How is my pet story?
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Hi everyone... Well, I've finally finished the story for my pet, Susurrous. Hooray.
Juuuust one thing...I've never really written before. I mean, sure I've written in school but they had really low standards there, so...yeah. I really would appreciate some criticism, and corrections if necessary.
Susurrous' story will be about a man having a near-death experience after being bitten by a mysterious snake (that's her) that turns out to be a seemingly all-knowing, transient being, there to help guide him in the right direction
Here we go:
<p>After this series of extremely unfortunate events, he became helplessly self-destructive. He dropped out of school, began to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol, and started doing hard drugs on a daily basis. Now he is on the verge of taking his own life, and he finally decides that he will do it – but not without planning.</p>
<p>On a clear, beautiful evening, he walks off into the Sonoran desert, towards the sunset, several miles away from his home. He wanders while listening to his iPod, contemplating his life, or rather, how he will end it. Deep in thought, he continues to walk a couple more miles into the desert, when out of the corner of his eye he sees an odd-looking snake.</p>
<p>Before he can even look directly at it, the snake, without warning, strikes him in his left leg. Its fangs sink deep into his skin, causing him to back off and fall backwards over a rock. He slams his head onto the ground.</p>
<p>He lifts his aching head up to look at the snake. His vision is slightly blurred from the impact, but his sight quickly recovers. He starts to notice…it&;s a snake he&;s never seen before.</p>
<p>This snake… it&;s not a rattlesnake. He&;s seen those before and it looks nothing like that. He thinks to himself, “Maybe it’s an invasive species? Someone’s missing pet?” No, it looks like nothing from this earth: it has dark, human-like hair on its head, its back is navy blue, its belly is shining gold, and it appears to have black, bird-like wings on the upper end of its back. He begins to think that he’s seriously hallucinating from the fall.</p>
<p>The snake hisses. Its eyes glow at him. [insert picture ]</p>
<p>He attempts to get up when suddenly, he experiences convulsions. His vision quickly goes dark, as does the sky while the sun sets behind the mountains. He lies there, staring up at the darkening sky, with mixed feelings. He had wanted to die, but wasn’t expecting it to happen this way. He hasn’t prepared to say goodbye to his few remaining loved ones…whom he didn’t love quite so much, now that he’s thinking about it. But still, he doesn’t want it to happen quite like this.</p>
<p>...</p>
<p>He begins to feel himself coming out of his own body. The distant stars in the night sky become brighter as the sun continues to go down, and now they feel like they&;re getting closer as he feels himself heading up towards the sky, rapidly.</p>
<p>...</p>
<p>Suddenly, he finds himself among the cosmos. Visions of nebulas and novae flash before his eyes. All at once he sees the life and death of stars. He has a feeling of euphoria, and a feeling of lucidity he’s never felt before in his life. Somehow his mind is able to comprehend the vast amount of beautiful, breath-taking imagery that is all occurring simultaneously. [insert picture ]</p>
<p>The energy fills him up. Intense joy overtakes him. He sees colours he&;s never seen before. He becomes entrapped in thick, colourful stardust - the very thing that lead to our existence. He looks down and sees a tiny blue dot, surrounded by black, and he realises…it’s Earth, barely recognisable. The blue dot starts to become larger, and before he knows it, he is freefalling through the sky, all the way back down into his body, where he hears the snake, still hissing at him.</p>
<p>This hissing...isn&;t like a normal hiss. Actually, it sounds like whispering…</p>
<p>“In this world, we all experience different levels of hardship… Your circumstances are understandably difficult, especially among average people in the first world, for you as a youth, have already suffered great loss. The loss of loved ones is often the worst kind of pain anyone in any ‘country’ will be forced to bear. I say ‘country’ in that tone because I do not personally believe in the silly concept of nations, for I believe we are all one and the same – we are all children of the stars.</p>
