New Voice
Name/Pseudonym:
ellymelly aka Alexandra Marshall or simply, 'elly'.
Critiquing skills
Choose one piece of work from the application of an accepted member or mod and give constructive feedback on it. You may find the 'accepted' tag on the right-hand side of the community page helpful. Let us know which piece you're critiquing.
I've decided to critique, 'Leaving the Pool of Eons' by Christina (
meupatdoes )
The opening statement is gripping. 'I know how water is born' is a bold way to begin a piece of writing and presents an interesting subject to explore. Indeed, this tone is carried through the work where the personification of the environment, elements and time make for additional characters in a very effective way.
This story is more a 'feeling' than an actual plot. Your character is very clearly in a place, but whether it is reality or not appears unimportant and even in the final stages where the purposes is revealed, it still feels secondary to the imagery. Mainly, this piece creates the ability to present contrasts of reality which leave the reader deep in thought with several lines before finishing the paragraph.
That said, it is a slow read. Many sentences are extended beyond their need by the repetition of, 'and' when commas would perhaps be more appropriate. For example:
'I have watched water pour from the middle of a rock and I have knelt in a shallow pool and I have reached down to let the pool slide around my fingers and I have asked the water where it has been and what it has seen and I have been answered by a sharp pain under my right ankle and I have jumped up and flailed and cursed.'
All of which is one sentence. A few fullstops and commas would certainly increase readability.
The beauty of the opening paragraphs, for me at least, lose their appeal when repeated over the next half of the story. Perhaps cutting these slightly, or even finding different aspects of the pool to explore might deepen the piece. That said, the pace picks up when night falls and the pool shifts to a stream. This contrast is welcome and ever so slightly sinister showing the duality of the water. Getting to the end, the addition of tears to the water was clever and tied in well with the character's final motivations. However, the purpose of the entire work felt flippant after the descriptions spanning eternity. Maybe a more epic description of the bug itself, transforming it into some kind of eternal creature or fear could solve this.
Narration: In the beginning, the shifting between 'I' and 'you' was distracting especially as only one paragraph displayed this tendency. Better no reference to the reader at all I think. (But that is only a personal opinion).
Imagery: In all seriousness the writer of this work is accomplished, talented in the art of making a scene tangible. There are times when the reader feels it possible to reach out and run their hands along the rock face or shy away from the water.
Grammar: I'm not sure about the correctness of, 'forever, itself'. I feel as if this is a noun, and should instead be written, 'Forever itself'. There were also some awkward sentences, mainly due to their length.
Typos: 'wrest' I'm positive is supposed to be, 'rest'. Also, 'gulpingly' could be 'gulped from the'.
All said, a strong piece of writing which I found an enjoyable read.
Writing sample
Post 1-5 samples of your writing, up to 2000 words. These can be an extract from a novel, short stories, poems, factual pieces, essays, lyrics...anything you like. If it's an extract, let us know the title of the piece, a brief synopsis, and which part of the piece the extract is taken from
I wasn't quite sure what to post here because most of my short stories are more than 2, 000 words and any extracts from my novels would be utterly useless so I decided to post a short piece of poetry and the shortest of my short stories. Butterfly in the Water is not my most recent work, but I figured it provided a reasonable example.
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The Universe
A complex immensity stretches itself into nowhere with frightening beauty.
Scattered between the violent swirling of dust and fire are fragile outposts of quiet.
Life, dormant in space, thrives in the sudden calm.
From the most basic of beginnings, a single cell seizes the opportunity to divide.
With the grace of splitting atoms, a new breed blooms in a hostile world.
It is a community of molecules existing one breath at a time.
Against all uncertainty they live.
Their newly formed eyes lift into the darkness and seek out a point of light.
A sea of stars shimmer back, a billion billion eyes blink.
Though they may never meet, they see each other and smile.
The universe shifts, and the worlds go quiet.
Ambivalent, the suns go out.
Dust becomes ice. Life becomes dust.
Complexity gives way to chaos until there is nothing more certain than the endless night.
In the quiet nothingness, energy seethes.
It churns upon itself, kept company by time.
Then, quite by chance, something moves.
A flicker of light. A division of cells.
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Butterfly in the Water
A butterfly struggled on the surface of the pond.
