. CG - sorry if I got on your nerves. This shouldn't have even gone this far.
Having (finally) read the review in question and having gone back over the complaints to it, I honestly don't see what the problem is.
As Eric stated, the excerpt used and altered falls safely within 'fair use' for criticism.
My suggestion? Get over it. It's a cogent, well written, constructive review (In my opinion, he actually went rather easy on the story) which holds up to the standard of reviews which CINCGREEN has set for himself.
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