'Honouring The Wind' Workshop

[Mordelain]

Rules

1. No outright attacks on thread writers or reviewers. You may criticize the thread only. This is not a venue for trolling, flaming, or otherwise bashing, demonizing or demoralizing individuals. You will receive only one warning, and upon the second offense in the entire forum, action will be taken.

2. This forum is for Workshop type evaluations only. If you have a thread you want others to look over and comment on, create your own Personal Workshop thread (or whatever you want to call it) in the Role Players' Corner.

3. Take criticism well. The comments here are intended to help writers improve as such. Do not get disheartened if someone says something ill of your work, but rather take it to heart and work hard to improve.

Lady Oni and Glories of Myrmidon have requested a Workshop Judgement for the thread, Honouring the Wind.

To relaunch the Writer's Workshop, and to encourage contributions, all contributors on this workshop will receive an additional 50 gold, and the best contributor double experience! It will remain open for feedback until midnight on the 22nd of September.

[Breaker]

Howdy, glad to see you both back in the writers' workshop! I am a really big fan of threads like this - characters meeting and becoming bound to one another by circumstance. It read reasonably quickly and gave a good overall feel of how crazy a day in the life of an Althanas character can be.

Storytelling - I have couple of specific issues with the way things got started... Lady Oni's first post didn't do a very good job of letting me know Lilith and Neko were in danger. You very, very briefly mentioned the monster was after you, but even in re-reading the post it didn't feel like there were any significant stakes until the bird showed up. Other than that though, I felt Lilith was well introduced and portrayed throughout the thread, while Neko could have used more fleshing out, he did serve his purpose.

Glories of Myrmidion's entrance was great, with the exception of one thing. Your description of the oni's landing "shattering earth and breaking trees" made it seem a lot bigger and more powerful than it seemed the rest of the time. There were a few more instances later on of the same thing. So I guess the note here is, be careful not to let hyperbole bleed into literal descriptions, and vice versa. Overall you controlled the setting and your cast of characters admirably, although I didn't really understand where they were from, or why they were in Concordia that day. Maybe I missed it in all the excitement, but I think their overall motivation could have been clearer.

Characterization - Most of my notes here are dialogue and action based, and most of them are for Lady Oni. The things your characters say seem to alternate between ultimately serving the plot (helping move things along without necessarily exploring the character at all), and saying things that are characterized way over the top. Finding a consistent middle ground should work wonders. I never really know what kind of advice to give for this kind of thing, except to really think about how the character and their upbringing influences how they say what they say. Using a character that's half a century old makes this more difficult, but I think you can do better. Also, I really didn't get that Neko was Lilith's teacher until you told me near the end of the thread, and that's the kind of thing that's really easy to play up in dialogue.

Writing Style - I noticed a lot of unnecessary repetition from Lady Oni. Things like "the thundering of hooves was thunderous", and some places where the narrative took big jumps, like in post #13 where Lilith suddenly goes from watching the beast die, to mourning Neko's death. I'd recommend taking a more "limited" third person approach to your writing. That way the world gets filtered through your protagonists senses, and the focus shouldn't jump around so much.

Other than that, I noticed a few more errors from both of you than ordinary - I think GoM wrote "drew black his blade" by accident in one post, things like that. So if you didn't this time, I'd recommend proofing not only your own posts, but peer-editing each others'. You both write good imagery, but again, just be wary of the line between beautifully descriptive and confusingly purple, and not allowing metaphors or hyperbole to cloud what's actually happening. First, the reader needs to know what's going on.

Because this was light and enjoyable I didn't take as many notes as I ordinarily might, so feel free to contact me if you want any further feedback! I hope that you guys will run the sequel to this through the WW!

[Max Dirks]

Oni, I think numbers hit the nail on the head with respect to your perspective changes.

Glories, I've hammered you on this before, but I'll mention it again. Your descriptions, while often beautiful, frequently confuse the subject. Here's a sample line:

A joyfully stentorian cry cut through the Crane’s victorious bellow, thunderclap through the storm. Instinctively the fiend hesitated for that vital moment, beady gaze drawn aside from its prey. Slit pupils of sickly ochre focused almost instantly on a flash of steel caught beneath the dawn.

While this paragraph sounds lovely, I have no idea what's going on. First, it's difficult to identify the subject of your sentences. The subject of your first sentence as written is "the Crane's victorious bellow," though it should be the Crane. The subject of your second sentence is "the fiend," but it's unclear if it's his "beady gaze" that you're referred to or someone else's. Finally, in the third paragraph is the subject the "slit pupils of sickly ochre" or the "flast of steel."

Here's some suggested changes to fix these sentences up but maintain your trademark descriptions:

"Like a thunderclap in the rain, a stentorian cry cut through the Crane's victorious bellow. This made the fiend hestitate for a moment and turn its beady gaze from its prey. It's slit pupils of sickly ochre focused almost instantly on the flash of steel sword caught beneath the dawn."

