Crit request: Shisa's Interview
This is the link for the work Shisa's Interview
"Your mind scares me" -My English Teacher
Crit request: Shisa's Interview
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» Crit request: Shisa's Interview
Summary:
Please check this out. I worked really hard on this
Howdy! Thought I'd drop in and see what's what.
That would be like committing Suicide.
"Suicide" shouldn't be capitalized.
Looking through, that's the only spag related issue to bring up, though I admit that that's one of my lesser strengths.
My general thoughts on the piece are as follows:
This feels very shallow to me. Like it's banking on a proven concept without trying to differentiate itself in some way. The piece doesn't dive into anything meaningful, it just presents a film on the water's surface that suggests a deeper tale. Who is Shisa? I know she's a conspiracy theorist (who might be right? Can't tell.) Who's the interviewer? Who do they work for / what are they in charge of? Why is the leader talking to Shisa? Wouldn't they have better things to do? What's so important about her? What conspiracies is she spreading? What's her message? Some mystery is perfectly fine, there's nothing wrong with that, but having a tale devoid of genuine detail doesn't make for a good mystery.
The ideas that Shisa spouts are extremely common and almost overdone ideas. "Thinking outside society's box," "throw your phone away," "this might all be a figment of our imaginations," and so on and so forth are ideas spread quite commonly these days. A multitude of media and real people have explored these ideas. Am I telling you that you can't engage with these? Absolutely not, working with tried ideas is perfectly fine, but it needs to do something that makes it stand out, something that makes it worth wrestling with the philosophy again. This piece is very short and fails to deliver anything beyond a surface-level spouting of the ideas, never digging any deeper or doing anything unique with them. It feels like the character is just checking off boxes for what makes them an "outside thinker" or whatever, throwing out multiple ideas and queries but never doing anything with them.
As a final comment: I hope you work more at this. None of this is meant to be discouraging or meant to hinder your writing. If you think you're onto something with this piece, then I more then encourage you to keep digging into it as much as you can. Find the depth that this piece needs and write a banger.
Keep up the good work, good luck!
Shisa's Interview Crit — Redux
Calm Down, do you
"Down" shouldn't be capitalized.
Society…It's like a slow poison
You don't capitalized after an ellipsis, it's a part of the same sentence you're just mimicking a pause in speech.
be sure to Look Closer things are not
I'm gonna note that "Look Closer" shouldn't be capitalized, but I'm beginning to suspect more intentionality behind the capitalization which brings up another question: why? Why does the capitalization of certain words (including "suicide" which was capitalized in the previous iteration and I made note of) matter? From back here as a reader, it doesn't make much sense.
Okay, general thoughts. I'll go ahead and tl;dr it: I feel the same as I did before.
The piece hasn't progressed all that much in the areas I outlined before. It still feels like a shallow regurgitation of ideals and there's no intrigue only confusion.
I would also like to add that the addition of full paragraphs of text has made me realize how hard it is to read. I highly recommend adding breaks when switching speakers.
Finally, I'm really confused by the tone Shisa has. It's aggressive at the beginning but suddenly shifts to being extremely amicable around halfway through, why? What changed?
I also still stand by my last statement from the previous one, I don't want this to be discouraging. I also think this may be an issue where I just don't vibe with the piece from a fundamental level, so I encourage you to seek out other critters if possible. I'm happy to keep looking over this piece as it evolves nonetheless.
Sadly the breaks make the format itself look like a entirely blank space without any text
"Your mind scares me" -My English Teacher
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