Writing Challenge #4

[Brian]

Okay, this challenge is something I'm not very good at myself.  But, hey, challenge, right?  This time around:

Try to write a scene that describes a thing in detail--  It could be an object or the setting of the scene itself (a room, a ruins, a planet's scarred surface, etc.).

[Jason_Miao]

It could be an object

class pizza
{
enum (NY, Chicago, New Haven) style;
List enum (extra cheese, pepperoni, mushroom, anchovy, arsenic) toppings;
u_short diameter;
}



(Yes, it is a fake language).

[alethiophile]

I have to say I'm disturbed by your list of toppings there.

[Jason_Miao]

As a pauper in a past life, I found each stall of the merchants' square a new adventure.  Now, I wandered through the square under a steel coloured sky, with the Earth Mollusk gripped in my left palm, eyes darting down the Street of the Four Winds yet finding nothing that I valued.  Everything was here - everything from across the corners of the earth of possible interest, but nothing held mine.  Jade of deeper green than grass, knives with razor edges, rings of love, I passed them all by.   

Walking at a brisk pace, certainly not running, and certainly not hurried, I accidentally bowled over a wizened antique store clerk in the process of moving the last of his inventory; he'd gone out of business immediately after his last and only customer had left carrying a monkey's hand.  A brief apology, and once again, I moved on, ignoring the rare folio of a play on mustard-coloured symbols as it lay half-open on the dark cobblestones, and sidestepping a sword of nobility and valor propped against an unyielding granite wall, before taking my leave.  The encounter had taken a merely a few moments.

Mere moments, but it was out of place on that street and it attracted the attentions of every vendor within sight, each of whom sought to outdo the others in praising the quality of their wares.  A man of only one eye was ignoring an angry dwarf, offering power over the world for the price of love.  A flame-headed woman of ice cold beauty offered weapons that would cleave mountains, free the rivers, and disperse the storms, in exchange for solitude.   An enormous slave trader with booming voice stood on a raised platform, hawking the men who made the clothes that make the Man, costing only freedom from wealth.

In the past, I would have stopped to browse and buy.  In the past, I had.  But not for a long time, and not today.  Today, I passed them all, only pausing to pass into the alleys between the Bank of Souls and the Lender of Sorrows.  Down a short alley, with the sounds muffled, it ended in a square empty save a pit in the center. 

The pit, itself, was not empty, but filled with a fine, pearl-coloured powder.   Looking back up at me, as I stood at the edge of the pit, were whitish rocks, with jagged edges.  This was what I had sought, to the exclusion of all else.  Though I'd passed by all of those opportunities with a slight tinge of regret, this was what I wanted.

Just like that, with the world as my oyster, I stepped into the crack of doom.


--
So, immediately after I wrote the last post, I just started writing this scene.  It was going to be loaded down with details of a market but ended up being this.

@ale: I know what you mean.  Anchovies...ugh.

[Brian]

Repetition of interest in the first paragraph; maybe adding interest to the 'my' before the second instance would help offset that (or changing 'my interest' to 'mine').  Interesting setting.  Reminds me of Yu Shan.

[Anastasia]

So there I was, checking out Soulriders when I see a new topic. Turns out that Brian wants us to describe something in a short scene, but that's where he loses me. Any old hack can describe something. It'll probably be scanty, spartan sentence fragments or purple prose, but this isn't much of a challenge.  So I say to myself that there has to be a way to attack this without just describing any old thing. The question is how do I describe something that hasn't been done to death?

I let it all shift 'round my head like a tossed salad, 'till it comes to me like a bad case of stomach cramps. Why not describe the process of coming up with and refining an idea for this challenge? Nah, that's dumb. Who would be so bankrupt on ideas to do that? What could I do, describe the no doubt over romanticized firings of inspiration deep within in mind? What about the stubby persistence of my clumsy fingers clacking away at the keyboard? Perhaps I could elaborate on the exact fake-sweet flavor of the Pepsi Max I'm sipping as I type this? How about mentioning the grime on my computer monitor as the words form, reminding me that I need to be less lazy and clean the damn screen?

Nah, that would just be pretentious. Can you imagine the sort of person would do that and then hit reply, a single audible mouse click sending this racing through the 'net to SR's server?

---

I really was running empty on something interesting to describe, so I tried something off the wall.

[Brian]

I read that in a Film Noir hard-boiled detective V.O. style.

*slow-clap*

[Anastasia]

About what I was aiming for. Yay.

