Lost Twins

[Muphrid]

The prose in this piece has always trended a bit purple, in part (I had thought) to highlight the discrepancy between Simon's inward eloquence and his outward awkwardness.  So, I guess my question would be whether it's too purple for the effect to matter, or if there were some other intention behind it?

[Arakawa]

The prose in this piece has always trended a bit purple, in part (I had thought) to highlight the discrepancy between Simon's inward eloquence and his outward awkwardness.  So, I guess my question would be whether it's too purple for the effect to matter, or if there were some other intention behind it?

The question isn't relevant for this scene, mostly because it has a PoV shift into omniscient narration, unlike most of the other scenes. So it's not an issue of "does this fit with the idea I gave earlier of the narrator?", so much as whether it tells the story well.

And, especially with the subject matter, this scene could be narrated more simply. Do the example rewritings I gave serve to move it in that direction?

I'm certain once I post the chapter there will be a lot of rough edges of this sort. In general, whenever I push to flesh out a difficult set of impressions into a scene, things seem to start trending purple for me. At this point, it's a choice between endlessly revising the few difficult scenes where I'm tempted to put in flourishes, or putting it out there and having someone tear it apart with a critical eye as to which aspects of it actually bog down the narrative.

[Muphrid]

The question isn't relevant for this scene, mostly because it has a PoV shift into omniscient narration, unlike most of the other scenes. So it's not an issue of "does this fit with the idea I gave earlier of the narrator?", so much as whether it tells the story well.

Well, I guess this indirectly brings up another question that had been on my mind: who the narrator was for this scene (whether it should be Simon talking about things he learned after the fact or what).  If it is just a plain old, not-any-of-our-characters narrator, then yeah, I think that should be pretty distinct from Simon's narration proper, yet on the other hand, any big shift will really point this out.  Sticky.

And, especially with the subject matter, this scene could be narrated more simply. Do the example rewritings I gave serve to move it in that direction?

The rewritten passages do seem a bit more straightforward, yes.

It seems strange to me that you're trending so purple. I didn't think "Anywhere in this World" was that way per se, but I do think you have a tendency to try to tackle really complex ideas or thoughts without breaking them down into more manageable pieces.  Perhaps keeping that in mind will help you mitigate the problem?

[Arakawa]

Going to start a new thread to post the actual chapters:

http://www.soulriders.net/forum/index.php/topic,102788.0.html

A request to the moderators, could this thread be locked? Probably not going to add anything in this old thread.

[Arakawa]

*slaps forehead*, apparently we can lock the topics ourselves. Okay, no need for moderator assistance, then.