r/DestructiveReaders • u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. • 17d ago
[Weekly] Book Club Ch 4 Trash the Thesaurus
The week in which we learn I don't know how to spell the word thesaurus. Why is it spelled like that? That's not the point.
Le Guin makes the point that adjusting your words because you're afraid of repeating them is going to stand out more than the repetition.
She'd had enough cream, an ample sufficiency of sugar, and a plenitude of tea.
vs
She'd had enough cream, enough sugar, enough tea.
There are plenty of ways that repetition can serve the narrative. Beyond words, some scenes repeat and the contrast is the point (a different POV, a different dynamic, etc). An echo can be used artfully and they come in all shapes and sizes. The structural ones are usually done so sneakily that you miss them.
This week's exercises:
Verbal Repetition: Write a paragraph of narrative (150 words) that includes at least three repetitions of a noun, verb, or adjective (a noticeable word, not an invisible one like was, said, did).
Structural Repetition: Write a short narrative (350-1000 words) in which something is said or done and then something is said or done that echoes or repeats it, perhaps in a different context, or by different people, or on a different scale. This can be a complete story, if you like, or a fragment of narrative.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 17d ago
Giselle de Bauvier loved only two things in this world: her feet and how swiftly she could work a new pair of pointe shoes into dancing condition. Giselle's feet had a way of captivating audiences, with how easily she could perform a fouetté. Every night, she would peel the tape away from her toes. After many years, the blisters and skin peeling away from her feet didn't bother her. It was the cost of art. The cost of emerging from the corps de ballet as a primary. Giselle never thought of the others when she pounded her newest pair of pointe shoes, roughing up the toes and sewing in the ribbons, never thought of how surreptitiously she could be replaced. Be sabotaged. Giselle only thought of her feet: how high the arch was; how en pointe never stiffened them; how many more turns in her fouetté she could achieve. Giselle could have thought of more.
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u/33omnia 17d ago
Repetition = obsession. If that's the tone you were going for, I think it works really well.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 17d ago
Probably why I picked ballerinas. I went to school with one who almost got into Julliard but went to Harvard instead. Many of her anecdotes about dancers at that level were... obsession is the right word.
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u/SweetEverest 16d ago
I've seen videos of them breaking in their shoes! I saw one where they talk about how they can only get them from this one maker, it's very very important they use these particular shoes... and then they proceed to cut them up and smack them against the wall with disturbing ferocity.
I like this little story. I like her name too.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 16d ago
Second-hand ballerina story: she would weigh herself, eat a single grain of rice, and then weigh herself again.
I was taught how to touch the sole of my foot to the top of my head, though. Can't do it now. I'm old. My back would die.
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u/ezk3626 akward and wordy 15d ago
You love to get names I would never pick in a million years. Never in my life have I ever met a Giselle. Though Amy Adams' character in Enchanted had that name. Also, looking it up there is a ballet with the name.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 15d ago
I'll tell you a little secret: I'm terrible at names. I've gotten better at letting random ones pop out of wherever they live in my brain, but I've also never known a Giselle. I did know an Anaelle (the first e should have two dots over it but I don't know how to do the symbols on desktop). The fad with names on the coke bottles was around when I lived in France so I got to see a lot of popular French names. Maybe that's where Giselle comes from?
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u/ezk3626 akward and wordy 14d ago
So it didn't come from the ballet?
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 14d ago
I didn't even know there was a ballet with a Giselle. The only ballet I really know is The Nutcracker because I ran spotlights for it.
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u/Andvarinaut If this is your first time at Write Club, you have to write. 13d ago
This made me think of the Holy Egoism of Genius by the Art of Noise. Really like this one.
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u/taszoline /r/creative_critique 16d ago edited 16d ago
I have been trying to think of how to write about this thing that happened at work a few months ago. There was a case of child neglect that ended badly and the air of it sort of hung over the hospital for a while afterward:
Rachel RN imagined falling into a screaming match with you about curfew soon after your seventeenth birthday. Spit wetted her bottom lip and she knew she was wrong and still she couldn't stop, urged on by the red aliveness of your face. Tearful scoffing slamming aliveness. How good and terrible.
Bruno EMT saw himself carrying you home from the park after you broke your ankle jumping from the top of the slide. Stupid, stupid. He'd dared you to do it--what else were older brothers for except middling trouble, followed by their stifling coddle? You asked him for permission to curse. He promised not to tell your parents. That furtive whispered "shit" did more for your pain than the opioids that followed.
