Living is Easy with Eyes Closed

[Removed for editing. Thanks for reading.]

Before I even read this story, I must strongly recommend that you post a little note at the top of your story saying that you took the title of the story from the lyrics of "Strawberry Fields Forever," and no copyright infringement is intended.

Wow.

In think this was the best thing I've read on here. No, strike that. This is the best thing I've read on here. I loved that when I was reading this, I didn't feel like I was reading a story. I felt like I was in the story. My attention from the actual story wasn't detracted by bad writing.

The plot is great. The characters are great. The writing is great. There are no cliches (Finally!). I loved the whole isolated-development idea.

I was almost deterred by the length of the article, but then I thought it's Review Sunday, why not go for it? The story was definitely worth it.

The few problems I had follows:

“Dr. Hank Cohen, along with myself, was one of the founders of project. We selected the first of the subjects from mothers who could not provide in the most basic of needs for their future children. In fact, P7-101 here was the first to enter the program.

The first sentence makes sense. The rest doesn't follow logically. It sounds more like the author giving information than what the doctor would really say.

“We’re going on 163 hours without sleep by now.”

Do you really mean 163 hours? That's almost a week. I think that's way too long to go with sleeping.


Overall, I don't really have any bad comments. Keep up the good work.

Sargsauce, you're good. You are seriously a freaking good writer. This was even better than the story I critiqued earlier, I think. And the fact that this is so good, paired with the fact that I'm pretty exhausted right now, means that I really only have one suggestion here.

“So here we are,” Dr. Byrne continued. “I know you already know what we do, but I want you to hear it from my mouth and not filtered through the media’s many-headed hydra. We are a privately owned business that deals in one simple thing: truth. The truth of the nature of the human mind, development, and discovery. The truth without adulteration or filtration. Because out there in this cynical world, we can’t say anything without fear of responsibility. Each and every one of our thoughts is tainted by societal implications and tied down by a million distractions, and we’ll never know what fundamental—or theoretical—possibilities our minds may hold.

This seemed like the easy way out. You get to tell us directly what's going on, what the experiment was for, what their goal is, who The Other One is, Dr. Cohen's suicide, everything. It's all spelled out for readers, and I think it causes the story to lose some of its effect. If you could find a way to take some of this telling out, I think you could weave the memories through Dr. Byrne's narration. He can mention things in passing, recall painful days, have something remind him of Dr. Cohen. Maybe as he's observing the subject her thinks some of these things. I just didn't like the way all the important background information was neatly laid out for us and the investors in three paragraphs.

And finally, the last line fell a little flat for me. I'd even suggest you just cut it and end on the line before, but if not, come up with a different, more unique way of describing the gunshot.

Besides that, bravo. This was striking and well written, emotional without being too sappy. I'm following you know so I can read more of your work. PM me for anything, or if you have any questions.

~Evi

Abigail: Thank you very much for reminding me and keeping me out of trouble! I plumb forgot. My apologies.

Viviel: Thanks a lot! As for your comment, I can very much see the truth in there. Good catch. I'll think about it and see if I can figure out a smoother transition. Or just leave that second tidbit out completely; it's not that important. As for the 163 hours, before choosing a time, I looked up the world record for going without sleep. It was something like 11 days. So I figured I'd undershoot it a little.

Evi: Yeah. There was actually another version I was running with for a while where I introduced Byrne in a locker room and he was going to open a locker and there would be some photos or something. But it would take a godawful series of flashbacks and convenient mementos to get through it (not to mention several more paragraphs). I did indeed take the easy way out and I'm sorry!

As for your suggestion about the last line. Actually. Spectacular! I don't know why I didn't see it before, but cutting that last line off would be so much better. It has been done.

I've actually been following you and some others, too, without actually following for the last month or so. Shhh! I'm just not good with reviews sometimes, especially when I don't have that much critical stuff to say. But now that's it out in the open, I'll click "follow" on you, too.

