forum I'll critique scenes!

Started February 21, 2018 by @WriteOutofTime

tune

Yeah, I have that problem with the the past and present tense. I don't pay attention to it until I go back to revise technical things, lol. I'll make sure I change up the first few paragraphs then.

As this has gone into another column and it has been awhile since I posted I'm going to put down a few scenes I've been working on periodically the past few weeks. Let me know what you think:

It took some time to reach the mouth of the cave. According to their Intel from command there was an unusual signal emanating from deep inside the mountain. Team SLVR was the closest currently operating unit to the disturbance and had standing orders to investigate. Soon the group of brightly armored knights was peering into the inky blackness of a hole carved into stone. They were near the peak of the mountain and even with the insulation built into their custom patrol gear; the chill of the snow gathering in their joints began to seep into their flesh. There was no time to waste.

“The entrance looks clear Sable,” a girl in green armor was using a flashlight to view deeper into the cave, “It looks like to continues straight for about twenty meters at least.”

“Excellent job Vert. We’ll leave Robin and Lily to guard the entrance until we’ve scouted a bit further in.” Sable said.

“Oi, oi. Don’t leave me with her,” Robin, the figure in red-armor, complained, “Lily’s nervous habits drive me crazy!”

Lily, youngest member of the squad, was currently fiddling with the hilt of the long sword attached to her white armor as she glanced between all the other members of the team and the cave entrance. Sable sighed. This had all the elements of being man-made, especially with the strange signal, but there was no way of knowing exactly who or what they might find in there. To tell the truth, there was no practical reason to split their already small group prior to investigation. It was better for them to stick together from a tactical standpoint. She decided that she was just being selfish.

“Alright then. We’ll all go,” Sable said, “But I want every angle covered. Don’t give a single opportunity for an ambush. Is that clear?”

“As crystal.” Her team replied.
_________________________________________

A loud crash resounded around the chamber. The resulting cloud of dust was thrown up so violently that it penetrated the protection offered by their helmets. After several seconds of violent coughing, Sable finally managed to squeak into her headset.

“Everyone okay? Say something… anything… answer if you hear me!” Sable’s voice grew louder and louder.

The swirling dusts and darkness of the tunnel after the cave-in limited her perception to a tiny bubble. She hadn’t felt this alone since first arriving in Atlas. Not since she had made friends. The only reply to her plea was the deafened ringing of her own ears. How could this have happened?

Sable groaned as she began to remove several of the larger chunks of rubble that rested on her protective armor. After standing, a few stretches told her that she had suffered no serious injury. Sable had just enough time to feel a brief sense of relief before a hand appeared from the black emptiness of the tunnel behind her to rest on her shoulder.

Acting on instinct, Sable grabbed the arm with both hands and attempted to heave the unknown figure over her head and into the ground. However, the figure was far heavier than she anticipated. As she struggled another hand grabbed Sable’s helmet and spun her around to reveal… Robin.

She had taken off her helmet and a small cut on her forehead caused a stream of blood to run down her face. Her face was pale and Sable could feel her trembling through the arm on her shoulder. Despite her condition the only expression on her face was a look of annoyance.

“What gives Sable? I’m trying to conserve my strength here. Don’t rip my arm out of its socket.” Robin muttered accusatorily.

“Robin,” Sable couldn’t help but sound relieved, “You’re okay!”

Robin’s frown deepened into a grimace. “Okay. Sure that works. What about the others? My com-link was damaged when that rock bashed my helmet in. Luckily I had just enough aura to prevent permanent damage.”

“I can’t get through to anyone. It’s possible they’re stuck on the other side of the tunnel.” Sable restrained herself from sounding worried. It wouldn’t do to show weakness as a leader. “Regardless we can’t go back. The most productive course of action is to continue the investigation.”

Robin managed a pained grin, “In the face of this disaster? You really are crazy, leader.”

“There are standing orders to retrieve us in a few hours anyway,” Sable explained, “Without any worthwhile Intel this entire mission is pointless.”