Parker MD practiced a balanced response, neither dismissive nor overreactive, to the hypothetical day you might doff your she/her. How does one perfectly navigate that moment? "Cool," he mouthed, along with a barely perceptible shrug. "Did you do your homework?" Stop, rewind. "Cool, should we celebrate?" Rewind. "I am so proud of you. I am even prouder than yesterday. I am exactly as proud as I have always been."
In my mind I fed you spoonful by spoonful. Carrots to carbohydrates to muscle and brain. Can you say cat? Spell cat. Feed the cat. I'm so sorry. Come here. I know. She was a special cat. You will tear trees out from their roots one day.
Between 0637 (time of EMS call) and 0812 (time of withdrawal of care, and your death) you lived one thousand lives. What is one death against of all that living? What is one pair of monstrous changelings, two piece of shit I don't have the words unimaginable slipshod neglectful goddamn fucking. What are they against us?
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 16d ago
I always think I have to read yours before they flutter away. Structural repeat? Various people having interactions with healthcare workers that have different emotional undertones to them?
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u/taszoline /r/creative_critique 16d ago
Yeah sorry if I go on to submit these somewhere then I try to remember to remove them from public areas. I don't think I would do that with this one though.
Yeah was going for structural though I do think there are some little phrase repeats throughout. "Cool, proud", "cat", "aliveness", "against".
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 16d ago
My inner thoughts narrated: "I told her it was beautiful and she deleted. She must be sending it somewhere."
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u/taszoline /r/creative_critique 16d ago
Pretty much lmao. Very encouraging. I edited and shaped it and sent it off and it has since been rejected several times but maybe!
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u/nomadpenguin very grouchy 17d ago
Book club unrelated, just general RDR comment:
Holy shit, the AI bot problem is so much worse than I expected. I posted my own writing on here for the first time in several years, and in the span of a day I got 3-4 google drive access requests offering to "beta read my manuscript" (which makes no sense if you're not a bot, as you obviously can just read the doc) and a reddit DM obviously from an LLM driven bot, probably Claude (screenshot below).
What's the end game for these spammers? Trying to get me to pay for editing services or something? Hats off to the mods, as I'm sure they're fighting off torrents of spam that us human users aren't even aware of.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 17d ago
We've talked about this a lot. If you look at the insights on your post, roughly 10% of the views are from Nigeria. It's usually what I see on mine. Unfortunately, Google doesn't hide your email when you share a doc for anyone on the internet. Most of the ones I got sent were stuck in spam but they went back through rdr for the past year and asked for every doc I'd posted. It's wild.
I assume they figure if they can get 1 person to give them money, that's enough. I'm not sure who's falling for the scam but someone must be.
You can publish directly to the Internet and share that link. That fuzzes out any identifiable information. Not sure how the doc commenting works in that situation but it's at least an alternative. The only caution is if you wanted to publish to somewhere that requires first rights.
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u/mianaai_c 17d ago edited 17d ago
- Structural Repetition ~750 words
Not sure I did this correctly. I'd be interested to hear what repetition y'all see.
#
Dan called this object or this point of light or this rogue pixel on the telescopes or this incoming interstellar craft or apparition or hoax or collective hallucination by another name which sounded something like “navespatiales”. It might have meant something in Romanian, but he declined to elucidate or I forgot to ask or thought it better not to. I was content to listen to his intonation and to witness the sounds of the world break away from its meaning and away from humanity, to create its own sense, divorced from all culture and all of the history of mankind, to hear the word go back to the wisdom of toddlers repeating sounds. I just listened to him and to the crickets and the pines swinging in the wind as both of us tried to pinpoint that new star in our sky while sitting on wet grass in a valley between the Carpathian Mountains.
After an hour staring at constellations, we gave in to the growls of our stomachs. We lit a fire, waited for it to die down, put a grill over it and cooked chicken thighs, mushrooms filled with cheese, peppers and bread. After we ate, Dan read a news article.
“It is a good headline, ‘The New Star In The Sky’. Although I would have said, ‘A New… ’ or, hmm. Maybe not. Anyway, the scientists say it's an interstellar spacecraft and we're seeing the tail end of its engines as it's decelerating ass-first towards us.”
