Wednesday, January 28, 2009
SNOW DAY and Whippoorwill Critique!!
Though I did have some classes today, it is the perfect day to stay at home and snuggle with your computer and blog. For the story that we had to read Whippoorwill, like I kind of got into last time I didn't really enjoy. I guess I saw no real point in the story. The story didn't really have any plot or lead anywhere and neither character were really interesting or made me want to read more. Maybe it's me but I don't believe a stage fright trucker. Besides this there's no real conflict (besides some of his homophobic fears). Also the dialogue felt kind of fake. At points I felt maybe the trucker was a little unstable or slow but I never got a definite feeling about him. There was some good descriptions though. He definitely had some interesting word choices. Maybe if he added some suspense and a dramatic ending it would feel like the story actually went somewhere. It seems like he builds up a whole bunch of suspense and then nothing. To be fair, maybe it just wasn't my kind of story but I didn't enjoy it at all.
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I agree a little with the lack of plot in the story, but I think it's an interesting take on truck drivers. I do agree with the amazing descriptions there were; I really enjoyed those as well.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the plot and the story not seeming to really go anywhere, but I actually felt that the focus was more on the characters than on the actualy climax. I guess it works for some people and not so much for others. I do agree that the ending was dry and the reader was left with nothing. I thought the characters and the dialogue was a little interesting, but once it got to the end it was sort of like...okay...and?
ReplyDeleteI think you've done a good job here at describing your initial and legitimate first responses to "Whipporwill." To be sure you're not alone in your reactions. It's only a four page story, after all, without much in the way of actions or events.
ReplyDeleteIn this class and as a writer I want you to try and look harder, to read more than once, and to QUESTION your responses. The first question to ask (for instance) is, "What might the point of this story be? What might I be missing here?" Or, when you say the dialogue sounds fake, give an example to show what, exactly, you mean (this would certainly be helpful if the writer were present.)
I think, too, that you might extend the author a little more benefit of the doubt. Though there's no big dramatic climax, the story does go somewhere and there is a conflict—namely, the conflict between people's public personas (the "tough truck driver") and their private, inner selves (the same truck driver singing Whipporwill). That conflict, here, is exploded when the hitchhiker accidentally stumbled into the truck driver's inner (private) life. And there is an erotic or homophobic element here, but the real phobia is a fear of intimacy. The story uses the experience of hitchhiking to explore, in microcosm, moments when lives intersect and how delicate lines of intimacy that are drawn and breached between stangers.
Not that the story works 100%, but there is more there, I think, than what you took away from what seems to have been a single reading.