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[perception090]

intense short story
my punctuation sucks but i feel like you will bear with it.

]stranger things have happened in a night,
but never before in my own presence.
building up vast utopias,collapsing the with a flex of my mind.
as it went, the vast began to tremble as the empty became full and began spilling over .
the trees could have never stood against a sky like that.
deep furrows rolling off of its brow, through vivid exchanges of color flush on it immense face.
the rain sang from the face of every rooftop,
every structure groaned as they clutched their foundations.
wind sang in many voices detonating panes of glass
it wept into the street and springing to life driven by something more than insanity.
the momentum was building like the steady lug of a locomotive breathing deeper with every waking second.
and off in the distance a figure stood quite calm through all of the commotion no name or face had ever been know to this man seemingly existing only for the occasion, i moved nearer so that i might have a better chance of understanding and once he knew he had my attention, the power i had thought cloud grow no more had been awakened. he thrust his batons towards the sky
parting swirling masses of atmosphere until the stars became the perfect audience, mumbling to each other things which had never been told dancing about themselves. and so it had found its purpose the percussions began lightening licked the face of the earth and spectacular lights sprung up in its wake climbing over anything it could to consume it in its dance stretching out towards the its audience as if it could be fostered in the soul of the burning masses. the earth trembled both above and below .
as salt laden body's of water of every corner of this earth swelled with anger and consumed large portions of land as if it had been stolen and recovered. the man was trashing his hands about
wildly yet his movements had a tempo and were precise , had the the world been consumed by his tempo? had it relinquished its orbit and as easily as it began it ended?..... to the sound of an alarm clock. i may have been the only one to whiteness such an art the symphony of destruction through the barometric dreams,

[gruntingslime]

I'll start off by saying you're a tweakfest, which might be a good thing... I hate critiquing work because I tend to see all of the bad things, but don't be discouraged by what I say. First of all, did you mean this to be somewhat like a poem? It appears to be because of the format, the way that the ideas flow, and what sometimes comes off as a "pseudo-artistic" word rant, you might not have meant it to be that way or you might of. Do you by any chance find yourself ~trying to write a certain way~, by that I mean, you specifically try to write in a way that you think writing should be done in, rather than strictly writing what you want? Again you might or might not.

Becoming more specific now, you might want to think a little about the words you're putting down. For example the first two lines "stranger things have happened in a night,
but never before in my own presence." I'm taking these to mean (being blunt and not at all artistic) That stranger things than what you're about to say probably happen, you've just never personally experienced them? The way you say that is slightly vague, which could lead some to think it can be interpreted many ways, for example beginning with the night time naturally spawning strange things (as apposed to other times), but never before your presence, possibly never before you existed? Were present on the earth, that interpretation is slightly paradoxical, nonsensical, but then again your "story" takes place in a dream, and dreams are usually just that. But I'm not actually sure whether you meant anything further than stranger things have happened, but not while I was there, or not to me... in which case you might want to be more clear... or if you want to be vague, you might want to be clearly vague, if ye catch me drift... Picking out words with double meanings, or expanding your imagery to directly represent both ideas simultaineously.

Which leads me to the next thing, you're imagery comes off a lot of times as incomplete. Whether it is a poem or not is not relevant, your ideas don't run on long enough to complete the idea they begin, and your descriptive words don't generate images. Even if you're going to plit up the flow of things, you're still mentioning specifics, and in mentioning those specifics you should complete them, even if you don't want the thought to be completed, I mean even if you're making the thing purposely confusing, if you're talking about a head being cut off then give the image of a head being cut off, don't chuck a couple words at us and move on to a new incomplete image, or the thing comes off as a mishmash of words which isn't too fun to read. <That last bit sounded a bit preachy and bastardly, and I don't mean it like that...

But your whole story is filled with examples, "vivid exchanges of color flush on it immense face" You sort of come out of nowhere with this immense face, vivid exchanges is really vague and gives almost no image at all, and I don't see any colour because you haven't said any, which could work, but all these disconnected things hitting the reader at once doesn't form an image...

I'm not big on ten hour descriptions, in fact I hate them, it's just the words you use to describe are not words that conjur images, vivid exchanges for example, Although like I said before you could be trying at double meaning, metaphors, with the word exchanges, which can mean a ton of things, but you don't delve into that at all so it remains vague, and most people would never catch it, and even if they do sit and analyze it most likely wouldn't be able to see what you're going for.

