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!!/7cMIiSCHvi/lit/24447613#24470591
6/16/2025, 8:51:20 AM
The Glare Off My Glass
by Nomenklatura+77
>>24455119
>“What they won’t teach you at ‘Jenni Staffing’ is men are obsessed with the thought they have secret children they never knew, crisscrossing the globe.”
Yet we never hear Johnny having this thought?
I mean, I get why he wouldn’t—he probably abstained from un-smart sex his whole life, what with how much he despises his father—but it’s just as important for the reader to know (or at least notice) that this axiom DOESN’T apply to him, and not through a rather pathetic hint like this one:
>My own father would’ve, but he abandoned my mother, so I never got a chance to have him make me do things.
Other authors have already taken issue with the cliché of Johnny’s own father finally turning up, but I am here to advise you how to make it work, how to make any cliché work, really:
Start the story with it.
If there is one spot where the reader will forgive a cliché or an over-contrivance, it’s the beginning.
From there on out, the tough pill has already been swallowed; the audience is along for the ride, and whatever comes next will be two-times “new.”
Instead of building up Johnny’s life and career first through is intro spiel, what if you opened on the action of a man killing his own father, committing patricide, and then slowly revealed the surrounding aspects and circumstances of this individual and his setting—the temp at the door; his knuckle-oil stain on the window he had tapped on during his speech to her; the setting sun on all his thank-you momentos reunioned families.
There’s a massive lull in the story after Johnny does the deed anyway, sitting one out—why not fill this section up by scattering in such flashbacks of the hours before?
I gave similar chronology-gimmick advice to GreenSleeves, but amnesia and father-killing are more than warrant this kind of shift/shattering in/of perception/storytelling.
You are a very good writer, Nomenklatura+77, with this month’s submission a great level-up from last month’s—
>nice suit jacket, black, the kind of thing he could even be buried in,
>“Don’t come in!” I say in the rapid-fire speech of a man in a toilet stall.
>The veins in my eyes start popping up like rainy season rivers in the amazon but I’m close.
I could write a paragraph on each of these—how they’re pitch-perfect when it comes to foreshadowing, indirect characterization, and poetical speech—but I’ll just say: Perge!
I commend your submitting so close to when you thought time was up.
When I submitted in February, I think I had 5 mins left?
But, like you this time, I had an extra hour I wasn’t aware of.
Still, maybe like a tracker in the woods, I can see the momentum you were picking up near the end of your piece.
I love that feeling of screaming urgency when I write under time, and, for the most part, I think it benefitted your ending, almost like the world was being stripped away with emotional intensity.
Congrats on 3rd!
by Nomenklatura+77
>>24455119
>“What they won’t teach you at ‘Jenni Staffing’ is men are obsessed with the thought they have secret children they never knew, crisscrossing the globe.”
Yet we never hear Johnny having this thought?
I mean, I get why he wouldn’t—he probably abstained from un-smart sex his whole life, what with how much he despises his father—but it’s just as important for the reader to know (or at least notice) that this axiom DOESN’T apply to him, and not through a rather pathetic hint like this one:
>My own father would’ve, but he abandoned my mother, so I never got a chance to have him make me do things.
Other authors have already taken issue with the cliché of Johnny’s own father finally turning up, but I am here to advise you how to make it work, how to make any cliché work, really:
Start the story with it.
If there is one spot where the reader will forgive a cliché or an over-contrivance, it’s the beginning.
From there on out, the tough pill has already been swallowed; the audience is along for the ride, and whatever comes next will be two-times “new.”
Instead of building up Johnny’s life and career first through is intro spiel, what if you opened on the action of a man killing his own father, committing patricide, and then slowly revealed the surrounding aspects and circumstances of this individual and his setting—the temp at the door; his knuckle-oil stain on the window he had tapped on during his speech to her; the setting sun on all his thank-you momentos reunioned families.
There’s a massive lull in the story after Johnny does the deed anyway, sitting one out—why not fill this section up by scattering in such flashbacks of the hours before?
I gave similar chronology-gimmick advice to GreenSleeves, but amnesia and father-killing are more than warrant this kind of shift/shattering in/of perception/storytelling.
You are a very good writer, Nomenklatura+77, with this month’s submission a great level-up from last month’s—
>nice suit jacket, black, the kind of thing he could even be buried in,
>“Don’t come in!” I say in the rapid-fire speech of a man in a toilet stall.
>The veins in my eyes start popping up like rainy season rivers in the amazon but I’m close.
I could write a paragraph on each of these—how they’re pitch-perfect when it comes to foreshadowing, indirect characterization, and poetical speech—but I’ll just say: Perge!
I commend your submitting so close to when you thought time was up.
When I submitted in February, I think I had 5 mins left?
But, like you this time, I had an extra hour I wasn’t aware of.
Still, maybe like a tracker in the woods, I can see the momentum you were picking up near the end of your piece.
I love that feeling of screaming urgency when I write under time, and, for the most part, I think it benefitted your ending, almost like the world was being stripped away with emotional intensity.
Congrats on 3rd!
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