“This mission is already pointless! Lily and Vert might already be…” Robin began to shout angrily.

“Stop. I’ll take responsibility for what happens from here on. Vert and Lily are fine and I know they can take care of themselves. After all,” Sable placed her hand over her breast, “I trust my team.”

Brianna let out a long sigh as she flopped onto the bus seat. Reaching into her backpack, she took out her portable video game system and began to play a monster catching game. The school year was almost over and she was glad to be rid of the work. Being a high school senior, she got out a week earlier than the underclassmen and also didn’t have to take finals.

“Senior year was a bitch,” she muttered to herself. When the bus finally arrived at her stop, she gathered her backpack and lunch bag and proceeded to get off. She gave the bus driver a nod as she exited the vehicle and she headed home, following behind her sister, Daniella. Once home, Brianna dropped her lunch bag on the kitchen table and headed upstairs into her room. After getting inside and shutting the door behind her, she set her backpack on the floor and jumped onto her bed to continue playing the game. She snuggled with a few of the many plushies that she kept on top of her bed. What she didn’t notice, due to the natural clutter of her room, was a small note written in gold sharpie on a napkin on her bedside table.

Brianna was a short, brown-haired girl with chocolate brown eyes. She was around 5’2”, had very pale skin, and her hair was a couple inches shorter than shoulder-length. Since it was almost summer, she was wearing a t-shirt and jean shorts. Daniella was the younger of the pair, and a sophomore in high school, but was the taller one. She had dirty blonde hair that was longer than her sister’s hair and it was almost always up in a ponytail. Her eyes were the same chocolate brown as her sister’s. Unlike her sister, Daniella had tanner skin, an athletic build and enjoyed playing volleyball.

A little later, Daniella came into Brianna’s room, holding an identical note to the one Brianna hadn’t quite noticed yet on a fancy card in her hand.

“Hey bitch,” Daniella said, lightly hitting her sister’s head with a water bottle.

Brianna grunted, but didn’t look up from her game. “Get out!”

“No,” Daniella replied curtly. “I have something I need to show you.”

Growing more annoyed, Brianna looked up from her game to glare at her sister. “What is it?”

“I found this strange note on my bedside table and- Oh, you have one too!” Daniella explained, walking over to the table and picking up the note.

Brianna snatched the note from her sister’s hands. “Give me that!”

The note said:
Congratulations! You are one of the lucky fifteen who have been selected to participate in a grand competition! You will be transported to the island within a few weeks. Be prepared for an experience that will change your life!
See you soon!
Your Gracious Hosts

Daniella read the note over Brianna’s shoulder.
“That’s exactly what mine says!” Daniella exclaimed, slapping a hand on her sister’s shoulder. Brianna winced at the pain.

“But what does it mean? And more importantly, how did it get here?”

“I don’t know. It’s probably just Ryan trying to play a prank on us.”

Brianna glanced back at the note uneasily. “I’m not so sure about that. This handwriting is too neat to be his.”

“Mom probably wrote it for him. You really shouldn’t get so worried about this. It’s probably nothing,” Daniella reassured, easily convincing herself that it was just their little brother playing a trick on them, but not convincing Brianna, who seemed a bit uneasy.

Later on, Brianna received a text from her friend, Rose. Rose asked if she got a strange note as well. She replied that while she and her sister did get similar notes, hers was written in gold sharpie on a napkin as opposed to being written on a piece of sketch paper or a fancy card. Because of this exchange, Brianna only grew more uneasy about the notes and what they could mean. She told Daniella about it right away, but she waved it off as just her overreacting to a harmless prank. Nobody had any idea what the notes meant or what was to come.