Amen to Viviel's review. This is, by far, the best work I have read on this site. Not only is your idea original, but it is also well-written. I am relieved to have finally read a piece that is not filled with hackneyed expressions, cliched plot line, or dull characters. I appreciate how you did not tell the readers the whole background, but rather, we were allowed to discover what the whole operation was about as we read.

As I read and analyzed your composition, I found myself regaining faith in the creativity of the human mind. Why? Because it is not often ( esp. on this site) that I run into stories that fuel the gears in my brain and get me thinking. What you have written here could be turned into something bigger, perhaps a bestselling novel or even a classic film if you'd like. But maybe you just wanna leave it as a short story. However, I feel that this piece has a lot of potential that could cause it to be the next milestone in literature and maybe enlighten those interested in pursuing a science career.

My only complaint, and it's hardly a complaint, is the title, Living is Easy With Eyes Closed. This story is worthy of a more sophisticated name. I don't know exactly what, maybe something like The Blind Life, or something else that's short, but still really captures the meaning of the piece without giving away too much.

Well, A+ job. Keep writing. I hope to see this in a Barnes & Nobles soon.

Oh. My. Goodness. I don't know what I was expecting when I started reading, but it certainly wasn't this. Simply fantastic.

A quick question: what is it that he is reading in the beginning? I couldn't decide what that was and at first, through the whole beginning of Dr. Byrne was saying, I thought perhaps it was some sort of cataloging program or something, run with human minds or something... I dunno. Sort of Matrix-esque. As Byrne continued, I realized what was going on, but I still want to know what it was that the subject was reading.

Also, you mention him taking the music box down from the shelf but don't call it as much. Then you mention the music, then go back to the music box. At first, I was really confused as to how big the music box was later (when you mentioned the gun) because I hadn't connected the "big box" he got from the shelf to the music box. Perhaps make that a little more clear? I seriously ran into a hangup when he sees the gun because to my mind, the music box was much smaller and I was like "just how big is that gun?"

All in all, this was fantastic. Very lovely and quite powerful.

~GryphonFledgling

Valteria: ...Sheesh. Thanks! I'd use the blush emoticon, but I can't think of the syntax. Actually, this was originally a screenplay I wrote in school and my instructor passed it onto a friend of his who did short movies. Unfortunately, his friend had just finished another movie and didn't have the funds to get into another project. As for the title, I agree wholeheartedly, actually, that I need a better title. I'll think about it.

Gryphon: Thanks! Unfortunately, the book he's reading isn't that complex. It's simply a phone book. The white pages, specifically, with all the ads and anything other than names, addresses, and numbers torn out. It's the most bland, inconsequential, book I could think of that doesn't reference anything outside the room that he might question. As for the sizing, I'll try to clear it up in the future. That was one concern I had about the readers' understanding from the beginning.

Oh my gosh, I don't know what to say. This is amazingly well written. The other people who got to it before me have really covered all the minor issues. I just wish there was something after this
At first I was going to say that I was curious what the world outside this man's prison is like, you give hints, you give little bits of information. Like how a company could get away with something like this. But then I realized, that just put me in the shoes of your main character. So ignore that part.

Keep it up and I look forward to seeing more of your work!

This is fantastic. I read it yesterday and didn't have an opportunity to comment, so here goes. Your writing is a lot stronger than I remembered it to be; you've taken an oft-done idea and played with it in a way that comes across as fresh and intriguing and quite a bit devastating. The first segment reminds me of that Paul Auster book, Travels in the Scriptorium. It's quite lovely.

There are only a few things that stuck out to me. The investors sequence felt like an obvious way to handhold the audience through the background of the facility. It took me out of the story a little. Evi's proposed a fairly good solution to that, I think. The only truly vital information in that part of the story was the death of Hank Cohen and the intelligence of the subject. These can easily be conveyed through internal monologue, or some other way.

