#also I think clarity as an idea is interesting when you think about prose vs poetry

[loverboydotcom]

purple prose might be another term that needs to be put on the high shelf of writing advice cause why does nobody seem to agree on what it actually means 😭😭😭

[fivewrites]

5557 Reviews Your Fanfic #3:  Soul of a New Machine by StygianLotus

Hello, friends, I am 5557 on Ao3 and I review your fanfiction if you want me to.

Soul of a New Machine by  @stygianlotus

Summary:

Lance had been living the same cycle of events over and over since he got captured by the Galra. After seven months with Haggar, the other Paladins finally manage to save him. However, they soon realize that Lance's wounds run much deeper than they had hoped.

Rating: M

Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence

Tags: Psychological Torture, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Psychological Trauma, Torture, Aftermath of Torture, Coran helps Lance, Langst, Lance (Voltron) Angst, Angst, Post-Defeat of Zarkon, Post Season 2, Flashbacks, Lance (Voltron) is a Mess, poor lance

Optional info:

Is English your first language? Yes How long have you been writing for? 4 years Are you 18+? No Do you want publish / write professionally one day? Maybe

Technical Style / Formatting: Paragraphs are of a good size.

Quotes and dialogue are all correct, punctuation is used correctly.

I find parenthesis to be unnecessary in fiction, but they are still used correctly.

Could use a bit of dialogue attribution switch-ups (Lance said vs. said Lance) here and there, but that’s a very small thing.

The second chapter’s flashback doesn’t need to be entirely in italics, but it’s ok.

Pace: The pace is affected by the problem of the mixed-omniscient narrator.

The biggest core problem in the story, and one that is at the root of all others like the confusing sentence structure is: Who is our narrator and what does our narrator know?

In some paragraphs, is seems like we have an unreliable, deep-pov narrator that keeps us well inside of Lance’s head. In other paragraphs, the narrator informs us in a more omniscient way of information that Lance himself does not know. And inconsistence narrator can lead to plot and characterization problems, as well and issues with general prose flow and how the story progresses.

We need to establish solidly who the narrator is (is it a detached voice of lance, or an outside figure?) and what exactly they know. Do they know A) everything about everyone, all the time? (omniscient) B) Everything about lance and only Lance (Limited omniscient) or C) Some things about Lance, but not everything (Unreliable non-omniscient)

Establishing this will help with the confusing sentence structure and set the pace and tone of the story so the reader can understand what’s going on (even with limited information) and progress.

Dialogue: The dialogue is fairly good, and I appreciate the fact that the team care about Lance and want him to feel safe and welcome back on the team.

Once we solve the narration problem, the dialogue will fit the story that much better.

Characterization: So far, characterization isn’t too much of a problem, but with huge, personality-changing events such as capture and torture, it’s really important to research trauma and how is can affect a person. It’s up to you to decide how lance’s behaviour deals with his trauma, whether he chooses to smile through it and pretend nothing is wrong, or like in your story actually show that he has been deeply affected.

It’s not wrong for Lance’s personality to change from an extreme situation. I think it would be wrong to write him as the exact same person he was before his capture, but I also want to stress that he is not 100% a new person. There are and will always be fragments of the old person there, and they will have good days where they are able to laugh and joke and have  a good time. It’s about finding the balance of depth.

For research, I would really recommend watching the movie Room (2016) about the 5-year-old child who grew up in captivity with his mother. This movie does an amazing job of showing that even in a dire situation, they are able to be sane and smart. It also shows that they are not immune to breaking down and falling apart. Both are true, and that is what makes the story so powerful.

Flow / Prose Style:

Try to find and remove extraneous filler words like was and had. As well, look for text written in the passive voice, and try to edit it to become more active.

“The cup was picked up by Lance.” - Passive “Lance picked up the cup.” - Active

I think I understand what you’re going for in the beginning, so I’m going to make a few assumptions.

The opening fades in like a person coming into consciousness after being knocked out- blurry, unclear, unable to pin facts and details and people. This is an appropriate way to open a thriller / angst story, no problems there.