<p>“My reason in being here is to deliver the message to you that you, human named Travis, will not suffer for much longer. I showed you those images of the universe because I wanted you to see where we come from – because you need to know, that your being here – your very existence, is something that is so rare, and so very precious.</p>
<p>“My goal now, is to stop you from doing the irreversible. If you choose to do it anyway, I will not blame you. Death is not necessarily a bad thing, for all things die, however… I have visions of the future that may bring you hope…”</p>
<p>The snake moves the tip of its tail, and with it, touches the centre of Travis’ forehead. [insert picture ]</p>
<p>The snake telepathically shows him the visions she had seen of his future. It’s a surprisingly happy future, with good friends, a lovely wife, and adorable animals. They have 3 dogs and a cat.</p>
<p>“No children?” Travis asks the snake. “No.” she says.</p>
<p>“Good.”</p>
<p>The visions continue with scenes of laughter and joy, of travelling and adventures, of nights alone with his beautiful wife. And these visions come with feelings of peace, and satisfaction in life.</p>
<p>“That is you, human named Travis, if you just wait a few more years… In the meantime…make up what it is you want do to with your life…and hang in there.” The snake smiles a gentle smile.</p>
<p>“Live…”</p>
<p>Her voice fades.</p>
<p>“Wait, come back!” Travis shouts in his mind.</p>
<p>Travis wakes up. The hissing has stopped.</p>
<p>Still in awe, he gets up fairly slowly. He looks around, his hand on head, which is still aching, and sees the snake, slithering away into the shadows. He stands up and dusts himself off. He discovers that the wound on his left leg is gone. He turns around and looks into the sky. The star and moonlight are just bright enough for him to able to find is way back home. And so he does.</p>
<p>Before leaving the desert, he turns around and takes a long look back, and thinks about the snake that bit him. He feels a sense of gratitude to it. He stands there awkwardly, feeling like he’s supposed to do something.</p>
<p>“Thank you.” he whispers into the desert.</p>
<p>A female voice from within the desert whispers back to him,</p>
<p>“You’re welcome.”
[edit] Oh god, sorry it's so long, lol. I didn't realise how long it was. I do hope you folks will still be willing read it... Thanks if you do! Annnd I understand if you don't. :P
Hey, I like long stories :) providing of course they're interesting, which yours was or else I wouldn't have read it through. So I'll give it a shot at suggesting some ways to make it better, and apologies in advance if I sound over-critical.
First off I have to admit I'm not a fan of present-tense stories, however that's my own personal prejudice and I can see why you chose it for this one, since it hangs at that turning-point moment between the character's past/future. Most people are so used to past-tense stories that it can be tricky to maintain, but you did this really well. However there's still a couple of places where word choice seems to throw us out of the present.
Before he could even look directly at it, the snake, without warning, strikes him in his left leg. Here "could" isn't necessarily incorrect, since it could (:P) be a present-tense theoretical and that would still make sense... but it read to me like a past-tense, and I don't think you'd lose anything by changing it to "can".
Somehow his mind was able to comprehend the vast amount of beautiful, breath-taking imagery that was all occurring simultaneously.
- "his mind is able to comprehend"; and "that is all occurring".
I may have overlooked some.
That said, there's one paragraph at the start that should be using past tense, and isn't (since it is describing stuff that has already gone by to lead to the present situation - the same as where you correctly use past tense in the first paragraph). It ought to read something like this: After this series of extremely unfortunate events, he became helplessly self-destructive. He immediately dropped out of school, began to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol, and started doing hard drugs on a daily basis. He is on the verge of taking his own life, and he finally decides that he will do it - but not without planning. The final sentence only remains present-tense as it sums up the situation happening right now in your story. (Incidentally I struck out the "immediately", because it seems redundant once the situation shifts to the past tense; again that may be personal bias.) Although you may decide that the sudden shift in tenses is jarring in its own way, and perhaps change the last to "Now he is on the verge" &c.
I am really bad with grammar, but here are a couple of nitpicks I found...
