I and GenericAnon both collaborated on each document, just to be sure our characters stayed in character. It was a lot of fun; we mostly just worked out dialogue and some scene details together. Vamprina can't wait to cross paths with Eric again... :)

Generic, it is very hard for me to put this politely but I just see no excuse for your piece.

Alphaeus had implored me to read some of your stuff. I'm not sure why I listened to him because I've been verbally slagging this guy off for a year now for the exact same reasons I dislike your work (don't worry Alph you know I still love hate you). So far I'd always steered away because your stories are way, way too fucking long, but this one topped the cake and I just had to know what even is in a fifty page battle.

The answer, simply put, is nothing. I could really go on a ten page rant as to why I absolutely hate this stuff but as I said, I'll refrain from indulging. Yours is perhaps the worst example I have seen yet of portraiture and purple prose. Perhaps there was a story buried under there, but all I really noticed was: Eric protects plot device from Vamprina, they fight, some edgy shit happens, I show up (though I'm a bit shadowy) and then it ends I guess.

If you don't know what purple prose is, it goes somewhat like this:


Right, sorry. I'll admit, at first I had just read the first eight pages, skimmed the rest, and condemned it as being not worth my time, but I was completely stumped at how many votes you were getting so I was genuinely curious if I'd just completely dropped the ball on this one. I went back in, read sixteen pages, then skimmed the rest again. There really is nothing in here to retain my interest, and I'll tell you how it comes:

Eric is a hollow facade of a character. Story is only meaningful when meaningful things happen, all that happens in your story is shallow and vapid. Your characters are portraits, they never show any deeper emotion than they do at face value. So how do you show deeper emotion? Put your characters in front of conflict, rip open the gap between expectation and result, and their reaction to this gap shows us, the audience, who they truly are. I'll give you a very brief synopsis of the first (eight?) pages:

Eric's at a ball. So far, nothing out of the ordinary I guess. You're referencing MacBeth, alright. I hate that character with a passion but I'll take it. Then there's a whole bunch of stuff I don't really give much of a shit about because I've absolutely 0 involvement in any of these characters. Maybe that's just because I haven't read your past works, though I doubt it. The only real gap between expectation and result in these eight pages comes when the lawyer tells Eric he's being chased by an assassin, and even then I'd argue this gap is more contrived than anything else. But alright, you've your opportunity to show us just how Eric reacts, just in what way he expresses his desire, or his reluctance, to help out this poor man with an assassin on his tail. Instead of that, there's just a tilde and it cuts to the next scene.

Fucking what.

I'll be honest, at this point I stopped caring. I read on for the next eight or so pages but it's just Vamprina hiding and the whole situation being stalled out. I guess you were trying to build tension but I honestly didn't feel it, because there's no conflict. Eric's not really faced with a 'gap', he's never really forced to choose between lesser evils, or irreconcilable goods. There's nothing on the line, there's nothing meaningful happening. Instead both characters are just sort of shouting exposition at each other we may or may not already know, they're just behaving exactly like we expect them to and everything's utterly predictable.

I started skimming now. From what I gathered the next thirty or so pages were just fight; I'm sure some more meaningful things happened there but you'd completely lost me at this point so I hadn't the eye to find them. Then for some reason Serra shows up but she's a phoenix and also a goddess of light, and then I show up but I'm shadowy and also a lord of darkness (an astute observation) and I read "I am a God" and I realised this was just edgy bullshit so I didn't care to find out what happened. By the end the both of them were in a hospital I believe and they were being nice to each other now. Something meaningful happened in the battle that ended up making them friends I guess, or it was just plot device/deus ex machina (considering the involvement of Gods, the latter may be very literal).

So how do you even fill fifty pages with a plot so thin? Purple prose, overdescription, you name it. Even then I'd argue you're describing the wrong things. Stuff like decor, the colour of people's eyes, whatever the fuck mundane shit it is. Your audience has common sense, your audience has imagination. Throw them a bone and leave something for them to fill in on their own. If you need to overdescribe on one thing then let it be emotion, let me see some internal conflict from these characters, instead of the flaundering of their wings in every minute detail.

