tWR Critiques You! with Haegun

Mar 20, 201520 min read

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Published: Mar 20, 2015

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What is "tWR Critiques You!"?

To learn more about tWR Critiques You!, check out the first blog entry of the project HERE.

Previous features in the series:

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the articles to get our writers more exposure. :eager: by darkmoon3636

Today we'll be critiquing...

In Sickness by Haegun

I'm going to focus on three particular areas for this critique for your story: setting, dialogue, and characterisation. Of course, that's not everything, but I don't want this to get too long, and hopefully, what I have to say on those three will be useful for your editing process!

Firstly, setting. I have absolutely no idea when or where your story is set, and while that's not necessarily something that has to be in every short story ever, the lack of a setting often makes for a vaguer story that has a little less 'UMPH'. The question of where is important here, especially considering these sort of phrases and their implications:

scavenging for food and fuel ... my hiding place ... in the surrounding area ... the rendezvous point we had prepared ... there ... the building ... the perimeter ... the secret entrance ... the third floor ...

Is this 'scavenging' happening in abandoned grocery stores? - greenhouses or gardens? - restaurants? What sort of location is this that allows for a scavenging and a separation and a hiding place? If there's a building, this must be a city or a town as opposed to, say, a jungle? I'd also agree with TheMaidenInBlack 's comment on the repetition: without a clear setting, the story is already vague as it is, and the repetition here creates a lack of precision. There's no need to give a paragraph devoted to background: simply changing the phrases I've highlighted in the quote above could do the trick, e.g. replacing "in the surrounding area" with, I don't know, "the suburban sprawl" - that depends on you.

The vagueness of your setting undermines the vagueness of your epidemic: together, it's too vague. However, with a little sharpening of your location and time, the deliberate vagueness of the epidemic can be highlighted and that would be great, because it gives you room for potential implications, for example: the epidemic was too terrible for specificity; there are no words to describe the sickness; etc.

Moving on, the question of when is important for me mostly because it bleeds into dialogue, and your dialogue is what made me aware of your setting. Your dialogue is sometimes formal, and sometimes informal, and often stilted, which is slightly jarring for me, as the reader - for example, you have sentences like this, which are quite formal:

None of the other groups will have me now. Even if they did, it would be at a price. One that I’m not sure I’d be willing to pay.”

The structure of these sentences are not what you'd expect colloquial language to be like - which is fine! Relatively formal language is fine, as long as it's justified by the character and the setting and so on. However, you have words such as 'babe' and 'okay' which are quite modern and informal. Neither informality or formality on its own is a problem, but I think consistency is the key here, because the current mix of both is slightly jarring. With a consistent style of dialogue, there's more of a stability to the setting. Of course, sometimes you don't want the setting to be stable, but here, I think, it would be an advantage in setting the scene.

With regards to characterisation, I think you've got a good thing going that could be made even better, with changes to both dialogue as well as some descriptions. There's some really neat lines in there, like this:

So we lived as best we could, avoiding the infected ones as well as the most aggressive of the clean groups. Gangs would have been a more accurate term.

Not only is this an interesting line in terms of world-building, but it gives us an interesting look into Becka's character: her equating of two binaries together as well as a hint of her distaste for the "groups" with the use of the word "gangs".

In fact, combined with the sort of formal, higher class vocabulary we've seen from Becka's point of view (as with the first paragraph, of how she described the "perimeter" and her checking for signs of "forced entry", it's telling of what she's like and where she's coming from. Little hints like this can make a character in ways that are more subtle and engaging, more so than, say, the part where Becka remembers her almost-wedding day.

I thought back to our wedding day, the day that the outbreak changed everything.

The problem with this is that it's more telling than showing - it's given to the reader without making the reader really work for any sort of interpretation. There's very little emotion on the part of Becka here, with regards to the events she's narrating. In contrast, lines like this are fantastic:

I had a notion to point the gun at his head and blow it off.

This is a great line, probably my favourite. It's a line that comes across as being deeply in-character. More lines like this can really deepen the nature of the choice that Becka is making here - right now, it feels as if it's more of a, "oh, why not" decision on her part rather than a desperate last-resort to be with her husband.

Anyway, I'll stop here and briefly answer your questions, but I hope you found this critique at least a little useful, and if there's anything you'd like me to clarify / talk about, let me know!

On to your questions!

Given their circumstances, do the characters seem believable?

I think they do, yes - at least, I was on with them from start to finish, so that was definitely well done. Again, as I stated above, a little more work on Becka and her voice could really shine through.

What were your feelings as you read this, and did they change over time?

My feelings didn't change much, as I said above - it wasn't as if a character changed unexpectedly or a shocking event happened, so there wasn't a real shift in my feelings. I enjoyed the vagueness of the epidemic and its exact nature, and the subtlety of how you dealt with the adult matter.

Taking the length and requirement to avoid adult matter into consideration, what would you say were the strengths and weaknesses of this story?

The strengths of the story, I think, would be the concept of both the transformation and the reasonably solid plot you have going, as well as, in part, the characterisation. For the weaknesses, the major ones for me would be those of setting and of dialogue, as I've outlined above. I thought it was an interesting story, with room for improvement and some great material to work with!

The next part is a bit new! We've realised that not every writer is going to have a gallery that showcases their growth in a specific area of writing, or they don't have many deviations up, or the majority of their writing doesn't fit in with our group (e.g. chaptered work, mature work, non-English work, etc), so for those cases, instead of picking three deviations, we'll instead showcase some helpful guides/tutorials geared towards the areas we discussed in the previous critique!

