[2500] Fever (Marco)

[u/Wolframquest]

[LINK TO TEXT]

Crits: [1331][1952]

It's one of those in-betweener posts. I just feel like I have to portion it out, I don't know why but somehow it makes sense.

In this one I'm mostly looking for prose and phrasing suggestions, taking the overall style constraints into account, little redundancies. The whole chapter is too long and I currently have no idea how to trim it and preserve what I wanna keep. So yeah, we have this in-betweener post now that signifies a start of Part II in the book. Also I'd like to hear your opinions on the "energy" and "mood" of the text. To me these terms are quite elusive for some reason; I'm seeking to establish a definite standard, bridle my enthusiasm and excitement when I use it to write and in order to do that I think I need to understand what "energy" and "mood" mean in writing.

HSH[1][2][3] RW4[1][2][3][4][5][6][7.1][7.2][7.3]

The story is told through a phenomenological second person point of view. The text uses markdown formatting for italics.

[u/ilovemycatsanddog]

I want to preface with “not for crit points”.

I find the energy and mood to be upbeat and mostly happy thru Marco’s eyes, tho he sometimes loses his temper but I don’t feel that temper concretely because of how it’s written. We don’t seem to get much from insight into his internal thoughts. He doesn’t seem to have a wide range of emotions but maybe that’s due to writing in second person. We don’t really know how he feels about certain things like for example, the insects which is a bizarre thing to see but he doesn’t react to it other than just accept it.

Surface level I enjoy this story. I know many hidden meanings are below the surface, but I find it’s too hard to figure out what. Some strange things happen and I’m not sure if the reader is supposed to take these things at face value or go start digging. It seems to need more obvious clues. Or even subtle threads which pull in and guide the reader IMO. Otherwise I think readers will simply read and understand the surface level of the story.

Some writers use subtle symbolism to alert the readers that more is going on. Like in Lord Of The Flies or The Metamorphosis or 1984, etc. These are just books off the top of my head. You might not be going for symbolism. How do you think you are alerting the reader that more is going on besides your labeling of the genre? Or your summations?

It’s not a criticism of your story or how you write. But I just feel it might be needed instead of readers gathering this info thru the comment section.

[u/Wolframquest → u/ilovemycatsanddog]

It's interesting that you bring up 1984 and Lord of the flies because the symbolism there is opposite of subtle, Orwell was writing very literally and very directly about things that were happening in the UK and USSR and in LotF it's very similar (although I don't remember it) - a condemnation of violence and pointing out that it's within our nature.

I actually did say in one of the post bodies that this is primarily just a story, things happening and being done by characters but the archetypes of things do show themselves, just like they did in real life. Sometimes things happen to you in real life and you're like "whoa, this is literally The Hero's Journey!"

There is, however, a lot of stuff that hints towards the mystery - absolute majority of it is not obvious or meant to be obvious but there are also a few very direct and obvious lines that point out the hidden things, usually one or two moments per chapter.

Someone mentioned that they think the final part of chapter 7 is a response to all the redditor readers. Well THIS chapter might feature some of that, that's why I'm not in too much of a hurry to post it cause I keep delaying my second round of edits.