Now, take this with two grains of salt if you like, because one could argue I'm someone who is at times TOO economical with his words. Indeed, going helter-skelter from event to event without some literary pause in between may give the story a bit of a breakneck pace. There is also such a thing as underdescribing. And every writer has his own style, some like to be a bit more descriptive, others like to be more concise, there's no issue with that. You know how to put things in detail, use that to your advantage. But you can not carry a story with pretty descriptions alone: Literary talent will NEVER substitute the lack of content beneath the veil. As things stand, this is indeed the worst example of purple prose and overdescription I've seen. (Then again I barely ever read anything that's thirty pages long here so there's definitely worse out there, don't take it too personal).

Moving on, there's just the issue of sheer length. I will be frank, even if you were an experienced storyteller, even if your story carried me all the way from A to Z, I would still argue that fifty pages is simply too long. A battle should never be fifty pages long; If it's truly fifty pages of nonstop battle, you've padded out your story too much and there'll be whole chunks you can snip out just like that. If it's neatly tied together, then fifty pages would mean there's simply too much content that isn't directly relevant to the battle. There would likely be a sizeable chunk in the beginning or end you could chop off and post separately, or you could use Seb's trick and include those in the battle post itself, but exclude them from judging. (Speaking of which, his battle is in my eyes the only one that warrants being as long as it is. You should go check it out, it's a good example: just search for Gladstone v. Janice).

I don't know who else bothered to read this far, but this goes for all the thirty page battles too. Once your battle is longer than ten pages, or say fifteen, is when you need to really open your eyes and realise it's getting too long. Write it out completely as it is, then look at what's just mindless filler or overdescription, and start cutting out. Once you feel you that taking any part out would make the story collapse, is when you're free to breathe easy.

Now, there's one last thing I want you to know Generic. I don't claim to be a good writer in any sense of the word, heck not even a decent one. I don't view myself very highly in that regard, I bang my head against the wall for twenty days to get a single good idea for my upcoming battle against Gen. So please, don't take all of what I said too harshly. You comport yourself well, I've no reason to fling shit at you for some kind of attitude or whatever, so I want to excuse myself if I seem a bit harsh. If I really thought you were just a hopeless piece of work, I wouldn't have bothered to spend an hour of my life typing out this critique, I wouldn't have bothered to push myself to try and read a fifty fucking page battle TWICE. I do believe you can and will take something away from this, so please do.

And stop with the thirty page battles. It's really annoying. If they have to be thirty pages because the story demands it, so be it, but please don't waste my time with nonsense.

Quote from GenericAnon

What I like to do is to sculpt a world in writing, as well as try to develop other people's characters. Further, I don't see battles as the culmination of a single event, but as playing a wider role on a grander scale. I don't want to just rush out some battle, I want to try and explore motivation, build different dynamics, give a reason for event A happening, and try beyond all else to not just focus on one conflict. This is a wider world, and shouldn't be restricted to just two people fighting.

Awesome! I like to do that too : D

Quote from GenericAnon

As for your argument on purple prose... I understand what you're saying, and I can see how moving from point to point is important... but stories that just move swiftly on, dashing from one point to another, actually feel less satisfying than those that try to explore the wider world.

And stories that insist on staying in a scene for too long without any kind of movement or reason to stay there are uninteresting to read.
The majority of the first scene in the ball was unnecessary. Sure, you do need to give a scene to the reader, but the amount of time spent just looking around and making comparisons and having the narrator passively-and-sometimes-more-aggressively show his discontent for the customs of the higher tiers of society felt like something the story could do without and it would not suffer in the slightest. Indeed, it may have given the story a bit of personality, but that would only be the case if you kept the tone throughout the rest. Which you did not. A few pages in and it's a regular narrator.

Think of it this way: What is the scene supposed to do? Does that scene function towards something that'll advance the story? Does it give the reader something that they'll make a connection to later on? Some kind of detail or piece of information?

It's fine to use the scene to explore the world around a bit, but you cannot be that tourist couple who stops out of nowhere in the middle of a crowded area for a couple of minutes to take pictures. People will just get annoyed at you. You need to keep things moving forward in some fashion.

