Concritathon

[indri]

Text pinched from peasant_ and deadsoul820.

This is my post for peasant_'s Concritathon. Anyone who wants to give me public concrit for Descent is very welcome to do so here. Anyone who would rather send the concrit privately, my address is archaeoindri@yahoo.com.

According to the rules of the concritathon:

Concrit is Constructive Criticism. This means that it must point out at least one, preferably more, flaws in the story as well as at least one, preferably more, good points in the story. It must also be written so as to inform the author of your opinion without hurting their feelings.

Ta.

Comments

Re: Part 2

[indri]

My apologies for not responding before now. For various offline reasons, I've barely had a minute to myself over the past few weeks. I only have a moment now because a computer's down for maintenance tonight. I'm really hoping my life gets less hectic soon...

I'm glad you liked it in general. Obviously, I'm going to focus in my reply on areas where I might improve. To paraphrase your main points:

I could achieve a greater sense of immediacy by using more typical Spike speech rhythms and vocabulary in the prose whenever the POV moves closer to Spike's perceptions;

the fight scenes could become more suspenseful and exciting through the use of strong verbs in shorter sentences and paragraphs;

weak verbs are a problem in general, as are weak phrases.

The first two points were also raised by my other Concritathon reviewers, so I'm going to post a general request on my LJ for examples of fic which excel in related aspects so I can study them. (I'd be delighted if you made suggestions, of course.)

I had heard the phrase "weak verb" before but I did not know what it meant. Thank you for explaining this, as I suspect this is a recurring fault.

I'm currently writing (when I have time!) a sort of companion piece to this fic about Dru. I'm adopting a similar tone for the piece so it should be an ideal way for me to practice.

Have you read your story out loud?

Routinely. Perhaps I should get someone else to read it out loud to me too so I can spot offending passages.

Pull (up)

I'm afraid I had no conscious aim in using this phrase so much!

maybe it’s because I’m used to American punctuation, but I often felt that there should have been more commas throughout

Oddly, shortly before signing on for the Concritathon I read some remarks from a long-time copy-editor who said that far fewer commas are used in UK English compared to US English. I'll keep an eye on it though as I don't want to reduce clarity through an absent comma.

Thank you again. I hope you don't mind if I contact you again once I've finished the Drusilla piece -- it's likely to take months -- to ask if you'd be willing to beta it. I'd like to know how successfully I address these issues in future work.