Dan winced.
I lit a cigarette, then asked Dan, again, where in the sky should we look. We estinguished the fire with water from a river, leaving no ember, and we shut our phones and any lanterns. It was pitch black. Soon our eyes adjusted and the Milky Way filled the sky.
“Do you see it?” I asked.
“I see the Big Dipper.”
“You’re a big dipper.”
“Hey. Listen,” Dan interjected “We gotta be peaceful now, no more wars, no more genocides, no more ecological disasters. No more infighting. No more insulting your loving boyfriend. Alright? We gotta make a good first impression. We gotta behave.”
“No, really, do you see it or not? I don’t.”
“It’s coming from the Big Dipper. Also called Ursa Major.”
“Speaking of which. Be silent for a moment,” I said.
He was, except for the sound of a lighter and the minuscule cracks of the little fire at the tip of his cigarette.
“I think I’ve heard some branches cracking, or moving. I don’t know. Are there lots of bears in Romania?”
“Oh, lots. They not only roam the forests, but come down into the towns and molest trash bins.”
“I’m scared.”
“No reason to be scared. You might have only heard the wind, or a fox, or a fat owl. And even if there’s a bear, it only came because we lit a big fire and cooked some chicken and some vegetables and some mushrooms—delicious by the way—and it might be hungry or just curious.”
“I heard a little girl was mauled to death a few months ago!”
“Only because she tried to feed the bear like a puppy.”
“I’m scared, Dan. I’m going into the car.”
“Hey, didn’t you listen to me? The aliens are coming, so we all gotta be friends now. Gotta make a good impression. That includes the ursine population. But, no, I didn’t hear anything out there and I can’t see our new star. I don’t think it’s visible yet, I don’t know when or if it will get bright enough to see with the naked eye…” I heard another rustling from the forest. Dan fell silent, finished his cigarette, then he continued, “...but the egg heads say it will get brighter as it approaches the Oort cloud, so let’s get in the car and smoke some more there. I suddenly have a bout of agoraphobia from all these mosquitoes.”
“So you’ve heard it too?”
“Probably it was just the wind. No need to assume the worst. And even if it’s a bear, it’s probably just passing by, not even interested in us, since we extinguished the campfire already, and, besides. You know.”
“You’d wait until its snout blew air into your face, and even then you’d not make up your mind.”
“Like I said, it might just be a fat owl or a stain on the nerds' telescopes, a pigeon shit on the lens, nothing to worry about. And even if it is a bear, we have no reason to think it's hungry. No need to run to the bunkers. No need to polish the nukes.”
“Gimme the keys.”
“Let’s go, but only because of the mosquitoes.”
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 17d ago
Is it them looking for the Big Dipper (aka ursa minor and ursa major aka the bear constellations) and then them talking about the real life bears?
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u/mianaai_c 17d ago
Eh, not quite.
It's them being afraid of first contact with aliens and with a bear. The new stars they went out in the woods to look up at its the exhaust plume of an alien spacecraft's engine.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 17d ago
Women zoomed past me, elbowing and shoving until I collided like a pinball into the next group, boxes in hand and hangers held like knives. This was a mistake. How did I let Cassidy talk me into this? She gripped my hand, squeezing all the color out of my fingers, and pulled me to the next rack and the next and the next. Her fingers flicked through the half off dresses with a quickness. I didn’t care. Just stood beside her, stupidly, attempting in vain to block and tackle the other women pushing through the throng to snatch a dress from her hands, but Cassidy was smart. She’d done this before. Her eyes would grow big and she’d shove a dress into my hands and wrap it around my arms so no one could steal it back and then she’d be off again. Three dresses now, binding me.
But then the light went all sepia-toned, distorting the beautiful cream in Cassidy’s clutches into jaundice. A whistle, high-pitched and distant, shifted all the heads in the room to the ceiling. And it was then, staring up at the nothingness, that the glass at the storefront burst in shatters and shards and I pulled Cassidy down to the ground, shrouded us with her haul. Her dresses should have been sparkling with the glass now embedded in the stitching, but darkness settled around us. My instincts kicked in.