[Jason_Miao]

Perhaps I could elaborate on the exact fake-sweet flavor of the Pepsi Max I'm sipping as I type this?

For some reason, I found this particularly hilarious.

I noticed that both times you answer a question, the line started with 'Nah', which seems awkward. 

The meta-referential was neat, but the number of questions in the actual post was a bit much.  After "Who could be so bankrupt?", what would you think about changing all of those questions to declarations highlighting how absurd you'd have to be in order to write a self-referential post?

e.g:  "If I were going to sink to that level, I'd only be describing  (no doubt) over-romanticized firings of inspiration deep within my mind.  And really, there would be little to describe.  Extolling stubby persistence of my clumsy fingers clacking away at the keyboard; elaborating on the exact..."

Repetition of interest in the first paragraph; maybe adding interest to the 'my' before the second instance would help offset that (or changing 'my interest' to 'mine').  Interesting setting.  Reminds me of Yu Shan.

One thing I was trying was to set up an undercurrent of neurosis, by repeating phrases (hence, the 'mere moments' of the second and third paragraphs).  Reading it over again, I agree with you: the repeated "interest" sounds awkward.

Yu Shan?  What's that?  The only Yu Shan I know of is a mountain in Taiwan.

[Brian]

It's where the gods live in Exalted:

http://wiki.white-wolf.com/exalted/index.php?title=Yu-Shan

[Jason_Miao]

It's where the gods live in Exalted:

http://wiki.white-wolf.com/exalted/index.php?title=Yu-Shan

Hmm...so, in Exalted, the gods live in Taiwan.


I'd never heard of the RPG before - according to one of the linked articles, Exalted itself is based on Asian gods.  The elements of scene were inspired by both eastern and western sources, so I can see some parallels.  Yu shan literally translates to 'Jade Mountain', and I used Jade to represent the common wealth.  The King in Yellow and Wagner's Odin are briefly mentioned, and those are gods.

Oh, and the classes of weapons were all based on a Zhuangzi fable.

[Anastasia]

I noticed that both times you answer a question, the line started with 'Nah', which seems awkward. 

Yeah, agreed. I noticed that after I posted it, but I decided to leave it rather than starting to edit the entry.

The meta-referential was neat, but the number of questions in the actual post was a bit much.  After "Who could be so bankrupt?", what would you think about changing all of those questions to declarations highlighting how absurd you'd have to be in order to write a self-referential post?

e.g:  "If I were going to sink to that level, I'd only be describing  (no doubt) over-romanticized firings of inspiration deep within my mind.  And really, there would be little to describe.  Extolling stubby persistence of my clumsy fingers clacking away at the keyboard; elaborating on the exact..."

I freely admit I have a tendency to resort to several unanswered questions like that, strung together. I've always liked how it flows, though I don't disagree that it's somewhat excessive.

Thanks for the comments.

[Arakawa]

Hmm, this is a describing-things challenge, right? This only qualifies (barely) because it's focused nearly as much as the characters' clothes as on the characters themselves. There is also some low-key action. Anyhow, a number of things are described/introduced on the fly, and this is definitely a work in progress.

Spoiler: ShowHide

"Magic," the man with the impressive-looking briefcase was saying, "is no great deal. It is merely, as my old mentor liked to say, the incomprehensible principles that govern all existence made visible."

In the seat across from him, the gray old man was politely skeptical. He had boarded the (F) train at Herald Square and soon afterwards found himself besieged by innocuous-seeming conversation. The contrast between the two men did not bode well for any agreement between them.

The gray old man was dressed in a thick, coarse, but well-laundered suit, his eyes shaded by a wide-brimmed felt hat. He studied a handsome coppery tortoiseshell notebook, as though looking for some profound meaning underneath the nonsense scribbled in it. All in all he must have looked like a stern, old-time preacher poring over an obscure religious tract in preparation for his next sermon.

(You often hear talk about the prevalence of various racial, gender, and other prejudices in modern society. Well, on a subway train in New York at least, these sorts of off-the-cuff stratifications absolutely pale next to the question of dress. This is so self-evident that I'm kind of embarrassed to be bringing it up. It helps that now is not the New York of 'Bonfire of the Vanities', where even a meager assistant DA was tempted to disguise his social status with natty secondhand sneakers when riding the subway in order to avoid unpleasantness. People with sneakers and dress shoes may be seen to intermingle quite freely within the narrow metal tube, and to go their separate ways outside it. And at no time in the history of the streets of New York would you expect to encounter a gang-banger dressing convincingly like a banker, nor vice-versa.

