[sploop!]

I haven't written in years. Suddenly though, I feel inspired. But I don't know if what I am writing is too personal to appeal to a wider audience. I don't want to write just for pleasure - I'd like to be able to make a bit of cash and maybe cut back on working so I can write some more.

I'm working on a book of ultra-short prose pieces. Not short stories, but pieces designed to create a mood or a thought - fragments that might appeal to people who don't really read much. My hope is that gathered together, they will be able to produce a narrative of sorts to satisfy the more serious reader.

Here's a sample of the sort of thing I have:

justine

She stood here, you know.

This exact spot, over the motorway, watching the cars passing beneath. You might even have seen her once.

Then she jumped.

She was a musician. Double-bass and saxophone. I used to joke with her about the saxophone.

She told me about it once, when it all began. She used to do the whole thing in her head, her heartbeat marking time:

Each car, in lane, a note.

Each colour, an instrument.

Every vehicle sounding out pitch-perfect, entering or leaving the shadow of the bridge.

And there was something else.

She said it was like God, or the Buddha, or Something, playing alongside her in the background, on some sort of huge cosmological guitar, wired to the universe, a single flawless chord, stretched into infinity, distorted by space-time, ringing out amongst the stars forever. She said the music was calling to her, calling her out there, into the dark.

It's funny. Standing here, on the bridge, watching the cars as she did, sometimes I think I hear it too, exactly as she said.

Constructive criticism please? And go careful - despite appearances, I have a fragile ego.

[Nets]

You forgot to mention Israel, it doesn't have that "Sploop Brand" feel to it.

But anyways, I feel like the suicide bit is somewhat cliched. Try writing about her actual life and come back to us.

It sounds really forced, to be honest. I would try writing about less cosmic issues and more about real life.

I like the last line, though.

[sploop!]

You mentioned Israel before I did! Don't go pinning it on me..

Suicide is cliched. It's very difficult to get it right... Luckily, this will probably be the only suicide in the sequence, although it isn't the only one with a spiritual overtone. I wonder if it feels forced because it is over-stylised? Thanks for commenting, Nets..

[Michaeluj]

It seems too much like poetry to me, and I HATE poetry. I don't want to read it solely because of that. Sorry.

[QatzelOk]

First of all, I really like both the content and style of this prose.

So here's my suggestion: Put a bit more emphasis on the fact that she committed suicide.

I realize that brushing over it like you did calls attention to the dehuanization that is part of Modernity... But I would still emphasize it a bit more in order to call attention to the many layers of suicide that are suggested in this story's details.

[sploop!]

Maybe more context will help. And I have tried emphasising the suicide...

justine

She stood here, you know.

This exact spot, over the motorway, watching the cars passing beneath. You might even have seen her once.

Then she jumped.

She was a musician. Double-bass and saxophone. I used to joke with her about the saxophone.

She told me about it once, when it all began. She used to do the whole thing in her head, her heartbeat marking time:

Each car, in lane, a note.

Each colour, an instrument.

Every vehicle sounding out pitch-perfect, entering or leaving the shadow of the bridge.

And there was something else.

She said it was like God, or the Buddha, or Something, playing alongside her in the background, on some sort of huge cosmological guitar, wired to the universe, a single flawless chord, stretched into infinity, distorted by space-time, ringing out amongst the stars forever. She said the music was calling to her, calling her out there, into the dark.

It's funny. One year later, exactly one year after her death; standing here, on the bridge; watching the cars as she did; flower in hand; I think I hear it too, faintly, exactly as she said.

Piled one atop another for some several miles, roughly organised by weight rather than shape, or colour, along the length of the beach, the pebbles slip and slide under her feet.

She told me once that she thought of this place as somewhere where one might find one's own soul, held safe inside a rock. Or maybe the soul of a person one knew. She said that she often picked out particular stones and held them for a while, believing that in this way she had touched the life of someone near.

Today, she walks the beach looking for lives to hold.

Following behind her, some two hundred yards distant, I search in vain for the stone which might be myself, picked out from all the others for a moment and held, only to be returned again and lost amongst the millions. But to me, they all look the same.

