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

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

Don't be surprised if you get no response whatsoever to this. It's that it must point out at least one, preferably more, flaws in the story rule that's the killer; I've never been able to find any flaws in "Descent" at all.

[estepheia.livejournal.com]

Hi Indri,
I took over from EntreNous who had to drop out.
I am afraid I won't be able to post my concrit on time. I started working on your piece, but because of a nasty cold that makes all my RL chores so much more exhausting, I didn't get as much done as I wanted. Weekends are always tough because the entire family goes to chess tournaments and dance practice, but I think that I should get your concrit done by Monday. I hope that's okay. :-)

I read your story before and liked it very much. I will write you a general critique, but I'll also send you a beta'd file, if that's okay with you.

Have a good weekend.

[girlguidejones.livejournal.com]

Hi there!

I'm assigned to you, but will be a day late getting it in. I have a rather odd work schedule which can get in the way of really important things like fanfic reading. Heh.

I must say that after reading the above comments I am really looking forward to your story. It looks like I will need to search for flaws, :) so I will have a stern go at it!

~GGj

[estepheia.livejournal.com]

Critique of Indri's 'Descent' - by Estepheia

Few stories fit as seamlessly into Mutant Enemy canon as this one. Many viewers have wondered how Spike’s sanity got shattered like that and how he got back from Africa and what First Evil’s role was in Spike’s return, and what First Evil’s plan was for him. You have answered these questions in a way that’s so utterly convincing that it feels like it ought to be canon. Actually, in my head this is EXACTLY what happened and how it happened, no doubt about it. You nailed it. Whenever I write souled!Spike your story reverberates in the back of my head along with official Mutant Enemy canon.


Plot

I like the way Spike is threatened from two sides, physically by the vampires of Uganda, and mentally by the First’s insidious machinations. Spike is caught between a rock and a hard place, slowly crushed between them, bruised and battered, yet he never gives up.

I like Spike’s determination, his pig-headed pride that forbids him to just hurl himself into the sun’s rays, his desperate hope that maybe, at the end of his journey, he will find forgiveness.

He’s on a hero’s journey, traveling through an unfamiliar country (being newly ensouled is also a kind of terra incognita), gritting his teeth, fighting the pain, unaware that he’s being pushed into the abyss of madness. The sense of journeying is conveyed neatly through the different settings and landscapes that he travels through and through the various vehicles he uses or encounters. The heart-wrenching thing is the fact that the journey is rigged. The reader is constantly aware that Spike is being manipulated, that First Evil is trying to find the right way to pull his strings.

The First leaves no button unpushed, no dead face unworn to find the weak point where Spike will crack. At the end Spike is right where First Evil wants him, a weapon primed and about to be deployed, ready to be fired when First Evil sees fit.


POV

One of the most effective aspects of your story is the twin perspective. There is the third person limited perspective: we follow Spike’s travels, see what he sees, hear what he hears, smell what he smells. We feel his pain. We see him act, and we observe what he thinks. Sometimes we get close enough to really hear what he’s thinking.

On the other hand we are never allowed to fully merge with the character, never fully immerse ourselves in his thoughts and feelings, because we, unlike him, possess foresight. We know what will happen, know that the woman in the lab coat is the First. We can never quite exclude our knowledge, it gives us a kind of double vision of events. We know, unlike Spike, that he’s not hallucinating, that he’s being manipulated.

This double vision is maintained through skillful information management. Our canon knowledge of things to come and things that have already happened is repeatedly woven into the story, like an almost invisible thread.


Voice

By ‘voice’ I mean the narrator’s voice. The narrator’s voice is predominantly factual, not quite journalese but on the whole lean and precise. (And a lot more factual than Spike’s voice) Sometimes, when the POV moved closer to Spike, I felt that a choppier and more colorful language might have created greater immediacy. I would have liked for Spike’s voice to be more prominent in some of the introspective sections.

On the other hand, the language evokes an almost dreamlike sense of transit, not so much of falling but of slow motion. (Like when you stare out of the car window and lose yourself in the whoosh whoosh of the passing landscape.)

Overall the voice is very effective. The reader is never told how to feel. He’s not prodded and over-stimulated with great showy effects, he finds his emotional responses within himself. The sentences with the nastiest punch are those that are stated matter-of-factly.

