May 2021 Madness Round

[morbane]

Madness will happen on this post and in its comments. Thanks for playing!

Getting concrit - Requesting Now Closed
Ask for concrit by replying to this post (until the end of May 31 - NOW PAST). Anyone's welcome, whether or not you just took part in the April round. If you did sign up, you're welcome to ask for concrit on the same or different pieces, or ask for responses to more specific or different questions or the same ones. Concrit is not guaranteed.

Please include:

• How you want to receive feedback - ie, by reply to your own comment, by posting a review where the work is published (AO3, ff.net, LJ...), or by another means. (Note: comments are not screened on this post, so if you post a contact detail, anyone can see it.)
• Any specific questions you want concrit-givers to focus on, and what level of bluntness you prefer, if relevant
• Which works you want feedback on, and if any of your works are "safe" or should be skipped over.
• What fandoms and content, roughly, your works contain - especially if asking for feedback on just a few pieces.

You can comment asking for concrit until the end of May 31 - NOW PAST in your time zone.

It's okay to be more specific about the kind of concrit you want in Madness than in a normal round. You might not get anything, but feel free to ask.

Please feel free to leave constructive criticism for those who have requested it in comments!

General feedback

If you have thoughts on this community's events or the April 2021 round, please leave your thoughts on the previous post, which is a feedback post.

If you are willing to provide feedback on the feedback you get - "Yes, this was what I was looking for / I was surprised you focused on this aspect / Actually, that wasn't quite what I was asking / etc" - consider saying so. Please be constructive in these replies as well.

If you don't want any more concrit, reply to your own comment to say so.

Comments

[eglantiere]

I read Over Grass and Over Stone and The Bottom Half of the Hourglass, and since I've been alerted by your question, I did pay attention to the descriptions, and for both stories there practically were no descriptions at all. Both stories were dialogue and action, practically without set pieces - it's especially noticeable in the Big Hero 6 fic, where there are several 'look' verbs - Hiro looks at the hospital and it 'looks the same,' Honey Lemon does her chemical stuff but it's descripted in broadest possible terms.

But at the same time: if you didn't mention your descriptions to your request, I think I wouldn't have paid attention to the lack of them? You have pastiche/voice down for the Ranger fic, and a lovely emotional tone to it; the BH6 fic moves along briskly, and evokes the mood of canon very well while keeping the canon divergence nice and interesting. I don't know if your style would work for something like original works, where the reader needs to have something sensory to ping off; but for fic it more or less works out. I read Tolkien and I've seen BH6; I know how things look and how characters look, and I don't need additional information that much.

(I do prefer more descriptive prose when I'm reading for myself! But I indeed thought this was a stylistic choice of 'just the ways things go sometimes.')

Hope this was helpful!

[lirin_lirilla]

Thanks so much, this was super helpful! It sounds like (at least for you; I probably shouldn't assume this across the board on only one data point) it's about how I figured and kind of hoped, where at least the lack of description doesn't jump out at the reader. (And if I do write original works, I'll know that's something to keep an eye on and try to push against my usual instincts a bit more.)

And thanks for your notes on what works well in the fics as well—those compliments were nice to hear. :-)