• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

NeoGAF Creative Writing Challenge #66 - "This NeoGAFian Life"

Status
Not open for further replies.
I came in to see who won... and I find that I didn't post my crits or votes...
edit: Here they are:

Crits

viciouskillersquirrel - "Sounds" - cool story. Had issues with tense.
JCX - "Don't Dream It's Over" - Love arcade fire. Fragmented nature weakend the piece.
hey_monkey - "Disneyland"- <3 political reach more than plot, but the story worked very well.
Ronito- it felt like I was lending a sympathetic ear, rather then reading a story. Bit Neutral.
RurouniZel- Haven't you watched Jerry Maguire? Roll the dice dude. Roll it like you just don't care. Absorbing tale detached from some writing dents but as was apt for the theme, it was very forgivable.
Zephyr -Sentences drew attention by their long windedness. Prose needs work.Especially for this type of audience. (genre?)
Bootaaay - narration needs work. It came accross as uninteresting. And edit it down to its purest form without the need to embelish. There's good stuff underneath.
Tangent - "Shopping"- Very energetic. Should have started with escalators. Not necessarily the action parts, but in the opening sentence or two. The focal point of the piece got lost somewhere at the back end of the first paragraph.
Crowphoenix- lively piece, didn't need the first third to be about 'that guy'. I was like stop talking crow, get on with the damn story already! Stop being 'that guy' you know the one who talks and talks and talks before getting to the point. :)
nitewulf- Loose ends in the middle, but in truth I felt a bit of depth in the piece.
Cyan- A good return to form. Your stories are always best when the narration is clear, and full of character. Good start and a great ending too.

Votes

1. tangent
2. viciouskillersquirrel
3. Ashes1396

I demand that my votes be counted sir...!
 
Gotcha!

I don't know how I would have voted in the end. My top three would have been between, Cyan, nitewolf, Hey Monkey, RurouniZel, Crowphoenix, tangent, viciouskillersquirrel etc etc etc... wouldn't have changed the lead, I don't think
Edit:
Thinking about it, Cyan may have been the first place pick after all.
 
Just in case some people missed it. There was a special 'born to write' part in the link provided. Try to make it there, if you are in London or something...
Here is the link again. :)

ps. Also, that vid is amazing. Hat's off to the person who wrote the narration for that.
 
Cyan said:
“The Christmas Tree” by CrowPhoenix – I like how you described this friend: “Will is THAT guy.” He’s so symbolic of distractions before finals. I liked this line: “With a curse and as much grace as a penguin on a sand dune.” In the end, though, I would have liked to find out if the MC's friendship with Will changed at all for better or worse, and what happened to his studying, or his perspective on studying(?), and what happened to the actual final exams. Maybe it's just me, but I thought that the Christmas Tree would somehow feed into a new perspective on studying. But maybe that's over the top. Now I'm switching up on myself!
Click to expand...
I don't think this incident really changed much (I am a calmer studier and our friendship has worsened). I just thought it was a fun story that could work into a TAL segment on horrible holidays.

Ashes1396 said:
Crowphoenix- lively piece, didn't need the first third to be about 'that guy'. I was like stop talking crow, get on with the damn story already! Stop being 'that guy' you know the one who talks and talks and talks before getting to the point. :)
Click to expand...

XD Unfortunately, I am that guy. I tried to write the piece how I normally talk. I just so happen to be that pedantic asshole that explains simple concepts that a normal person could pick up easily. See what happens is that I just get distracted and go off on tangents because I never really know where I'm going so I have to fill time... :P

Cyan said:
crowphoenix - "The Christmas Tree" - You're familiar with "show don't tell." In this case, when you tell us that you're being dumb, it's much less funny than when you show us. Lines where you directly tell us this can be cut and it will make the piece stronger. For the most part, very good. The ending is hilarious, but I think the last line itself could be even funnier. As is it isn't quite at peak funniness. Maybe putting it in actual dialogue? Not quite sure.
Click to expand...
I wrote the piece as I felt I'd do so if I were on TAL. And you should have seen the first draft. I over explained the hell out of stuff. There was about another 400 words in the 'THAT guy' segment.

ronito said:
Crow
Also Wil?....Will Arthur?
Click to expand...

Huh?
 
Thank you, Yeef!

Zeph... You don't have to take the advice, but hell, son, it's not like anyone has to take the time to read your work and try to say something thoughtful about it, you know?
 
Zeph, we're here to improve not to praise. You're a good writer, man, but you've got flaws. And you're only going to get better if you're willing to take our critiques and look at your stuff. Just blaming us isn't going to help you.
 
crowphoenix said:
Zeph, we're here to improve not to praise. You're a good writer, man, but you've got flaws. And you're only going to get better if you're willing to take our critiques and look at your stuff. Just blaming us isn't going to help you.
Click to expand...
.
 
crowphoenix said:
And you're only going to get better if you're willing to take our critiques and look at your stuff.
Click to expand...
While also remembering that we're just dudes (and dudettes) on the internet. I wouldn't necessarily take all crits to heart either.

New topic coming soon. Just got out of a long meeting at work. Bah.
 