My advice for a choice like this is that as an author you need to be very careful and specific about what you make clear and what you make hazy.

Too clear, and you don’t get the desired effect.

Too hazy and your readers are confused and bored because they can’t understand enough

So when you’re doing a style like this, be very careful about who knows what, and who is being mentioned. If you turn too many names into epithets or pronouns (he or she) we very easily lose track of what the narrator is referring to.

“He remembered Allura ordering for them to attack him, remembered Hunk being the one to do it while Lance was still restrained.”

This sentences contains two “he’s” and the second one is unclear as to who it’s referring to. We could use clarity by saying “Lance remembered Allura ordering for them to attack him, remembered Hunk being the one to do it while he was still restrained.”

“How could they still act like they were best friends after everything that had happened?”

And here, it’s slightly unclear as to who the “they” is referring to. Lance and Hunk? Lance and the rest of the paladins? Hunk and the rest of the paladins? etc.

For someone who is english as first language, some of the phrasing is… odd. It’s not exactly passive voice, nor is it grammatically incorrect, but it attributes action and intention to the wrong symbol of importance.

Like PutTING the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble. It’s not incorrect, but it it is jarring.

““Hey, Lance?” The sudden voice jerked Lance out of his thoughts, looking up quickly like he had gotten used to doing.”

The second part of the sentence says that it’s the voice, not lance, that looked up quickly.

“Keith’s face made Lance take an involuntary step back, watching him cautiously.”

This is also odd phrasing that leads to odd mental image. It’s like Keith is pressing Lance around physically… with his face. Keith’s face doesn’t really make anyone do anything unless he’s physically using it. The way it’s described currently gives keith’s face, and not keith himself the agency and importance.

At the very end of the sentence, it’s unclear whether it’s Keith’s face or Lance that is doing the watching cautiously.

I get the idea of the scene, but the phrases used to describe the action are odd. So when the common thread of concern is confusing sentence structure, it’s often a good time to go back to the basics and start from the bottom. try to rewrite sentences three times and pick the best one you like. this can also help stimulate new ideas and new ways of phrasing.

Parenthesis tend to be aside thoughts. Find a way to integrate them into their own sentence or paragraph. Also, things said in parenthesis tend to come across as comedic, so it helps the tone of the serious story to try to minimize them.

The same goes for but / although additions to sentences. Decide if they deserve their own new sentence or paragraph or if that information really needs to be told to the reader at all.

Beware when using epithets. “The blue paladin” sounds cold and unsympathetic. If you want readers to attach themselves, use names.

Story:

There’s a lack of impact in the initial chapter because we are told snippets of Lance’s experiences, but rather than holding it as a mystery, or exploring it in more depth, these things come across like an informative list rather than a story.

Each event and experience that lance has faced, while impactful on its own, loses impact when strung together with the other pieces that come across as list-like.

There are two options of exploring lance’s experiences, and this will come down to how you choose to narrate the story, and it’s this: Do you want Lance to be the POV character or not?

If you make lance the poc character, you can explore all of his thoughts and memories of the events of his capture. It would be an internal tale, and explore him learning to communicate with his team once again.

Or, you could make Keith the POV character, and write more of a “medical mystery / crime procedural” type story, where the team slowly learns of the events that happened to Lance and how deep they go. (this does not have to be a klance fic or romantic at all if you choose to make keith the POV. He’s just the narrator who cares about his friend)

The flaws in the first couple of chapters are a little counterintuitive. The story seems a bit rushed, and one would assume that it’s under explained. I think the opposite is true. It’s over explained, trying to catch us up as quickly as possible to everything that has happened to Lance.

What would make the story more interesting would be to let each event breathe a bit, and explore more of Lance’s sensory reactions and his dialogue with his team than simply stating what happened to him and what went wrong. Show us Lance’s flightiness and mistrust instead of telling us about his torture.

The first chapter could use a bit more environmental description. Where do they go in the lions? How far? When?