What I'm trying to highlight is, the gray old man's suit was clean, and crisp, and probably attractive and signifying of great intelligence to the layperson, but to the financial eye it merely revealed an uninitiated simpleton. Though, given his actions later on, I am certain he wore this kind of clothing as a deliberate provocation.)

Across from him, the (relatively speaking, since to me he would be pretty old) young punk with high-minded words about magic was dressed in the kind of suit that practicing financial magicians seem to favour for whatever reason -- probably due to the aforementioned stratifications of dress. It had a pocket square, of course, greatly useful for various actions requiring sleight-of-hand, and a bunch of those stripes that are not quite green, not quite gold, and not quite brown. Vertical stripes, to be exact -- in an attempt to seem a bit more taller and imposing, most likely, at the cost of a somewhat seedy second impression. I never saw who the man actually was, but I have my suspicions, so I will take the partly artistic liberty of assuming he was one and the same with a certain college acquaintance of Powell's. Said acquaintance happened to be a self-proclaimed, but not very skilled confidence artist suffering from a somewhat ludicrous curse that confined him to the island of Manhattan.

He had two undeniable assets on his side. First was a bloodyminded persistence -- if you were trapped on Manhattan Island for ten years, you would be desperate to scrape together the means to get out as well -- and, of course, he had the hefty leather briefcase, a truly infallible and imposing object with brass fastenings, which served to compensate for the man's lack of authority and good sense. He began his approach by rustling impatiently through a pile of papers, as though clearing his throat, then placing them into the briefcase, and fastening it into undeniable security with an audible clunk that rose above the noise of the train and galvanized the attention of half the subway car in the manner of a judge's gavel. The other half (which included myself) were listening to their earphones and staring out the window.

"This economy is going to pot," the man had proceeded to state, clearly and to no one in particular.

I'm looking at this as a test of how much more I need to work on this narrator's prose style. Right now it feels like it might fall anywhere on the continuum from 'unreadable' to 'kind of mildly baroque'. (

Spoiler: ShowHide

Also, the narrator is supposed to be about seventeen years old. While seventeen year olds who senselessly throw around this much vocabulary certainly do exist, they are not typical. Not sure how easy it's going to be to make this feel realistic.

)

[Arakawa]

Also, here is a troll.

Spoiler: ShowHide

At the other end of the room was a sight that one would hardly hope to encounter in an astronomically expensive Upper West Side apartment. Resplendent in what seemed to be most of a gigantic (large enough to hold a hippo) bathtub, one side cut away and the resulting sharp edges sanded down into what was still-sharp-but-serviceably-not-so, was the biggest-, fattest-, meanest-, widest-, hugest-, ugliest-, wartiest-, nastiest-, knobbliest-looking troll I had ever clapped eyes on. (Given that I'd only started looking at trolls and goblins during the past several hours of my life, this leaves open quite a range of possibilities, but suffice it to say the sight was very perversely impressive.) Two eyes, huge for any other life-form, but beady-looking in that gigantic face, stared at us disapprovingly, framed by huge, hanging jowls. There was barely any nose and the rest of the troll was all covered in rough, stony-looking lumps, tumors and protrusions scarcely worth thinking (much less writing) in any detail about, as they also seemed to serve in place of clothes to satisfy whatever sense of modesty the creature had. A mouth opened in between the jowls, displaying great greenish tombstone teeth all bent and crooked every which way, and gave us a taste of the barely comprehensible Greater Bolg accent:

Not sure if a troll has any business entering in a challenge for describing things. But does anyone really want to contradict a troll if one decides to barge into the room?

_{(Well, besides every single sane person on the Internet.)}

[Muphrid]

Re: narration.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Also, the narrator is supposed to be about seventeen years old. While seventeen year olds who senselessly throw around this much vocabulary certainly do exist, they are not typical. Not sure how easy it's going to be to make this feel realistic.

The narrator definitely doesn't sound like a typical 17-year-old, but then, the narrator need not be typical.  I could believe this is still a kid if I knew that there was enough background on the character to justify the manner of speech and choice of words.  It definitely gives the impression that this character must be well-educated or come from a well-to-do family that naturally talks this way.  The thing is, it does still sound like this narration belongs in the mouth of a 40-year-old scholar instead of a kid.  I'm not sure how to mitigate this while leaving the narration mostly intact.

What kind of background should the narrator have?