JCX (Don't Dream It's Over) - This story turned out unexpectedly sad and you did a good job of bringing emotion out of the reader. However, I don't think the transition between the dream bit and the father dying bit worked for me. Maybe if you'd introduced the father sooner, perhaps during the spiel about lucid dreaming, it might've worked better, but as it is, it felt like two different, unrelated stories.

hey_monkey (Disneyland) - I liked the use of statistics interspersing the story. Very apropos and effective at setting up context for what was going on. It took me a little while to understand what was happening with the whole family situation, though. Was this deliberate? I can't tell. I got it in the end and you might've had a reason for doing it but it wasn't clear in the first few paragraphs whether the girl's parents had divorced or whether or not they were still married.


ronito (Proliteriate Soap) - I don't understand the pun in the thread title. The story was hilarious and told in the right style. Apart from repetition of a few phrases like "evil grin", I can't fault it.


RurouniZel (A New Year, A New Promise) - I liked the repetition of the "This year..." phrase. It held the whole theme of the story together, though I felt you could have used it later on in the piece to remind the reader how the narrator got here. There was a run-on sentence or two that needed some work, for instance, the one where you mentioned Jurassic Park. I'm often guilty of the same thing, but you needed to find I also need to find a punchier way of saying it. I commend you on the theme of letting go of childhood dreams and growing up - it fits well with the general gist of the challenge.


ZephyrFate (A Magestic Glimpse) - I really loved the language in this one and the imagery it evokes. There were a few bits where the language may have been a little too poetic and I couldn't figure out what was being described, but that's part of the fun of this kind of slice-of-life writing. The one defecit I do need to point out is that the story needed an ending. Something like describing the final rays of the sun dying off or the storm ending could have rounded it out nicely.


Bootaaay (Stories) - I really liked this one and you did nearly everything right. One thing though is that you put in a little too much foreshadowing at the beginning (mentioning that in later years you'd see things differently as an adult in the first few paragraphs) so the reader saw the reaction to Dunkirk coming. It's hard to see these sorts of things without a fresh pair of eyes, but it's important to know when foreshadowing is appropriate and when it isn't.


Tangent (Shopping) - I thought this one was funny, if only for the repeated instances of "my butt". The descriptions of the legs of the grown-ups really take the reader back to early childhood. Fun times.


CrowPhoenix (The Christmas Tree) - There were bits of this one that I couldn't follow because you used handyman/Christmas tree jargon without providing context for it. Being from Australia, the practice of using real pine trees as Christmas trees is almost entirely alien to me, so I don't know how it works. There were some awkward sentences like "and maybe a little confused that he still called this asshole", where I wasn't sure what the subject of the pronouns were as well. It's a fun story, nonetheless.


nitewulf (Weekenders) - First off, you probably didn't write this one in a style that's appropriate for the challenge (I tried imagining someone with an American radio voice reading out all the entries, so the dialogue was awkward), but it was well written. If I were writing it, I might've explored a little more as to how the town used to be to juxtapose it with the present day. Maybe using those "sidenote" style paragraphs or something.


Ashes1396 (War, Weather and Celebrity) - This was a touching story and you do a great job of making the audience feel for Meena. The commentary at the end I could have done without (I think it's wanky when This American Life does it too, so don't feel bad), but it is in the correct style. Honestly, it felt complete to me at the smashing of the camera.


Cyan (If You Meet Butter Tea On The Road) - This was a highly amusing story that made me smile. If I were to try to improve it, I might remind the reader of the sibling rivalry during the actual tea drinking by having (say) a moment of solidarity between the two siblings through a sympathetic glance or something. You reminded the reader in the conclusion, but for me, it was like "Oh yeah, they were fighting. That's right."

I'd have liked more varied description of the tea too. You could've been a little more, how you say, lurid in your description of it, which, for me, would've played up the laughs angle.

My picks:

1) ronito
2) Bootaaay
3) Tangent
 
Cyan said:
While also remembering that we're just dudes (and dudettes) on the internet. I wouldn't necessarily take all crits to heart either.
Click to expand...
I dunno if I agree with this. I could certainly get this if it was just random people. but the fact is that we're all writers that have to put ourselves on the line and further that we keep coming back I'd give any crit received here pretty seriously. We've had this whole 'it's a poor artist that first blames his audience.' discussion before.
 
ronito said:
I dunno if I agree with this. I could certainly get this if it was just random people. but the fact is that we're all writers that have to put ourselves on the line and further that we keep coming back I'd give any crit received here pretty seriously. We've had this whole 'it's a poor artist that first blames his audience.' discussion before.
Click to expand...
Occasionally you do get conflicting advice, though, and often on the same piece. Readers disagree about great literature all the time (some people LOVE The Great Gatsby, some hate it), so why not for these sorts of stories? Rule of thumb though, if several people say the same thing, the problem has been identified and you can take steps to fix it.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

I need your opinions... I'm writing a book
34
522
DeafTourette replied
Stephen Colbert is co-writing "The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past"
2 3 4
169
1K
TintoConCasera replied
  • Locked
Neogaf unusable on mobile
10
931
EviLore replied
A Magnificent Life Trailer #1 (2026)
4
232
NotMyProblemAnymoreCunt replied
Life on Mars?
21
815
ForAcademicPurposes replied
Top Bottom