Quote from GenericAnon

The supposed 'purple prose' I've put in isn't meant for just vague descriptions. It's meant for emotion, to try and immerse people directly into the universe by getting them to feel what the characters are feeling. When I put in what you think is 'purple prose,' it's mostly to try to expand character, or to show different ideas.

You may certainly try, but in this instance in particular (I have not read anything else that you've written), you seemed to have not succeeded. They did not, in any way, keep me interested and more often than not, they just stopped the action because you kept telling me things that either did not relate to the action itself or I already knew (be it because I deduced it or because you had already even said it before! You repeat, more than once, details that have already been said).
Funny thing is, in the midst of all this description, I actually managed to be caught by surprise by a detail that should have been mentioned, but didn't.

"Elouise sighed, bringing a mechanical arm up and wistfully laying her chin on her palm"
...how did her arm not get mentioned earlier?

I can buy the fact that you didn't mention her blindness until later; that served to further explain how infatuated she was with her dancer (that, you did well. I liked it), but her mechanical arm was something that should have been mentioned before. It was a feature that distinguished her from the rest rather severely. Much more so than the fact that she was unusually tall.

Quote from GenericAnon

Really, I think the difference here is that of style. I'm a novelist at heart, and aspire to be. I try to immerse people into the world by imagination and emotion, as well as build a compelling story which people can follow more easily when they're emotionally or mentally invested.

It's not a difference of style. If you want a good example of frequent description done right, I'd recommend you look at a book called "Os Maias" by Eça de Queirós. The beginning's dense, but it gets a lot better. I'm sure you can find an English version somewhere.

But there are still a couple of things that no one has yet to mention regarding your piece.
You actually fail to describe more pressing topics, and the story itself as a whole seems to lack some amount of sense. Both on the plot-wise and character-wise.

Let me give you a couple of examples of the first.

[...] he guessed it was somewhere near the intersection between Vague Central and Cloudneath

This is not a reference point. You did not establish a proper map before making the reader try and deduce where the heck this is.
I'd be lost if I tried to use this on a visit to Vague City D:

He watched as George accidentally leaked a divorce request by Lord Blackbriar to his wife.

Too specific. How...?
How did the leak happen. How did George, which you established to be a fairly decent public defender, accidentally leaked something of that importance to the man's wife? You could have used this to further the argument that George was a good enough person to be helped. How he leaked such a thing could give the reader a better idea of what kind of person he is. The fact that you went to specifics (mention of "leak", "divorce request", "Blackbriar" and "wife") but not delve into it further made it feel like there was something there that needed to be expanded on.

As for examples of the latter:

There were two shadows. There was one light source.

A professional assassin. Who has taken countless jobs. Makes the mistake of not aligning the shadows to account for the amount of light sources? I find that hard to believe >: I

"A man named Xavier and… a strange shadow magician without a name. Of course… I could have dug up more on them… but I’d prefer to be left in the dark for now."

It tends to be a bit unprofessional for someone in the assassination line of work to give information about who their patrons are. Especially as openly as you made Vamprina do it :c

[...] crashing into the plasterboard wall, leaving a sizable dent.

Drywall doesn't leave dents at that kind of power. Or at all, I think. It just crumbles.

“Call an ambulance for yourself,” Eric advised, “You’ve got at least 30 minutes.”

This makes NO sense. Wasn't Eric supposed to keep the guy safe? He's going to allow him to get out of his sight? Vamprina shown that she can make decoys and that she can manipulate her shadows while keeping attention to someplace else. Besides, the guy now has a useless arm and is in her sight. Like hell she would allow him to call an ambulance.

Quote from GenericAnon

Also, if you do have certain segments that you feel were too heavy on description, could you please present them too me?

K : D



Here's the deal. I can see you have the vocabulary. And I can see you can do things well, but you have no sense of speed and no sense what needs to be explained. But that's fixable. And without trying to force you into a different style.
Just be on the lookout for what's redundant, what's unnecessary and what's irrelevant.