Here we go; feedback for those who requested it at the right time. As always, my philosophy is that if you can't say something negative then don't say anything at all - fragile egos need not read on.
If you want to further discuss anything then PM me, if you want to dispute anything or rationalise then please don't.
Now without further ado or aplomb...
Hawkeye
Formatting:You were mostly solid to be honest, which is an awful lot rarer than one might hope. At one point you neglected to prefix some of Sean's dialogue with his name. This was probably because he'd been speaking prior to the stage directions, but later on you found yourself in exactly the same position with Nikki and did the opposite. Either approach would have passed unnoticed (as formatting should), but the inconsistency stuck out, and as a general rule the more somebody notices your formatting the worse it is.
That being said, it was only one small anomaly, other than that the formatting was perfectly acceptable.
Writing:Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a small penis. Don't use them. Seriously, it makes no grammatical sense and doesn't make a statement appear any more emphatic, it just looks like you don't know how punctuation works. Whilst I'm at it, there really is very little reason to have words written all in capitals. Unless you're trying to convey that Alex randomly screamed the final word of his sentence (in which case he come off looking like a deranged idiot/tourettes patient) then the capitals achieved nothing other than to look silly. Less is frequently more when it comes to writing, and the concept of subtlety is worth regularly reminding yourself off.
The tense of your stage directions flips around in a manner I found most distracting. They start out as typical present tense script directions, but then change to being past tense exposition, then go back to the present tense but shift the narrative. Different people use stage directions differently, but like with formatting the important thing is to be consistent. You can use them to exposit on backstory, or to change scenes or to direct action, but doing all three at once is confusing.
The level of mistakes and typos was slightly too high. The odd mistake happens with everything anyone writes, and people will happily overlook most of it, but at the point at which you're missing out entire words your stuff ceases to make sense, and at that point lack of proof reading becomes a problem. If you don't mind looking like a dick to anyone else in the room then I find reading stuff slowly aloud to be the best way to catch mistakes.
As for the quality of the writing... it was alright. It was mostly dialogue that came across as natural enough. There was no area of writing that caused me to pause in appreciation of a well crafted clause, but on the other hard there was nothing bad enough for me to really highlight. A solid meh.
Content:It worked. It was a fairly unexceptional 'guy A talks about guy B' piece, although you did at least manage to convey some personality upon Cruz through his fish out of water response to a Mayhem contest. Having him directly interact with Bowen was a nice change of pace since people tend not to go that way, and I'd have liked to see more made of their interaction.
One concept I'd be remiss if I didn't mention (although I bring it up in feedback about as often as I do the use of commas - good show on using commas correctly by the way) is that of "Show - don't tell".
Simply writing that Sean Cruz is "visibly upset" is lazy and unhelpful if you don't tell us how he is visibly upset. Is he pacing? Is he holding his head in his hands? Is he kicking small furry animals? I have no idea, because you didn't bother to actually show his emotion. When somebody feels something it is far, far more effective to show them feeling it, rather than simply telling the audience what is going on in their heads.
The same goes for your expositing on Nikki's history and motivation. Exposition is usually a bad thing, especially in such a short piece of writing. You don't need to tell us what Nikki is intending to do when you can simply show her doing it. Show, don't tell.
Summery:Yeah, it was alright. Nothing memorable, nothing that made me want to stop reading. I feel no better or worse for having read it. A solidly average piece.
Harthan
Formatting:I don't like it. I bitch about it to someone every time I do feedback, but I hate seeing people rely exclusively on colour to distinguish between characters speaking. You mostly get away with it since you only have two people in the scene, but it's still a substandard way to format dialogue. I'm also not wild about the orange; it'll do in a pinch, but there are much more readable colours out there for selection.
Writing:Right, this is the bit I wanted to talk about: Stage directions.
He grunts.
He sits in silence.
He continues to contemplate.
So Stark is sitting quietly not doing anything... I don't care, and certainly I don't need to be repeatedly told about it.
If the character is not doing anything worth writing about then
don't write about it. It is not necessary to break your dialogue up with constant stage directions unless they serve a purpose. Yours quite emphatically serve no purpose whatsoever, and as such should be got rid of. I can appreciate not wanting to have six consecutive paragraphs of dialogue (especially when it's an unpleasant orange colour) but if the dialogue is compelling then it should present no more of a problem than six paragraphs of prose.
I had a nice argument with JG recently about whether every word written needs to advance the narrative, and although we eventually agreed that it did not, it remains a fundamental truth of writing that every word written needs to be able to have its existence justified, otherwise it is simply wasting the reader's time. Amusingly, most of the time when you actually require stage directions (such as to indicate unspoken thoughts or quiet mutterings) you don't deploy them, instead trying to make the formatting do the work for you. What you did there worked well enough, although all things considered I'd rather see it accomplished through good writing rather than by fluctuating font size.
The Dialogue was actually very well written in places. It says a lot for good writing that I was more engaged in a discussion about the merits of tea than I was by most people pontificated about how they wanted to stove other people's heads in. Hiraku is a very interesting character who legitimately captured my curiosity, and who I'll be making some efforts to keep up with.
Writing was tight and professional with very few errors. You got its and it's confused at one point, but other than that I noticed nothing wrong. One error in fifteen hundred words is less than I'd expect to make myself, so good show.
Content:Definitely above average, for the simple reason that you actually had a narrative. This was not simply two people talking about an upcoming match. There was a clear indication that there was history between them, and that there would be more to happen in the future. It felt like the middle of a story, which never fails to make things a hundred fold more interesting.