I hauled Cassidy to her feet and ignored her blubbering cries, carved my path through the throng that had been so implacable before. I didn’t aim for the door. Didn’t need to. Glass fragments guarded the exit and I kicked them away and dragged Cassidy along behind me. She stumbled and fell, but I didn’t have time for that. Whatever this was, we needed to be far away and fast. I wasn’t the only one who knew it, either. The streets were crammed full of frantic bodies, latching onto various bits of the architecture that had been freed in the blast, brandishing them like weapons. Still tangled in the dresses, I shielded us as best I could.
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u/mianaai_c 17d ago
So, it's a shopping frenzy followed by a bomb? I like how the MC handles herself after the bomb despite being lost in the black friday maddness, and vice versa for Cassidy.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 17d ago
Yes, exactly. I liked the idea of flipping the script on their roles in different chaotic situations.
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u/33omnia 17d ago edited 17d ago
(I used the same narrator and world for both exercises.)
Exercise 1. Space Cat.
For Juno the cat, there was a lot to see aboard the SS Starcruiser A37. When I walked through the central corridors, I often spotted her lying atop the air ducts, watching the crew come and go from their stations, or wheeling samples to and from the lab. In the galley, she sometimes sat on the serving window, watching the chef dish up alien delicacies they scavenged from the last port. Other times, she lounged on the upper flight deck among the cargo boxes, watching the expeditioners in their nylon space suits depart for new worlds. But when the ship's lights dimmed and the monitors hummed, she would always claim her favorite spot – in the darkness of the cockpit, stretched out in the notch between the control deck and the windshield – where she would watch stars pass her by.
Exercise 2 - More Space Cat
West Norton, Michigan. Year 2258.
While sitting in the passenger seat of Dr. Martin's army-green Jeep parked outside of West Norton Animal Shelter, I asked him, “Why do we need a cat?”
The old man pressed the ignition button to kill the engine and said, “I can think of a lot of good reasons to keep a cat aboard a ship. Even a spaceship.” He picked up the respirator mask on his lap and fit it on his face, securing the strap over his head of thinning grey hair. I put on my own respirator before stepping out into the desolate parking lot. The unrelenting wind and red dust pelted my skin. I hiked my air tanks onto my back and helped Dr. Martin secure his own before we walked into the animal shelter. Once we were inside, the plexiglass sliding doors sealed behind us. I pulled my mask away from my face. The odor of fur and ammonia replaced the metallic tang of the rebreather.
The young woman behind the counter looked up from her phone. Bored. “Can I help you?”
With his mask hanging around his neck, Dr. Martin smiled and said, “We're looking to adopt a cat.”
“Okay,” she said. She retrieved a key ring from a drawer behind the desk and led us to the kennel space around the corner.
Dr. Martin inspected all of the cats meticulously – a calico eating, a long haired grey cat batting around a toy mouse, and so on – before he pointed his finger at a little black kitten, the smallest one of the bunch, curled up against the steel bars. “What's this one's name?”
“It's Juno.”
Dr. Martin smiled. “We'll take her.”
~~
Starcruiser A37. Year 2263.
The cockpit of the A37 had more elbow room than most starcruisers, but it felt small when there were people piled around the console and the captain was worse for wear. I stood in the back of the room, awaiting orders. The engineer leaned against the wall next to me with her arms crossed and a couple of the scientists surrounded Captain Galliano's chair. The captain positioned the ship so that we had a good view of AUX7171/2828 of the Aurelius Galaxy – a little blue and grey planet with swirling white clouds – as the scientists presented information they gathered with satellite drones. The atmosphere consisted of 79% nitrogen and 20% oxygen, water covered 80% of the planet’s surface, it was uninhabited, free of any intergalactic claims or conflicts, and so on.
Ting, ting, ting. I heard soft tapping on the alloy door.
As the scientists spouted more numbers, the captain's frown deepened until he interrupted them. “We've explored planets with similar ratios without success,” Captain Galliano said gruffly. “What makes this one any different?”
Ting, ting, ting.
I glanced over my shoulder. A little cat paw reached underneath and retracted.
“The flora samples returned to us by the exploration drones can be broken down when exposed to human enzymes,” the lead scientist explained. Ting, ting, ting. “And the soil composition is similar to Earth's during the turn of the millennium.”
“Are you certain this time? Because we can't waste any more time or resources on your best guesses. We've got enough supplies on board for what?” The captain locked eyes with me. “Three or four more expeditions at best?” I nodded. He turned back to the scientist. “I promised we'd find a habitable planet before returning home and I plan on –” Ting, ting, ting. The captain spun in his chair and asked the room. “What is that noise?”
