On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, Seventh Messenger wrote:
Notes on this fic:
Despite anything anybody says, this fic is most definitely not a
spin-off. It only looks like that because aliens from planet U-3825 have
secretly altered everyone's brains.
SeventhOne
nanashi96@hotmail.com
http://www.nanashimanga.com
2B or not 2B. That is the question . . . unless you happen to use pen.
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Disclaimers:
To be short.
Everything belongs to everybody those things belong to. My stuff is mine
unless it's someone else's (in this case, Long Ngo's). Hope that's not
confusing.
Revelations 0:1:1
the calm before the storm
There is a small child on a hill in the plains, standing in the tall
grass. It's stormy, though there's no rain, only violent winds that
cause the grass to ripple. It tears at the child's long ragged shirt,
but he doesn't seem to notice.
Present tense prose is very non-traditional, and is very hard to pull off
well. Good luck to you!
He's talking to someone, a specter of a woman.
"What is your name?" she asks.
"My name is in the past, and I dare not think about that which has
been, for the more I remember, the more I want to forget."
"Where are the other people?"
"Where is no one here anymore. Once there were many, but they have
all left for a better place."
"Why are you still here?"
"It is my fate to be here, and I shall fulfill it."
"When will you leave?"
"I shall never. I love this place, and I shall protect that which I
love, else there would be no meaning to what I do."
"Can you live on?"
"I live in the future and the future is unknown. I shall make it so."
"Can I trust you?"
"I have nothing to lie for, nothing to lose."
"Thank you."
With a gust of wind, she blows away like a cloud of smoke before the
child's eyes. The child looks up at the sky.
"I remember your name. I have lost you once, and I shall never lose
you again."
Okay. Here's what I see so far:
The dialogue's cool. I like it. And, as you promised, it's not in script
format. However, the point of prose format is not the dialogu, but the
narrative. The descriptions, when there are descriptions, aren't
detailed. We have a child. He looks at the sky. Okay, that' great. We
have action, but no description.
What color is the sky?
What's the child look like?
Are there clouds in the sky? Stars? The twin suns of Omicron Ceti 6?
What about the spectre woman? What's she look like, other than a spectre
and a woman?
A lot of personality can flow through dialogue. You seem to know this.
And you do a good job. The dialogue is very reminiscent of J. Michael
Strazynski or Chris Claremont before he got really pretentious. You set
up mystery here, some questions that show us a little of the environment,
but there's whole pages of description that seem to just be missing.
Show, don't tell! (It's stupid to say it, I know, but try it, and see if
it makes the world jump out at you)
Chad Yang presents
Revelations
a fanfiction
Layer : 01
Inside a gothic church, a few old ladies listened intently to a
sermon. The speaker is Ikari Gendo, but he's . . . different. His face
is almost . . . kind. Standing at the podium, he smiles as he speaks,
with a sort of a wild gleam in his eyes, a passion that we've never seen
before.
Gothic in what sense?
What do the old ladies do?
And again, the present-tense prose will get you into trouble if you're not
careful. It sounds too much like a script many times, and is used mostly
in first-person narratives. Third-person omni in present-tense is almost
exclusively the domain of the script. I suggest trying past-tense, but
keeping the 3rd person omni perspecive.
". . . you can spend hours, days, even weeks arguing whether miracles
still happen today. In the end, you'll get nowhere, for miracles, like
beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. The question is not whether
miracles still happen. The question is whether or not you believe in Him
enough. For the believer, everything is a miracle. The Lord is the
Creator of this world in which we live, and every bit of this world is
part of the miracle of creation. Those who believe see truth in this,
and are grateful; the grass; the trees; the air. Even the pain. All
these things were created by the Lord to teach us, and little by little,
we become closer to Him. We thank the Lord for his teachings. Amen."
Does Gendo do anything during this. Usually some actions to break up long
bits of speech help things immensely. It paces the sequence with more and
varied pauses. A period makes the reader pasue for a second, a comma for
half a second. Adding an action more accurately recreates a longer pause,
and give insight to the thoughts of a character while he's talking. It'll
tip of a reader to a lying character, or to a nervous one who's telling
the truth. Without actions, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
For example:
". . . you can spend hours, days, even weeks arguing whether miracles
still happen today." Gendo shuffled the pages of his sermon. "In the
end, you'll get nowhere, for miracles," Gendo enunciated the word slowly,
almost like it was foreign. "like beauty, are in the eye of the
beholder." He took a sip of water and cleared his throat. "The question
is not whether miracles still happen. The question is whether or not you
believe in Him enough."
There's a whole subtext created in the descriptions that can supplement
the speech (like the enunciation bit) or counteract it (pausing to take a
drink of water, as if he was very nervous about this sermon). It'll bring
a third dimension to your fic. Really! ^_^
"Amen," returned the mass. The old ladies begin to leave.
Gendo smiles. He gets down from the podium and makes his way to the
office.
There's a girl, a Japanese girl, sitting in an armchair within
Gendo's office, looking at the lunchbox on her lap. You can take a
closer look if you want. She's fifteen, average height. She looks . . .
remarkably similar to Rei. But she's not an albino. She's normal.
