The following comments are just my personal opinion.
Plot:
The plot is very creative. I like the twists you added in.
Grammar:
I marked a few commas, and so on in the line by line below.
Also, I would put the chatacter's thoughts in italics. it makes it visually easier for the reader. You may have already done this in your original and it didn't transfer over to WDC.
Style/voice:
I marked it in a few places, but you could cut down on the wordiness by getting rid of a bunch of helping verbs, were, had, has been, and so on. When you do your revisions, be sure to take a look at that. You don't need to dump them all, just cut down on them.
Also, I would take a look at your speech tags. You tend to use asked and said over and over. Try adding facial expressions to show us how more about the characters.
Setting:
You've done a great job with your descriptions. You created great images.
Overall:
This is a fun, interesting read. Anyone who has written an experienced the dreaded writer's block will enjoy it. Thank you for the enjoyable read.
See below for more details.
Ms. J
GRAY HOUSE
AARON STARED AT I'm not sure why you have this all in caps the package. The writing on the backside was narrow, concise; much like the message itself—
Mr. Pennington,
dial 86-7325.
He had been sat at his typewriter when the doorbell rang and suspended his struggle for words. Only a temporary ceasefire, he thought, and the hostilities could continue. But it was a war that he was losing; every word he seized cost him a chunk of sanitycomma and he hadn’t yet filled a single page. So he had almost welcomed the distraction and when the big package turned out to be a big package of nothing—unless he counted a pile of white foam peanuts as something—he puzzled over it, turning it this way and that, trying to understand.
“Consider it an offer, Mr. Pennington. You do some work for us, semi colon we give you your words back.”
“Your words. Inspiration, muse; Calliope or Melpomene, call it whatever you will, Mr. Pennington. We can give it back to you, and you can start writing your third novel. commaIf you accept our offer.”
Aaron did not know whether he should be concerned or angry. Be that as it may, they—whoever they were—must have been snooping around—probably had access to his agent’s files and knew he was missing deadlines. Next call on the list was to his agent. But first he had to must get rid of this nutcase.
As he went deeper in the forestcomma the road twisted and turned to keep up with the steeper incline. At one point he stopped to clear some branches that blocked the way; Christ, it was chilly outside—chilly and completely still. The breeze was gone; nothing moved. And he couldn't shake off that strange sensation too. Then the road took a final turn and he was there.
Aaron parked the Toyota in the circular drive in front of his house and glanced at his watch. It was five past four; the drive from the skyscraper—he couldn’t bring himself to call the building anything else even though it sounded ridiculous—to Arlington Heights must have been more than an hour long, because he couldn’t have spent more than ten minutes at the clearing. Back in the house, he walked to the study for the bottle of bourbon—he had to have some giggle juice first—and froze when he turned on the light. Five letters were missing from his typewriter. The spokes were still there, but—but the W, R, O, S, and D keys were gone— great twist
w o r d s
The man in the gray suit was leaning leaned forward. “You have decided to take us up on our offer, am I right?” he asked.
“The Wizard of Oz!” laughed the man in the gray suit. Loud, good-humored laughter. incomplete sentence “The Wizard of Oz, I say! I suppose that is as good a name as any, Mr. Pennington. I have to confess though; I am not him.” The man was laughing and shaking his head, as if it was a very clever joke. But then he seemed to sober up, pulled himself together, and resumed with his former deadpan voice. “One has to put on airs when conducting business, doesn’t one, Mr. Pennington?”
The orchestra was performingperformed March, I would put the titles of the songs in italics the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. The playing was flawless, with the brass section soaring to the repeated climaxes of the music and the rest of the ensemble responding with an unusual vigor. For a while, Aaron stood at the end of the ballroom and listened. It was to a performance the likes of which he had never heard before.
He sat down at a table with another man who looked about thirty or thirty-one, slightly shabby, with a woolen pullover on a white shirt—clothes that Aaron wouldn’t have dreamt of wearing to a ball. The man appeared to be enjoying the music.
“Hello, Aaron,” said the man with a friendly nod.
“Hello, Marco,” said Aaron. How does he know the guy's name? Maybe give us a facial expression like Aaron gave a wry smile.
The orchestra hadended March and was now beginning began The Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy. The man turned to Aaron and looked at him with an expression of mild surprise.
Marco shrugged and turned to the music once again. The orchestra was somehow already halfway through The Arabian Dance. Aaron looked around. People were seated at tables on both sides of a narrow red carpet that divided the ballroom along its length—many people, most of them intent on the orchestra’s performance. Each face he looked at was a face he recognized. A good number were characters from his novels, but not all of them. There were also faces of relatives and friends, as well as a few actors and politicians. Why there were some people and not others, and how they ended up here, he had no idea. interesting
He just stood there, not knowing what to say or to think. What could he say, anyway?—It wouldn’t make much of a difference, would it? No, he’d rather just enjoy the concert. comma Or ball, whatever it was. What had happened, had happened and all the world’s imagination could not make it unhappen. Instead, he let the music carry him away. The orchestra was playing The Dance of the Reed-pipes, which he loved; it was one of those pieces that had the power to transport him into a world of fantasy. But not here. Moreover, not here in this spot. He turned away from the woman.