The second chapter where Keith is rescuing Lance is fairly straightforward a good, we just need to decide on a main narrator and stick to them.

“Keith wished that he knew how to help, really – it was frustrating to all of them. They wanted to be able to help, but Lance wouldn’t let them in. He still kept everything inside, as he usually did, they’d learned. Lance was the type to bottle up his emotions because he was worried they’d hold someone back.”

This would be a great opportunity to show us Lance’s mistrust instead of telling us. What are his actions? His reactions? What does he do, specifically?

“Coran wished that he could see what was going on inside of Lance’s head so that he could help him.”

This comes across as odd and weak because we as readers can see inside of lance’s head. We were told lots of things by the story, so there’s no surprise or mystery. We feel smarter than Coran, rather than on his level.

The story really starts to take shape in the third chapter, and I really like that Coran is both a main part of the story and well-characterized. But the POV / narration problems are of prime concern. Once we figure these out, it will start to flow much more smoothly and be much more engaging to read!

[ghostproposal]

Interview with Jake Syersak

Associate Editor James Eidson interviews Jake Syersak, winner of our inaugural chapbook contest, on his collection, “Impressions in the Language of a Lantern’s Wick,” and the interwoven strains, digressions, deconstructions, and manifestations of schools of poetic thought.

Ghost Proposal’s annual chapbook contest opens May 1st for submissions through July 31st.

James Eidson: Early on in "Impression in the Language of a Lantern's Wick," you ask if you're "more liable to inflate a musical tool with air or consciousness?" One of the major themes of the book seems to regard the power of language and how it can manipulate conceptual space to create the impression of a difference in the homogeneity of formless material—all of this speculation as a means of asking you who your influences are and what kinds of language games you like to play.

Jake Syersak: At this point I'm pretty hostile toward anything that refers to poetic language as a "game." I don't mean to take myself too seriously (because I did, in fact, have a lot of fun writing this book), but I think there’s always more at stake. I blame the LANGUAGE poets for creating the mentality that poetry is somehow nothing more than a “game” to be played. There are too many life / death ramifications evident in language pervading our culture to think like that. Looking back, I actually think now that this book (what’s now the last section to a larger collection called Yield Architecture) was my attempt to purge the influence of LANGUAGE poetry from my own poetics. My poems will always be haunted by their influence, but I hope it endures as some centrifuge of sabotage, maybe through the formless material you cite that manifests through sensation. Anyways, you’re right: at the heart of this book is an obsession with paradox—the palpable vs. the impalpable, the ethereal vs. the concrete, etc. I’m obsessed with poets who share that obsessive deconstruction of paradox but want to lug it into the real world, charge it politically, and break it into digestible pieces. Juliana Spahr, j/j hastain, Hoa Nguyen, Will Alexander, and Fred Moten are all poets that were really present with me while writing it. Most everything released by Action Books, Ahsahta, or Commune Editions endures with me.

JE: It does seem that the LANGUAGE poets became over pre-occupied with developing weapons in order to jam oppressive orders of signs—that somehow the research became an end in itself and engaging the reader got left to the wayside. The cleverness of the sport of innovating often gets emphasized over how a work can incite people to self-actualizations. Maybe those good faith linguistic trends get rerouted in the slow and insular activity of freeing language from its exchangeability in the semio-capital circuit, but is this type of sabotage too slow? Meanwhile, there are "life / death ramifications” of language use. How do you feel your work addresses these ramifications through "sensation?"

JS: I agree with you that LANGUAGE poets uncovered some really beneficial weapons to use. The problem is, I think they were more interested in sharpening them than using them, as you hint. To me, their work often becomes esoteric at best and, at worst, grotesquely incestual. I'm thinking specifically of a reading a former LANGUAGE poet extraordinaire gave in Athens last year, in which they read "white dialect poems." I was embarrassed to be in the room. It was a perfect example of what I find frustrating at the core of a lot of LANGUAGE poetics and their conceptualist counterparts: a game that turns into self-aggrandizement for the sake of empowering an already too-prolific voice, usually in the name of “irony.”

