Original Story (Paradox)--Critique of Writing Style Wanted!

[Caiaphas]

I had a brain bug that's been gnawing at me the past week. Here's the intro to that.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What most people don't realize is that time is malleable. In the right hands, it's nothing more than wet clay on a potter's wheel, or perhaps tissue paper in a food processor. To the right individuals, time is nothing more than a toy, an interesting plaything to be examined and possibly explored.

Unfortunately, of the six of us, one wants to rule the world, another is a neo-Nazi, yet another simply wishes to destroy everything, including the Earth itself, one is a whining brat of a high school child, and the fifth's intentions are obscure to me and at present I highly doubt that he supports our cause.

Then there's me. I'm just trying to fix everything. I suppose it's a holdover from my FBI days, but I don't dwell on that. Ironically enough, I don't have the time to dwell on that. I'm kept too busy keeping the other five from unraveling the very fabric of spacetime, and the latter two work with me.

But that's beside the point. I ask you now, whether you're a spelunker reading this on a cave wall or a historian discovering a piece of notebook paper wedged in a 16th century bible: are you ready to begin the shunt into time?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

No flames, please. I'm looking for constructive criticism here.

[Mayabird]

Well...we don't have much to work with since it's a short intro. It seems like a pretty standard start with a first-person narrator but it could go pretty much anywhere from here. I'd have to see a chapter or longer section to get a good idea.

[Caiaphas]

Yeah, I should have the first chaptermabob up later tonight, maybe around nine? Thanks for the patience, Maya.

[Caiaphas]

Next installment is here.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There was a boy walking down the street. He was oblivious to his surroundings, his iPod presumably blasting away so loudly I couldn’t understand how he wasn’t bleeding from the ears. It was all the better for us, though; he might’ve understandably been slightly freaked out by the way myself and my companion were staring at him from the top of an abandoned, derelict building.

“You’re sure that’s him?” she asked.

“Yep. He’s got that weird tug to him, y’know?” I responded. “You feel it?”

“No.” She frowned. “You’re absolutely sure? You’re sure that that tug you’re feeling isn’t just what you ate for breakfast?”

“I didn’t eat anything, remember?” I retorted. “We didn’t have time, ironically enough.”

“Exactly.” We were silent for a moment. “So you’re absolutely sur—” She stopped. She must have felt the same thing.

It’s hard to describe. The phenomenon is rather easy to describe physically—it’s a simple manipulation of local space-time that not only throws you either forwards or backwards in time but also anchors you to the nearest gravitational field, otherwise known as Earth—but very, very hard to actually place. Time-insensitive people don’t feel anything. The time-sensitive feel something that is akin to having all of your intestines pulled in one direction all at the same time. It’s rather uncomfortable, to say the least, and the closer you are to the phenomenon, the more uncomfortable it gets.

We both looked to see the boy twenty meters ahead of where he’d been previously.

“I’m sure,” I said smugly. “Oh, I’m sure.”

She scowled at me but said nothing aside from a terse, “Pursue?”

“Pursue.” She nodded, attached a carabineer to a prepared anchor, and rappelled down. I took the long way down instead, clambering down an old fire escape. It didn’t really matter. We knew where and when he was, and our enemies were nowhere to be seen.

In hindsight, I really shouldn’t have let myself think that. The boy jumped back as a Humvee screeched up to the curb. We recognized the car.

“Oh, hell,” I uttered. My companion pulled out a handgun and started running. I stopped and shunted myself into the future.

When I could see well enough to make out individual shapes, I noticed my companion on the ground, bleeding profusely from several gunshot wounds. I looked about to find no one else in sight—not the boy, not our enemies inside the car, no one.

I shrugged, walked over to where I had seen the boy standing, and shunted back.

I arrived just in time to witness my compatriot opening fire on the car. I ducked and tackled the kid around the knees.

“What the fuck, man?” he shouted, furiously struggling.

“I’m saving your life, you ungrateful brat,” I responded in kind. I shunted the two of us into the past, this time, and dragged him kicking and screaming a few meters back. A second shunt brought us to the present, just in time for me to see the brief flash of light that marked my flight about an hour backwards earlier.

“Can we get out of here, already?” I shouted. My comrade-in-arms paused long enough to fire a couple shots at the car, then grabbed hold of my arm.

This was going to be tricky. Two people are easy enough to shunt; three, not so much. There’s always the possibility of someone leaving a limb or an organ behind. If two people are shunting a third at the same time, that possibility is removed, but the added danger of separation in the middle of shunting. Let’s just say that the results weren’t pretty.

“Two hours back,” I said as calmly as I could manage. “Now!”

The air flickered around us as we shunted ourselves out of danger.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Very rushed, I know. Reviews?

[ShadowDragon8685]

It's a bit cerebral, which can be okay. Aside from the description of the 'tug', there's a lot - I mean a lot - of 'fill in the blanks' in your writing. The writing is from first-person narrative, which can be fine, but the narrator is assuming the reader is familiar with a lot of sensations and concepts he may well not be; even from an in-character point of view, there's no reason to believe the historian finding it in a piece of lined notebook paper found in a 16th-century bible would have any idea what a shunt feels like, or how one initiates it.

If that's what you're going for, letting the reader fill-in-the-blanks, that's not so bad, perhaps. It lets the reader imagine a shunt as anything from Q's "snap your fingers and appear elsewhere" trick from Star Trek to a gut-wrenching experience more akin to leaping from an airplane to a colored-tunnel sequence like from Avatar.

