Everybody on this website keeps sharing their characters and snippets of they're stories, and a lot of them are really good and I want to keep reading.
I also have a really bad case of writer's block, and I need some inspiration.
Any body have anything to share?
I've got this snip-bit where I saw a writing prompt and rolled with it.
The prompt was: "In your dying moments, you see a 'Game Over' screen with two options: Try Again or End Game."
I wrote:
sigh This happens every time. Sup? I’m Julie. And, I’m a videogame character. Here’s the funny part: You see~… I’m not controled by a player. I control myself. An NPC if you wanna put it that way. Except, there’s one little problem with that. Nothing I do is scripted. I guess that makes me an AI. shrugs Except, heh heh… No one created me, so I’m not artificial. Yeah… It’s pretty confusing. Now at this point you might want to call me a glitch, but I’m not. I work perfectly fine. I follow the same functions and rules as everybody else, NPCs and players alike, in this game. I’m not a bug or anything. Really, there’s no explanation for how I even got in this game. I mean, of course, I was born and hav- had a family… But, I don’t know why I have the ability to do almost whatever I want. I don’t even know why I can respawn. I’m not a player, but I’m not an NPC. The END GAME option… I don’t even know what it does. I’ve never tried it. I’m kinda afraid to, to be honest. I guess by this point, you’re wondering what game I’m even in. To be honest, I don’t know what it’s called exactly. Players that travel here and there say it’s called Part Heroic, so that’s what I assume it’s called. It’s a roleplay game, and I’ve been living it my whole life.
The houses of the village were identical and crammed so tightly that when he was younger he couldn’t tell his own house apart from the others. The dinginess of the area, the lack of natural light, and the mud bricks the houses were formed from all blurred together. It was easy to get lost if you weren’t paying attention, and easier still if you were.
He reached his home and stood at the threshold, his squirrel slung over one shoulder, his backpack slung over the other. He decided to knock, his fist rapping against the door. He heard movement and felt his heart sink. The door opened. Reos stood within the door, his face still bleeding from the side, his hair trussed, his body covered in char. He tried to smile, opening his arms wide. “Hello, lad. Welcome home.”
Tasper shoved past him and entered the house, throwing his belongings onto the kitchen table and whirling back to face Reos. “Where’s my mom, Reos?”
“That’s a Heol for you,” Reos bemoaned, “always straight to the point.”
Tas scowled at him. “This isn’t a game. Tell me.”
“I know better than to baby you, Tassy.” He bowed his head, his mouth pulled in a grim line. “She was injured on our mission yesterday. We returned only hours ago.”
Injured. Not dead. He wasn’t sure which was worse. “How badly?”
“Not good.” Reos lowered himself into one of the kitchen chairs, leaning back with a gasping sigh. “Broken ribs, pierced lung, smoke inhalation, poison inhalation, gashes all up her side. We were all surprised that she pulled through.”
Tasper only nodded. “I wouldn’t expect anything less of her.” His chest constricted. “Can I go see her?”
“Well, see,” Reos answered, “the last thing she said before falling unconscious was not to tell you about all this.”
“I don’t care.” The boy snorted before reiterating, “I mean, is she physically well enough for me to see her?”
Reos hesitated and then gave a brief nod. “Clean yourself up. By the time you’re through, the healers will have had their way and she’ll be conscious. I’ll wait for you if you’d like.”
Tasper lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “That’s not necessary. I know the way.”
“’Course you do.” Reos managed another smile. “Just thought you might like company. I’ll be waiting here.”
Reos smile was contagious, and soon Tas felt his own lips quirking. “Fine. See you in a moment.” He gathered his backpack and headed for the washroom, but paused when Reos called his name. He turned back over his shoulder and looked at the shorter, older man expectantly.
“Put some shoes on, lad.” Reos’s grin grew larger. “You’re going to mess up your feet.”
Tasper laughed, “You’re not my mom, Reos.”
“No,” Reos exhaled, “but I know your mom. That’s why I said it. Put some shoes on.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I just chose a scene short enough to paste here lol. hope u enjoy it :D
okeydokey here's a short snippet
One of the doors on the other side of the Great Hall was propped open, letting a cold breeze cut through the room, and with it, the unmistakable scent of magic. It tasted bitter, like the tang of blood, streaking like coarse fingers over my skin. I blinked, wondering at the familiar, and yet entirely foreign, sensation, my gaze darting around the room to locate the source. Magic didn't exist in this realm. Didn't exist in any realm anymore.