That was when he saw the small round table set to one side. A very small one, hardly enough room for two people. Seated at the table was a man in a black-and-white harlequin motley, and it was his laughter that had attracted Aaron’s attention. Strangely, the man seemed oblivious to the rest of the people and they to him.
Aaron looked at the man’s face, and although it was one that he didn’t recognize—the only one in the whole crowd—he had no doubt who the man was. But as he drew close his confidence vanished. The man exuded uncertainty; it was not doubt, at least not in the conventional sense—he was still sure of the man’s identity—it was more of an amnesiac lack of connectedness. Even the black and white diamonds on his costume seemed to shimmer and move about.
“Perhaps I’ll just put an end to this pretty mise en scène—what do you say, hmm?” asked the Wizard of Oz.
Aaron fought a losing battle against the stupor that blunted his senses. The sudden change had somehow pieced together the puzzle in his mind and he wanted to scream, but as the Wizard of Oz grinned at him from ear to ear, as those eyes shone with a gleeful luster, Aaron’s voice absconded. He wanted to scream—he wanted to scream and shout that no, he was not beyond reproach; that no, perfection was not necessarily a good thing, that mere allusions were sometimes better than perfection; that despite their perfection, the cancellations were unconvincing and artificial; that despite being faceless, the people were still drinking and dancing and talking—soundlessly and speechlessly perhaps, but they were talking nevertheless; that if he considered himself beyond reproach, it was only on account of him being a machine, that proficiency at any rate was not applicable to machines; that what mattered was the humanity, that without the humanity Tchaikovsky would lose his great genius and Ashkenazy his inimitable interpretation. And most of all he wanted to scream that the man was no Wizard, that King Nothing was a more appropriate title. But his lips abstained and his tongue held fast. Instead, he averted his gaze from the Wizard and looked at the white diamond that he was standing on. With a final sway and a stagger, his vision faltered, he dropped, and everything turned black.
Kathy, Jorge, and Kurt trudged through the thickets at the base of the ridge that formed the French Peak. They had followed the Boulder River for six miles or so and then turned off the wide trail and onto a lesser travelled one. Their intention was to skirt the ridge for a couple of miles and then climb it and trace an easterly passage towards the Peak. Kurt had planned the route with his usual scrupulous care and he now led the buoyant trio; Kathy followed a short distance behind, and Jorge brought up the rear. It was cold, bracing cold, but they were well-prepared and had dressed for the weather. Show me it was cold instead of telling me. The way they are dressed is a start. Are their noses red from the cold air? As always, the topic had turned to movies and Jorge was doing[c:blue}did most of the talking.
“Like I was saying,” said overusing said~ add some variety Jorge, “put yourselves in a story—a screenplay or a novel or whatever. As long as it’s got a plot it’ll do. Do you know that you’re in a plot? No. The vast majority of characters in movies or novels that come to mind don’t at least. That’s your typical story in which Jane wakes up one morning to find her husband gone and wonders what happened, only to find out at the end that her alter ego had murdered him, chopped him to pieces and buried him in the backyard.”
“Gross, Jorge!” said Kathy, screwing her face.
“Excusez moi, mMademoiselle,” said Jorge. “Anyway, that’s the typical story, and it could very well be a damn good story too. But what if you—that is to say the main character—know that you’re only a character in a plot? Have you ever imagined that? I can think of only two movies that use that device; the rest are either of the standard Jane variety or at most the kind that hint at the plot. Most people watch a movie and expect it to play out like a movie—they don’t want to interact with it. The very idea baffles them. It’s like when Atonement came out; I heard of so many people that couldn’t wrap their head around that postmodern twist at the end—the whole point of the title, by the way—yet Atonement didn’t do much more than self-reference the process of creation. So what happens if the main character becomes aware of the plot? Well, basically the whole plot becomes the plot itself.”
“I’d ask him what’s beyond the plot,” said Kurt when the buffoonery had died out.
“Right on, aAmigo,” said Jorge. “If life as you know it were only a plot, then what’s beyond? That’s The Truman Show for you. Wherever you go, whatever you do, there’s this someone—this Director with a capital D—that sets up the scene so that everything looks just right. He plans the conversation beforehand because he knows what you’re going to say and wants you to say it. You’re in his show, after all. It’s the whole idea behind intelligent design. But what in my opinion makes that movie an excellent movie is Truman’s desire and struggle to see what’s beyond his scripted world—it’s that interaction of actor and plot. Pure genius, if you ask me.”
“Yes, that’s a very accurate interpretation,” said Jorge. “What I think really stands out in The Game is the way in which it portrays truth. The standard Jane variety mystery usually has fact masquerading as fiction, and fiction masquerading as fact. So to Jane it might seem that neighbor Joe is the murderer of her husband, but in fact it turns out that she is, and it’s as much a surprise to her as it is to the audience. With The Game, however, truth actually hides behind its true identity. The remarkable thing is that fact can sometimes be so strange that it is dismissed as fiction, so the writer does not have to disguise it in any way. Then when the conspiracy is revealed at the end the audience has to face the tenfold surprising fact that fact is indeed fact. It’s a very powerful tool. Plot-actor interaction demands that the audience reexamines its notions of reality. And if pulled off correctly, the world outside becomes in a sense the theater within the theater.” Play within a play, like Hamlet.
Regards,
Ms. J
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