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.

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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!

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