On the other hand, Lyn Hejinian's newest book, The Unfollowing, which I finished not too long ago, does a brilliant job using a self-critical conceptual system to criticize systemic institutions in a spectacle-bash the Situationists would party down with. I’m really not trying to demonize LANGUAGE poetry, per se, just a particular strain of thinking that it sometimes cultivates. Concept is important. Sensation and emotion is important. I think the best poetry, regardless of school or intent, tries to reach with everything sensuously human it's got across the boundary separating it from the weird innards we're told make reality. It's like that Halloween game where you blindfold yourself and try to guess what you're feeling in a bag. Contents/concepts really only become less oblique as you let your senses worm into them and create what’s not actually there.  

JE: Let me quote one of my favorite lines in the book, break it apart, and yield a question:

"Telephone wires sketch the far-off mountains closer in. That's why I prefer the word dove and bomb side-by-side. To think divebomb, is to think more presently a dove."

For my own pleasure at your book's expense: I see the idea of telephone wires conflating with the visual edge of a mountain range. Then there's some kind of refusal of having mistaken that boundary. This mistake gets played out in a reflection on the ironically close associative distance between words; the neologism, "dove bomb," nearly realizes the actual verb, "divebomb," just as thin black wires come close to approximating the black line of the mountain range's contour. Although I couldn't find "dove bomb" in the dictionary, its nearness to the word "divebomb" caused me to create a connection between the movement implied by "divebomb" and the oddly specific image of "dove bomb" in which the noun "dove" gives a subject to the verb with which it has become associatively entangled. Suddenly, the confusion of "dove bomb" becomes necessary for the clarity of the image of a dove divebombing..."presently." And it goes without saying that when "divebomb" is detached from this confusion, it evokes too much—something between Tony Hawk and WWII dogfights. Again, it needs "dove bomb" to take on a specific reality.

All of this is a means of articulating how I felt reality forming as your mistaken perception of the real became realized in the unformed thoughts in your head searching for meaningful expression and accidentally finding it. I love the filter-less traveling this line does through concepts in order to encounter an incongruous, hyper-extended, but tangible meaning. It takes an associative scope as wide as doves on a telephone wire and Tony Hawk to graze the misshapen representation of an experience as fathomless as total reality. I almost felt like those lines were parodying the theater of reality principles, and yet you deftly bring the most alien entities into a compelling harmony. By some miracle, the line feels more precise the thinner it's stretched.

A big question mark follows all of this analysis, but I'm also curious about your recurrent "I," as well as the autobiographical tidbits that appear throughout the text. It intrigued me that you often formed self-reflection out of deliriously active language.

JS: Wow, that’s a mouthful of an interpretation. I like that: “self-reflection out of deliriously active language”—I can only hope I was thinking an iota of what you gleaned from it while I was writing. If nothing else, I do remember consciously wanting to explore what kind of associations and stories could be intertwined not only imagistically, but also formally, reverting back and forth between hypotactic and paratactic syntax, fragments and prose, autobiography and imagination, reality and irreality, etc.

I'm compelled by the friction between all these things, and more; “Impressions...” is basically my love letter to dialectics, when it really comes down to it. But I like especially how an "I" can gum things up, even just by its presence alone. I think it's—paradoxically—pretty easy to become so enraptured by human-developed structures that you forget the human source of things. Language and semiotics are all fascinating and what not, but I'm more fascinated by what propels our psyches to disfigure those things and then what manifests out of that. While the book doesn’t often refer to immediate politics, it’s “political” in that regard.

JE: There's this common sentiment in the community that goes: while fiction creates mass hallucination, poetry can break through into the real—in a good poem, events aren't rendered but actually take place in the language. I'm not sure I understand that, but I do sense poetry often transcends, or seeks to transcend, the language it's constructed from—that there's some sensuous excess that defies the semantic function of language. Ambiguity always arises, even if it's via the most mechanical turn at the end of the most conservative poem. Ambiguity seems inherent to the poetic medium. The illusions fiction can create seem problematic to the poetic form, whatever that might be. Given what you've said about getting to the human beneath the human-developed construct, how do you think poetry can help people as they reference themselves and the world via language?

