king007 - A Swordsman's Fight - 466 words

[king007]

I originally planned to submit something else. But today while I was strolling on the beach, this scene came to mind so I wanted to try it out instead.
 

I'm going to keep submitting short scenes or stories from now on to improve my writing. And when I'm satisfied with my level, I'll start writing something with a complex plot.
 

How immersed were you while reading this ?

Please focus mainly on the writing part and point out any style/grammar mistakes you find.
 

Thanks a lot!

[Mandamon]

I was somewhat immersed in this.  Good job on getting second person to work.  I wasn't actively thrown out by that, which I usually am.  Mainly I wanted to know more about the person and his/her opponent.  I think you could add a little setting and person description and turn this into a flash fiction.

 

Clench your sword, clench it hard. Your life is your sword. Hold on to it well.

--Actually, you want firm but relaxed grip.  Clenching something leads to tense muscles, slower reaction time, and the possibility to drop the sword.

You might want to do a little research on sword fighting.  You don't give a description of what kind of sword (rapier, broadsword, katana) and the styles are very different.  But there are some basic similarities.

 

Grammar notes below

 

He strifed to be the best

--strove

 

Who shall come on top?

--shall come out on top

 

you’ve know it 

--known

 

and shatter his away

--probably not 'shatter,' unless the sword is breaking.

 

like his has already done

--like his already has.

[king007]

He strifed to be the best

--strove

 

I appreciate your feedback, Mandamon. It's good to know that my text captured someone's attention. And I really do need to do research on swords and other fighting "stuff", thanks for pointing that out.

Aside from that, I'm just going to comment on the small part above.

I looked it over on the internet and apparently "strove" and "strived" are both correct.

Here is a link for that: http://grammarist.com/usage/strove-strived-striven/

And here is a link I also found entertaining: http://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/dived-or-dove-which-is-correct

[AuthorityHellas16]

Hi king,

 

Like Mandamon said, well done on getting second person to work. That's not something I've seen a lot of, and it's very easy to screw up. So very well done there. 

I'm intrigued as to how this second person segment fits into a larger work. I know you're spitballing at the moment, but it would be an interesting exercise to see how much of a coherent story you could write in this style. 
I like the writing itself, but there were a few areas where I thought you could have gotten more out of the words and painted a better picture of what was going on. 

 

- Instead of "his head was there and now it's gone," perhaps say something like "he dodged! He was never that fast." The difference is you're making the movement active, rather than passive, which is much more engrossing. 

- If this were a scene in a novel, I'd be much less accepting of the amount of navel gazing in the scene. Given that the fight would last over a maximum of minutes (if not seconds), I'd struggle to buy that the character had enough mental capacity to fight and wax philosophical at the same time. The one character I've seen pull that off is Deadpool, and a) it's played strictly for laughs and he's completely nuts. Always be careful where you put your self-reflection sequences. 

 

Finally, if you're interested in writing exercises, you should check out the Writing Excuses podcast (apologies if you already have) and try and tackle some of the "homework" they give after every podcast. Some of the exercises are really thought-provoking and challenging. 

 

All in all, a good submission! Keep writing!

[rdpulfer]

- I was immersed in the prose quite a lot. It definitely kept me interested.

 

- The lack of setting was a drawback. Okay, the subject has a sword. And he's fighting someone else with a sword. I understand the narrative was purposely vague at points, but building up the setting could work to further immerse your reader.

 

- I also never felt like the outcome was in question. There felt like there was only one-two paragraphs of solid action.And then he won. As a result, it felt anti-climatic.

 

- Just a thought, but it might have proved more suspenseful if the subject lost the combat. This might be another writing exercise for you - write the same scene from the perspective of the loser. What was he thinking and how was his thoughts different? 

[Shrike76]

There's not much story to critique so I'll skip that and focus on the language, since that's what you asked for.

 

In general this is pretty clean. I think you've more or less made the second person work (I tried it in a story once. It sucked and I never felt like it was doing what I wanted), and the general use of shorter sentences, as they represent shorter thoughts, works well for this sort of thing where you're depicting someone concentrating hard on a particular task. Also, short sentences keep the pace high, which is good for a fight scene. I was interested most of the time, but I can't say I was immersed because it was so short and there were a lot of ways where you lost my attention, as detailed below.

 

Anything that doesn't immediately focus on the action at hand (including the setting and the opponent) takes away from the tenseness and the effectiveness of the scene. You don't have to cut it all out, but you don't want to present something interesting and have the reader want to skim past what they consider to be "the boring bits". For me, the entire paragraph that starts with "Who said this was going to be easy..." was an example of this. He's in the middle of a sword fight, he shouldn't be dwelling on his opponent's motivations. In a longer story you'll want to characterize the fighter and his opponent, but not in something like this.

Same thing for the paragraph near the end that starts with "Alright then, don't hesitate. You've practiced this..." - That's a lot of thinking for the amount of time it takes for a sword to complete an arc. Don't tell me he's practiced it, show me his body making the move before his mind tells it to BECAUSE he's practiced it so often.

 

When he defeats his opponent, is the other man dead? You describe it in a fairly final manner, but you didn't describe it earlier as a battle to the death. I'd expected the POV character to be in a different mindset if his life was on the line rather than simply a trophy of some sort.

 

There's a few places where you pulled your descriptions short and I would have liked to see them fleshed out a bit.

 1)  "Examine your surroundings" - Show them to us. Or show us some small important thing which the swordsman notices, and that he/she thinks can be used to their advantage or to their opponent's detriment. Show us the crowd, and describe the opponent, at least a little bit. I wasn't sure if this was a longsword tourney, or a fencing duel, or a gladiatorial bout, or something else entirely.

2) The opponent being defeated. A bit more description of the final blow landing and the opponent dropping would have been good.

3) You never mentioned until the very end that they were wearing armour. That affects how nimble he is, and he should feel its weight.

 

For your response to Mandamon's comment: As a native speaker, strove sounds far better to me than strived. But whichever of those you prefer, "strifed" is still wrong.

 

All in all a good effort. Keep up the hard work!

Edited January 27, 2016 by Shrike76

[Robinski]

Interesting piece, a nice idea, but I'm not sure I ever quite felt immersed in it. Not knowing anything about the participants or what is at stake really, it’s hard to invest in the outcome of the bout.

 

Also, there’s no great threat to the protagonist. Using the parlance of Writing Excuses, things don’t ‘get worse’ for the protagonist before he wins out. I appreciate it’s a very short piece, but I think you still need to have an eye on story structure to generate tension and conflict.

 

Another thing occurs to me, which is that there are no surprises of twists. They’re not mandatory, of course, but I would think it was advisable to use as may ‘tricks’ as possible to make such a short piece memorable. In the end, the arc of this piece seems safe and predictable.

 

In terms of the language, I thought it was an improvement on your last submission, still with the odd issue that others have noted, but a step forward, I thought.

 

Glad you submitted something a bit different. We don’t get a lot of flash fiction round these parts.

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

“His head was there and now it’s not.” – my first thought was he had decapitated the enemy.

 

“and shatter his away” – suggestion, more direct and less awkward of phrasing.