Me again! An idea popped into my head and I just wrote this down quickly and I'd like to see if it's any good:
The bleak expanse of packed dirt spread far as they could see. Spectators milled about, ready for the show. Dread held the air in its iron grip; the duellers had arrived. The seconds were the first to march onto the field, but it was a quick exchange. They shook hands and backed away without a second thought. The main event was confirmed.
Jasper and Niel straightened up proudly and strode onto the battlefield. Silver met black as they stared each other down. Then the seconds’ booted feet hit the ground with a resounding crack. It had begun.
Two lives and a thousand hearts were at stake.
“One.” Not a sound was to be heard.
“Two.” A lone cough echoed through the tension.
“Three.” Sydney’s last minute arrival disrupted the stillness.
“Four.” People were fidgeting.
“Five.” The tears started to come.
“Six.” Sydney made it to the front and stared as the step was taken.
“Seven.” Both sets of hands crept to their respective pistols.
“Eight.” The tension mounted.
“Nine.” The penultimate step. Hands gripped whatever comfort made itself available: a familiar hand, a handful of fabric. A gun.
A threatening whisper rippled quietly through the crowd. “Ten.”
Both men whirled around; two bullets were fired. One hit home. One skimmed his ear. One shattered scream rose into the air.

Okay there's been like three different scenes shared but not a single critique. If everyone keeps posting than the ones at the front of the line are going to be lost. Just putting this here to remind the original poster to start from his latest critique.

I'll critique the newest scenes tomorrow in order of oldest to new. If I forget someone, let me know!

@"The Enigmatic Wayfarer" I like this segment! It's very interesting and flows well. Grammatically, a few things could be adjusted, but overall very clean. A couple pointers, though:
The dialogue is alright, but it could be improved. For instance, you have the characters saying each other's names quite a lot. Listen in on conversations IRL and on TV, paying close attention to how often names are actually spoken. I know I've gone full days around someone without saying their name in casual conversation unless I was trying to get their attention. It's an easy mistake to make, but the result is some stilted dialogue. The grammatical issue of not adding a comma before the name just makes it more glaring. Example: What gives Sable? would become either What gives, Sable? Or in my opinion, simple "What gives?"

Other than the dialogue mistakes, and a few dropped commas, the section is quite good. I like the mystery and slight eeriness of the caves. Good luck.

@3abbie3 This has some potential! However, a big writing tip for you: Start as close to the action as possible. Meaning, you don't need to tell us all that exposition about the bus, the game, the senior year, and the HUGE block of physical description. It interrupts the story. I'll be honest, I didn't even read that description. It's not the best idea to add such a long physical description at any point in the book –especially not the beginning. It bores the heck out of your readers and can instantly turn them off of your book. If you want your readers to know how your character looks, introduce description naturally. Instead of flat out saying your character is 5'2, have her struggle to reach the top shelf of something, or someone tease her about her height. That way, the reader will know she's short, without you having to add that much detail about her height.

Expounding on my start close to the action tip, if I were you, I'd start the book with Brianna finding the card and her sister barging in. The extra stuff before hand? Cut all of it! It's unnecessary and hard to read.

You have a few pacing issues, as well. You say "later on" at least twice. Avoid any time skips at the beginning of a novel. Slow it down, but speed it up. Things need to be happening, but one after the other, not a wait period where you have to skip some time.

You have an interesting concept –after all, how did that card get into her room? Did someone break in? That small detail is what kept me hooked, but the things I've mentioned were a major turn off. Focus on the most interesting aspects of the story, and discard everything irrelevant. Good luck!

Mila, I love the tension! Really cool concept. I like the tone you set, along with your word choices. "dread held the air in its iron grip" gave me chills, honestly. My only critique would be the sentence after every count. It took a while to read through, and felt a bit stilted. Maybe skip a few numbers? Start at one, skip to like four, etc. That way you don't have to have a separate sentence for all ten counts. That's just a suggestion, though, because grammatically and stylistically it was very nice. Great job :D

New to the site here. I'll take a look and find something to critique soon. In the meantime, enjoy:

[Task Force Pale]

The ship was fast. Indescribably fast. Fast enough to venture outside of our light cone and carve a curved trail through the before and after of spacetime. Still, our speed is only finite. Andromeda loomed in our forward scopes. We will pass the outer rim shortly.

