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 Review #4642254 |
 | The music man with no name  [E] An extremely short story about a man with a saxophone, and a girl with imagination.  |
| (4.0)  Welcome to WdC from the "Newbie Welcome Wagon" Good day to you, tara celeste , and I hope it finds you well. It is with great humility that I come before you with this review. I am certainly no one to be telling anyone how to write, having myself successfully managed to avoid fame and fortune for over sixty years, but I flatter myself that I have learned a thing or two in my decades of chasing the dream. I have found your story on the Read a Newbie forum, and though I was not invited, I come, notwithstanding, to offer my opinion. And make no mistake, it is nothing but an opinion for you to use or discard as you wish. My reviews are thorough and honest, and while I hope we can be friends afterward, my greater hope is that you become a better writer as a result of our having crossed paths.For the record, I am an occasional hobbyist writer of fantasy, horror, and steampunk (hence my handle) who tries to review in a wide variety of styles and genres. I should explain that I use this review template in which I discuss my views on the important areas of quality storytelling, then compare your work to my own beliefs on the matter. As I said, I'm no authority, but hopefully my comments will give you some ideas to take your writing in directions you hadn't previously considered. Let me just drop a warning here, and we'll get started. THIRD-PARTY READERS TAKE NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD PRESENTATION: This aspect deals with the first impression your story makes when a reader clicks on the title. Call it the cosmetics. I'll be looking at abstract items from text density to scene dividers in an effort to ferret out any unfortunate habits that might cause a reader to move on without actually reading anything; before you can dazzle him with your show, you have to get him into the tent!   Where to start... A lot of work is needed here, so let me begin by pointing out ways to make your posts more physically attractive. First is the font. The default font provided is a tiny version of Arial, which in very dense copy like this closely resembles the fine print in a used car contract. It can be changed using the shortcut keys above the creation box — for example, this review is in 3.5 Verdana with a line spacing of 1.4 — but the easiest way to make the default font attractive is to simply add {size:3.5} at the beginning of your text.Indenting paragraphs is another way to improve the look, giving it an almost tangible professionality. You do this by placing {indent} at the start of each paragraph. Sounds like a slog, I know, but there is a shortcut button at the top of the creation box that places one wherever the cursor is. Not much different than using the Tab key. I recommend familiarizing yourself with Writing.com 101 in the Writing.com Tools menu. There are an awful lot of tricks you can use to spark up your presentation, but this site speaks its own language, and if you're used to using Office or a similar program, they don't play well together. STORY: But those are things that can be fixed with a few mouse clicks. Now we come to the heart of the issue. This is really the basic element, isn't it? If you can't tell an engaging story, it doesn't matter what else you can do, because nobody's going to read it anyway. I try to explain aspects from characters to grammar, but I don't know how to teach someone to have an imagination. The fact that I'm here writing a review is proof that you've done a pretty good job with the story. Let's examine the individual parts of the whole and see what works to make it successful. This is a lovely piece of flash fiction about ships that pass in the night. Here is a man with an untold life behind him. Maybe he's homeless, maybe he flops in a rundown hotel room, but he comes to the station every day to bring joy to his life and those of others through the only source left to him. And a young lady chances to hear him and invents a life for him from whole cloth. This is touching and uplifting, and has a tendency to make the reader wish that he had more of her qualities. This is really top-notch.MECHANICS: Whether you're writing fact or fiction, prose or poetry, the "holy grail" that you're striving for is immersion. This is an area that no author, myself included, ever wants to talk about: "I've done all this work, and you want to argue over a comma?" But those commas are important. What you're really doing as a writer is weaving a magic spell around your reader, and your reader wants you to succeed. He wants to escape his mundane world for a period, and lose himself in your creation. Errors in spelling and grammar, typos, "there" vs. "their" issues, use of words inconsistent with their actual meanings, all yank him out of his immersion while he backtracks to re-read and puzzle out what you meant to say. This is never good, and this is the section that deals with that. The first letter of the piece should be a capitol. There is also an incomplete sentence in When he moves his fingers so fluidly like a light breeze upon this thing that he so depends on each day. It needs an object; what happens when he moves his fingers? This can actually be fixed by removing the word "when." I'm not going to harp on that, as these are minor things that would be caught in editing. However...Paragraphs, and I don't mean indentations. That first, giant, rambling paragraph could profitably be spilt into a half-dozen or more. A paragraph is a discrete package of text or description that conveys a single idea. It can be one sentence or ten, but it must all be about one idea: At the start of the story, the girl "sits quietly, listening." Her eyes "set upon the lonely man." Two sentences. The second paragraph begins when the man "slowly and carefully moves..." and continues until he completes what he's doing with that piece of cloth. Then the next one begins, each paragraph signaling the reader that a new idea or new speaker is being introduced. This is not a huge discrepancy in terms of what I've seen in the course of 600+ reviews, but in a piece so small, every mistake is amplified. In the end, though, it's your story; tell it as you see fit. CHARACTERS: This section discusses all aspects of the characters, the way they look, act, and talk, as well as the development and presentation of backstory. Allow me to present "Tyler's Axiom:" Characters are fiction. Rich, multifaceted characters with compelling backstories will seize the reader in a grip that will not be denied, and drag him into their narrative, because he can't abide the thought of not knowing what will happen to them. Conversely, lazy, shallow stereotypes will ruin any story regardless of its other qualities, because the reader will be unable to answer the second question of fiction: Why do I care? It is difficult to develop characters in flash fiction. One almost has to rely on stereotypes. But not always, and you've told a soft little tale about two people who briefly cross paths, and if the man's character is not developed in fact, it is in the girl's fantasy. Excellent work on these two!SETTINGS: This section deals with the locations you've established for your action, the ways in which they affect that action, and your ability to describe them clearly and concisely. You could say that this aspect answers (or fails to answer) the first question of fiction, What's going on here? Setting can be used to challenge a character, to highlight a skill or quality, to set the mood of a scene without overtly saying a single thing about it, and a host of lesser impacts too numerous to mention. You might think of it as a print artist's equivalent of a movie's "mood music," always important yet never intrusive. All in all, a pretty big deal, then. So how did you do? Well-used. They are in a train station. You make that point, and move on. That's the essence of flash fiction. You have no time to dawdle over details. You have to make your point and move on, and you've done that elegantly here. You don't waste more than a handful of words on description — "train approaching," "screeching brakes," "cold tile wall" — yet we never forget where we are. This is superbly executed, and I tip my begoggled patrol cap to you!SUMMARY: And there you have my words of "wisdom." I hope that I have presented my opinions in a way that is constructive, and that you will find helpful to your endeavors going forward. I thank you for sharing and exposing your work to the whims of public opinion, and I wish you a thrilling journey to wherever your writing takes you.** Image ID #2234711 Unavailable ** Drop in and meet the gang at the
 My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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You responded to this review 01/05/2022 @ 5:25pm EST