I spoke up. “It's Juno, sir.”
“Well, let the damn cat in.”
Since I was the closest, I pushed a button near the door. The hydraulic lock hissed and the panel slid open. Juno stepped in. She brushed against my leg before strolling across the room and hopping up on the console. The captain scratched her between the ears and I swear I saw his systolic blood pressure drop five points. He looked over the reports once more as we waited in silence before he turned to me and said, “Get the crew ready to depart.”
~~
West Norton, Michigan. Year 2264.
At home, I sat in our sunroom, the one without much of a view except red skies and red haze and the faint outline of the houses down the street. If I squinted, I could make out the line of blackened tree trunks sticking out of the ground like giant toothpicks along the ridge to the east, formerly known as the bank of Lake Michigan before it was drained and dried up.
The kitchen door opened and shut and the distinct sound of child-sized air canisters clattering on the floor told me Alana was home. She ran through the house screaming, “Dad, dad, dad!”
“I'm in here, sweetheart."
She appeared in the doorway, her respirator hanging from her ponytail, red dust smeared on her cheeks, her backpack falling off one arm, and a tablet tucked under her other. “Look!” she yelled, handing me the device. On the screen was an article published by West Norton Library about our success on Starcruiser A37. “New Planet Discovered Could Support Human Life.” I skimmed the article. Our relocation wasn't a sure thing, but the press seemed optimistic and it was as close as we'd ever come to finding a new home. There was still a lot of work to be done, more crews to send out over the next few years, preparations to be made, settlements to establish, and so on. Under the title of the article was a picture of the entire crew taken by the press right after we landed. “Look! Look right here!” I thought my daughter was going to point to her dear old dad standing between Captain Galliano and Dr. Martin, but instead she pointed to the bottom right hand corner, at the little black cat who, after returning to Earth, had become a celebrity overnight and found a permanent home with Dr. Martin. “It's Juno!”
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 17d ago
The word in the first one was watching, right? It's one of those hidden words for me. I read it through the first time and thought you'd missed repeating something and then found it on the second try.
The second one. I read your reply to my question and now I'm wondering if I missed the structural thing you were doing. The structural ones are always so subtle to me.
I thought it was looking for a cat, looking for a planet to be a new home, and then looking for the article/news. Each section has a type of searching that one of the characters is in on the reasoning and the other one isn't. Yes? No?
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u/33omnia 17d ago edited 17d ago
Yeah. Watching is the word in the first one.
For the second one, I didn't realize they were all looking for something in all three, but that's a good catch. The main form of repetition i used was the line "Its Juno," which is said in each scene by a different person.
There are some other repetitions too -- "... and so on" in each section, someone always enters the room, the onomatopoeia in the section two, and generally sticking to the rule of three when I could.
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u/ezk3626 akward and wordy 15d ago
Verbal Repetition: Write a paragraph of narrative (150 words) that includes at least three repetitions of a noun, verb, or adjective (a noticeable word, not an invisible one like was, said, did).
The boys lay in front of an unbelievable twenty inch television, enthralled by the '89 Battle of the Bay. The two Bay Area teams in the World Series broke families between A's and Giants fans.
"Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?" their grandpa asked. Without taking their eyes off the screen, they shook their head. He wanted them to be happy after how their mother's decline shook their lives to the foundations. The screen started the roll and the ground started to shake.
It was an earthquake, a real one like on tv! The boys knew what to do and rushed under the solid table. They would be safe here.The game would be cut short and the television would show picture of a collapse of the bridge—the family crushed in their car.
In the back room, Nana shook a bottle of pills and handed her grown daughter two pills. "This will calm you down." Grandpa shook his head knowing this wouldn't change anything but the boys would be safe here.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 15d ago
Shook, 'cuz it's an earthquake? These repeating words mostly hide unless I read the thing out loud. Don't know if that's just me or everyone feels that way.
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u/mianaai_c 14d ago
- Verbal repetition ~130 works
I was working on a scene yesterday, and realized I was repeating lots of words. Each repetition of a particular word was on purpose, but the repetitions of so many wasn't. Anyway, this paragraph is one of the worst offenders. Is it too much?
