Error code: 172

Error code173: This is a synopisis. Synapse? Synopsis?... That's how you say it right, synopsis? Synopsis.

Honestly the book is more of a found footage summary of a pretty lacklustre teenage boy in the middle of a bloody war and a premature raging dumpster fire of an existential life crisis. There is much force in attempt to prove my witticism is in fact witty, and my mush of a brain can develop intelligent thought  (which is difficult when you're named after an ancient cake topper).  There is also a boat load of gayness, none of which was planned but subsequently trolled into my dilapidated  eighteen-ish existence.  Which soon in this book becomes my nineteen-ish  existence.  The tale is truthful to the  complete and utter spiral of the total societal eyesore that is my town  to a shattered rubble of technological spitz and spaz. Of course much of my existence has to do with that particular turn of events, but fret not, it was not merely I who masterminded what technically becomes the end of our world ( and I, quite frankly am not one to hide behind bullet holed technicalities). Through the much needed help of a  guild of 8 semi-skilled individuals with more than 9 pairs of eyes between  them,  what seemed initially like a diabolical ploy to shatter  what is left of Earth ( horrifically engineered metal rust) , what is , basically organised debris held in place with layers  and layers of  paper thin ferromagnetic antimatter became a reasonably major extinction-preventing event.  Although it was supposed to be a rather uneventful half term it became more like an extended wade through swamps of other peoples s**t, ( I mean both literally and figuratively),  fighting seemingly never ending battles betwixt two species involving a narrow slit at the end of the propagation of a series of waves in deep space, misusing ancient tools, and hunting hills for condoms and soy creamer, (which in my opinion was pretty friggen rich). All in all  the few months completely panned out the way I imagined, I  never really got much school work done, and watched a shitload of makeup videos on Youbetoobe, which, evidently, were put to practice in a very serious sting operation. 

What could have easily been a sluggish half term, proved to be of more consequence, pretty much rupturing of an already failing system of worlds.

Pretty gnarly s**t isn't it, yes, yes it is. 

-Marzipan Kimberly Sepina  

Reviews

[JayG]

Here and in the chapters you've posted,you're transcribing yourself talking to the reader. It works for you because you know HOW to read it. You know what emotion the reader should place in their voice for each line. The reader? For them there's no emotion in the voice but what punctuation suggests. Have your computer read it to you and you'll hear the problem at once.

Added to that, because you have intent for how the words are to be taken, any detail you leave out because you know the story so intimately it seems too obvious to mention is supplied by your own memory as you read. For the reader? Someone they know nothing about, and have no reason to care about, is talking TO them about people they know nothing about—people who are involved in events the reader's not been made to care about. And that's the key: Involve the reader on page one or they don't turn to page two. The goal of fiction isn't to make the reader know what happens. History books do that, and who read them for fun?

You can't talk TO the reader because they can't hear the emotion you place in the words when you read—which means the narrator's voice is lifeless. And in any case, the reader doesn't want to have things explained. They want you to make them feel as if they're living the story, not hearing a report on what happened in it.

The short stories you say aren't all that good, in your bio, aren't written badly. It's that we're trained only to write reports and essays, in school, to prepare us for employment. And reports are nonfiction, meant to explain and inform. Your teachers spent not a moment on the way to open a story, and how/why to provide the context a reader needs. So, not knowing that it was needed, and why, you didn't take them into account. No one told you the true goal of fiction, as E. L. Doctorow put it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

So, not knowing that, and like most hopeful writers, you focus on reporting that it's raining.

So it's not a problem of talent, or your potential as a writer, it's, as Mark Twain noted, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” And that's fixable. Remember, professions are learned in addition to the general skills we're given in our school-days. And Fiction-Writing is a profession.

Your local library system's fiction-writing section holds the views of pros in writing, publishing, and teaching. So time spent there is time wisely invested. And the articles in my WordPress writing blog, while they're not meant to teach writing, may give you an idea of what you're missing at the moment.

One of the best books on writing techniques I've found is available free at the site linked to below. Just use the leftmost of the three buttons to select the format your reader requires.
https://ru.b-ok2.org/book/2640776/e749ea

And given that you, and everyone you know has chosen only fiction created with the professional skills of Fiction-Writing, some time spent on acquiring that professional knowledge is a pretty good idea.

So give it a try. If you're meant to write you'll find the learning fun.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/