Likewise, you don't really describe a lot of the scenery. It's not out-of-the-question to imagine a reader from at least the late 19th century might know what a metal fire escape is like; one from the early-to-mid twentieth might know what a carabiner is like, but he might also have to consult a dictionary. Most modern readers won't know what it is off the top of their heads, either. They probably wouldn't understand rapelling unless they were from, say, the 40s or later, and nobody will know what a "hummer" is in this context (though they may be able to guess it's a kind of automobile if they're from the, say, 20s onwards,) until about 1998.

As a personal journal style of presentation, it works, but as a story to read, to consume, to live and breathe, it lacks detail, focus. You get the broad strokes down well, but it wants for chewability. A reader might know what gunshots are, but you still shouldn't gloss over them the first time weapons are fired in a given story.

[Caiaphas]

So if I were to modify that particular part, I should add more detail? Like if I were to describe the shunt, I would describe it as how the narrator feels and what he sees during that maneuver?

As a personal journal style of presentation, it works, but as a story to read, to consume, to live and breathe, it lacks detail, focus. You get the broad strokes down well, but it wants for chewability.

[ShadowDragon8685]

So if I were to modify that particular part, I should add more detail? Like if I were to describe the shunt, I would describe it as how the narrator feels and what he sees during that maneuver?

Yes!

I'm writing a bit of Avatar fanfiction at the present time. It combines both first-person narrative at times (in the form of the audio track of the character's video log) with primarily third-person descriptions of what's happening, including what the protagonist experiences and feels. Here's how I described the protagonist going under in his link pod for the first time.


---

“Roger that. Going in!”

Just like the sims, Tristan. Close your eyes, stop thinking, and let it come.. He took a deep breath, and let it out; the dimness inside the pod was replaced with absolute blackness. The machinery embedded in the wall started to spin up

You don't dream in Cryo... But this is gonna be awesome, he thought to himself as he could feel the tingling on the edge of consciousness; coalescing into a rim of white around the edges of the fake vision of the mind's eye. Suddenly it felt like it was streaming, blossoming into a multicolored tunnel; a whirling vortex he was flying through, being sucked through, then his vision flashed white before going black; no pain, no nausea or illness came over him. Suddenly his vision swam, and he saw a doctor leaning over him. She was wearing an Exopack and a clean-suit, but he felt no tell-tale pressure of an Exopack around his own face. He gasped; the air he sucked in felt, tasted cleaner, purer, headier than any he had ever. “Stay down, you might be a bit disoriented,” she softly said, and held up a light to his eyes; it hurt, but it was strange in that even though it hurt, he could make out every detail of the multi-bulb LED lighting element.

---

You see the difference? Once something has become routine, it's okay to say "Tristan slid into his link pod, closed his eyes; calmed himself and awoke with yellow eyes," but even then, saying "he linked to his Avatar" is too threadbare. You don't want the fantastic elements to become so mundane that they bear only simple, boring, cut-and-dry descriptions as might be worthy of a police report.

[Caiaphas]

Right then. So what do you mean by "not glossing over the gunshots?" Do you think I should describe placement and the ammunition used to shoot holes in her more?

[ShadowDragon8685]

Right then. So what do you mean by "not glossing over the gunshots?" Do you think I should describe placement and the ammunition used to shoot holes in her more?

Have you ever been near a firearm being discharged without wearing protective hearing? You can go into that - at close range the ear-piercing loudness, the shock that the sound delivers to the guts. If you want to give the readers a good cold start, a "holy shit people are being gunned down!" you could describe it from the third-person heroic point of view of the heroine, running towards the bad guys firing into a wall of bullets, describing the pain and visceral fear and damage as each bullet hits, like in slow-mo. Basically, set it up like the "hero's sidekick dies heroically" that you might see four-fifths of the way through a movie, only to yank the rug out from under it by having the hero pop back in time and prevent it as if this was standard operating procedure for them; which it is.

[Caiaphas]

Only thing is, my narrator has shunted a couple minutes into the future, long enough for his companion to be gunned down and long enough for his enemies to have driven away.

Have you ever been near a firearm being discharged without wearing protective hearing?

Yes. It's loud as hell, even from a distance of maybe thirty to forty meters.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Only thing is, my narrator has shunted a couple minutes into the future, long enough for his companion to be gunned down and long enough for his enemies to have driven away.

Then it's gotten to be so routine that he doesn't even stay to watch? Ouch. You might want to mention that, then.

Have you ever been near a firearm being discharged without wearing protective hearing?

Yes. It's loud as hell, even from a distance of maybe thirty to forty meters.

Yes, I know. Try to convey that to the rear, that chaotic, body-blasting sensation of being near unsuppressed gunfire without ear protection.

[Caiaphas]

Then it's gotten to be so routine that he doesn't even stay to watch? Ouch. You might want to mention that, then.

But I do--it's in the paragraph immediately following.

I shrugged, walked over to where I had seen the boy standing, and shunted back.

Specifically, "I shrugged." Wouldn't that indicate something routine? Either that or sighing.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Then it's gotten to be so routine that he doesn't even stay to watch? Ouch. You might want to mention that, then.

But I do--it's in the paragraph immediately following.

I shrugged, walked over to where I had seen the boy standing, and shunted back.

Specifically, "I shrugged." Wouldn't that indicate something routine? Either that or sighing.

Perhaps, but you need to go into more detail. Detail is not the spice of a story, it's the meat of it. If it's become so routine, have him mention how he dispassionately looks down at his friend's shattered, wrecked body without any anger or pain, because he's seen it dozens of times before.