Hunting Party Workshop Judgment

[Breaker]

This is the writers workshop thread for Hysteria's solo Hunting Party. (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?22714-Hunting-Party)

Keep our rubric categories in mind when providing commentary, but don't forget to bring your own unique insight and experience out as well. Remember this thread is for constructive criticism only, and all those who contribute helpful commentary will be rewarded!

Lord Anglekos will be handling the official judgment of this thread... so Hysteria, when you feel you've gotten enough user commentary, PM him requesting that.

[The Sweetest Thing]

Reading your first post, I felt the first paragraph was quite strong writing, but lackluster overall. Remember that (in this case at least) your first post is much like an establishing shot in a movie, showing the reader where they are. Making that first paragraph a bit longer and using it to show the reader a bit more of Talen's surroundings, as well as how he's reacting to them (the cold) can effectively put the reader in the character's shoes.

Most important thing I noticed though is the way you introduced Talen's background. "The boy spy had just arrived in Underwood to personally gather information for the Ixian Knights."

This sounds more like something written on the back of a novel, or in a thread synopsis, than part of a story. By simply telling the reader exactly what Talen is, why he's there, and what he's doing in one sentence does nothing to draw the reader in. It would have served the purpose of your story much better to use a paragraph or two of Talen's actions, thoughts, dialogue, to show the reader where he came from, and what his intentions may be. By not setting these things in stone at the beginning of a thread, you leave your character more room for growth, and the plot stays open to development or twists as they occur to you.

Reading through the bulk of this thread, I notice that the quality of your writing is somewhat inconsistent. There are places where it flows very well, where I could almost lose myself in the story. But it seems whenever you hit dialogue, the action gets choppy. Looking at post #4 for example, you only had an average of 3-4 words after each line of dialogue. Remember that this is not a screenplay; the things your characters do before, after, and during speech are often more important than what they are saying. Work on attaching every line of dialogue to a solid paragraph of text. I'm not saying you should only write like this as a rule, but it's a good thing to think about when you're aiming to add a little depth to your NPCs.

Your writing style is developing really nicely, but to keep improving you'll need to focus on giving every part of every post your full effort, then re-reading, and editing where you think you can make it better. It's difficult to advance past a certain point without some level of self-analysis, and I think you're definitely there. As a quick tip which could really help clean up your action sequence should you choose to follow it, is proper structuring. Unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise, most sentences should be structured subject - verb - object. The subject is the person/thing doing the action, the verb is the action, and the object is what they're doing it to. For example... (post 9)

"The stalemate was broken as an arrow flew past Vlad's head and struck the beast in the shoulder."

When we apply proper structure, this sentence becomes...

"An arrow flew past Vlad's head and struck the beast in the shoulder, shattering the stalemate."

This way the reader gets to know what happened first, and the result second. By structuring entire posts/action sequences properly, you allow the reader to follow the events at their own speed, which does wonders for maintaining suspended disbelief.

You can also do wonders by avoiding words like "that" "slowly", "very".. these are thickeners that can be useful in everyday language, but rarely serve a purpose in prose. By re-arranging sentences to eliminate these thickeners, you'll create opportunities for nice imagery like personification.

[Hysteria]

Thank you person with Christina Hendricks in your avatar. That was extremely helpful :)

If I could ask a follow up question, what did you think about the portrayal of the NPCs, and Talen's interactions with them?

[Sheex]

I believe I'll form a habit. It simply seems appropriate to tell someone who's work I'm about to critique a little something about myself. I've never published a book, and as far as knowledge goes, I graduated college with a few writing classes under my belt. I only do this because what I'm about to write is my opinion, and if it doesn't feel right to you, then by all means ignore it! For all you know, I'm drunk off my ass! Er, I'm not, by the way.

I'm only a little tipsy to be honest, I swear! Formalities out of the way, let's have some fun!

I'll start by saying this was an okay read. It was short enough for me to do in one sitting, and your posts weren't overtly long. Not that there's anything wrong with long posts, I often write very long ones myself. Simply put, this was a short story, and you wrote it as such. Good for you!

Here's the thing. Until the end of the thread, nothing really happens. Now, this is partly because of the prompt, but I gotta be honest, the middle of this quest is a whole lot of filler in my mind. I get that the prompt was "go hunting," and you did exactly that. Went hunting. Here's the thing, I simply didn't find myself caring about the hunt. This is just an opinion mind you, but I hard a hard time caring about the death of deer (good job on using deer and not deers, by the way). Personally, I think when a person picks up a book, they expect something of it. A comedy makes you laugh, an adventure makes the spirit soar, and a romance makes you feel all warm and cuddly inside.