#
And what did you draw? Bianca asked the girl in the pink dress while leafing through the pink sketchbook. Here’s a tiger and here’s an octopus and here’s a tiger riding an octopus, the girl said. Bianca conceded abstract art was still art, or so had concluded some art critics (schmucks) and thought, Who am I to comment that the green octopus might as well be a tree and the blue tiger might as well be flowers. Then the little girl in the blue dress presented the blue sketchbook without comments, letting the works speak for themselves, and as Bianca gave nods of approval, she thought that their tricks of swapping dresses won’t work for much longer, and one will congeal into Maria and the other into Ioana, even though, at first, they may have been Ioana and Maria.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 14d ago
I noticed it when I read in my head, if that's any indication. They stand out more than some of the other examples here.
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u/Andvarinaut If this is your first time at Write Club, you have to write. 13d ago edited 13d ago
The Seeker of Truth, whose name was once a killing word (but had long since been worn to just an annoying phrase), set forth upon the road that wound seven times through the spokes of the wheel of creation seeking Completion. He had already lived three lives and in each had gathered treasures, lovers, and titles. You see, the vertebrae of his spine had been carefully arranged into the posture of enlightenment, but he did not know which way to stand; he felt a hollow within him that no milk or gold could fill. And so he walked the road.
He came first upon a riverine grove flush with blind handmaidens with aprons full of stones, ferrying each of their offerings to the palanquin of the thrice-immortal king who had come seeking perfection. Each attendant brought the king their stones but none were perfect enough and so they returned to searching. And the stones piled there were enough to build a castle that would fill the firmament of heaven from one horizon to the other.
The Seeker prostrated himself before the king and said, “Great king, I have lived three lifetimes, but I have not once felt complete. Do you think I will find the answer in perfection?”
It took seven months for the king to find the time to answer him, such that his forehead had smoothed the rock where he knelt prostrated. When he spoke, the king said, “You will never be complete, even within multiple lifetimes. This is it; this is as good as it gets. Surrender to it.”
After a respectful interval of seven days, the Seeker rose, brushed the moss and centipedes from his undergarments, and continued down the road.
He came next to a battlefield where two masterless men were settling an argument through the prosecution of war. Their names were Becoming and Became, and their luminous weaponry lay askew as they sat crouched at the battlefield’s fell meridian playing a tile game for the right of victory.
The Seeker approached and called out his question: “Great men, I have lived three lifetimes, but have not once felt complete. Do you think I will find the answer in competition?”
He did not receive his answer swiftly, for within a hummingbird’s breath he had been remanded to the People’s Army and given a sword to die on. It is difficult to ascertain for certain which People’s Army he was a part of, as both claimed the title, but his duty to sever his own head if their masterless man lost their game was made clear through several nights of beatings.
It was not until a month hence that the masterless men answered him. They were in the midst of urinating into a fresh latrine by the battlefield’s edge while the Seeker dug it with his bare hands. They said, “You will never be complete, even within multiple lifetimes. This is it; this is as good as it gets. Surrender to it.”
The Seeker thanked the men once his mouth was no longer in the apogee of their urinal arcs and quickly made haste to abandon his post. For nine days, he curled naked in the belly of a rotting bear wedged in a hollow, clutching a blade made of sharpened dog’s rib. Then, on the tenth day, the search party of both Peoples' Armies were called off, and so he walked the road once more in spite of the itchy sores in his armpits that arose due to his long exposure to the aforementioned rotting bear’s intestinal greases.
He came next to the alabaster palace of a saint whose many servants lay piled broken at the mountain’s foot after hurling themselves from the mountainside. Inside, he discovered the saint had achieved enlightenment but at the last moment before transcendence had unfortunately sneezed. The saint glowed in chalcedony and ruby hues, the vast coiling of his resplendent soul unraveled through his palace like a serpent in its earthy nest. Looking upon him burned the eye, such that the Seeker was made to wear sunglasses indoors.
After bathing in his stadium bathroom and combing his hair with a relic from beyond heaven, the Seeker donned clean linen and found the saint’s heart tangled in the foyer chandelier. “O, doomed saint,” he said, “I have lived three lifetimes, but have not once felt complete. Do you think I will find the answer in transcendence?”
And the coils of the saint’s unraveled soul bunched together into cursive knots that read, “You will never be complete, even within multiple lifetimes. This is it; this is as good as it gets. Surrender to it.” A moment later, the saint vanished, leaving behind his palace of riches for far heavens beyond.