Our path will take us skimming past the surface of stars, in systems found to bear sentient and industrious civilizations. We will follow through, dipping out of our superluminal travel into the fiery corona of a star, dropping our payload, and proceeding to the next waypoint on our solemn journey.

For such stars bearing habitable worlds, the surface temperature can be anywhere between 4000 and 6000 Kelvin. Titanium itself melts at a third of that temperature. Not a problem for our ships and the payloads they carry. They have the Midas Shield.

The name is an inside joke from a fairy tale from long ago. As the story went, everything King Midas touched would turn to gold. The Midas Shield does more or less the same thing, though it could turn anything into just about any transitional metal. Take a single wavelength channel electron trap, and pump exactly 79 electrons into it. They don't like being trapped in there, but you'd be surprised what a little exciton-polariton spin manipulation can do to make them behave like a proper set of orbitals. Now take this electron trap - scarcely smaller than a silicon synapse, and make a grid of them the size of a football stadium.

Spared no expense, did we?

Each of these payloads sit docile within the evacuated hangar bays of our ship. Dozens of them lined up, with the ship's Autofab queued to produce more. The ship's XO has declared the hangars to be an exclusion zone to all crew or autonomous drones. The curse of King Midas does not end with an old fairy tale.

Seventy-Nine screaming electrons mashed into a Pauli waveform the size of an actual gold atom, packed valence to valence across a curved dome protecting a matter conversion factory. The shield will immediately strip stray protons from the solar wind and suck them into the traps, ripening into a nanometer-thick shell of bright shiny degenerate matter. Yet - the Midas Shield will not play favorites with what it consumes. If some unfortunate bastard managed to get just close enough.. well, let’s say nature abhors a vacuum, and we've created a damn big one.

The long explanation would involve in-depth knowledge of particle physics, virtual boson gauge theory, and a bottle of aspirin.

The short answer is the Midas Shield would vacuum every proton out of your body until you were no more than a golden sheen splotched across the surface.

As I walk, I ponder just how much of a person would be left over after such an unfortunate event. The ship's service bus informs me that there are roughly seven times 10 to the 28th power of free electrons in the average human body, happily answering my idle thought.

The ship's service bus has also provided me with a detailed and vivid simulation of the incomprehensibly instant devastation that 10E28 free electrons would cause, if someone became part of the Midas Shield.

I shudder.

In less than 36 hours, the first of these factories will find their way around a distant alien star. It will feed upon the sunlight, and convert the raw mass of the solar wind into a transparent meta-material - one impervious to heat and intelligent enough to knit itself together into an optical lens that will grow until it has a surface area comparable to Australia.

At once, some million planets will face the pent fury of their own stars, as continents are peeled from their mantle and atmospheres made incandescent by an unrelenting torrent of light.

I can only hope it will stop them.

Shalrath, wow! Well written segment. Very polished and scientific. Sounds like the start of a good, well-grounded sci-fi. My only complaint is the amount of exposition you start with. It's interesting, but it's still an info dump. Maybe you should cut back on the straight information and let that leak more naturally into the story. It gets tiresome after a while to read all those scientific/quantum physics terms while waiting to get into the story. There were no grammatical or structural issues, so I guess that concludes my critique. Good luck :3

Thanks! The story itself is a oneshot from a chapter i havent gotten around to writing yet, so I did have to squeeze in some exposition. There is plenty more written already in this universe, if you'd like to have a read.