So why was it here?
Movement flashed outside, beyond the garden doors, and I surged towards it. The patio that ran the length of the Great Hall was shrouded in fog, shadows swirling through the maze of flowers and shrubs and fountains. I didn't feel the chill as I gripped the railing and peered into the darkness, searching, scanning.
Someone shuffled behind me and I whirled around, hands coming up to ward them off. My other maid, Mavis, stood in the doorway, a thin scarf wrapped around her bare shoulders. She came up next to me, seemingly unaware that I had almost attacked her, and reached up to brush a strand of hair from my face, her gaze focused on something behind me, grey in the dim light. Deep shadows circled her eyes.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she murmured, turning her unblinking eyes to me. I couldn't read the expression on her face, an unsteady storm just barely contained. “And I don’t know why I'm so angry. I feel…” She trailed off, her gaze distant, a flicker of something in their depths.
My own fingers stretched towards her, to comfort her, to calm her, but as they brushed the bare skin at her wrist, my world exploded in pain and light, before going very, very dark.
Okay here's a little short inspired by the color grey:
The water turned grey. The fog snuck in, blocking all color but that suffocating grey, closing around a helpless boat—the ocean’s victim. Then, the winds came, and the sky shook with rumbling thunder. The sea began to bubble and froth, like it was coming to a boil. Yet, a bitter cold chilled even the memory of the sun.
Waves pounded ruthlessly, relentlessly, deafening all other sounds. The boat, listing to one side, was destined to be smashed and washed up, another piece of driftwood on some sandy shore. Water poured in from all sides, each wave a promise of the dreary depths below, a despairing embrace. It’s lone passenger struggled, fighting off the onslaught of dark waters, pushing back with the little hope she had. But in vain…
Grey—all she could see, all she could hear, all she could breathe. It was a harsh reminder of what the ocean could be—pitiless, merciless, unforgiving. She had forgotten what is so easy to forget standing on a bright warm beach. The ocean doesn’t have to stay blue.
(This is the final scene of my book)
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.
So I have a lot of parts that are all consolidated in one thread if you want to give them a gander: https://www.notebook.ai/forum/sharing-critiques/the-pravaci-court-the-first-few-pages-of-what-is-sure-to-be-an-incredibly-long-story-leave-me-a-critique
Writer's block sucks, hope it leaves quickly!
hey can you guys critique my paragraph:
Monday is a hard worker. He will wake himself up at 5 in the morning every day, eat breakfast silently and alone in his dark kitchen and be at work before his wife and kids are awake.He works non stop from 6 in his office until 12.He will have a 1 hour break and then work until 7.Monday gets home at 8 just in time to say goodnight to his kids and have dinner with his wife.Then he will go straight to sleep ready for another day at work.Monday is the CEO of a large banking firm and runs three small law firms as well . He is addicted to caffeine and his favourite food is sushi.Monday will always wear a suite even on the weekend and his favourite animal is a cat.Monday is an only child and has black hair and glasses.He lives with his family in a marketing suite that he built and his hobby is architecture.For Monday there is always the week ahead and he is determined to give his family a better life than he had when he was growing up.Monday is a vegan and loves to run marathons in his spare time.To monday appear
ances are everything and he always gives a good first impression.
I've got… a long snippet. I hope you enjoy it though! (warning, I just wrote this yesterday and it's not finished or edited. It's honestly pretty raw, sorta shaky. Needs quite a bit of work.)
A young man stepped into the building. He was wearing a dark suit. It was decorated with intricate patterns, and was ironed perfectly. His body was adorned with silver jewelry that wasn’t too flashy, but was enough to catch somebody’s eye if he walked down the street.
He didn’t blend into his environment too well. The man was standing with perfect posture in the entrance of a small convenience store, where the paint was peeling off of the walls and the air smelled like gasoline and cigarettes. A woman at the counter had been staring at him for some time, brow scrunched as if she was concentrating.
“Need something?” she asked. She was surrounded by pots of wilting plants and flowers. The woman used one hand to fiddle with the shriveled and stiff petals of a rose, the other to tap her nails slowly on the wooden counter. The man met her gaze.
“I’m okay,” he said. She stared at him suspiciously for a few more moments before turning away from him.