There is a car burning at the junction of Park Street and Broadacres Road. Sickly looking flames rage at a colourless world beneath a monstrous, sticky mushroom of smoke dropping black tarry spores of carbon, and God only knows what else, into the street below. In the distance, many sirens and alarms throb and wail. Angie watches from a safe distance as mechanical components crack and pop, signalling their transformation from careful construction to chaos. She is smiling.

Angie turns and walks away into Park Street, which, at this time of day should be busy, full of shoppers worshipping to the Gods of retail. But this church is abandoned today, and the only other living thing to be seen is a bedraggled looking cat, which crosses the street and vanishes up an alleyway between two shuttered fashion outlets as Angie approaches.

Here, away from the burning vehicle, the air is clearer, cleaner and the sun has broken in places through the hydrocarbon sky, illuminating first one element of the street-scape, then another with an intention that remains, for the moment at least, undisclosed. Now, a clear shaft of autumn sunshine has alighted precisely onto a Plane tree outside one of the fashion outlets and the tree is suddenly ablaze with colour, leaping into life to highlight the washed out tedium of the surrounding glass and concrete shrines.

Angie looks at the tree, and the tree looks back at her. Way back down the street, unseen and unheard, the burning car explodes, quite softly, throwing burning debris on gentle arcs in every direction.

Sometime in '89, September, it would have been, we went on holiday together, to a cottage next to the sea. I remember clearly the sun beating down on the water smooth and undisturbed, more like a lake than the edge of an ocean.

We spent our time there throwing pebbles into the water and talking, taking turns at speaking, speaking only when the ripples from the stones we had cast out could still be seen; ceasing mid-sentence as they faded, unable to defeat the distance and the depth.

It became our way, our own special way of talking. First she would throw a stone, and speak, then, as the disturbance settled, it would be my turn, and I would choose a stone to suit my words, and throw it in a gentle arc into the cold, clear sea.

It comforts me to think that our conversations are out there still, sailing the ocean on the crests of waves created all those years ago by the two of us, throwing stones into the deep.

[Luke]

Ignore the guy who said that he hated poetry, if you hate a whole genre of writing then you don't deserve to have any opinion on any form of the English language.

This is very good, but I think that it requires expansion. I don't have a feeling of who she was, and I don't feel a sense of understanding at the ending.

With that said, I will not pretend like I am above you, I've just gone back to school after graduating from High School 3 years ago so I probably have less training in writing than you and perhaps my opinions are less correct.

However, if you find my judgement at all helpful I'd appreciate it if you also critiqued/edited my short story, I just wrote it yesterday inbetween classes over the course of about 45 minutes.

All across the small sunken valley between my home on the hill and that of my neighbours’, the sounds of the dusk flitted and strummed and echoed, harmonious as song and dissident as a one-stringed violin. All at once the croaking of the frogs clashed against the chiming of the crickets, while the fluttering breeze repeatedly rapped an open shutter against a wall to some cosmic tune. The night was coming and the wind sang and the animals cried in trepidation of the dark and the world reverberated in a strange sort of dulcet bedlam.


Blue-berried honeysuckle and wild unkempt ivy laced up a trellis from the ground towards my room’s open window, latticed and wild and to me seeming to rather flow down than grow up, flow down from my window in violent trickles of my discontent that poured out night after night as I listened to the song of the dusk and waited for the shimmering of the stars to break like pin pricks through the membrane of the raven night sky, the glittering of pure white light which to me represented the most tangible sense of hope that I was able to find in this strange world.
A verdant mad ravine next to the craggy gravel driveway still flowed with a thin rivulet of mid-summer, a small struggling last breath of life from a river past that had roared and pounded through the forest in the spring, filled by the melting of snow in early May, gushing and overflowing with triumphant victory over the frigid frost of the winter past. And so soon after victory over the dead glacial slumber of winter, the sun that had been ally in driving away the woes of winter now beat down incessantly and dried up the glory of spring, and the dying whimper of a fallen soul curled and crawled slowly over the dirt and pebbles.


