: Re: Is this stylized writing successful or gimmicky? This is a ~3000-word piece, with deliberately stylized writing. Is the style of this piece successful or gimmicky? Does it read smooth or choppy?

@Cody1607638

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From the opening, the style feels distinctly noir-ish to me. Short, choppy sentences; curt tone; detached musings about humanity - I can just imagine a hard-boiled private detective narrating the first couple of paragraphs.

I suspect that this is, to some extent, intentional - that you wanted to evoke the voice of someone detached and curt; that you want the reader to feel awash in the narrator's rapid stream of thought. That being said, I think the style choice has significant problems as well.

The noir tone is so strong, I was frankly astonished when the narrator turned out to be a teenager. Whether or not you make the specific association with noir that I feel, this style feels entirely out of place as a teenager's viewpoint. It's a rare teenager that has anything approaching the vocabulary on display here, and nobody has this type of phrasing - opaque and impossibly bombastic (e.g. this line - He was looking down at the cars, but not at their metal chassis. He was concerned with their existence, and their heavy weight in our perception of time. - what teenager speaks that way?).

The style leans too heavily on melodramatic phrasing. If I've already begun comparing this to noir, I'll continue - the typical tough, curt detective uses noir-type writing to seem nonchalant and collected. They crack dry jokes about crime, violence, drinking. That means they take the choppy sentences and use them as punchlines - if not for actual humor, the for sharp contrast or to make a painful point. A random sample from Raymond Chandler:

I was as empty of life as a scarecrow's pockets. I went out to the kitchenette and drank two cups of black coffee. You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick.

The lines are short and choppy, like yours, but what they do is build up to a punch - which is still delivered deadpan. That's a tough skill to learn! But in the meantime, you've gone for melodrama, which is really, really hard to take seriously. Some examples from your piece include:

This is how his story began. This is how his story ended.
Why is everyone letting themselves be so blind to the truth?
Why is no one grasping the present? What are they avoiding?

These are all lines which, I think, are trying to add weight and import to the piece. Unfortunately, they're not very convincing, because you haven't done much (at this point in the story) to prop them up with characters or situations we understand clearly and find compelling. For example, when the narrator bemoans "everyone being blind to the truth," we haven't yet seen anybody being blind to the truth, or what the truth may be, or why the narrator feels he sees something other people don't. So he's got this deep complaint, but the reader isn't with him on his complaining - it just seems melodramatic.

IMHO, the total effect takes the style from "curt and introspective" into "disjointed, deliberately oblique, and self-important." That's a reasonable point to reach as a writer experimenting with style, but for the reader, it's not so fun...

I found that for me, most of this piece is downright confusing. I think you're intentionally being disjointed, giving us a bit of detail from here, a bit from there, not showing us everything at once... but I don't feel you've grounded your work enough to take that kind of hopping about. For example, at The screen went dark, and he visited the episode at his house earlier that day, you've shifted into a flashback before anything has occurred in the timeframe you've chosen to start from. You can tease readers with a mosaic of snippets, but for that to work effectively, you must know what your hook is - why you expect your reader to care enough to read past the first page. This piece deliberately hides what it's about until near the end - the style you've chosen makes it difficult to get interested and read that far.

Lastly, as others have discussed, you make many POV swaps, shifting from the narrator to his mother and to Emily. These kinds of shifts can be very disconcerting; I'm wondering if that was intentional on your part - it seems like it might be; switching POV as suddenly as you switch subjects from line to line. Assuming this is an element you'd like to keep, I think it would be nice have the different POV's use somewhat different styles of narration; at the moment they all speak and sound very much alike - even if their content is different. Also, the narrative is so dominated by the narrator that the shifts seem more like brief slips than intentional departures. Perhaps if the piece was more balanced between its various POVs, you could achieve a similar effect, but be less confusing and more a sense of skipping back and forth between known quantities.

In conclusion, my sense is that the style here is quite gimmicky. Definitely choppy, but I see that as being the intent. Style is very difficult to separate from content; the same style might work much better with more appropriate content or with different detail, but in the case presented, I felt the style was distracting and more decorative than I enjoy.

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