“Alright, well I’ll be in the back room. If you need me, just yell.” The man nodded, stepping forward. He scanned the small store, searching for something useful. A lot of the shelves were mostly empty, candy bars scattered here and there. The only thing that seemed to be fully stocked was the front counter. It was littered with personal items, cigarette ashes, and dead plants. The man frowned at the mess, about to turn away when something caught his eye.
On the shelf behind the counter was a compact mirror. It sat open, framed with gold and the glass reflecting the light. He stepped toward it quickly. That was exactly what he was looking for.
He leaned to the side, peering into the back room. The woman was shuffling through some papers, humming quietly to herself. He smirked, walking behind the counter and reaching up for the mirror. He swiped it off the shelf, smiling to himself.
It was cold and a bit heavy in his hands. The man snapped it shut, slipping it into the front pocket of his jacket and turning to leave, his small smile turning to a beam. He had finally succeeded in getting his hands on a dimensional mirror.
Suddenly, he felt a harsh tug on his hair. He yelped, feeling himself get pulled back away from the door. He heard a voice behind him.
“Where do you think you’re going with that?” it said. The grip on his hair was released, and he spun around to face the woman that had been behind the counter before. He tensed, backing away from her. She stepped toward him.
“What, with this?” He said, pulling the mirror out from his pocket and holding it up for her to see. She immediately lunged forward and tried to snatch it from his hand, but he held it up out of her reach. She jumped up, but still couldn’t touch it. He smirked down at her. “Having a bit of trouble, shorty?”
“Shut it, blondie,” she growled. He chuckled, waving the compact around above her. The woman glared up at him, tying her strawberry blonde hair back in a messy bun. Her grey-green eyes glittered with anger and mischief, and the smallest of smiles tugged at the corners of her lips. The man blinked, confused.
She then grabbed his tie with one hand and pulled herself up. She braced her other hand on his shoulder and pushed her body up to reach the mirror. The woman grabbed it from him, then let himself drop back down the wooden floor.
The man was speechless. It had happened so fast, he wasn’t sure what to do or say. She smiled at him, putting the mirror in her pocket and placing a hand on her hip.
“Don’t you know it’s rude to steal personal things from people you’ve just met?” She asked, tilting her head to the side, holding her hand out. “I’m Amber Lumic, by the way. I own this store.”
“Nice to meet you,” the man replied hesitantly, shaking her hand. Amber smiled at him. Her soft pink lips contrasted her smooth porcelain skin. Her face was edged with perfection, as if it had been produced in a factory. The only thing that seemed to be in the way of that was the thick scar that ran from the arch of her eyebrow to the corner of her mouth.
Amber blinked. “Are you going to tell me your name?” she asked. He thought about that for a moment.
“No, probably not.”
“Fair enough. Can I ask why you were trying to steal a personal item of mine?” She said, holding up the compact mirror. He looked over at it, and felt the urge to reach out and grab it.
“Do you know what it is?” he asked, gaze not straying from the mirror. Amber chuckled.
“Of course I know what it is. It’s mine, after all.” The man nodded. “It let’s a sentient being travel to parallel dimensions. I just can’t figure out why you need to do that.”
The man glared at her, stepping back. “Of course you wouldn’t know, we’ve only just met,” he said. His body began to emit transparent gold flames. They were soft and barely visible, but Amber had noticed them. She tilted her head curiously, trying to figure out what they were.
“Can’t you at least humor me? You tried to steal my mirror, so you owe me something,” she pointed out, turning away from him. She walked around the back of the counter, entering the back room. “Get back here and answer some questions for me, and I might consider forgiving you!” she called to him. He cautiously made his way to the back of the store to meet her.
There were more dead plants and flowers in the back room than he could count. Some of them still held on to a bit of vitality, while others looked as if they were about to crumble to ashes. He felt a chill looking at it.
“Don’t worry about that,” Amber said, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder. He jumped a bit, looking at her. “It’s just Dark Magic. We drain the life force of plants and convert their energy to perform spells and whatnot.”