JS: I think you do know what that means. And I'd bet a lot on the fact that it's why you write poetry. Ambiguity is just one of many things that makes a poem feel like a living organism. I wouldn't dismiss fiction altogether, but I do often feel that its ambiguity becomes overshadowed by its more dictatorial elements of narration. Maybe that's just me. I can only speak for myself, but a poem's ambiguity, its leaps in logic, and its often writhing and warped syntax works to present itself as a medium for you to exist in conjunction with rather than a construct to be led around. I'm always surprised by how others perceive what a poem thinks or does or asks—or even how my perception varies as years pass. I've rarely had the same experience with fiction. There’s an inherent democracy you just can’t jostle out of poetry, no matter how hard you try, and I’d say that’s good for everyone.

JE: I've heard you're working on an anthology of North American Surrealists. How have the surrealists come to shape your work?

JS: I read them a lot as a teenager, so they were a gateway to me. The idea to work on the anthology grew out of me thinking about my initial experiences with surrealism. I loved the francophone surrealists. At the same time I was reading them I was becoming involved in radical politics and they were the perfect fusion at the perfect time. It was something about their attempt to universalize the radical voice through a shared aesthetic. Once I came across Césaire, Senghor, U Tam’si, etc., I thought I had found the epitome of poetry. But I found it difficult to sort through some of the English translations. Some are great—especially anything by Mary Ann Caws and Clayton Eshleman—but a lot are just awful. There’s still a lot of work to be done to bring surrealism into the English language, but it’s getting there. In fact, I just started translating francophone Moroccan poet Mohammed Khair-Eddine who, despite being credited by many as having revolutionized a whole country’s literature, is largely unknown to the English world. We’re missing out on a lot.

Anyways, I didn't really know how to sift through translators at a young age and I know I would've had a much easier time accessing surrealism on its own footing had I had access to an anthology of surrealist poems originally written in English. To my knowledge, no one has really put something like that together. People still tend to regard it, historically, as a purely French phenomenon. Its influence is everywhere, though. And on American poetry its influence is complex and rhizomatic, especially when you look at contemporary poetry. I'm having a lot of fun sorting out its various strains and digressions, and if I can bring focus back to important but now largely disregarded figures like Bob Brown or Eugene Jolas, all the better.

As per my own work, I think the surrealists have helped me suss out when the dialogue of a paradox—which poetry is such a great conduit for—is useful and when it is not. In a poem, I like to squirm around in an unfamiliar world until I feel comfortably uncomfortable there. That's life to me. That's also the poetic image to me. Surrealism takes the poetic image to its extremes by positing that juxtapositions are really just yet-to-be-realized associations. We live in a weird agreement with the impossible. The surreal aesthetic helps reveal that and I find myself often using it as a language through which to navigate supposed political, aesthetic, and identity-related impossibilities.

JE: On a concluding note, where is your work headed now?

JS: My first full-length book, Yield Architecture (of which “Impressions…” is part), is out from Burnside Books at the end of the year. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of object-oriented ontology and thinking about its affinities with contemporary ecological theory, and (surprise, surprise) surrealism! I’m fascinated by how equally strange the world gets when you look at it too closely and when you look at it from afar, and how the very fate of the world may hinge on us just coming to terms with that, with radical co-existence on all fronts.

I have a manuscript I’m currently shopping around called These Ghosts / This Compost: An Aubadeclogue which is my attempt to reconcile the personal/collective split of ecological consciousness by viewing the lyric “I” as what OOO enthusiast Timothy Morton would call a hyperobject.

Right now, I’m working on another ecologically-inspired book (cuz, hey, we’re pretty damn close to having destroyed the world, after all) called Neocologism: Encyclopedia Entries for the Anthroposcenic Psyche. That one both defines and generates neologisms for various traumas induced by the Anthropocene, trying to instill an all-too-real sense of “natural” plasticity.