This helps very much!
thank you so so very much for this!
ill be taking this very much in mind while writing my next piece, probably reading both of your posts like a thousand times to make sure I do it right.
Looking for advice
Sun, 09/30/2018 - 22:56
#3
Sun, 09/30/2018 - 22:55
#4
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Mon, 10/01/2018 - 08:19
#5
doubleintegral
PKW has some really good plot/character advice so I won't rehash most of it in my own words. What I will say is that your characters, more than any other element of your story, are what can really make your story shine or suck. If your characters are believable, and if the reader can really understand who they are, that can fill in a LOT of gaps that may exist elsewhere.
However, I will key off of PKW's "refining your grammar" comment that he made but never really elaborated upon. As I've grown as a writer, I've found that saying more with less is a valuable skill. When reading your story I felt like it had a lot of unnecessary words that made the narrative a little difficult to read in places. One example:
"But instead, she was in a noise filled hallway of her school." -> "Instead, she was in her school's noisy hallway."
I came across a lot of places like that - either the sentence was simply too wordy, or parts of the sentence were repeated needlessly. You might try setting an aggressive word limit for yourself. Google Docs tells me your story is just shy of 2400 words, but I'd be willing to bet that you could write the same story in 1500 words. Go check out the old Prose that Blows contests to see what you can do when you are limited to 500 words, 750 words, 1000 words, etc. It's a painful exercise at first, no doubt, but it's a really good way to sharpen your skills when you force yourself to be economical with your writing.
Overall, the grammar was mostly fine, certainly nowhere near the worst I've read but there's still room for improvement. Then again, I am a huge stickler for this sort of thing because I see grammar as something that should be largely invisible to the reader; if they're thinking about the grammar, it's probably wrong.
Also, your story changes between present and past tense quite often, starting even just within the first paragraph.
Fortunately, these are all rookie mistakes that we've all made with our early stories, and it takes practice to learn better habits. Overall, you've got a very good grasp of how to write the inflation scene itself, but that's the easy part! Figuring out how to get there and what to do afterward isn't easy and takes some serious thought and trial and error. But you've got a solid foundation on which you can build. Keep up the good work!
One last thing, a shameless plug... once upon a time I compiled all of my writing tips into a guide. Maybe you'll find something useful in there.
Mon, 10/01/2018 - 19:28
#6
A good early effort, but I have a few comments.
I'm not sure if this was an issue because of the tense used, but I did find this to read more like a script than a story. For the first two thirds there's a pretty set pattern that stood out to me where nearly every paragraph consisted of an action description and a line of dialogue. Even visually on my screen it looks too consistant and repeptitive. My suggestion would be to get into your characters heads a bit more and generally flesh out your descriptions. It's a subtle difference, but I feel your story has an almost second-hand quality (accounting an event) as opposed to hearing it from someone who was really there.
Hard to explain, and I hope I didn't just confuse or discourage you. Keep at it.
I recently commented on your story and put most of my initial thoughts in there. Overall, I believe you've got the right track for inflation fics, but I feel you should focus on refining your grammar and conventions in another work. It breeds better first impressions for readers, most of all.
I think I'll try elaborating on here what I meant by expanding Taylor and Eva's interactions. On a second read I did find a bit more contact between them - Taylor running her hands and such - but it felt a bit more "tell" than "show" whenever it happened. I had a bit of trouble with this as a writer when I was starting out, when I kind of described actions a bit too literally and didn't quite reveal their full effects on either who's doing it or who's receiving it. I suppose what I'm trying to suggest is an "outcome" for every motion, something felt and then reacted to.
The inflatee is a special character for a lot of people reading inflation literature which plenty like to imagine them receiving the process. When sensory details succeed in carrying this out, either providing accuracy or fantasy to the situation, it makes all the difference. A couple details along the lines of "the gas flow into her making her cheeks feel over inflated", if I can try to sound not too critical, tells us nothing how "over-inflated" feels like. "Like" as a basic metaphorical word is the magic key for another detail to follow up. "Banging her belly like a drum" for instance -- that was a good step on your part. More of that please! How does Eva feel being treated like a drum; what does she feel emotionally?
A second thing that I wanted to remark on was perhaps the similarity of your characters; they lack a bit of inner thoughts or motivations that breed good conflict, or an engrossing experience. Taylor appears and gets Eva's attention, Eva willingly follows, worries but never fights the hose in her mouth or questions Taylor's logic aloud. It's the somewhat-convenient chain of events (the helium tank and the 30 foot of string included, both at the ready) that can bore people, and it happens usually from characters or situations that don't run up against each other. Eva's panic when she starts to float is a suitable reaction, but the limb flapping is sort of cosmetic. Taylor wanted to do the nice thing and help Eva skip class, but where did the motivation to blow up her friend come from? Nobody else was going to see them sneak off? I'm not trying to bombard you with questions and point out the gaps necessarily, because they can potentially open up new scenarios when you answer the "what ifs".
Say if you imagined Taylor as a girl who's known for being a bit bossy, but Eva has never talked to her directly and views her suspiciously (and that lets Taylor's words of "just trust me" take on a brand new meaning); would that be grounds for some more clever, more forceful, or more intimate ways for them to wind up with one inflating the other? What if the mood was always rushed under the classroom bell and Taylor's just desperate to see her friend turn into a naked balloon? The gist of all of this is to shoot for the blending of both a good plot and a good sensory experience; it takes retries of changing the attributes of this character and the context of that situation to find a match that comes together perfectly, and I want to encourage you to keep experimenting.
Though I've been rambling, hope this helps...!
Check out my stories that I've written...!