The Inexorable Rise - Act 1, Chapter 1, PART 3 of 3

[AnyaKimlin]

Thanks for the recommendations, @Jo Zebedee and @AnyaKimlin. I will look them up.

Well, my original hope was that people would see this rich, vast, terrifying realm of darkness and get sucked in, and tensely follow the (admittedly) slow journey of this character battling his demons and emerging from his shell (and his capsule) to confront the entity he perceives to be this dark demon, only to be totally taken back by its response to his appearance. I had hoped people would be curious enough to keep reading.

I'm going to be blindingly honest, feel free to ignore it but:

All of that is there. It's just lost in the writing. Unlike the others I think your writing is the problem not the storytelling, not your imagination, not the characters.

Seriously, I have pulled my way through a lot of meta fiction this year were the writing is a part of a story. Some I like and some I don't. I am guessing that's what you are aiming for.

At the moment your fiction is genre and your language is purple, it's not meeting the meta fiction stuff yet because you are losing the world and the characters in the text. The writing should still build the character. This doesn't feel like your voice, it feels like you are trying to be a voice that isn't your unique one.

My advice is to write it out without trying or thinking too much about word choice, try not using anything overblown. You can always put the purple back in.

One thing my degree has done has made me try out styles that aren't in my comfort zone. That then allows me to update my own voice with the things that work and the things that don't. You may well decide we are all wrong and you are going to do things your way - and that's fine we all have our own styles. But without looking at other styles, reading different kinds of books etc it's hard to find out what works.

 

[BT Jones]

Hi @BT Jones
I would agree with the other comments on here that the prose is way too purple to be taken seriously. There were a couple of sentences that made me laugh, although probably not for the right reasons. Looking at your comments I think I can see what you're trying to achieve, but using a style like this is not the way to do it, IMO.
I'm also wondering about the use of 1st person here. Is this story truly meant to be accepted by the reader as the hero's own written account of what happened to him? Or (shudder) is the story going to end with the hero describing his own death? I'm asking because, and I freely admit this, I can't read a 1st person story unless I can accept that this guy did survive his adventures and did find time to sit down and bash out his memoir.
Having said all that I did like the concept; gothic horror and pseudo-science experiments, what's not to like.

I'm actually not familiar with the term 'purple' prose so this is new to me. Is it a rule that 1st person narration has to be memoirs? If so, why? How is 3rd person narration any more realistic? 3rd person narration is like a floating, omnipotent entity that just happens to be following all groups of characters simultaneously, interpreting what they do and then sending it off to a publisher!!?!? Being not much of a reader, I can't speak for how many books are written 1st person but there's surely be some that don't require the central figure to survive to the last frame.

All that being said, this guy isn't the main character, and the perspective chops and changes between chapters anyway.

I'm going to be blindingly honest, feel free to ignore it but:

All of that is there. It's just lost in the writing. Unlike the others I think your writing is the problem not the storytelling, not your imagination, not the characters.

Seriously, I have pulled my way through a lot of meta fiction this year were the writing is a part of a story. Some I like and some I don't. I am guessing that's what you are aiming for.

At the moment your fiction is genre and your language is purple, it's not meeting the meta fiction stuff yet because you are losing the world and the characters in the text. The writing should still build the character. This doesn't feel like your voice, it feels like you are trying to be a voice that isn't your unique one.

My advice is to write it out without trying or thinking too much about word choice, try not using anything overblown. You can always put the purple back in.

One thing my degree has done has made me try out styles that aren't in my comfort zone. That then allows me to update my own voice with the things that work and the things that don't. You may well decide we are all wrong and you are going to do things your way - and that's fine we all have our own styles. But without looking at other styles, reading different kinds of books etc it's hard to find out what works.

Thanks for your honesty, @AnyaKimlin. And I think you are right. I've learnt so much since I last rewrote this early this year. I just think my motivations for doing it this way were a little naive and misguided. I think my current plan on how to revise it will make it both much more easy and enjoyable to read, and also be more representative of my current writing style.

 

[msstice]

I can't read a 1st person story unless I can accept that this guy did survive his adventures and did find time to sit down and bash out his memoir.

There is also the "Letter from a dead guy" technique. Person writes down all they can, ends with them in a sticky situation, letter is sent off, say in a bottle, last transmission etc. etc. and you can keep the suspense by indicating no one really knows if the narrator died or not.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

1st person present is a perfectly valid storytelling technique, don’t worry about that - but there are a lot of haters of it out there, so good to be aware of it

purple prose is when we useso many descriptive words the story gets lost

 

[HareBrain]

I'm asking because, and I freely admit this, I can't read a 1st person story unless I can accept that this guy did survive his adventures and did find time to sit down and bash out his memoir.

I'm like this too -- with a first-person past tense narration, the back of my mind is searching to place the narrator in relation to the story, and I'm happier if it's made clear up-front, as in a memoir. That said, if it isn't, it doesn't really worry me unless I start to suspect it's unrealistic. (The book I'm reading at the moment has fun with the trope where the characters find a written note from someone who's about to die a gruesome death, typically full of language they would never bother to use in great urgency; in this case the last line is "The pencil's getting blunt".)

I've seen justifying a first-person narrative taken to ridiculous extremes, though. One book with three first-person strands sought to tidy up the whole thing with a letter written by a lawyer, to his wife, whilst he's on the train home to her! That information was actually the last line in the book, and it made me laugh out loud with disbelief and almost destroyed the whole thing.

 

[msstice]

a letter written by a lawyer, to his wife, whilst he's on the train home to her!

Plot twist: the wife is dead, this is how the Lawyer copes, he makes up adventures, then writes them as letters to his dead wife. It's a niche cross-over genre, admittedly.

 

[Capricorn42]

@HareBrain :

I'm like this too -- with a first-person past tense narration, the back of my mind is searching to place the narrator in relation to the story, and I'm happier if it's made clear up-front, as in a memoir

Best example of how to do it right that I know of would be the Harry Flashman books by George MacDonald Fraser. He wrote the first in 1969 with a fake author's note describing how the memoirs were 'discovered'. A good number of readers and critics fell for it

 

[BT Jones]

I've got to say, I'm struggling to see the issue here. It's a story. Who care's whose perspective it's from. If it's 1st person, at least its relating to a tangible entity that exists in the realm of the story. The narrator doesn't exist. If anything, the narration angle should be harder to accept. Where has this magical perspective come from - the one that can see everything that's happening everywhere in the universe, and can magically create an account of it just for you to read!!

Is it just the difference between 1st person present and 1st person past that you struggle with, @Capricorn42? Because, I should say, there are several 1st person present perspectives in my story. Only one is 1st person past but that is, legitimately, a journal written by one of the characters that survived it all.

I agree, that 1st person past would be a bit weird if you didn't actually know the character survives. I think you have to just assume that they do.

 

[Capricorn42]

I would say that the telling of the story (perspective, vocabulary, rhythm of the sentences, use of humour and more) is as important as plot and characters, after all the telling is the reader's window into the story. Sorry, not trying to hijack the thread, ultimately it's all down to personal preferences when it comes which story telling style we prefer.