Young Writers Society

Hey there, noticed this lurking in the back of the Green Room here, and I thought I'd come kick it out.

First off, I pretty much agree with what Sweater said. Although the somewhat minimalist style is nice, you don't give them enough dialogue to make it much more than just confusing. I did figure out it they were birds, but it took a while. Also, your "I" narrator takes up far too little of the narrative.

You also, because of your fluctuation between actual actions of the birds and the general espousing on the human condition, fluctuate a lot between past and present tense. Technically, you are using both correctly - it is logical to use present tense when talking about things in general, and using past tense for the specific actions of the birds is common storytelling technique. However, even though this is technically correct, the way you use it here makes it so that the tense changes nearly every couple of lines and just winds up being confusing and awkward to read.

The other main problem is that the dialogue you do give the birds is overly cheesy. I know you're trying to be clear about what's happening, but nobody talks like that unless they want to sound really pretentious. Their fear feels fake - in fact, it kind of sounds like how the shallow 1800s era women are portrayed - the kind that are appalled at a torn handkerchief and seize on every bit of gossip.

I like your last paragraph a lot, although I think the very last line is kind of weak and might be better off removed.

Anyway, I hope this helped, and I wish I could tell you exactly how to fix your dialogue, but if I knew how I'd be a lot better of a writer than I am right now. In general, a good tip is to read it out loud and if it sounds weird, you probably need to change something. Good luck!

Hi.

From where I’m from Sakrant is an annual kite festival, and this piece seems to be, in a nutshell, about two talking kites who get philosophical and talk about the state we are in and how things might look in the future for us.

This isn’t strictly nonfiction, but more of a rambling, thought piece told by kites with sakrant in the background. You write in a stripped down manner which is nice, but you keep changing topics way faster than you should. The kites don’t have a lot of attention span and keep jumping from one thing to another.

This works against what you wanted to have here as I see it. You wanted to use the talking kites like puppets to basically say what you think about these matters, right? If that’s the case, you gotta give the reader a coherent argument. It could be that kites don’t have a long attention span and talk like this, but even then, at the end of the day, the reader doesn’t totally get what the author tried to tell them.

I talk about this because it gets to the reader. I might ask what the point of the kites is, randomly going into however humanity screw themselves up as they are desperately trying to stay afloat. You get what I mean?

I sorta understand what you were going for, and the whole thing started of pretty good, so I feel like you have a lot of “potential”. And then again, there aren’t enough writings about kites. Hope this helps? Write on my wall or PM me if you have any question or something.