Redesigning Eva: A Thriller by Connor

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I like the part where the teacher madturbates to death.

I posted this in both threads because it's that good.
 
I found the prose hard to follow and the characters to be kinda flat.
 
CompyRex said:
I like the part when the teacher madturbates to death.
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I've been told by reliable sources the teacher was thinking of Molly Ringwald's duck when he wrestled his :pickle: into submission. :tomgirl:

molly.jpg
 
I think it's best if you take a really critical look at what you've written so far. The way everything's written feels disjointed and at most points it's a chore to read through. There are little to no points in the story where I feel like I should care for what the characters are going through.

The nurse's attitude was absolutely bizarre, and I couldn't really come up with some kind of logic as to why she'd act the way she did. Being in an inner-city public school doesn't seem to be a justifiable reason for her to suddenly snap and tell a student that she needs to get laid and to take drugs.

I'm not sure whether I should like about the main character or not. Sure, she's in a shitty situation, but other than having nightmares, there doesn't seem to be much that anyone can relate with.

tl;dr I think you need to go back to the drawing board, so to speak.
 
Eva's personality and inner monologue is extremely hard to deal with as a reader, and you sort of throw in pieces of a larger story without any context or subtlety. Are you leading up to Eva maybe being bipolar and unmedicated, or something? I concur with Little-Lovely on the school nurse's reaction: having worked in education, no public school employee in their right mind would DARE insinuate either of those things about a student.

Also, speaking as a mother, you need to do your research on labor and deliver. Eva's mother as a first time mom wouldn't be likely to have her water break on the way to the hospital, let alone deliver within thirty minutes. It's a baby, not Domino's, you know? It's typically a lot more prolonged.

In short, I guess that this feels like it's only a thriller to me because the writing references "edgy" things, but it feels tremendously high school in its pacing and characterizations. I don't feel any sort of fear about Kreiger, only a sort of... expectation? Since he feels like a cliche to me at this point. I really think you need to view this as practice and not your magnum opus, and work on a solid outline and some character development before anything else.
 
I'm 2 months late but I gotta say this is the worst thing its been my misfortune to read EVER.
 
FlyAwayNow said:
I've definitely seen worse.
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oh yeah its no tiberius rising. not nearly that bad. its just kind of rambling and fractured which makes for a disorienting read

also "arctic sweat" is a pretty good example of what i dislike about it - it could've said cold sweat, but the author went with arctic because its got more "xtreme" connotations, but it doesn't really fit the sentence at all. it was a very shallow attempt to sidestep a cliche that ended up obfuscating the entire introduction. the text has plenty of moments like that and it's usually a sign of someone trying to impress the audience instead of make a cohesive, emotional story.

also arctic doesn't need to be capitalized when used as an adjective (though that's very nitpicky i admit)
 
i'm not going to touch on the story because others have said it best: it's hard to follow. not in a good, challenging way, but in a piecemeal, mincing way. revealing parts of the story and withholding information can be a very effective narrative tool, but you've got to make the reader really care first. all i know about eva is that a) she's unhappy b) her inner monologue sounds like the chick from ultraviolet

honestly man your style needs cleaning up. i feel like you really want to hit a dark but youthful, disjointed note (like a scanner darkly meets a teen novel) but it comes across as sloppy and uneven. it's not concise or powerful enough to have a the big-impact juanot diaz edgy artsy feel but it's not out there or original enough to feel avant garde burroughs-y either. it's like you're writing in the the stereotypical depressive teen fiction style but with a thesaurus to narrowly avoid cliches (which, unfortunately, just highlights them because the departure from the standard isn't subtle enough to be unnoticed or different or insightful enough to be clever or unique). as stupid as this stock advice seems, you need to be yourself. write genuinely. stop worrying about making sure we know how creative you are - we will, if you use your own voice.

i'll take a few things i liked and few things i didnt in the beginning and break it down

Eva said:
The water at Hollenbeck, not far from where she would be lying, would be slick and serene, a giant puddle that seemed to live in symmetry with the wind of that perfect day. The water would rise up and slide down the edge of the grass as the wind whooshed and faded intermittently.
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this isn't bad, you use parallelism nicely, even if the 'perfect day' is a bit unnecessary and the 'whooshed' is a bit out of place. the playing with tenses in this first paragraph is interesting, but it needs to be consistent to avoid confusion (eva's so eager to commentate that it interrupts the flow of the scene, a nice microcosm for the entire work)

Eva said:
Krieger was, to Eva, a regular Keyser Soze. He had heard much about him, but what she heard was enough to bring apprehension into her.
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namedropping felt kinda weird, considering i thought this was some sort of perfect dark-esque america ran by corporations, but maybe i was just improperly reading the setting. my real problem is the awkward "to bring apprehension into her".

Eva said:
Eva found herself standing in front of the mirror of the upstairs bathroom, staring at the strange girl which returned her gaze.
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please dont do the "character-describing-themselves-in-the-mirror" thing. it's a staple of bad writing and you're better than that. also, you run the "stranger in the mirror" trope to hell and back in that paragraph. it's not necessary to add drama to everything. it takes away from honestly impactful moments.

Eva said:
It was the City of Angels, but the angels were crying this morning. Eva had already shed her tears for the day; she wiped them off in the darkness just as Holden had walked into her room. (...)This didn’t really feel like Los Angeles anymore. It was more like Noir Angeles.
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just say that out loud. better yet, imagine saying that out loud in front of people.

once you start the the CLASS WITHOUT CLASS segment shit really gets off the rails and you kind of lose me completely. i could take a look but i have a feeling what i wrote is falling on deaf ears. also arctic sweat lol
 
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You know, I was just being an asshole before, but this time I actually sat down and tried to read Connor's story. I couldn't, and this is why. I have no clue what the actual story was about. The actual writing process gave me a sense of nausea that's really hard to explain. There's a psychological ghost/demon story by Stephen King which is the only other story to affect me in such a way in the physical sense. Congratulations Connor, your writing was as disjointed to make me feel like I wanted to throw up. The actual confused process in which you transcribed your autistic thoughts lent a feeling like car sickness to a guy.

This was a special turn of a hat for King to do. He had to work hard to incorporate that sense of imagery in his work. You managed to do it in your own incompetence.
 
A-Stump said:
You know, I was just being an asshole before, but this time I actually sat down and tried to read Connor's story. I couldn't, and this is why. I have no clue what the actual story was about. The actual writing process gave me a sense of nausea that's really hard to explain. There's a psychological ghost/demon story by Stephen King which is the only other story to affect me in such a way in the physical sense. Congratulations Connor, your writing was as disjointed to make me feel like I wanted to throw up. The actual confused process in which you transcribed your autistic thoughts lent a feeling like car sickness to a guy.

This was a special turn of a hat for King to do. He had to work hard to incorporate that sense of imagery in his work. You managed to do it in your own incompetence.
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Which story of King's? I'm curious.
 
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