The Party

[Delta40]

^

Now that is truly entertaining on an otherwise boring day at work. Thanks CreativeOutlet!

[mgv1208]

Ok Matt - you posted your story on a public forum and asked us to let you know what we thought. I did so (as did several other posters) but you didn't like what we said. That's fine. We're all allowed an opinion.
You also asked us to suggest ways to improve it. The best suggestion was to delete it but you chose to ignore that advice. Instead you launched a personal attack on the person who was offering a way for you to save face. Not the best way to get us to appreciate what you're trying to do here.

So let's look at what you actually wrote (and I'll ignore any grammatical flaws since you don't believe in proof reading before posting).

You begin by setting the scene - time and place.
This was your typical small college house party, a pretty good mix of people, a decent ratio of guys to girls, and lots of booze.
So far you're not grabbing my attention. You're busy drawing a picture but we need to know why we should bother watching. To be honest it reminded me of the kind of 'celebrity fluff' one reads in gossip columns. Who's dating who and were they were seen last night. In a nutshell you're not telling us a story are you?

The party isn't being described through the eyes of any particular character so we have to assume all the observations are yours as the omniscient author. In which case your choice of vocabulary is presumably meant to make some kind of point. Perhaps inject humour (or what you call a 'comedic' element). Which brings me to your portrayal of the women in the 'story' and the reason for my 'misogynist' comment:
The girls at this party weren't ordinary girls, by any means. They were either spectacularly attractive with big tits, big asses, and long legs, while somehow maintaining midsections that would make Olympians cringe with envy, or they were remarkably unattractive with stomachs that stretched below their ****s, tits that flopped around their ribs, and legs, which were somehow lacking in any visible muscle, despite all the weight they carried.
You can hardly claim that this was written by someone who has a high opinion of women. You're using physical appearances as the sole arbiter of whether or not a woman is to be admired or denigrated - making fun of those who don't measure up to 'the ideal woman'. It might get a cheap laugh from the jocks - but not from most of us, believe me. And I'm no 'stiff'. I was brought up on Frank Zappa's music so I've heard my share of 'A**es', 'c***s' and 't**s' - yes girls love to be objectified by guys. In context there's nothing wrong with coarse language, but I still maintain that the way you wrote this is disrespectful and a sign of a misogynistic attitude.

We're then subjected to a great deal of small talk. The kind of stuff girls talk about in their dorms or the rest rooms. Nothing shocking. But nothing remotely interesting either. Your characters came across as shallow and one-dimensional. Admittedly this kind of behaviour goes on - but what was your reason for displaying it in such detail?
You claim -
The girls in my story act exactly like guys, and are strong and do exactly what they want.
I thought most contemporary women had more ambition than that. Are you implying you're writing this to show your support for 'girl power'? or are you again looking for a cheap laugh?

The story then suddenly jumps to Billy's pov as he reflects on his date with Courtney. No plot structure as such - we've merely moved from one room to another and are suddenly inside one particular character's head. Obviously he's a loser and he provides a wealth of material for you to expose his limitations as a human being and as a lover. Perhaps this was supposed to be funny? Well, the word that springs to mind is 'embarrassing'.
None of us expect great literature on here but the entire scene was repetitive and stomach-churning. Reading it was like having someone place road-kill on our dinner plate then expect us to laugh at it. Puerile rather than audacious.

All you managed to do was make sex demeaning and boring. Throwing in as many sexual references as possible isn't considered particularly ground breaking or clever.

It doesn't get any better. Bobby's next. Still no plot arc. Just random snapshots of people you want us to laugh at. Billy finds a chisel in the room (like you do) and uses it to stimulate his girlfriend. Is that the part of the story that's supposed to be funny perhaps? No. You still didn't raise a titter here.

Then we go back to Billy and his drunken finale. And you want to know how you can improve your writing. Perhaps I'm missing something but I would say you need to find something worth writing about first. Why would anyone who wasn't at the party want to read this dross?


But your readers have the right to decide whether they find something offensive or not when a piece is put up for feedback. No one is advocating censorship on here but if you genuinely want your writing to be admired you have to exercise some restraint and some self-imposed quality control. This piece was self-indulgent.


Define the word 'interests' - what was there in this that could possibly interest anyone outside the small group of people who attended the party?


Wrong assumption - poor writing is generally exposed in limited vocabulary rather than the overuse of particular words. There's lots of great literature that uses the occasional **** word.