On Friday, October 13 at about 3:34 PM, three people popped into existence in Oriole Park, Toronto and startled the everloving fuck out of one Victoria Scannado. She was not usually very easy to startle, but she had just been minding her own business, waiting for her shift to start, rereading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and SUDDENLY there’s this like loudass bang and the worst, most anguished scream she had ever heard and when she looked up, there they were! Usually, she would have ignored random, screaming strangers, but she was the only one around and the one had burst into heartbroken, wailing sobs. Also, he was covered in blood and wearing what looked like an old military uniform. Victoria thought it looked like the ones the Americans had worn during their revolution, but she wasn’t really sure. She hadn’t studied much American history, but one of her coworkers had had a period where he was obsessed with Hamilton, and he had made her watch a bootleg once when work was slow.
One of the other strangers rushed over to him, so Victoria confronted the third.
“What the fuck?” she said, just a tad bit insensitively. “Seriously? Where the fuck did you come from?” She paused, then, “What the fuck???”
The third stranger was unreasonably tall, despite looking like they were about thirteen, (‘Which is just un-fucking-fair,’ thought Victoria, who was five foot nothing and bitter about it) and they looked like they were about to bolt. They probably would have, but they had no idea where they were and this random girl was staring at them really intensely.
“Ok.” she said. “Who the fuck are you?” That just made the kid look more skittish, so she tried again. “What’s your name?”
“Um… Chaffinch. What is thine?”
“Victoria.”
“Pray, knowst thee where we are?”
“Oriole Park? Toronto? Ontario? Canada? North America? Earth?”
Chaffinch looked more nervous and confused than they had before.
“Ok… Where did you come from?”
“London? It is in England?”
“I know about London.” Victoria said disparagingly, and the hurt look on the kid’s face made her regret it. She changed the subject. “Do you know what’s up with him?” She gestured to the bloody guy, and Chaffinch shook their head. “Should… we see if he’s okay?” All thoughts of her shift had been driven out of her head.
“O… kay?”
“Yeah, you know. Since he’s all covered in blood and crying.”
“What is the meaning of okay?”
“Fuck, man, I don’t know. Like alright... I guess?” Her explanation did not seem to help them in the slightest. “Like, is he hurt? Why the hell is he crying like that?”
“Ohhh. Yes.”
She blinked in slight confusion at the answer that didn’t really answer anything, but led them over to where Bloody had crumpled to the ground. The other stranger was kneeling next to him, rubbing his back and getting dirt and blood all over what had been a pristinely pressed white shirt and long, dark grey skirt. She looked up as they approached.
“Excuse me, do you know what the fuck is going on?”
The lady was utterly scandalized. “Language, young lady!”
“Sorry. But seriously what’s happening? Where did you people come from?”
“I don’t have any idea! One moment I was on my way home with the groceries, the next, someone grabbed me from behind and then I was here.” she looked around, taking in the park. There wasn’t very much to see, just trees and grass. “Where am I?”
“Oriole Park? In Toronto? Canada?”
The lady’s eyes widened. “Toronto? Canada?”
“Yeah, why? Where were you?”
“Donfrey, Michigan!”
“Never heard of it. Hang on, let me pull up a map.” Victoria pulled out her phone, and they lady eyed it suspiciously.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Uh.. My phone?” she flashed the screen at her, and the lady squeaked.
“Oh my goodness!”
Her surprise at the phone combined with the way Chaffinch had been talking, like someone out of a shakespeare play, gave Victoria a thought.
“Hey… um… weird question, but what year is it?”
The lady paused. “1911?”
“Oh MAN.” she ran a hand through her hair, and added in a mutter. “What the hell?”
“What is it?”
“It’s..” she checked the date on her phone “Friday, October 13, 2018.”
theres gonna be more someday this is just all I have
"There are a lot of ways to break something. Someone Stupidly huge variety, really." Not good-stupid or bad-stupid, not as a quality, but as a quantity. A truly, honestly vast quantity that was painful and violent and gentle and– "Stupid," he said again.
Most people didn't realize how very many there were.
Some of them broke like glass, could be rearranged to save something of the original. Some of them broke like pottery, never to regain their shape. Some like stone, worn and chipped away until what was left bore no resemblance to what it started as. And, sometimes, they were drilled into, so the humanity drained out of them like broken yolks and they could be carved up with relative impunity. Such pretty filigree eggs.
The crunch of glass under a boot didn't sound anything like the crunch of a can being crushed, nothing like the crunch of gravel run over by a car.
(This is the final scene of my book)
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.
THAT WAS REALLY GOOD!!!! I LOVED IT!!! That ending though…so good.