I guess I can sum it up as this: it doesn't seem like a hunt when you're blasting a deer with dark magic. Cool as it is, when magic is involved, I expect something a little more epic. I mean, come on, did the deer really deserve that? Jokes aside, my point is as follows. If you're going to write a hunt, write a hunt. There are plenty of successful stories about a hunt; I've even read a few (you can often find one in the back of a hunting magazine). If you want to write a hunt, tell me about the hunt. Write about how you tracked the deer, give me feelings of the group as they track the animal, the thrill of the kill as you brought down the target. Any of that will do. Basically, I'd have liked a few more details about the hunt, if in fact this quest was about a hunt, which it seems it was. All I really got was a post by post snippet of: found an animal, killed it. With magic. Dark, scary magic. And yes, I'm well aware I'm playing this part up. A guy's gotta have a little fun, ya know?

That being said, the rabbit's last thoughts did elicit a chuckle. Poor Bugs Bunny.

Also, on the whole group setting (as your above post asked about it anyhow), I really felt a little confused when it came to them. You dropped a lot of names in this thread, let me show you: Talen, Vlad, Shaw, Regan, Jenny, Paul, Red, John, Eve, Sai, and Ute. That's a lot of names, and you really didn't have much to go with them. I didn't expect you to go into detail with all of them, but walking away from this, the only NPC who I can even remember was Vlad.

The reason is simple, you gave Vlad a unique trait (his method of talking); the rest simply meant nothing to me. Obviously, not everyone needs to mean something (the last three were simply mentioned as casualties), but why not go into a bit more detail with rest? Hell, to be honest, I forgot Shaw was even a woman. Make Talen drool over her, mention big boobies, joke that she looks like a man, give a ravishing picture, anything! Make her a little unique, as she is the only female in the group, or so I assume.

At least the only female you spent time on. In my opinion, "Jenny turning two tricks a night" stood out more than Shaw.

My suggestion would be to drop the character count. Drop half that cast, and make the remainder mean something. Give John (or Paul, either will do) a solid character, so I care when he gets eaten by werewolves. As it stands, his death meant next to nothing. It's more scary if a character I care about dies than some random dude I know little about.

This leads me to the end of the quest. It's pretty obvious, what with the foreshadowing and all, that the werewolf battle was supposed to be the climax. I have to say, it was a real let down. I mean, come on! It's frigging werewolves for crying out loud! Give me blood, guts, a horrid battle scene, and possibly a few tears as someone realizes the werewolf he blasted with dark magic was an old childhood friend!

Okay, maybe that's going a bit too far, but I think you get my point. A climax should be a climax. More detail would have been great for that post (number 9 to be exact). It was a little disappointing for that which was built up from close to the beginning to end so quickly. I really would have liked this part, more than any other, to have been more fleshed out.

Oh, and I suppose I'll mention that you missed a few punctuations. Simple things really, but I guess it wouldn't be a critique if someone didn't say it. Seriously, I think every quest on Althanas EVER gets this remark.

Ergh, just saying that demands I give more detail. Okay, here's a simple one. In good ol' America, commas always (well, almost always) go inside a quotation mark. Don't write this:


“Gardeners Wanted!”, “Posse To Be Created!”, “Call For Hunters And Trackers!”

The commas there are unnecessary; just go with this:


“Gardeners Wanted! Posse To Be Created! Call For Hunters And Trackers!”

Random fact, the only time a comma (or period for that matter) goes outside a quotation mark is when the quotation is a single letter or number. Or so I learned, in any case. I suppose an example is in order.


She freaked out because she got an "B", and not an "A".

If you've been paying attention, I said in America. This ought to tell you that I happen to be an American, which really isn't important, but the America part IS important. The good ol' British don't write this way, so if you happen to be British, or just not American, ignore this little spiel about commas entirely. I simply don't know enough about other countries writing styles to even come close to telling you the proper way to write.

Well, that's all I got. More than anything, I found myself wanting more detail than what was given; that's my biggest gripe with this quest. That being said, it's no fun to end on such a boring note, so pardon me if I exit on something a bit more fun.

Werewolves. Freaking werewolves. Freaking werewolves without any blood or guts being spilled. Not cool dude. Not cool.

Wait, wait, wait, WAIT! Werewolf slippers. Chuckle. Freaking awesome spoil.

[Hysteria]

Ha! Best review ever!

I am Australian, so British commas and spelling. Centre, mum, organisation and no commas before a conjunction (although that last part is slowly turning into the American way). I wasn't sure about the Gardeners Wanted etc, etc. They were supposed to be headings of different posters but it did look awkward.

I agree with the fight. Next time (and I am doing another solo with the same NPCs) I'll expand upon the action. The names of the NPCs was a bit of a sticking point while I wrote it. I didn't want to overload the reader with names, but most came up in speech and it seemed weird to not say them. I also see what you mean with Shaw, her name was not feminine and without mentioning particularly female traits she melds back into a man.

Talen being 13, he's not greatly interesting in women yet either :-/

[Lord Anglekos]

Both were excellent reviews, but I personally felt that The Sweetest Thing provided more constructive input in Hysteria's case.
Therefore, The Sweetest Thing gains 100 EXP and 100 GP, and Sheex gains 150 EXP and 50 GP. Thank you both for your excellent posts.
And Hysteria, your thread has been judged.

[Silence Sei]

EXP-GP added.