I'm sorry, but your 'purpose' presumably was to poke fun at stereotypes. Hardly something to be admired and not something most would choose to read.


I assume you canvassed the jocks rather than the English professors. It might indeed be a true reflection of college life in the USA but it's still bad writing. It's not a 'story' because nothing happens. It's a muddled record of people behaving at their worst. There are so many ways you could have brought this to life and made the characters memorable. But instead you took the lazy way out.

Oh, and I also read 'The Splash Zone' and that's basically a feeble one-line joke stretched to more than 900 words. If you want the specifics you can read my post on there.

H

I respect your opinion, and i dont necessarily disagree with all of it. I acknowledge that this isn't meant to be anything more than a look into a college party. The reason i describe the women based on their looks and not their intellect is because of the setting, a party. Not too many people go to a college party and care about striking up some brilliant conversation. They look at the opposite sex in a shallow way because the goal is meerily to hook up. The girls are at this party want to get laid, just like the men, but i wrote them as the group that controls what happens. I'm not concerned whether, or not theyre deep, likeable characters, i want them to behave realistically, which i think they do for the setting that theyre in. This was a first draft, which is why i didnt care about grammar. I wrote that this was a first draft from the start, so why would i want comments on grammar mistakes when i know that theyre there. Steve was certainly advocating censorship and he was being extremely condescending and arrogant, which is why i said what i said to him. Sorry if this was all over the place, i was trying to cover everything. I probably didnt get to everything, but hopefully i got through enough to get my point across

O and the part that i want answered is this. What did you think of the actual prose? By this i mean the style and the rythym, ignoring the content, which im already aware that you dont like. Please give me a reason for your like or dislike of the prose. Thanks.

[hillwalker]

The style of dialogue seems a realistic representation of the kind of vacuous small-talk that takes place in such gatherings.

As for the description of Billy and Bobby's experiences - you're listing what happened as a series of events rather than writing a 'story'. I couldn't engage with any of the characters because they're caricatures. The structure of the story was muddled. And there's no rhythm in the way you use language other than the tedious bang-bang-bang of tasteless observations and words that would shock most readers.

Perhaps this will appeal to a particular audience but I don't see that as a feather in your cap.

H

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I joined this site just so I could comment on your story, which I enjoyed quite thoroughly. It was certainly way different from nearly all of the short stories one comes across these days. I didn't find it boring at all. And I like the way it had, like, no plot. And you name characters who then never actually resurface in the story. Like when you list the names of the hot girls and the ugly girls, then never mention most of them again.

I also read the edited version of the story on that link you posted. However, I think the unedited version--including the blanked-out words--actually works better for this particular story. I really enjoyed the errors and the fact that I had to guess what some of the "bad" words were (not that they were that hard to guess).

I know a lot of people are hating on your story, but they are thinking from the perspective of normal writers. It is highly unlikely they are capable of bringing anything unique to the table. However, I do believe that some of the most engaging aspects of your story are the unintentional result of your amateurishness/lack of awareness. Don't get me wrong about that. Having been around a lot of creative people, though, I have come to realize that creativity is frequently the result of a certain type of obliviousness. Like, for example, if I wrote this story, I'd be like, "What the hell did I just write? This is total crap that no one will like. I'm never showing it to anyone." However, your obliviousness to what the readers on this website will actually like is what allowed you to go through with posting this in the first place. That lack of awareness, in my opinion, is a source of true creativity. And again, the people here who are systematically deconstructing/putting down your story do not posses, or even understand, that type of creativity. Real creativity. That is what you have. Like, you can't help but be creative and do things differently. It's almost out of your control. That's the type of creativity I look for in a writer, or any artist for that matter.

So, I encourage you to continue writing and writing and writing and writing. You'll only get better. And when I talk about your "obliviousness" and whatnot, please don't take that as an insult. I am simply trying to describe to you what I have come to define as the real source of creativity.

Also, I publish a literary magazine at the University of Florida. It's just a student-run magazine, nothing huge, and the next issue won't be coming out for a few more months. However, given your permission, I would possibly like to publish this story (the original, unedited version) in the magazine. Also, before the story, I would write a short piece explaining why this story struck me as interesting and why I believe it has literary merit.

I'm not 100% certain I will be able to put it in magazine, but If I can, do I have your permission to publish it? Thanks.

-Mike

This is quite possibly one of the greatest posts on LitNet.