However, I wouldn’t mind seeing the narrator lose some of her impassiveness is during fight scenes. The events are depicted with precision, but the scenes lack in drama, especially when weak verbs take over. That may well be deliberate, and it’s not something that distracts greatly from the overall impact of the story.

Part 2

[estepheia.livejournal.com]

Pacing / Syntax

I already mentioned in the previous section that the fight scenes could be a little more dramatic. More paragraph cuts and stronger verbs could accomplish a lot, both give a sense of speed and immediacy. Also, splitting longer sentences in two might speed up fight scenes. The fight scenes should convey a sense of danger.

You already vary sentence length more or less throughout the story, but a few times I felt you were trying to cram as much info into several successive sentences as possible. In these instances I felt you ended up with a more monotonous tone. Have you read your story out loud? If you do, you will surely spot the few instances where the sentences start to bleed into each other.


Pet phrases / frequently used words

He - You don’t use Spike’s name a lot – which leaves you stuck with the word ‘he’. Normally names and personal pronouns are ‘invisible’, i.e. they convey information without flavoring the sentence they are in. However, excessive use of one and avoidance of the other is something the reader notices, and it makes a statement. Use of the pronoun should create proximity and invite identification, but your voice is often distant, and impassive. I find this a (mild) discrepancy.

There is – This is a weak phrase. (I use it way too often myself). It should be used sparingly. (In fact, one of my books on writing calls the phrase a ‘bloodsucker’ and recommends its immediate replacement with a more active phrase.)

Pull (up) – I noticed that you use this particular expression very often at the beginning, but not towards the end. (I will send you the annotated file of the story so you can check for yourself.) Because ‘pulling’ subtly evokes images of puppets, this isn’t a bad word choice, but there’s a thin line between over-use and what I’d like to call ‘leitmotifing’. I’d get rid of a few ‘pulls’ and I’d use it again later, towards the end, when Spike has been turned into a puppet.

Look like / look at – yup, I use those all the time and I always have to struggle to come up with alternatives. These are weak words. Sometimes we don’t need the reminder that what the narrator shows us is what Spike sees. You’ve established from the start that you won’t show us anything outside the range of Spike’s senses.

Think, seem, feel, a little, almost – these words/expressions should be used with caution. They often convey a sense of vagueness, as though the author couldn’t make up her mind. That does not mean you have to always cut them out, just that you might want to use the Search option on your word processor to check if you really need to use them.


Conclusion

Like I said before, the overall writing is lean and effective. In some instances, there are more poetic and poignant phrases, but they do not stick out like sore thumbs. They serve the story and snugly fit into the flow of the narrative. The dialogue I find particularly effective. First Evil’s many voices are spot on. One or two of Spike’s utterances might have been a little ‘Spikier,’ but I was never jolted out of the story by them.

If you ask me, there’s not a lot wrong with this story. Sure, one can tweak and tinker until the cows come home, but usually it’s better to try to make the next story even better. Even if you don’t change a word, I’ll still gladly recommend this as a great story.

(Just one thing: maybe it’s because I’m used to American punctuation, but I often felt that there should have been more commas throughout – but punctuation is not my strong suit. Feel free to ignore me.)

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

I've read estephia's critique and I don't think that her comment about the lack of a sense of danger in the fight scenes is relevant. We already know that Spike survives - this is a 'fill in the blanks' story not an AU - and therefore there really isn't much point in trying to inject artificial drama into the fights. I think that if you had done so it would have drawn too sharp a line between the real and the unreal and weakened the overall effect.

Concritathon feedback!

[girlguidejones.livejournal.com]

Hi there! I've organized my feedback in sections with different headers, with a summary section at the end, because that's how it was easiest for me to keep organized. (Hopefully it seems to be to you as well. Heh.) There will be several posts here, due to LJ limitations. I can send a full copy to your email if you think it would be helpful, just let me know!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Grammar

"He finds an unoccupied holiday shack -- built low, thatched roof -- and jemmies open its sole window."
I think this should be "jimmies".

Let me preface this comment with a statement that this is certainly not an error of any sort.
"...soon the stench of effluent becomes overpowering..."