Writing Tips - Dialogue

If you’re writing fiction, the dialogue is arguably one of the most important parts. And it’s the bit that’s the easiest to mess up, if we’re strictly honest. And why not? There’s so much going on in that single sentence that any number of them can go wrong; voice, character, tone, point of view, punctuation. We’ll start with punctuation, because I’ve already written that bit.
Punctuating Dialogue
Go here. I was originally going to copy and paste that part of the lesson into this lesson, but then the thing wound up being ten pages long. So, read that, and then come back to this if you feel you might need help with the mechanical bits.
When to use Dialogue
Right. So, you’ve got a story all set up in your head (or on a piece of paper if you’re inclined to pre-write), and it’s great. Your hero is blasting through space with a whole heap of misfits, and you

Notes on writing dialogueDialogue can be one of the most challenging components of writing fiction. Often, the conversations come off feeling too forced or too clunky, lacking in natural rhythm.
However, improving one's dialogue-writing skills is well within anyone's reach, especially considering that there is an art form solely devoted to dialogue: plays/screenplays. We are going to look at how to take tips and pointers from these things, and apply them to our own writing.
Recognizing problems
He would never say that!
Have you ever watched a movie or seen a play and thought, “Geeze, no one would ever say something like that.” Or maybe, “Why would they word it like that?” You know what I mean; where the delivery of the line is directed more toward the audience rather than the other character in the scene.
Maybe it's just poor acting; more likely, it's that the writer was lazy and didn't care if the line was out of character, or the writer simply added too much information Writing Tutorial - DialogueWhile some authors may talk about how their writing is all talent and a gift from The Powers That Be, the truth is anyone can do a great deal to improve their writing. One effective way is through working on your dialogue.
Fan fiction can be particularly bad about this, but God-awful dialogue can be found just about anywhere, from popular books to comics to television. Bad dialogue often happens when people lose sight of reality and get hung up in the information or message they’re trying to get their character to communicate. Good dialogue is a natural reflection of the characters and the world, is easy on the ears/eyes and moves the plot forward in one way or another.
Tips for Improving Your Dialogue:
1. Listen
Yep, just listen. Next time you’re on a bus or waiting at a restaurant, take a moment and listen to the conversations around you. Listen to the rhythm, the accents, the grammar people use in daily life. Good dialogue sounds natural. Bad dialog do

Haegun 's dialogue in the story I looked at before has actually improved quite a lot since some of his earlier work, but to further that improvement, here are some resources on writing dialogue that are concise and very helpful in conveying what effective dialogue is like.

Writing Tips: Characterisation

Characterisation: Avoiding the Dreaded Mary Sue
The characters you write are arguably the biggest part of your story. They’re the vessel through which the reader is able to identify with the themes and ideas that you’re trying to share. But creating brand new lives from thin air can sometimes be rather difficult. You have to find their voice, their needs, their personality; it’s a rather delicate balance, really.
Rather tempting, and often encouraged by teachers, is to do a “Character Profile” to help come up with some of the details. These are often pre-made sets of questions ranging from the mundane (eye colour, height, weight) to the fanciful (if your character caught someone looking at his girlfriend, what would he do?).
I don’t like these. And here’s why.
The questions are all a little too cookie-cutter. They promote stereotype characters, and you don’t want that. The actual physical details about the character don’t need to be mentione Writing Paranormal CharactersAs a writer of prose, you may at some point to want to write about a character or characters which are paranormal. We could perhaps debate over the exact definition of the word ‘paranormal’, and some may prefer ‘supernatural’ - a word more closely associated with magic, whereas ‘paranormal’ tends to be taken to mean something outside the realms of science (though of course, it is not as clear-cut as that, and you may like to think that I am wrong in saying this).
For the purposes of this guide, both ‘paranormal’ and ‘supernatural’ refer to conscious beings, not found in the animal kingdom, that differ in some way to what I controversially call ‘normal’ humans (some paranormal beings may be human, in part or in whole). To give some well-known examples: ghosts, vampires, witches, werewolves and mermaids all fall into this category. The details, of course, are up to the writer. If you t

Both of these guides are easy-to-read, quick rundowns of how to make the best of the characters you already have, and useful resources for other stories as well!

The Art of Refining Prose

The Art of Refining Prose
Many writers dread the editing process. Not only does it delay the showcase of prose, it can seem a tedious and painstaking task. Often, editing is more time-consuming than the initial writing and consequently, it is either ignored altogether or briefly indulged. This is a great shame. Sincere editing not only proves a pleasurable experience but invaluable to prose, as this is a wonderful opportunity to buff, polish and tighten the impact of one's writing.
Some might argue that editing is not only unnecessary, but detrimental to the “raw concept” of one’s inspiration. The answer to this is simple: select a prose that hasn’t been edited and compare against one that has. It’s soon evident that a well-edited piece is not only easier to read, but communicates the author’s ideas with greater clarity. Few Bestsellers hit the shelves having skipped the editing office. And unless the author has behind them years upon years of writi

Finally, here is what I personally think is an excellent resource on one of the most important aspects of writing: editing! It's a simple list that breaks down the kind of scary notion of editing prose into a manageable seven-point list.

Can I get featured like this?

A poll will be posted soon, asking you to link to a work submitted to theWrittenRevolution that didn't get much feedback, and one of the ones submitted there (or on one of the previous polls) will be picked. Keep an eye out for it!

>>All hail GinkgoWerkstatt for this beautiful skin.