All was perfectly still. The water, the butterfly, and its six tiny feet spread even as they balanced on the tension between the water molecules. Carefully, it opened its wings and beat them. In slow succession their tattered tips stopped short of the water, every pulse flashing black and yellow before the eyes of the eager children.
Then the world remembered that it was raining.
One full drop caught the tip of the left wing as it reached its maximum span. The impact pushed the wing past its limit and forced the alluring extension to taste the water. It seemed at first as if the droplet would not break, but rest there - balanced as the butterfly, atop the thousands of scales that armoured its limb. Momentum forced the wing further down and the sphere of water strained.
It shattered.
The butterfly tilted sideways in response, following its wing toward the dark liquid abyss. Defiantly, it raised one leg and with all the strength in its fracturable body, resisted the urge to fall. The system hung - the butterfly, the water and the droplet of rain. Equilibrium was reached then overcome. Remnants of the raindrop slid from the butterfly’s wing and dissipated, propagating hairline ripples which vanished across the pond.
Traces of water stuck to the wing making it heavier. The butterfly pulled it up to meet its partner, but the left wing did not reach the full distance. It could not - the water added too much weight.
Another drop fell.
Ruthless, it hit the wing again - dragging it further, this time beneath the once stagnant liquid. The butterfly pushed with its feet and wrestled the wing free, lifting its entire body from the water in a brief, desperate flight. It flew a millimetres above the pond and remained aloft between the rain drops that fell around it. Glassy orbs, they captured the sun, splitting the light into a spray of colour. The butterfly saw them as flowers and was dazzled by their beauty. It almost wished to touch one, disappear within its petals where bees traipsed pollen into sweet mounds.
A few missed, hitting the water below, bouncing back up in new, unstable orbits. The butterfly pounded energy into its wings, forcing its motion sideways with the uneven weight until a drop it could not avoid found the base of its body. The butterfly struggled upwards with a frantic flapping of its wings but the impact with its sticky weight tore the butterfly down - plucked from the sky it loved.
It hit the water, breaking through the surface with one of its slender legs. The butterfly panics as the combined impacts force both wings to lay along the surface of the water, melded together in a fatal embrace.
The children watch, heads to the glass and their eyes level to the water. They were perfectly safe from the rain, huddling under the insect exhibit where they had a clear view of the creature as it struggled both above and below the water. The smallest of the group, a young red haired boy, pressed his nose onto the glass, fascinated by the leg kicking beneath the water. The butterfly was trying to swim, thrashing back and forth. The teacher standing behind the children spoke through his greying beard.
“What happens now?” he said, moving to the side of the group, raising his steadily smoking pipe to tap it on the glass where the rain drops trickled down. The small child pulled away from the glass when his breath misted it, obscuring his view.
“It drowns…” he replied sadly, as the rest of the children watched the rain turn to a shower. The upper layer of the water had become a turbulent mess, writhing and breaking at the mercy of the sky above.
The teacher watched the boy whose mind was fixated on the event while the other children seemed trapped by the sight of the tiny creature, fighting to stay afloat. “How do you know that then?”
“The water,” continued the boy, using his sleeve to wipe away the last of his breath from the glass. “It gets on the wings and it can’t fly sir. Eventually,” he moved back to the glass in time to watch another drop of rain pound both wings under the water. Finally, the graceful creature’s head bucked up, its antennae unfurling before it slipped through the water in one swift movement. “It gets tired and it -” The boy followed the path of the butterfly as it fell, through the water and downward to the smooth rocks at the bottom of the pond. It gave a final kick of its feet and the boy thought he could feel its large, black eyes upon him.
The teacher finished the sentence for him, “And it dies - yes?”
The boy mourned the broken, lifeless body of the butterfly moving with the gentle currents - brushing over the rocks. “I guess,” he said, touching the glass.
Droplets of rain raced each other down the walls of the enclosure. The full leaves of the tropical garden on the other side of the pond, sighed with the artificial wind. The teacher put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and beckoned him back from the glass. “It’s inevitable. Come Edmond, class,” the teacher said as he led the children to the next exhibit.
The butterfly tried to beat its wings against the water, but the weight of the liquid mass was too much for the fragile body of the winged creature. It kicked its legs and turned its head and then -
And then nothing.
All about the air was still. The universe watched on, feeling the trembling limbs cease to move.
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