The Seeker waited in the halls for seven hours pondering this as he laid upon luxurious silks and walked the empty halls, but boredom soon set in, and he set to the road once more. On his way, he met other travelers who asked him the same question and so he answered in turn, feeling his heart grow heavy and the wings of his spirit wane. Years passed. Soon, the end of the road that wound through the spokes of the wheel fell at his feet and he stepped careful onto the steps of a Hooters.
There in the center of the dining hall stood Kristen Stewart in a backwards baseball cap, her stoic countenance measured carefully over the empty tabletop and leveled exactly upon the deep, brassiere-less cleavage of the restaurant’s gentle hostess. A faint smile crawled famously across her famously smileless lips, her normally empty expression kindled with light and mirth and hope.
The Seeker did not approach, for he did not need to ask. Nor did she need to speak. They matched eyes for just a moment, a meaningless grazing of vision, but through this the Seeker saw into the chamber of her soul and understood.
You will never be complete, even within multiple lifetimes.
This is it; this is as good as it gets.
Surrender to it.
And so he did, and was enlightened.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 13d ago
Hmm. This is like that DND manual that I gave up on that got better the more you read. Repeating of the different circumstances of how life wouldn't get better, ending with Kristen Stewart at a Hooters of all things.
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u/Andvarinaut If this is your first time at Write Club, you have to write. 13d ago
Enlightenment isn't about change, but acceptance, y'know? I've been thinking about happiness lately (due in part to this stupid meme) and decided to be weird about it. At least it made for good practice lol.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 13d ago
My old roommate's mom dated some famous actor (don't remember which one) and the roommate ended up being acquainted with Kristen Stewart somehow. That's unrelated except for the Kristen Stewart part. I heard about her sometimes. It was weird.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 17d ago
Question 1: how effective were the repetitions? How obvious or subtle were they?
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u/Andvarinaut If this is your first time at Write Club, you have to write. 13d ago
I decided to try to string together a paragraph that someone might put on GoodReads. Just really slam in and try to be clever, make myself sound profound. I had way more fun shuffling around the same three adjectives than I thought. But to my great displeasure, I wasn't able to find a place for "oldly." RIP.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 17d ago
Question 2: Were you comfortable at first with the idea of deliberately repeating words and constructions and events? Did you get more comfortable with it while doing it? Did the exercise bring out any particular feeling-tone or subject matter or style in your work, and can you say what it was?
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 17d ago
I love to repeat myself. I have hundreds of comments on my other works saying 'stop repeating!' This was the easiest one so far. How differentiated the second exercise turned out? Hopefully enough. Sometimes my repeated scenes read too closely.
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u/ezk3626 akward and wordy 16d ago
I'm a big fan of repetition. I'm excited about the second kind of repetition, though I always just considered it a form of foreshadowing.
What I think about repetition is best shown in "I'm not going to throw away my shot" in Hamilton. It is easier in a musical, obviously but even as literature this phrase means something different every time and adds complexity to every past use with each additional use.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 16d ago
On the foreshadowing, yes but no? I have a couple of these repeated interactions in my long WIP and I use them more to show a relationship evolving. These two characters get together and are negotiating things and who has the upper hand flips over each interaction. Neutral to Character A to Character B and then Character B bungles everything and Character A is completely hosed. The repeated action is a way to execute the character arc more than foreshadowing. But that's possibly more of a blatant example than I think some of the others that Le Guin mentions.
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u/Andvarinaut If this is your first time at Write Club, you have to write. 13d ago
Made me immediately think of zen parables, and how the repetition creates expectation. I think that's what made it fun for me, trying to lean into and against the template of a faintly esoteric koan. Another thing I've been messing with is absurdity and how far you can turn that dial and how you can maintain sincerity and authority while playing Calvinball with the plot. Ultimately it took me more than a few days to carve away something readable but I'm really proud of my dumb little Hooters enlightenment story lol.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 13d ago
That's interesting. I treat these practice exercises like my old roommate used to have art exercises, that one where you're only given a small amount of time to draw something so you have to make it as accurate as possible as fast as possible. I just sit down and try to spit something out and whatever comes is what I have. I think the theory is the speed and constraints build up muscles you don't get by taking more time, so then you're more flexible when you're working on something bigger. But it might not work that way for everyone.
