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Not gonna lie just to make my vote count.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sapphire
I guess my phrasing was pretty poor. I did get past the intro paragraphs, but they weren't really registering in my head because I didn't find them all that engaging. I know is a pretty harsh criticism, but since this is a contest, I'm not gonna hold them back.
Not gonna bother voting since I couldn't get through 2 of these stories.
I don't understand why everyone is saying the 1000 dicks story is so funny. Maybe I'm being curmudgeonly but Jesus whoever wrote that was trying so hard. Why that story would be funny to anyone is beyond me. It felt like one of those "Epic/Superhero/Disaster Movie" scripts. I'd love to see the author actually attempt some form of humor rather than expecting the relatively tame shock humor to carry itself.
The other story I read was Friendship, and while it was definitely the most cohesive and competently written story, it reads like a first draft. I'm guessing whoever wrote it spent 30 minutes recalling a touching memory, went to check for typos, and submitted it. I can't vote for it because it displays a serious lack of effort.
Really disappointed with this bracket. I hope the next set has something worthwhile.
How come you couldn't read Firefly? It was good!
Boring and really heavy on the dialog. I tried to read it again and only got a paragraph further than last time. I read the end and it just was not interesting. At a second glance it suffers from the same "1st Draft" syndrome that the rest do.
I can see why it's doing well, though.
What's the second draft look like to you, then? :O
About half as long. Entire chunks of dialog removed. Unnecessary descriptors and "thesaurus words" taken out.
Most of it is filler alluding to a background that's not important to the story. The author is trying to establish a relationship between the two principal characters and making a mess of it.
Completely disagree. The story didn't seem like enough to me. It needed more.
That's my point. It's a page and a half of nothing. It's style over substance and the style is so cliched that it's about as boring as the last few Pierce Brosnan Bond movies.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sapphire
If the author wants to produce something that will leave an impression by the next round, they need to ditch the fanfiction-style writing and practice timing and brevity.
Edit: I'm not trying to be rude. I think it's just clearly a product of a rush job and provides no incentive for the reader to pour through 2 pages of filler dialog.
Edit 2: I was trying to be rude about the 1000 dicks story. That one just plain sucked lol monkey cheese penis penis penis.
Personally it wasn't funny because of the sake of being funny. I found funny because it was terribly bad. It failed to deliver making it funny. Not a good funny though... but a sad one.Quote:
Originally Posted by XanBcoo
I voted for The Man With A Thousand Dicks and Friendship, because I did not care for the other two.
I'll try to keep the criticism constructive.
"The Game" - Needs work. Wasn't particularly original, but wasn't done in a clever way either. There isn't anything wrong with a lack of originality in premise, but the last four sections read like a Mad Libs with the countries/factions filled in. A more unique approach to each of the four could have been taken and it would have been much improved for it.
"The Man With A Thousand Dicks" - I don't know why, it is certainly intentionally vulgar and absurd, but somehow it just works. The eccentricity of it all just...worked. It flatly calls attention to itself with, "Premise," "Random time jump" and "Fuck it, I'll just throw these in," sections. It's stupid, immature, but for whatever fucked up reason, it flows well. I enjoyed the Absurdist style of the whole thing, honestly.
"Friendship" - Everything about this story is bland and ordinary, but there isn't anything really bad with it either. It's a slice of life, and while longer than it probably needed to be, it was very well constructed. It had nearly everything the short story format needs, exposition, complication, a pseudo-climax, and a resolution, but it didn't really rise up, have a definitive moment or a concrete climax. Reminded me a little of John Updike's "A&P" for some reason, but without a strong climax.
"Firefly" - Every line of this story screamed, "Trying too hard," to me. While it tries to be engaging, gripping and dramatic, it comes off disjointed, melodramatic, and somehow a bit dull. Where it falls flat is because it takes too many ideas and throws them in a stream-of-consciousness manner instead of developing any single one of them. Focus on a few concepts and run with them rather than taking what seems like a very small cross-section of a much larger exposition and flinging it at readers.
Yes, this is exactly what I was getting at. Thank you.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryllharu
I think it will be good if the author does a serious rewrite.
Hurry and vote guys! Poll closes tomorrow at midnight.
Know a member of GotWoot who hasn't voted yet? Force them to read the stories and vote!
