There were no specific examples in the form of sentences of the first two. There were specific attributes however.
I believe the thing you are trying to deliberately avoid -- keeping the reader in the dark chasing you -- was one thing that made the first two more theatrical. Just the right mix of details and meaningful action (
George Saunders
likes meaningful action vs the word plot lol ).
I think that because you were following
William Gibson
to a tee you got that for free. Kind of like getting a ton of things for free when following the conventions of an
MVC
webapp via
Ruby on Rails
or
Laravel
.
I think these last two assignments reveal how difficult it is to get that blend of details + meaningful action right. I think going forward that would be a great Daniel thing to hone your craft on, but given that this is the final week of
Echo and Narcissus
club it's a good opportunity to just do some more Gibson copying.
PS I'm already reading that Saunders' book
Maggie Appleton
mentioned and it is so necessary for fiction writers. You will love it. Please check it out. I hope Maggie does end up organizing a club around it!
My main feedback would be that this and the previous snippet have less of a theatrical engagement.
I think the first couple assignments you were deliberately sticking more closely to trying to mimic
William Gibson
so you got a lot of that 'for free'.
I think my main feedback here would be go and return to the different topics assignments that we went through ( detail / sentence structure /etc ) and go through this piece again and see where you can inject more of Gibson here and there.
This is assuming that you are still trying to copy Gibson for this assignment. I remember you mentioning Saturday that you didn't feel as much in the copy mood for that assignment. Maybe you feel the same for this week.
If that's the case, I think that theatrical element is what I found most engaging in your first assignments and i think you could still try to infuse more of that here even if it's not Gibson pastische.