Quieter than normal, almost part of the office itself, but still normal.
These descriptions work fine in script mode. But they aren't lyrical.
Many descriptions make use of metaphor, alliteration, the senses, etc. to
get their point across. Oftentimes, descriptions of people are given
through actions and reactions to the environment.
Then again, you can never tell.
If this were a first-person narrative, this line would kick much butt. It
shows the state of the narrator's mind. However, it has no big place in a
3rd person narrative, because usually the narrator tries to stay as
transparent as possible. A man named Dreiser once wrote a book called
"Sister Carrie". His big thing was that he wrote in third person, but he
constantly placed his value system on things, specifically stating what
was right and wrong in the world, juding the actions of the characters,
etc. it made him as a narrator unreliable -- the reader constantly has to
fight through the sermonizing of the narrator to get to the story.
I think I made a point there, but I can't be sure... ^_^
The metallic clank of the doorknob sounds, and the girl looks over to
the door. She appears slightly worried, a bit surprised. Why? We'll know
soon enough.
You do good job of activating your verbs, but you need to vary them, or
find more interesting ones. Sounds is rather flaccid for a verb. Also,
the emotions of your characters can be better shwon through their actions.
Maybe she bites her lip when she's nervous.
What that does (showing action rather than telling emotion) is lets the
reader get to know a character like they would get to know a real person.
A total stranger wouldn't walk up to you and say "I'm nervous." They'd
bite their lip or sigh or yawn or rub their hands together or lick their
lips or whatever. You eventually get to know the person through their
actions. My friend Eric would hum to himself when he was thinking. I
found out later it was because his mom hummed to him when she fed him as a
baby. This is a cool tidbit. It took me months, however, to figure out
what was going on enough to ask him.
Gendo opens the door. Blinks.
"Chie! Why are you here?"
Her expression changes slowly to a nervous smile.
"Hello Daddy! Um . . . You forgot lunch this morning. Mommy asked me
to bring it to you."
She stands up and hands the lunchbox over to him. He takes it with a
smile.
"Thanks, Chie. Hmm . . . isn't today Saturday? Tell your mother I'll
be home early tonight, 'kay?"
"Yes, Daddy."
She walks out, then closes the door enough so that Gendo can only see
her face
"Goodbye, father."
Gendo's smile fades.
"Was that . . . a farewell?"
Toji looks up at the sign, determined.
"Nippon Evangelical Reform Vindication Society. . . . She's here."
"Toji-kun?"
He snaps out of it and turns around.
Right into the girl's face.
He turns beat red and falls over. The girl giggles.
"Hello Toji-kun."
"Ah . . . um . . . Hello . . ."
"Careful, Toji. Next time you might break something."
She reaches out a hand
<Five Years Ago>
Ikari Shinji's standing on the shores of the Tokyo-3 lake.
"Will you come with me?" asks a girl.
"Yes."
<Now>
Two girls lie on the ground in a forest clearing, staring at the
moon.
"It's nice seeing how happy they are . . . Oririel?"
"Yes Chie?"
"I'm not sure who I am anymore. That boy . . . his name was Shinji."
"Yes."
"He's part of me. So is Rei. . . . and this girl with the same name
as I have, Chie . . . Oririel? Did you name me after her?"
"Yes."
"Am I Shinji? Or Rei? Or Chie?"
"You are who you are. Shinji and Rei no longer exists."
" . . . Who am I?"
"What do you think you are?"
Silence.
"Is Shinji still alive?"
"Only if you want him to be."
Another silence.
"Do you want to meet Shinji?"
This conversation made me confused as to who was speaking when. In prose,
be sure to tag who's saying what when every once in a while.
"Meet?"
"Yes. In the place where we're going to, he's still alive."
"He is?"
Oririeled breathed.
"Yes. He is . . . " she whispered.
A boy lies upon the sand, fainted from fatigue.
A shadow crosses him, and oddly unnatural shadow, consisting of a
rectangular box mounted on what looked like a branch of a tree.
Huh? I'm assuming this is a meta-narrative description, like a box that
is put up to show the score of a basketball game. In a prose sotry,
you'll have to find another way to do this. If that's what it is,
anyways.
Time: Unavailable
Name: Oririel
Race: Angel; Archangel
Class: Unlimited
Category: Unlimited
Expiration: None
Notes: Fallen
Somewhere, a redhead sits up, panting hard. She looks around as she
does, slowly taking in her surroundings. A bed in the middle of an empty
white room.
" . . . just . . . a dream . . ."
I'm stopping here. I won't talk about plot, because any plot, if properly
rendered is generally good. And a Ranma-Eva crossover can work. Just
remember that Ranma works on a set of archetypes and pre-determined
reactions. The characters work and are funny because of this. Eva is so
much more about being serious that it'll be a tough call deciding which
elements you want to sacrifice to reach a happy median.
Overall, this is still a script, just not in the format of a script. I
suggest you go back and line-by-line get down and dirty and describe
things. Over-describe. Then, you can trim it. It's easier to trim a
tree than to get it to grow. I guess...
I hope this is more like what you were looking for.
--Matt
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"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both
incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by
twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper." -- Rod Serling
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