At one point, the snake has a speech several paragraphs long; each of those paragraphs should start with quotation marks (though only the last requires them at the close).
Something about this sentence bothers me: He hadn’t prepared to say goodbye to his few remaining loved ones…which he didn’t love quite so much, now that he thought about it. I think it's mainly that the "which" should be "whom". But there's also the tense thing again. Maybe: He hasn’t prepared to say goodbye to his few remaining loved ones…whom he doesn't love quite so much, thinking about it. Putting "now that he thinks about it" to make the tense consistent sounded wrong (does anyone talk like that?), so I tried changing the end a bit. I may not have actually improved anything. ^_^;
Overall: I think main improvement you could make to your writing in general is tighten up your sentence structure. There's a tendency towards lengthy, over-punctuated sentences - a somewhat excessive use of commas and ellipses. I tend to fall into the exact same faults - although despite what anyone tells you to the contrary, just how much of a 'fault' this is in writing really does depend to an extent on personal taste. But run-on sentences in general are considered bad writing, and can make the story seem sluggish and/or hard to focus on.
There's not a single easy fix, though it should improve with practice once you're aware you're doing it. (Or here's hoping - I'm still working on that myself. 😊) I can only suggest you read the whole thing over and every time you come to a sentence with more than a couple of commas in it, or an ellipsis, ask yourself "Could this be phrased better? If so, how?" Sometimes of course you may decide it's fine as it is :) other times it might be better split into two shorter sentences; while again, the sentence length might not be the problem, it may just have some extra unneeded punctuation marks in there. At times you may find words or phrases that could be cut out entirely to make your writing flow more smoothly.
One last random thing: The snake smiles a gentle smile. Not necessarily wrong (since she is not after all a normal snake), but when reading it my thought was "Snakes can't smile!", so you may want to address that. Either with the character himself having a thought along the lines of "huh, so snakes can smile, who knew"; or maybe describe how, while he couldn't read her expressionless snake-face, her voice sounded like she was smiling.
Even as it stands I thought this was a nicely-written story, better than many I've seen on even spotlight-winning pet profiles; and I loved how cleverly the pet was represented based on her name.
Thank goodness! xD I was starting to worry that no one would post, seeing as there are other posts here that people have yet to respond to.
Ahhh I knew I must've messed up on my tenses as I do that all time. Same with over-punctuation. It's often difficult for me to see those errors, so I'm really glad that you pointed those out to me. I don't think you were being over-critical at all, actually, this is just what I needed and what I was hoping for. I've saved your post on my notepad so I can look it over as I write. Thank you so much for taking the time to write that! You were very helpful.
Are you done with this story or do you still need some help? :)
[TOT=Nezha-Veles]
-veles I appreciate you taking the time to read it through!
Ummm, I think I'm done with it, however, if there are still any grammatical errors I would love to have those pointed out to me. I'll post the edited version.
If you had anything else in mind other than grammar corrections of course you can go ahead and say what it is you feel would improve the story, although I should say the story has gotten a little more difficult for me to change because of time and personal preference.
[edit] Edited the original post with the newer version~
Thank you for letting me know! If you're happy with it I'll leave it alone. I find that folks have to be open to change for an edit, and it sounds like you're inclined to leave it as-is. Feel free to contact me though, if you need anything else looked over! :)
[TOT=Nezha-Veles]
-veles Thank you! I appreciate it.
And yes that's true! I was open-minded when I made this thread but after a while changing it just got harder and harder, y'know? x.x No doubt the story is far from perfect, and while I see some of the errors I don't actually feel the need to change them... This probably isn't a good thing for the story and I think most good writers would remain open-minded throughout but...it's kind of my first one ever and it's been...personalized. I dunno how to describe it.
I'll leave the thread open in case anyone has any criticism that they want to give despite my hesitance. Maybe it'll affect the way I feel and I'll go, "Yeah, that's a good point..." and actually improve the story without me cringing while I edit it :P