Published December 10, 2005
Yeah, I started out with no idea for a plot and am going to continue that way to see how it goes. Please comment. Should I continue?
"What is the meaning of life?" Some random kid asks.
"Ah, yes," I say wisely.
"Well, what is it then?"
"How should I know? I'm not done with it." I amble off whistling. I feel the daggers in my back as the kid glares at me. Obnoxious kid. I don't even know the guy and he comes up to me and asks the meaning of life. I wonder if I look wise. I don't feel wise. I just feel philosophical. And there is a big difference. Wise people would know the meaning of life while philosophical people ponder it. How dreary to be too wise to learn anything new. I would choose philosophical any day.
I examine the books I was carrying home from the library. Easy dumb reading. A book by an author I don't give a flying cork about. Book I will read but won't like, that I only got to heighten my already high self esteem. When people say kids need higher self esteem i always giggle. Maybe most 12 year olds just don't feel adequate compared to me. And book I will look at but never read.
How did any of them manage to get published when for the most part people don't like them? Oh well. Nonetheless i was still exited about reading anything. Presently I come upon my house. We just moved there from about 4 blocks away. I think it is haunted because the reason it was sold was that the previous owner died in it. An achoholic old lady. She had died getting herself a high ball at the mini bar. My room is the creepiest. It seems she had saved up every wine bottle cork from every bottle of wine she had drunk in her whole life to make it. There was a bookshelf attaches to the walls surrounded by a curtain of corks.
I decide to climb the tree after I put the books away.
I go outside and climb the tall sycamore tree in our front yard that overhangs the sidewalk. I go up about 50ft; high enough to see the ocean. It looks gorgeous deep emerald blue, the sky looks magnificent reflected in it. I imagine what my dad, Rick's navy days surrounded by the deep blue, must have been like. Then I imagine living someplace like Arizona and only seeing it a few times in a lifetime. I would rather be like me dad. Damn Zoenys. I wonder if Arizonians realize us La Jollians call them that. I have a fleeting compassionate moment that I should feel sorry for the zonies instead of scorning them. VERY fleeting moment when I see a car driving by with an Arizona lisenceplate. Why can't they get there own beach instead of invading ours? Damn zonies. A harsh laugh escapes my lips when I see some floundering away towards the beach. Now those were TOTAL zoenies. We can just tell. I think of my Arizona cousins. I guess we all can't be born lucky with a silverware in our mouth. Maybe kids who get snow feel the same about us Californians.
I start shaking the branches of the tree to make the orange leaves fall. Just in time I notice a group of people walking under the tree. They look around perplexed. Left and right. Front and back. Down. But not up. Why do people never look up? In movies they never look up either. When I point out the beauty of some clouds my friends and family just respond "hmm" without even looking up. Maybe they think subcouncancly (if they are religious) they can't boldly look into god's domain. I feel odd being right above them without them realizing anything strange was going on. Maybe that is how god feels. I wish I could be religious. I have tried a couple times. I just can't bring myself to believe anything so ridiculous though. It must feel good to have religion. Safe. I think when we die we just disappear like we (our souls) never were. I hope and wish I am wrong. But i doubt I am.
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137,563 Literary Works • 672,043 Reviews
Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),
Hi! I'm Knight Hardy here on a mission to ensure that all works on YWS has at least two reviews. You will probably never see this but....Imma do this anyway.
First Impression: So this one is a nice little piece. It doesn't really have a plot nor does it seem to be serving any sort of purpose but it does have some pretty decent depiction of the personality of our character and some pretty good descriptions as well. There was a slightly info dumpy but its very slight so I won't point that out.
Anyway let's get right to it,
Well this is quite an opening. Seems a little silly almost but definitely catchy.
Okay we are getting a decent picture of this man emotionally so that's a good thing to see.
Okay well this sounds like a pretty dangerous mental state to be in. At the very least we are getting a good sense of what sort of personality this dude has.
A somewhat odd but still pretty good description. And I'm sure the oddness in intentional so that's not something to worry about.
That is totally a normal sentence that a normal human would say.
Well that ends with more information about our protagonist but at this point I have to ask what exactly is the point of this story. It is simply telling us what one random person thinks as he does something random. We're not really seeing any sort of story here so that's just a little weird.
Aaaand that's it for this one.
Overall: Overall there was a lovely flow to this. It was definitely very to figure what's going on and the language was great. The whole emotional side of the spectrum was covered quite well but it didn't seem to be serving any sort of purpose and that is the one that troubles me about this story. But I suppose its okay to occasionally just write a sort of monologue. At any rate this was still a pretty nice story to read.
As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.
Stay Safe
Harry
Thx for the imput! I fixed it a bit.
Generally its a bad idea to start with mysterious diolog. We don't know who is talking, and we aren't exactly sure what is going on, or where anyone is.
Something I find myself saying a lot is this: Avoid using ambiguous "___ say/said ____ly" descriptors. They are extremely hard to pull off well, and very very easy to overuse, especially when thats the only information we have, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
And when telling a story, always always use past tense, especially in the first person. It soulds like you're RPing.
You have some good ideas here, but you're only tapping the surface of what is there. Go into intense detail. Where are they, what is around them. What is the difference between wisdom and philisophical?
This is actually two paragraphs, but they are very short. There is a break in message after "...there is a big differce." and "I examine..." Again, what is the difference? How heavy are the books? Why was it easy dumb reading? (and you might want to find a better word for dumb) and "A book by an author I don't give a flying cork about. Book I will read by won't like that I only got to hieghten my already high self esteem. And book I will look at but never read" is one run on sentence, broken up poorly into three sentences. It should look more like this:
"A book by an author I don't give a flying cork about, a book I will read but won't like that I only got to heighten my already high self esteem, and a book I will look at but never read."
You could break that up by going into detail into each book. "The first book is by an author I dont give a flying cork about. She 'blah blah blah.' The second I really only got to highten my already elevated level of self esteem. It blah blah blah blah' The last one I don't care much about either,and I probably wont ever read it because of 'blah blah blah' "
What kind of tree is it? Whe I first think of this tree, I think of a small tree. Something a child could climb. How old is this person? Where does he/she live? Close to the ocean, we should have known that before this point. Is it a pine needle tree? Is it a leafy tree? What is Zoenys? Is that her fathers name? Its a little weird, something else we should have known before this point. What are these zonies? Is she still in Arizona? Why did you climb the tree?
So its a leafy tree, I should have known that before. I would have looked up at the tree if the leaves were falling, I couldn't believe that those kids didn't. I could believe they couldn't see you 50 up in a tree, but not that they wouldn't look up.
What happened to that first line? "The meaning of life." You started with that, but never touch on it again.
Again, you have some good ideas, but you need to embellish a lot. A LOT a lot a lot a lot. Assume that the reader knows absolutely nothing about the world these people are in, because they don't. You have to paint a picture. We need to be able to see what you see in your head. You know what the tree looks like, but you can't assume that we do.
What you have here looks like it consumed about a page, page and a half. Embellish enough to make it take up about 4 pages, without adding any more diolog or action. Only run with what you have here, you can embellish on the action "she slowly stepped up each brach, being careful not to fall" but, for this to work, should not add "she climbed down and went to fly a kite" Describe, embellish, tell us the world.