Opinions / Criticism on Dialogue

[ekke_287]

Hi all, I thought I'd share this with you all, it's an initial draft for the introduction of a story I'm planning to write. I'm hoping you can give me some feedback as at the moment I'm free writing. Anyway here it is:

 

[edit - forgot to mention, it's set far in the future, is very negative and doesn't reflect personal opinion]

 

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A street. A bar. A club. A bed. Another day. Another day walking the same old streets, and seeing the same faces walking past. The same, miserable people who are doing they're own version of my boredom on a daily basis. Rain. Cold. Work.

 

The headlines in the offy show a story about a father who has impregnated his teenage daughter, and the sting burns me inside. The same sting, that's plagued me for as long as I can recall.

 

School. Standing by and watching the class retard being mentally tortured by the ******** in burberry, the sting growing in my veins, willing me to act but being over-ridden by my common sense that intervention will result in being targeted. I'd like to say this story has a happy ending, and that the victim became a stronger person for enduring, but that only happens on TV. He hung himself with his shoelaces. His bullies **** on his headstone after a night on the razz.

 

The sting has plagued my thoughts, made my life a misery but kept me alive and bruise free. Fearing pain is a sign of weakness. I don't see it that way. I could help people, and I could end up a victim myself. Keep your head down and your feet moving. Someone else's problem is someone else's.

 

I've experienced pain all my life. I've wanted to change, to meet someone and settle down. Start a family of my own in a safe neighbourhood. That's a pipe-dream. There are no safe neighbourhoods in this city.

 

Sheffield. The **** pot of Britain. It could be worse, but it could be better. People have no respect for each other. They'd rather stick a gun in your face than say good morning. Crime rates are up, police fatalities are up, prisons are over populated and there's no fear of justice. A life of crime is an easier option than an honest career. The government targets people like me, who work hard and keep their head down because they know they more likely to respond to a threat than thos who don't give a ****.

 

Life isn't bad. It's a cycle. The sting never leaves me, sometimes welling up in my throat and leaving me unable to control my mind. I swallow it back down with a drag on a smoke, and a stiff whiskey. It never leaves. Not fully.

 

Something in my life keeps me sane, that someone who cares for me as much as I do her. Someone whose voice instills a sense of hope in my being. Her love plagues my mind, making the sting writhe inside me at the smile on my face. I think about her every day.

 

I think about her today, and the spat we had at the weekend. The words said in the heat of the moment cycling over and over. We made up but I can't forget. I want to tell her that I'm sorry, and that I love her but I can't. There's too many reasons, and too many things said. I need her to know that she is perfect too.

 

These thoughts continue as I reach the roundabout close to my building. Five minutes away from my personal prison. I step into the road, my mind racing with paranoia and Billy Talent blasting my ear drums.

 

I never see the car.

 

And everything is black.

[coyleys]

Hi ekke, and thanks for sharing your intro.

I have to agree with you, it is a very negative intro, insomuch as if it was the synopsis to a book I would put it back on the shelf, sorry, a bit too much doom and gloom for me.

Unfortunately it’s probably reality for a lot of folk and what those folk don’t want is to be reminded of the truth.

I find that people read books to escape their reality. Your writing is good, so why not try a different approach.

[Tallyman]

Hi Ekke

 

Well, you couldn't be accused of writing an upbeat introduction!

 

Like Coyleys, I think your writing is good. Even though I really didn't take to the content, I found myself reading it all the way through, so in that sense it hooked me. Then again, it was short, so I'm not sure how much longer I could have remained hooked by something so unrelentingly depressing.

 

Your sentences are short, almost staccato. It reminds me of a kind of Raymond Chandler, but this time without the humour to balance the grim circumstances his characters find themselves in.

 

I get the feeling that something will change as a result of the collision at the end, so in a way it's difficult to comment further. Perhaps one thing I will say - and this may be completely off course - is this:

 

You've presented one viewpoint of the world - that of your main, first person character. It could be a biased one, or a false one. Your character could be mad, deluded, unreliable. If your setting of the world in this introduction is key to what happens after the car hits, you need to ask yourself whether you're right to have a one-person view of the world or whether you need to establish it as being a fair view of the current situation.

 

As usual, please feel free to ignore me completely