At the end of the day I'll put up with pretty much anything if it's telling an interesting story, and right now you've got my attention, so that's a thumbs up. Probably my favourite piece I read this round, though I didn't read very much.
Summery:Technically proficient it some areas, sadly lacking in others. Overall saved from mediocrity on account of it feeling like it was a part of something bigger. A thumbs up.
Jerichoholic4Life
Formatting:Right, before we start I want you to do me a favour. Go to your bookshelf and bring back a book. Any book of your choice.
...
It's OK, I'll wait.
...
Got one? Probably not, you've probably just scrolled down to see when I'd get to the point, but if you had followed my instruction then you'd now be able to open the book to a random page and take a look at how to words are organised. You would note that they are neatly aligned down the left hand side of the page. This is true for all books, and the reason for this is that it is easier to read. There is
no reason to centralise your entire roleplay, it looks untidy and makes it more troublesome to read. Stop it.
On the subject of being troublesome to read, it's a technicolour mess. You have four voices that you don't bother to tag and simply rely on colour to distinguish between. The forth voice you don't even introduce, leaving my scrolling back up to check that it wasn't a voice I had heard already. I advise taking a look at Cruz or Ale's roleplay for a quick lesson in how to do script formatting properly.
Writing:One massive problem stood out, which was that you seemed to have no understanding of when to use capital letters. A capital letter is used at the start of a sentence, or when a person's name is used. You do not need to capitalise regular nouns such as locker, bag, room, morning, bed or vest.
That completely broke my immersion, and by the time I got to the bottom of the page I was focusing more on trying to decode your used of upper case letters than I was on what any of your characters were actually saying.
By the end I was paying no attention at all, which is a clear sign that the writing was not good enough.
There are lots of other little things to correct such as not using ampersands in dialogue or the fact that you used more exclamation marks than every other competitor in the match combined (forty seven in total I think - which is ridiculous), but at the end of the day I think you need to get elementary grammar sorted out first. There's plenty of tutorials on the web detailing how to structure and punctuate a sentence, and it might be worth your time taking a look at one of them.
Content:Like I said, the quality of the writing completely took me out of the piece, to the point where I didn't bother reading to the bottom. I just about concluded that Scumm is deranged, but that's about it. I can't really judge what I didn't read.
Summery:It could have been the best piece of writing ever created, but I'm not going to soldier through it until you get structure and formatting sorted out. As it is the piece was completely ruined for me and I took nothing away from it. A definite thumbs down I'm afraid.
Numbers
Formatting:Technicolour mess; I didn't like it. I'm disinclined to repeat my moaning from higher up verbatim, but I do not like having my eyes assaulted with six or so different font colours and being expected to decode who is speaking. Had I not been picking over your piece carefully I wouldn't even have noticed to grey colour used for "Large guy", since it looks almost the same as the black.
Either you are writing prose, in which it should be made evident who is speaking at all times, and using colour is simply a lazy way to avoid formatting dialogue properly; or alternately you are writing a script, in which case it is expected to tag dialogue with the speaker's name. There is a reason why contemporary formatting is as it is.
Writing:It was a very nice piece of photoshop work. I'm going to completely ignore it since it's got nothing to do with writing quality, but I thought you might like to know that I appreciated it.
I'm four people in with this feedback and I haven't picked anyone up on utterly trivial word usage yet, so I might as well mention that it should probably be "a vast array" of merchandise as opposed to "arrays" plural. An array is a large group of things, and since it refers to a multitude it doesn't really need to be pluralised.
It should also be "all money collected" instead of monies. Monies refers to different types of money (such as different denominations of exchange) whereas the term for money presented in multiple is simply "money".
I'll stop now.
The prose is rather messy. Kudos for actually attempting to use metaphor and imagery, but it had a tendency to get rather lost at times. The hum of humanity becoming a tidal wave for example is a very awkward image that does more to take me out of the narrative than it does to set the scene.
250 people making the noise of 10,000 is pushing it too far. Drop a zero and I'll believe it.
You have quite an issue with telling us what your character is feeling instead of showing it. I'd like to see much more "Austin begins to pace again as he talks through gritted teeth about the Stantime defeat." and much less "Austin smiles, he is clearly intrigued by the possibilities and one thoughts dominates his mind. Him vs Showtime." Let the character's words and actions convey their emotion. Ideally it should almost never be necessary to out and out tell the reader what is going through a character's mind, because it should come across through their behaviour.
Content:Fairly standard premise that's been done plenty of times. A solid concept, but nothing that really grabbed my attention.
I enjoyed the fact that you were making such a visible effort to put your partner over; it's nice to see the logic of a rookie/vet partnership acknowledged.
I think it was too long considering what you had to say. You went over three-thousand words, which is fine if you're telling a story or following a character arc, but you weren't. Nothing was different at the end of your piece, nobody had changed and nothing had been discovered, it was just a Q&A. I didn't really learn anything about the characters or the match and I was bored before I got to the end of it.
It is said the worst sin a piece of writing can commit is to bore to reader. Personally I think the worst sin it can commit is to be shit, which you absolutely weren't, but I wasn't engaged.
Summery:Normally when I start nitpicking over the meaning of individual words it's either because the writing is fine, or because I'm bored. Here it was a bit of both. There was nothing profoundly wrong, but it wasn't interesting enough to justify the length. Everything you said was said well enough, but you took far too long to say far too little.
I've given everyone else a thumb, so yours can be in the middle, trending downwards.
And with that we're done. Enjoy.
) You did touch on the match, and each opponent, but the parts that stuck out were the "extras", especially about Gustav.