@writelikeyourerunningoutoftime
So I am very very aware that this probably has a lot of grammatical issues, but I was more wondering if you could look at the general idea of the scene?(I feel i'm not very good at writing scenes like this so, yeah)
For reference Camie is 4'11 and Lukas is 6'5.
Camie was curled up under a warm blanket on the couch at the house reading a book in the early morning hours. She heard a creaking coming from the stair hallway, Lukas, her boyfriend, poked his head through the door. “Morning Camie!! You’re up early… as normal. Can I join you?”
Camie grinned and patted the spot next to her while she closed her book. She set the hardcover to the side, her attention on Lukas. “Of course!” Lukas happily walked over to the couch and sat down next to Camie.
He tugged at the blanket. “Share?”
“Always.” Camie surrendered half the blanket, but Lukas pulled the rest off of her revealing Camie’s pajamas, an over sized t-shirt and huge sweatpants, which Lukas quickly identified as his.
Lukas raised his eyebrows quizzically. “Um Camie, are you wearing my clothes?”
Camie tugged at the blanket, trying to cover the clothes that were so glaringly Lukas’. “Uh, no?”
“Cam that is not a question you should answer with another question.”
“No, these are definitely mine.” Camie blushed.
“Oh really?” Lukas got up and pulled Camie up with him. He picked her up, raising her above his head, revealing the extra twelve inches at the bottom of her pants. “How come your shirt is down to your knees and how come you have an extra foot of length on the bottom of your pants?” Lukas’ eyes were alight with laughter.
“Put me down.” demanded Camie.
“If I do, will you tell me whose clothes you have on?”
“Fine.” Camie relented. Lukas put her down and waited expectantly. Camie clasped her hands behind her back and looked at the ground, playing the part of a guilty child. “These may or may not be clothes that I stole out of your room.”
“Oh really? They only may or may not be?”
Camie sighed. “Yes they are yours. But they are so much cozier then mine, I just couldn’t help it.”
Lukas laughed. “You can borrow my pajamas anytime you want.”
Camie hugged him excitedly. “Thanks! Now do you want to read with me..?”
“Of course.” The couple sat down together and read the book enjoyably for the next couple of hours until Everleigh and Markus woke up

Ahh I'm sorry! I'd read this the day you posted it and completely forgot to critique it. Sorry for the lateness of my response.

Let's get into the critique! The first thing I noticed is really nit-picky and something that you don't need to worry about that much, but don't!! put!! double punctuation!! Two exclamation points are never, ever necessary. Not a huge deal during a first draft, but still. Other grammatical issues include run-on sentences and dropped commas.

Here's a real, hopefully helpful tip about dialogue –the more you have a character say another character's name, the more stilted your dialogue sounds. Example: You have Lukas say Camie, Camie, and Cam in the first three sentences he says. Listen in on conversations between others. They may call each other's names to gain their attention, or to tease, but beyond that? Not very often.

Building off of the name thing, you also repeat their names a lot in the narrative. Think of it this way: in this scene, there are only two characters. A guy and a girl. Meaning, if you use pronouns "he said" or "she did so and so" it would flow better and retain its clarity.

To be more clear, yours:
“Always.” Camie surrendered half the blanket, but Lukas pulled the rest off of her revealing Camie’s pajamas, an over sized t-shirt and huge sweatpants, which Lukas quickly identified as his.
Lukas raised his eyebrows quizzically. “Um Camie, are you wearing my clothes?”
Camie tugged at the blanket, trying to cover the clothes that were so glaringly Lukas’. “Uh, no?”
“Cam that is not a question you should answer with another question.”
“No, these are definitely mine.” Camie blushed.

Edited version:
"Always." She surrendered half the blanket, but he pulled the rest off of her to reveal her oversized t-shirt and huge sweatpants. Lukas quickly identified them as his.
He raised his eyebrows quizzically. "Um, are you wearing my clothes?"
She tugged at the blanket, trying to cover the clothes that were so glaringly Lukas'. "Uh, no?"
"Cam, that is not a question you should answer with another question."
"No, these are definitely mine." She blushed.

I'm not amazing at critiquing romance/fluff because I don't write it often enough, but from what I can tell, this is really good! Very light and adorable. You've created a very domestic and cute scene that really sets up the characters' relationship. Good job.

@writelikeyourerunningoutoftime
Thank you so much!! I did notice that and in my later writings I've stopped using the names so much. This one is a month old, but one of my favorites. I'm glad you liked the scene