Skimming all four I didn't particularly like any of them so I decided to read them all in their entirety and find the two I disliked the most and vote for the other two. The Thousand Dick one read like a long joke not an actual story and didn't seem like it deserved my vote on principle. I do admit it elicited some chuckles for audacity though. The Game sounded more like the prologue to a video game than a full-fledged story and that didn't sit well with me as there wasn't much of an attempt to flesh things out. So by default Friendship and Firefly got my votes.
All right, time for me to review this shit. Let's start with Friendship.
This is one of those posts you'd see on 4chan.
Format for a successful 4chan-type post: Nostalgia aimed at people in their late teens, early twenties. Story involving an awkward male (audience pandering of course, considering the main readership). Descriptively believable, but too well manufactured to be plausible. Somehow ends in Forever Alone or That Was My Only Love or something that brings the audience back into relating to the author.
If I had my hard drive here with me, I'd bust out my 4chan/threads folder and show you this type of story in its previous formats.
Here, let's madlib one.
Nostalgic childhood interest: Yu-Gi-Oh! cards
Love interest name: Selena
Common meetup location: Park bench (Makes no fucking sense, but it's romantic somehow)
Reason for her disappearance from my life: Cancer
The story writes itself, guys.
Simple. And fucking stupid. If you liked this, you're gullible and probably a boring person.Quote:
I first met Selena when I was in the third grade. I had just moved from (fuck it, let's go Luxemburg) Luxemburg and I was new to everything. Selena lived next door and we became fast friends. She was always crying and I constantly picked on her for it.
But we were friends nonetheless.
In the fifth grade I became a big fan of Yu-gi-oh. Selena didn't see the appeal, but she saved up enough money to buy a generic deck. We would always play the game on a park bench outside of school.
We played throughout fourth grade. She never had enough money, so I would occasionally give her cards to build up her deck. Her favorite card was the first card I ever gave her - the Dark Sage. It made no sense for her to put it in her deck, but she always did. She said it was her "lucky card".
A year passed and we slowly stopped playing the game with each other. She moved to a different school at the start of fifth grade and her parents told me that she was too involved with her studies to play with me.
June 5th, her parents came over and had a talk with me. It was then I realized Selena hadn't transferred schools at all. She had been in the hospital for cancer treatment. That day, she had lost the battle against cancer and her parents felt I should know.
I didn't know what to do. I was numb, so I just took it at face value and didn't cry.
A month later, I went to the school playground. For some reason, and I don't know what came over me, I looked underneath the bench where we used to play.
There it was. A single card - the Dark Sage.
There were only three words written on it - I'll miss you.
I started to cry.
Firefly
Generifantasy. Absolute tripe. It's Riftwar mixed with Dragonlance mixed with elementary writing. I think I wrote something similar in the fifth grade, except there were goblins and wizards instead.
It was hard to read because I just felt so embarassed for the author. I envision him as a 30-year-old overweight, jobless Nintendo fan who can't even write bad fanfiction.
Terrible, terrible writing.
Thousand Dicks.
The author clearly tried too hard while at the same time not putting any effort into it. It has absolutely no redeeming value besides a few jokes which end up falling flat against the tepid backdrop of the story as a whole.
"Stream of consciousness" is right, and as a result the flow is insufferable.
It doesn't know what it wants to be, which combined with the juvenile "Hurr, hurr dicks are funny" plot is a recipe for failure.
The Game was the best entry in this godforsaken contest. The English was shit, but the story actually resonated well because it wasn't forced, and despite being unoriginal, it wasn't copy/pasted from a better source. It actually had the most effort put into it, despite it having seemingly been crafted in thirty minutes, max. It's readable if you ignore the last half.
None of these stories deserve a vote and I pray to your god that someone has the slightest bit of talent necessary to make something that's even moderately readable in the next rounds.
I think you guys are being too harsh for a contest held for members of a forum that isn't about writing.
That Dark_Sage story was beautiful. :(
Writing is easy. It's not my fault the writers are morons.Quote:
Originally Posted by shinta|hikari
I'm going to erase Kokujin's vote until he tells me his second one.
Are we going to be able to start round 2 concurrent with round one?
edit: thanks for the info, I remember their being some questions of concurrent rounds, so was inquiring to what came of it.
Round 1 ends at the same time round 2 begins, which is exactly 24 hours.