In fact most of the story doesn't illicit any images at all... It could be perfectly true that you're not going for that in the story, although dreams are usually quite vivid with images, you're going for, to be honest I'm not sure exactly what, just expostulating your ideas in a mix of words and metaphors and images into something which resembles "art".

I'd finally like to say that you shouldn't think I'm trying to bring you down, because I see in your writing a lot of problems I've had in my own, particularly in the past, and particularly when you get a preconceived idea about how one should write, as apposed to merely writing what you want to write, though that might not be true for you. If you want to put in images of endless vallys sewn together by giants with furry brows, then interject ideas about the character's feeling or position in the situation, I would advise that you try to split them up a little more, even if they're in the same sentence. Complete your ideas, then move on. You can move onto something unrelated, that's not the issue.

Good Luck.

[gruntingslime]

Thinking it over, I said a couple of dangerous things in my post. For the most part you'll have to pick and choose what you think is right for you and go at it from there. An example of what I mean is, when I told you you should separate your images from your ideas that wasn't entirely true, for one the images can BE the ideas, and for two you could intersplice the two like a wildman, but it'd take a hell of a lot of a skill... By all means, go at it, and you'd probably be able to master it at some point if tried and tried for a long time, but if you feel uncertain you might want to begin by separating them and slowly work them into eachother later or, or like I said make the images be the ideas.

[perception090]

i actually went back and and i am still editing quite a bit of it its quite mangled, althog it was really a dream but a mild spell of my psychosis so when i write its a bit hard to shake of the projections and the the vivid exchange refers to the sky, any one who has ever percieved the sky vissually can easily understand the array of colors altho it does not flow that well starting sentences with "the" to much then it cuts to the man. i do agree it is quite vague.
it is quite a bit easier with a clear mind to start making it flow.

[DickZ]

You would do well to invest in a keyboard that has a shift key.

[gruntingslime]

I've always done horrible in school for different reasons. Sometimes laziness, sometimes problem with students or teachers, sometimes lack of caring, other times I'll put effort into my work and actually get good marks, then my teachers will come to expect something from me and I'll buckle under the pressure and underacheive... Yes I'm revealing my weakness.

When I began writing I was grammatically horrible, and I still have a ton of obstacles in that field to overcome. Partly out of spite, partly to hide my shame, I decided I would write with disregard for the rules of grammar and hopefully gain my own footing within my flaws. I'm still learning, of course, and even if I was a perfect scholar I'd want to continue learning my entire life. But now I can't tell where particular problems come from, if they're related to my lack of procedure of if they're related to something new, which makes it all the harder to overcome them.

A little while after I began writing I went full circle and began teaching myself some of the rules of grammar. Only now am I beginning to experiment again with dropping those rules, trying to get back to my roots. Was it all for the best? I'm not sure, and I'm not sure if that's relevent, and if a better or worse objectively exists, because a lack of rules will not always teach us the better or worse ways, though sometimes it might, because sometimes it will just teach us different ways, and difference is not always a flaw.

I wouldn't advocate a complete lack of respect for rules, particularly after all of the trouble it's caused me in my development. But if somehow it comes natural to you to... whatever you want to call it, underacheive, or be self destructive, if you can't change that or even somehow decide you don't want to, it shouldn't be a cause for despair unless you make it so. I don't think people should attack others for it, but I think they will. There is a definite lack of understanding on earth towards differences in people, but in a way that is just another person's flaw which they might not entirely realize. So in turn it has to be understood and respected.

So what's the point of my writing all of this? I see obvious problems in the initial story of this thread, mostly in form. But there are still words, and they're words that have come from someone's mind. Maybe we all can't produce works of art, but art is a repesentation, or at least a product, of life.

Can we learn even from the flawed works? Can we gain benefit from them? Well, only so much as we could benefit from anything else. Meaning is subjective only because as humans we are equipped with the ability to reject it, or create our own.

So again what's the meaning of me writing this message? And why here?

[DickZ]

I think your message is great, gruntingslime, and all our aspiring young writers would do very well to heed everything you say. They should also note how you write very clearly and crisply, and how you conform to the rules of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. You obviously didn't jot that down in three minutes, but took time to make sure everything was stated properly.

Respect for the rules is extremely important to lots of us. Maybe somebody who can come up with fantastic written ideas without following any rules will come forward some day. But in general, disregarding rules is a great way to turn off many readers. There's more than enough written material out there to keep all us readers busy, and lots of us don't have time to bother with those who show a lack of respect for the written word.

I see you only have 7 posts in this forum, so I hope you'll post some of your creations. I would have to guess that you have some, based on how well you composed the post above.