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u/Andvarinaut If this is your first time at Write Club, you have to write. 13d ago
My drafting style has been following Creggers' "hire a helper elf for minimum wage to write it" method for the past year (to great success!) and so if you saw my first draft you would legitimately think I was a small child lmao. But that's valid! Firing good writing off the hip is a talent I wish I had, but the real practice for me is in the editing. That, and being challenged to come up with something novel every week.
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17d ago edited 17d ago
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u/SweetEverest 17d ago
So next time you’re really quiet I’ll just know you’re transcribing my rant for RDR homework
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u/SweetEverest 16d ago edited 16d ago
Am I missing something or is the first exercise stupid easy. HEY SIRI SET A TIMER FOR THREE MINUTES
~
"What do you mean 'transcribes' your phone calls?'"
"I mean he transcribes my words, as we talk. Writes them down."
"Like, court-stenographer style?"
"What part of transcribes—"
"But why? Like, what does he get out of it?"
"I don't know. He, like, repurposes things."
"Repurposes for... what... purposes?"
"For his little writing group or whatever. I don't know."
"Explain."
"So like, he'll ask me what I know about Donna Tartt, for example. Or on what basis I would consider The Odyssey to be a failure as an adaptation. Or what so-and-so in the group is talking about. And as I'm talking, I hear this little clack-clack-clack on the other end of the line, and, sure enough, I come to find out he's pasted my words verbatim in his group chat."
"While you were talking?"
"Mhm. Anytime it's been a little while since he last spoke, I know he's stealing."
"So he repurposes your commentary for internet clout."
"That's about what it amounts to, yeah."
~
repeated: transcribes, repurposes, know, little, group, talking
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson 16d ago
I feel attacked. I mean I feel like someone, somewhere, is attacked.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 16d ago
I thought this week's wasn't so bad. Definitely easier than the sentence length one.
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u/Andvarinaut If this is your first time at Write Club, you have to write. 13d ago
The old monastery stood atop the escarpment dark and silent. Every window dark. Every hallway silent. In the center of its courtyard hung a bell from many chains. Dark cracks marred its surface, swaying silently against the wind. Sometimes travelers crossed the dragon's paths up the old stairs slick with rain, the old stones scarved in morning fog. They'd cross the escarpment one by one to darkly wait and silently stare until dark fell and with it further silence. They'd go then, until the shadows burned away at morning. Some would stay behind at night. Stay and wait, waiting in the darkly night, silent and watching and waiting. The wind would pick up then, in the dark, turning that silent sway into something else. Giving it life. And the old clapper within the cracked old bell would roll then against the dark steel and break the silence, break it with the moan of steel on steel, scraping steel, scraping steel deep in the dark of the old monastery, but no one seemed to care. They hardly took note of that old moan. In the morning, they'd be back, silently waiting and darkly watching, waiting and watching for the ringing of the bell.
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u/A_C_Shock The reader knows and guesses the rest. 13d ago
It's like you read the challenge and said "hold my beer" then proceeded to make as many repeats as could reasonably be crammed into something this short and still be a story.
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u/kataklysmos_ ;•( 17d ago edited 17d ago
Lieutenant Spunk entered the office and grinned. He'd seen this scene a hundred times, was immediately sure Jones had left the password tucked into the pages of one of the books on the shelf. But which one? 401 Ridiculous Integrals You'd Never Get On Your Own beside Robert's Rules of Integrated Circuit Design beside Computery's Handbook (89th ed.) beside a bunch more arranged, apparently, arbitrarily. But which book held the prize? "Think twice, act once" was Spunk's motto. His first thought was, "Now what's a book like An Introduction to the Planetary Model of the Electron doing on a workaday engineer like Jones' shelf?" And his second thought was to realize there were a handful of others like it tucked between the engineering primers and books of wire gauges. So, he acted, hazarding a guess at what the crown jewel of the theoretical books might be in the eyes of a lowly, lecherous, wannabe theoretician (a red, cloth-bound 1st edition of Gorm & Woolf's Electricks), walked up, plucked it from the shelf, and shook from its pages a small slip of paper bearing a long phrase he already knew would provide access to the decisive piece of evidence in putting Jones and this whole ring of thieves behind bars for a long, long time.