This is probably a perception unique to me because I'm weird about word association, and I'm certain that you wouldn't need to have a concern with other readers. But for some reason, I initially perceived "effluent" as "effulgent" because of the notoriety and strong association the word has with Spike. Obviously the word was contextually wrong, and I re-read quickly and saw my error, but I thought it interesting enough to mention. If for some reason you think others might make the same stumble (I doubt it) you could probably use "effluvium" with no loss.

There were a couple of "Brit-isms" that I, as a yank, had to discern via context. I never did quite get what an antimaccassar was, but I gathered it was some sort of linen or sheet, and that was quite sufficient for the story's purpose. Personally, I have no problem with that, and think that it adds to the story, so yay. Others may not, however. But, who cares?

Overall structure comments

Runs more like a play-by-play than prose. Very structured, very clear, easily visualized, but I feel little emotional involvement with the story while reading. I felt almost as if we were watching a news broadcast or a documentary of "What happened in Africa" rather than being involved and swept up in Spike's story. Given the very real turmoil Spike clearly experienced due to his re-souling, this almost-objective telling of his story was unusual. I don't think it worked for me personally, but other readers might enjoy a more atypical telling of his experiences.

Intriguing sections

"What would she have done with her life had she had one? Got married and knocked-up? Put letters in the penny post, warning miners not to work tomorrow and sailors not to put to sea the day after next? Drusilla as kindly seer."

I like Spike's thoughts of a human Drusilla. This is also one of the few sections where I felt what Spike felt, rather than felt like I was reading a report of Spike's actions.

"Forget about the soul, Spike. Concentrate on what you're good at -- whenever you find out what that is."

I found this line intriguing, because as it happens, it turns out to be genuinely good advice. What I never did decide is whether the Angelus-spectre sincerely meant it to be, or whether it was intended as hurtful, and in truth was something else altogether. At first this bugged me, and I read and re-read the context trying to decide. Finally I decided that I liked not knowing the intent of the spectre when it was said. A little mystery is good.

[gillo]

OK, I’m very late with this, for which please accept my grovelling apologies.

First let me say I loved it – the blurring of the boundary between delusion and reality, (and the two realities of the vampires and the First) the insidious gathering strength of the soul, the way one only gradually pieces together what is happening – even who the woman with the clipboard is. I wasn't 100% sure whether everyone Spike met who we recognised was the First, or if some of them were his delusions because of the weight of guilt. Dunno that it matters really, though. (Is the Buffy he thinks is with him already when she visits him in canon the First or his dream anyway? Dunno about that either.)

But If I have to post some criticisms, I hope you’ll accept these:

He's managing to sit up now, back to the tunnel wall, sitting on his arse and pulling himself along, inch by inch.>/i>

Is this slightly tautologous? Sitting up surely must be done on the arse?

"Go to sleep! It's late, don't you have," he waves, "huts to go to? Go to fucking sleep!"

The break there feels artificial. Personally I’d put it before “Don’t” or after “to?”.

The jeep's down a ways,

Very American wording, or so it seems to me – slight disjunct as the POV has used English slang like “arse” earlier.

The third vamp is armed with a wooden spoon but she seems too angry to use it: she tries to bite and hit him instead as if he were human. She lands a few blows and Spike lands on his backside on the floor, his stake rolling loose from his grasp. He spins away from her only to have the fourth one's fist land on his jaw, sending him flying. The wooden-spoon woman stabs through his chest but misses his heart. He grabs her wrist, pulls her down on top of him like a shield. Spike rolls like this, holding the woman to him, for a good five or ten seconds. By then he's found the lighter in his pocket and has pressed it to her hip. He has to throw her off the instant her skirt sets alight or he'll go up in smoke too. He grabs the spoon from her just as she starts to incinerate and thrusts it into the heart of the fourth. Then he turns to the vamp with the broken neck and kicks off his head.

I feel this lacks urgency, mainly, I think, because the sentences are mostly very similarly structured or of similar length. While nothing but very short sentences is, I think, overdone as a technique to create excitement, they have their function in sustaining pace.

Angelus throws back his shoulders and puffs himself out. "Evil," he says. "You know it makes sense."

Now that is really funny – but is that what you want to achieve just here?

I can only really find niggles to comment on - it really is a very fine piece. Sorry again that it's late.