The Grand Musician
A prose I wrote a while back, touched up for posting. It's my second post here, still not sure what works and what doesn't, so any suggestions and opinions are appreciated!
The Grand Musician
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» The Grand Musician
Summary:
seeking critique
Alrighty, let's take a peek.
Suggestions & Grammar
anything out that is close to being legible
The glare of those "lights" from the pitch-black sky
It was not reflective but not black, not transparent but not white
This sentence doesn't make a lot of sense. A black surface can be reflective, and surfaces of other colors can be non-reflective, and transparency and the color white have nothing to do with each other either. I suggest rewording this a little.
Did not even think of touching it with my hand
they had no shadows
was also intriguing
but could be generally described as potteries
in a manner I simply cannot picture, but could somehow imagine
Kind of minor, but imagining and picturing something is pretty much the exact same thing, so this doesn't make a lot of sense either.
that can be related to experiences. But they were more like
Change period into a comma and decapitalize but.
or if it only took
that all music exists
that music was usually preserved
Overall Thoughts
So, this is interesting. There is definitely some pretty great imagery here, but I feel like there are vital pieces of information missing. For one, you never explain what a "manifold" or a "stack" is, or why exactly the protag is travelling in this space and what they are trying to learn, which makes this kind of confusing because the reader is lacking context.
Your descriptions are pretty good (aside from occasional confusing sentences), but the picture doesn't feel complete. You picture a lot of specifics, like the floor, the statues and the clothing of the musician, but you don't really touch on the general things. Like, for example:
I realized that the musician was in the first stack when my mentor led me up the tall spiral from the central structure square, a stack I have never entered before. As soon as we arrived, its defining characteristic immediately set it apart from the rest of the manifold. The ground, or floor, was even more perfect than the already flawless crystal surface I just walked on.
You mention a spiral and a central square, but I have no idea what there is outside of those things, or what they look like. Then you tell me that the ground in this new area sets it apart from the rest of the manifold, but that doesn't mean anything to the reader, because they don't know what a manifold is, or what it looks like, so they don't have anything to compare this new information to. You also mention a crystal surface, but you mention it retroactively about a location that the story has already moved away from, so that information doesn't help in creating imagery.
Overall, there are a lot of things that I like about this on a conceptual level. In practice, there are a lot of gaps. However, I do think that if you manage to fill those gaps, by making the imagery more complete and by clearing some confusion, then this could be really good.
Thank you for the reply! Your suggestions are really on point. I wrote this as a response to a prompt about music, so I mainly focused on that side of the story. I didn't realize how much stuff is lacking in order for the reader, who obviously cannot read my mind, to get a complete picture of the narrative.
I do have an image of the environments of different spaces visited in the story, and I will add them in. But I haven't got any specific ideas on what the protag and the mentor are like, why the protag went to learn these things, and so on. So I will continue to work on that. Do you have any ideas? I'm bad at writing characters, and I think some suggestions might help me out a bit. Of course, I'm not planning on copy-pasting your idea straight into the story.
Thank you again for your help!
Hmm… well since the theme here is music, try to think of what kinds of supernatural spins you could put on music. It would have to be something specific to this place they are visiting. The Grand Musician seems to be doing something very specific with those statues. Maybe it could be about that or something related to that? The protag also has that experience with the memories/experiences flooding his mind at one point, does that have fundamental effect on his mind and does he get something out of it?
That's a few things to maybe think about.
/forum/t-13407282/the-grand-musician#post-