GFF Literary Workshop: Trial Week 3

Trial Week 3: Closed
Note: Due to lackluster turnout last time, the trial period has been extended by one week to allow for tweaking and increased participation.

Welcome to the trial run of a rotating literary workshop here at GFF. Each week will feature a new piece of member-written literature for you to critique and constructively criticize. Download and read the work at the bottom of this post, and offer your comments! Depending on the status of this trial run, this may become a permanent fixture of the Creators' Café.

Comment Rules
There are no rules per se, but all comments are expected to be mature and within the bounds of common decency. The key is to be as helpful as possible to allow the author to improve their work.

Each work will be open for comments for one week, starting on Monday and ending on Sunday.

Submission Rules
The workshop is open to any and all GFF members; simply post in the thread and ask to be added to the queue. New participants are automatically placed at the top of the queue to allow them a week to prepare a submission.

Please send all submissions to orion_mk2@yahoo.com. Be sure to include your GFF username, preferably in the subject line. Submissions can be sent at any time, and will be held until your next turn in the queue.

Length
For now, submissions are limited to prose.
Prose: 500-5000 words

This is just a guideline; submissions slightly over the limit may be allowed. Sections of longer works are also permitted.

Format
Submit work in .doc, .txt, .rtf, or .pdf format.

Queue:
The Wise Vivi
Ayos
Helloween
Dark Nation
Lycanthrope
Pyromaniac
Matt
RainMan
orion_mk3
Acro-nym
Ozma
Phone

People in bold have submitted work for their week. If you have not submitted anything by the time your week begins, you will be moved to the bottom of the queue and the next participant who has submitted will go.

This Week's Submission
Ensayo Final by Phone
Prose, 1300 words

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Read the piece last night, and again this morning. I must say i enjoy it, but it seems kind of empty. Number one, there's no dialogue, i realize that you refer to this as an essay. I didn't think this really fit the description of an essay, and more of an outline for a short story. Is this based on true events? What inspired it? If you gave some background to this piece it might be easier to see why you call it an essay, and why you've written it this way.

Number 2, i can't really sympathize with any of your characters, mostly because there's no character development. You also imply that this takes place in the real world, but i find the situation hard to believe. I don't think people would ever stick around as long as Kaleb did if the work he did was truly slave labor. This sounds, in the end, like a person is just bitching about how hard their job is. I'm not saying that's what you're doing (cause i don't know any of you motives behind writing this story) but it's what comes to mind when i consider this person is working at an office supplies store and tells us how the work situation is unfair because management doesn't help customers. Managers do plenty of work behind the scenes and hire people to help the customers for them. In the end, the problems don't seem real enough to me for me to really care. If this is fiction, that can easily be fixed, if not, i'm sorry, but that's how i see it as it stands.

The piece does well in setting up a good situation that should be expanded upon. I can see this becoming alot more, but it needs tweaking in it's conflict and situation. That's my two cents.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Helloween sums up my thoughts pretty well, actually. Dialogue is a big issue here, for me at least, as the hero of the story is someone who motivated others with words. He's like a prophet or a general, yet we don't get to read the words that made him so inspiring. I felt disconnected.

And, on a somewhat minor note, you might want to change the name of the store even further to even further separate it from its real counterpart. It's not important that you do, but it seemed to be your intent to mask the name of the company and I don't think that was accomplished.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Great comments, guys. Now that someone else has gone, I can share my thoughts on Ensayo Final without worrying about it being merged into the first post:

The first thing the author has to do is ask themself what direction they want this piece to move in. There are two definite possibilities, both good but at the same time pretty much mutually exclusive. On the one hand, this could be the descriptive core of a story, and would work very well as such. On the other, it could be pushed further into essay territory, where it originally began. I'll address each possibility seperately.

If the author decides they want a story, all the heavy lifting is done as far as description and scene-setting go. This part is very well-done, and has an acid, ironic tone that I enjoyed. What it really needs is dialogue to help breathe life into the characters (as the others noted) and a conflict. The sudden firing at the end of the piece isn't sufficient conflict as is (though it's not a bad ending), but the setup is ripe with potantial.

On the other hand, if an essay's the thing, I'd say that the biggest problem is that I'm not sure what, as a reader, I'm supposed to feel. Am I to be incited to rage against corporate oppression? Sympathize with the downtrodden worker? Laugh? Cry? It's not really clear. If the piece is to be an essay, it needs to build off the strong descriptive foundation toward a definite goal.

In either case, I think the end result would be well worth reading, as the current piece is a good beginning to build from.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

As a former slave to the politics and environment of retail, I thought this piece captured and expressed the feeling of that world rather well. As an illustrative piece, it worked splendidly. If it was meant to be anything else, though, it fell short.

Personally, I felt no incredible need for dialogue, considering there was implied dialogue, and the actual words would far too easily detract from the piece itself. I'm sure others would disagree with me there, but that's what I think. Overall, I'd give it a B-minus. Solid stuff, but could have been so much more.

Also, you may want to rethink the way you use certain words. It's difficult for me to give specific examples, because it's kind of a vague thing for me anyway, but it just FELT sometimes like you were forcing a fancy word in there to seem more intelligent. Again, though, that's just me.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Well, I don't know what to comment, really. I've read this piece for about three times already, but I'm just feeling that something is missing.

The writing is good. It illustrates well about this Kaleb person, about his personality, his working, and his attitude, as if I were there, watching and observing him right beside him. Though at first I thought it would be telling about post-war situation ^^

But, for an unknown reason, I don't really get the goal of the story. It tells a good story, yet I don't feel like I have read something; the story seems to lack a hook to catch enough attention and it is not enough to develop a response on the reader. The conflict is present and strong, but fails to give more things to be told, to be thought. Basically, I feel like reading a newspaper article, not a story. I don't what to feel anymore.

But once again, it is worth to be read; this piece is different than anything I've read, though I must agree there are some words which are a bit too 'colourful' to use in the passage.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Looks like the author didn't feel like responding, but that's okay

Thanks for your participation, everyone. I think that there's enough interest to remove the "trial" from the event's name. From now on, if there are insufficient comments, things will just last longer a la Song of the Week rather than being cancelled altogether. I'm still trying to get an announcement--we'll see how that goes.

Thanks for commenting, and keep on submitting!

FELIPE NO