All around me this nature lived and died and sung and slept, I opened back up a book, resigned back from the window ledge to my bed, read, my eyes were falling slowly, the world was dark and yet somehow felt lighter, I slept, I slept. I was running, I was running and stumbling over ragged rocks, I passed a cracked old wishing well, I fell down it, I landed in a patch of milk thistle, the thorns clung to my face and my clothes, briers and spikes stabbed at me, the world was collapsing, I struggled I ran I fought, all around me people stood with dead eyes watching and they slowly faded away into dust, the world was collapsing and writhing, my mouth was full of dry dead sun-shellacked grass, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe


I woke up and tip-toed to the washroom. I splashed cold water on my face, a chilling sense of liquid reality, I took a soft woollen towel and held it against my face. It was a dream but it was not, it was my life, perhaps a nightmare, perhaps this was all the darkness that comes before the dawn, perhaps soon would come my rhapsody. I shut off the light and sat by the window again, the calm inky black of the night lulled me back to sleep. The purple bell of a foxglove jumped up into my room on the wind. I slept, I did not dream.

[sploop!]

I like it, Luke - we have something in common, I think...

If this is a first draft, then you clearly have a talent. In terms of criticism, please consider the following (but also bear in mind that my opinion isn't worth any more than your own, or anyone else's - you'd be wise to consider any comment someone makes, but wiser still to put your own vision first).

I think it might benefit from some careful punctuation - some of the sentences are (maybe) a bit long. Example:

Blue-berried honeysuckle and wild unkempt ivy laced up a trellis from the ground towards my room’s open window, latticed and wild and to me seeming to rather flow down than grow up, flow down from my window in violent trickles of my discontent that poured out night after night as I listened to the song of the dusk and waited for the shimmering of the stars to break like pin pricks through the membrane of the raven night sky, the glittering of pure white light which to me represented the most tangible sense of hope that I was able to find in this strange world.

This is a paragraph-sentence of over 100 words - for me, it doesn't leave enough space for the reader to breath, and for the writing to fully occupy my thoughts. I think it needs some pauses, to give the images a chance to take shape. I suspect your writing process is not unlike my own: you need to get it out, get it down, then carefully polish - just enough to form it, but not so much that the original feeling is lost. Don't be afraid to edit back if you need to.

You might consider editing some of the adjectives out - see what happens?

You have two themes going here. One is the approaching night, the world, and sleep. Then you have the dream, which has a completely different feel, but has an echo of the real world to it. Maybe structurally, you need to give the dream more space and draw out the significance of the contrast between that world and the real world?

I'm not sure you need to be so explicit about the dream - in the last paragraph you kind of say 'This was a dream.'. But in a strange way, the whole thing has a dream-like quality - even the waking world has that character to it.

The only other comment I have is to drop the word 'seemed' in paragraph two. It's OK to say that the ivy is actually flowing down from your window. Make it real.

I liked it. If I didn't, I would have struggled to find anything to say, so don't take my criticism to heart...

[Luke]

Yeah, I need to more properly punctuate some of the run-on sentences, except for the italicized dream sequence, that's intentionally run-on/stream of conciousness

[NoRapture]

She stood here, you know.

This exact spot, over the motorway, watching the cars passing beneath. You might even have seen her once.

Then she jumped.

She was a musician. Double-bass and saxophone. I used to joke with her about the saxophone.

She told me about it once, when it all began. She used to do the whole thing in her head, her heartbeat marking time:

Each car, in lane, a note.

Each colour, an instrument.

Every vehicle sounding out pitch-perfect, entering or leaving the shadow of the bridge.

And there was something else.

She said it was like God, or the Buddha, or Something, playing alongside her in the background, on some sort of huge cosmological guitar, wired to the universe, a single flawless chord, stretched into infinity, distorted by space-time, ringing out amongst the stars forever. She said the music was calling to her, calling her out there, into the dark.

It's funny. Standing here, on the bridge, watching the cars as she did, sometimes I think I hear it too, exactly as she said.

I love this, sploop! It strikes me that there is a lot going on here. I can feel the mood as both death and rebirth. Great poetry whether you regard it as a poem or not. It's kind of glorious. First draft is my favorite. Call it cinematic, prose, haiku.

[sploop!]

Thanks, No Rapture - you're very kind.

[Oxymoron]

I am not a good writer by any means of the imagination, but I really like your style. Reminds me a little bit of Bradbury, Keep up the good work.