Now we know you're talking about the Crane rather than God knows what.

Hope that helps.

[Flames of Hyperion]

Numbers, Max, thank you very much for the input!

To address Max's point: I realise that I'm using unorthodox grammar, and that if it's causing confusion then I've failed in my duty as a writer. That said (and if I might extend this question to anybody else reading this thread), is it too much to ask to infer the subject in this case? I ask because such technique - omitting subject, object, even verbs at times - is fairly common in languages including Japanese, especially where the implied meaning is clear from context.

In fact, I'd cite phrases such as 'like', 'this made', 'and', and 'its' in your counterexample as sentence elements that I'm explicitly trying to avoid... I tend to feel that they're clunky and subtract from a paragraph where I'm deliberately setting out to be poetically descriptive.

(If I might be so bold...) Thoughts?

[Max Dirks]

Comparing to other languages isn't fair, though, because those languages might not have words that we have in English or vice-versa.

For example, I just used Google translator to convert your sentence "Instinctively the fiend hesitated for that vital moment, beady gaze drawn aside from its prey" to Japanese back to English and this is what it spit out: "Gaze drawn separately, the devil, hesitation because of its important moment prey beady instinctively." I assume this is because Japanese doesn't have a specific word for "fiend" or "vital" or "gaze." Real translators make a decent amount of money making something readable in a foreign language.

As an English site, I have to grade you on your use of English. Don't take it too personally, though, especially if your style is intentional. Pavel has a relatively unique writing style as well, but I still regularly remind him how it may confuse writers. I would say the same thing to Tolkien too. If you've realized my point and still prefer to do your own thing, that's cool man. I still think you could do your personal style without confusing the subject as much though.

[Breaker]

Heh, I think I can answer the question, but I'll point out a few other things from that particular passage, since it's being analyzed.

First, to address implying the subject - yes, there are times when you can do that. I am forever trying to find those times, as skipping straight to the sentence's verb can do a lot for the flow of action. However, I usually employ this method only in simple sentences, and only when the setting and characters are clearly established. Focusing on sounding "poetic" rather than being "clear" and leaving out sentence subjects at the same time as bringing new characters into the scene is a recipe for confusion. There's also the issue that even if the reader understands what's going on, the word-picture can become convoluted if you deviate too much from subject-verb-object at the wrong time.

Now, on to the sentence elements you're trying to avoid... it is admirable to try to winnow out these less necessary, less effective words. However, I think you may be putting the cart before the horse. While there are times where avoiding using "like" or "its" can make a sentence flow better, there are also times when they are necessary to make the phrase read properly. As someone who's read a fair bit of your work recently, I'd rather see you work on eliminating unnecessary adjectives, commas, and phony intensifiers. I'm gonna copy the passage in question and do nothing except remove unnecessary elements.

The stentorian cry cut the Crane’s victorious bellow like a thunderclap through the storm. The fiend hesitated, beady gaze drawn from its prey. Slit pupils of sickly ochre focused on a flash of steel caught beneath the dawn.

The first comma made that sentence read fairly messily, and the words "joyfully, instinctively, vital, moment" all detract from the word picture. I can absolutely promise you that those words are a lot clunkier than "its" or "like". I think I've said this before, but I believe you could benefit greatly from using more verbs and less adjectives.

Now that there are fewer distractions, the omission of the subject in the last sentence isn't as big a deal. But cutting posts down this way serves another purpose; it shows what's missing. And that is, in this case, clearly described action. You had the crane swooping in on Lilith and Neko, claws outstretched, and then it... hesitated? Kind of makes it sound like it stopped and looked over its shoulder, but that's something a human does, not a dive-bombing bird of prey. Saying that it veered off and refocused on the flash of steel, or something, would have kept the word picture flowing. This relates to what I said in my initial post about not letting writing style cloud the action. While your poetic narrative is beautiful, it does not serve your purpose when it muddies up the action.

And lastly to touch on the japanese thing - there's always expectations from one language that doesn't work with the next. For example, "romantic languages" like French and Spanish refer to inanimate objects as masculine and feminine, which works really beautifully in those languages. That doesn't mean it's a good idea for me to write "The arrow flew toward the target and buried his head in her."

[Flames of Hyperion]

*Nods* I should probably note here that I'm fluent in both English and Japanese, even worked as a part-time translator for a couple of years, otherwise it wouldn't make sense even to attempt it. (As a quick note, I wouldn't trust Google translator for anything more complicated than a single word or a simple phrase - English and Japanese are on the opposite ends of the language spectrum, and automated translation algorithms between the two aren't that good yet!)

But again, I can understand your position - if it's confusing enough to come up time and again, then obviously I'm not doing a good enough job of applying the elements of Japanese that I find beautiful to my (English) writing. The search for that elusive middle ground between poetic and unambiguous continues...

EDIT: Thanks, Numbers, for the analysis! Very much appreciated, and I'll keep it in mind!