If you really do feel the need to keep the investors in, I would suggest that you think about giving Byrne a different tone when interacting with them. If they are in fact investors in his project, and he is something of an expert on human behaviour, you'd think he wouldn't be so blunt with them about everything happening in the facility. I imagine he'd speak more in euphemisms, and try to gloss over incidents like his colleague's death. Even when the man persists, there's a hint of him trying to cover for the whole incident ("he was having some instability issues") but he doesn't really try to make an effort to sway the investors into thinking differently about the incident. Even if he feeds the investors misinformation ("No, he didn't actually kill himself in front of the subject, he did it in the break room with the secretaries," only not that clumsy of a speech), we'll always have the subject to correct us on that account.

Whatever you choose to do, though, I would definitely suggest re-examining the bits of the story with the investors. It feels a bit too convenient for the readers right now.

The other thing that really throws me off about the story is Dr. Byrne, whom I originally found as a fairly sympathetic character but who sort of veers towards dimestore villainy by the middle and end of the story. Some of that is his dialogue: "I know a rat when I smell one," or, "The little bastard will learn his place," some of it is the way you've worded his dialogue tags (like "snarled"). But I found it disappointing once he started descending into this somewhat two-dimensional character of the thwarted bad guy. You make a bit of effort to redeem him later, with his dialogue to the absent Dr. Cohen (I'll get to that in a bit), but I feel like it's an easy route out to a story that could be more emotionally challenging. Now it's just the innocent savage and the evil scientist, while I originally found Dr. Byrne to be more interesting and multi-dimensional.

I didn't feel like Dr. Byrne was angry because his entire life's work was disintegrating before his eyes and he was suddenly finding himself completely out of control of the situation, nor did I see him feeling any genuine emotional attachment or sense of betrayal from the subject, which I think are sort of inevitable. I don't think his actions need to be completely different, I just wish that he came across (through his speech and his actions and responses to the situation) as someone who was more genuinely sympathetic. I feel like there's a chance to really play with the readers' emotions a lot more thoroughly instead of giving them a very clear-cut bad guy and good guy to root for. It also makes the situation a little more realistic.

The final note about Dr. Byrne is this line:

Over thirty years are becoming dust in my hands. Is this the life you saw for us, Hank? Old ghosts who thought they were gods?” 

I wanted to like this dialogue a lot, because it's beautiful and very eloquent and a little tragic. But it felt a little false to me. Partly because Dr. Byrne, same guy who says, "I know a rat when I smell one," has never come across as particularly eloquent. Partly because I find it hard to believe that in all of this mess, he would address his non-present dead colleague. I am pretty willing to give the eloquence a pass because, again, it's very beautiful, but the "Is this the life you saw for us, Hank?" feels like a bit too much. I think this entire dialogue is perhaps better reserved for internal monologue, because it feels like internal monologue that's accidentally been exposed. (Except, in this situation, I can't really see someone like Dr. Byrne pouring his heart out aloud.) I think it would feel a lot less jarring there, to have him being honest to himself for once.

Finally, as someone already mentioned, I had previously been envisioning the music box to be standard, tiny, music-box-size, and so it was a little bizarre for me to picture it being capable of carrying a gun in a secret compartment. I would recommend just making an aside about the size of the music box -- even when he cradles it, maybe something as simple as specifying that though he's cradling it in his lap, the edge of the box touches his chin. Or, you know, something.

Aside from that, this is wonderful stuff. Congrats on the Featured Work, by the way! I'm looking forward to seeing how you end up developing this story. It's really quite heart-wrenching.

Isaac: Thanks!
Smaur: You are completely valid on all your points. I'll take all of it to heart. Thanks for taking the time to write!

I didn't expect to be so wrapped up in this story, but it was almost as if I'd become melded into it, a witness that walked the halls and lived in the story. I thought it was practically flawless. Really, it had such deep meaning and such that I was literally mesmerized. There was something cutting-edge about it, new-age and fresh. *Liked
Keep writing,
StoryWeaver

omg...about halfway through your story and I have to say - its stunning! It is sooo compelling to read and reminds me of my favourite book - the knife of never letting go. It has overwhelming emotion and such a gripping storyline that you have to read to find out and understand the story. I'll be posting another reply/review when I'm done reading it but so far its amazing!