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What Caught My Eye

The title could have gone either way for me. But I saw that it came from a writing journal and thought it might actually be a 2nd draft... always nice to see. I don't think this actually is one though.

Favorite Aspects

This reads as an automated writing. I haven't read one in a while... it brought back memories of my high school creative writing class. Automated writings were required in that course. After I polished them up, a few even became interesting poems and stories.

Hook
In my reviews, I like to focus a bit on the opening line(s) of a poem. Sometimes, people forget that a good hook is as important for a poem as it is for a story. It might be more important, in fact. Given the length of a poem, the intro (that hook) is a considerable percentage of the piece as a whole. It needs to be both functional and interesting to serve its purposes.

I'd probably have stopped reading this after the first line, if I was reading for fun. Why? Waiting is like time standing still? Ummm... that's so obvious as to feel almost like a facepalm line. When you wait, you stand still... you're spending time standing still... so time is standing still. It made me feel like this was going to be full of ideas that weren't really deep but wanted to be or something.

You have much better lines in here than that, by the way. It just wasn't a great hook for me.

Continuing on... sometimes WHAT happens? Waiting? Well, clearly.

"Hell freezing over" is a phrase used to describe something that will never ever happen. Like, I'll be elected president of mars "when hell freezes over"... so using that literally means the opposite of everything you said before it.

Language / Word Choice

This entire piece suffers from lapses like the ones mentioned already. It also has a fair bit of filler wording:

"Or is it that I'm waiting for just a little hint of truth, instead of hidden lies?..."

First, OhEmGee with the ellipses! You're even using them even AFTER proper punctuation? There are SIXTY-EIGHT of them in here. That's 204 periods in a really short piece. Just saying.

Second, this is full of those filler words... thats and justs and whatnot. Simplified:

"Or am I waiting for a hint of truth hidden in lies"

Everything is still in there... it's just concise. Generally, concise language is easier to read and comprehend for the reader.

Flow / Rhythm

The flow is... all over the place. This happens sometimes with super long lines mixed with short. It can be done, but it's difficult to master. Cutting out some of those filler words would help to tighten it up and make the flow smoother too.

Imagery

There isn't much... but I like what's there. A turtle foot race . There are nice moments in here to be sure.

Effect

I'll go ahead and leave this here. This piece has some issues... and all of them seem to stem from the nature of this piece: it's a first draft, automated writing. It reads like one. Nothing wrong with that... there are bits in here that could be transformed into pure gold. They're buried in stray thoughts and filler and repetition right at the moment. Again, it's to be expected for this type of piece. I have a whole slew of these too... no shame in it, and it's a great way to get the juices flowing.

You've actually inspired me to create a book for automatic writings on here. It's such a helpful exercise that I haven't done in SO long. So thank you for that. If you pull anything from this and/or rework it, I'd love to see. Cheers!





My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .