Lets get right in. I'm already a day late and a dollar short

opening remarks:

I had a lot of problems with this piece, if it were a car I would look at you and say, it doesn't run. As writing I would say the same thing.  It doesn't work for me.

I don't know what genre I'm in. Is this horror? Cozy romance? It could legit be either. That's a huge problem. I should be able to nail down the genre.

I'm not even 100% sure of the format. Is this like an epistolary minus the epistle format? I should not be asking this question.

CHaracter:

Lucy: Here's my biggest problem: Lucy doesn't do, want or need ANYTHING. I want her to be driven to do things, and feel things. She is entirely a passive observer. This is the biggest problem. For real. Make Lucy a 3d human, and 99% other the other stuff will dissolve I bet.

Mr \*: What is this business? cut this crap out. Or genuinely make it creepy. Go all curious george and make him a descriptor, the man with the yellow hat. Or the man with blood un

Hold on, I’ll review this tonight. I’d love a link where I can French kiss the prose with line edits and not ruin it for people behind me

Thank you very much for your feedback! I had a read of the story you posted and really liked it, so I'll definitely be taking your suggestions on board.

Hi! This is my first time doing a critique here. I will try to be as detailed as I can and do my best to offer helpful advice!

FYI, when I scoured through the story, I was more focused on the structure, plot and tone, rather than the grammar or wording. I did leave some comments in the Google Docs document.

As I started reading the first paragraph, I felt a bit thrown off balance. You might consider grounding the reader a bit more, give them a sense of the surroundings through Lucy’s eyes. For example – Lucy can walk by the barn first. When she sees people instead of an empty barn, her curiosity spikes. She draws closer to the commotion, and then discover that a calving is happening. This would help me experience the scene through the main character’s eyes.

In the next paragraph, to make the tone stronger, you could directly say “Its round black eyes seemed to look into Lucy’s own, no matter how she positioned herself in the barn doorway”.

Then when you’re describing the two men, I

You definitely were not. I just about lost my mind by the time I read the last line.

Thank god it wasn’t just me. I mean I’m a linguistic productivist, but holy hell, there’s a limit

Thanks for the advice man.

There’s a lot of stuff to unpack in here and I’m not sure I understand 100% of what you’re saying, but you said some really nice things so that’s always appreciated.

I feel like I'd need to review a longer piece to get my hand on this one, so praiseworthy do I think you immediately. I do need to see you're building a theme. I am also left without a taste or touch of your theme. I don't know if your schrodinger's calf was alive or dead, but I also don't like thinking I'll be suprised when I finally know the answer. Its like being the only one in the group without secret knowledge. ...and I don't want to be left out somemore.

I think if I left this here, I'd lose my concerns about adult concerns. Far from falling prey to a pack of them, I'm afraid you will fall prey to an extremism to them. I fear you will fall into a wobbling farce of weighted concerns until her quivering busom is the only leg shaking because nobody had two braincells throwing arcs at the animal of their rents to pay.

If I left this here, I would lose my concerns about claims. You are a grandly celebratable writer in all but one aspect, the claim you place on your reader has the a

Hey, thanks for the feedback - really appreciated. 
1. You are right in that the prose is quite inconsistent in this chapter, and that’s because I was trying to keep it somewhat consistent with later chapters in which I tried to use more of a Woolf style stream of conscious. (That sounds super pretentious, apologies). Clearly I need to have a deeper think about how I want to do this bit. 
3. Yeah you picked up on what I thought was the weakest link in this chapter by far. I’m kind of torn between attempting a Kentish dialect for the guy or just trying to keep it classy, and I think I fail at both. Your advice to read it out loud is superbly helpful though! (Even if it did make me cringe a bit)

Thank you!

Hey there,

I had a read of your piece. And then a re-read and then another. I'll try answer directly to your queries and leave some of my comments to the end.

1. To be honest, I caught a whiff of what you were trying to achieve with the prose but it never quite got there or reached us as a reader. 
   1. One of the main problems I felt was that you went out of your way to point out that this was forcibly a third person account but at times you singled out Lucy and the narrative almost felt like Lucy addressing herself in the third person For example: *"Sweating, and rotund, the cow lowed and strained against the metal retainer. It had, Lucy thought, very round black eyes, and the effect of these round black eyes was such that they seemed to look directly into Lucy’s own, no matter how she positioned herself in the barn doorway."* Here the way the sentence unravels leaves us wondering with hint of what I mentioned above.  
This could have been better as: *"Sweating, and rotund, the co

Ok, thank you for taking the time to explain yourself so thoroughly. Lots of stuff for me to work on here.

>What do you mean exactly by the prose is on life support? Obviously this is quite a concerning sentence to hear and I didn’t fully understand what you meant by it. Is my grammar/sentence structure off completely? Is it just that you didn’t connect with it?

Sorry, I was being melodramatic and it seems to have distracted from my specific critiques. The use of hesitant and passive language combined with repeated/unusual phrases makes it a disconnecting read. Early example with problems bolded:

Two men stood by the cow’s hindquarters, pontificating. Lucy did not know it, but the shorter of these, was Mr \*, the vet, and he had come **all the way from Rochester to see this cow**. The larger man was Mr. Bell,; and it was he that had called Mr \* **all the way from Rochester to see his cow.**

This should be cleaned up. I also did not mention this in the original comment because I went through it in the Google Doc, but believe I count only two out of five semicolons used correctly. The gra

Hey, thanks for putting so much thought into your critique! 

What do you mean exactly by the prose is on life support? Obviously this is quite a concerning sentence to hear and I didn’t fully understand what you meant by it. Is my grammar/sentence structure off completely? Is it just that you didn’t connect with it? 

I definitely think you have a point with the characters appearing lifeless, and I suppose this is a result of me not trying hard enough with the scene, so I will be doing a bit of re-writing dialogue. 

In terms of adding in adverbs like ‘angrily’, I am really unwilling to do that, because literally every bit of writing advice ever suggests not using -ly adverbs. Perhaps I just don’t have a good eye for when to use them, but I think there are other major issues with the piece I can clear up first. 

Thank you for your time! It was really invaluable to hear feedback.

Hi! First time critiquing on here... tried my best to be thorough in the way I would usually critique a work. I apologize if I mess anything up/sound like a harsh critic! I do want to say that I went through mostly for grammar/spelling/assorted syntax on the Google Doc, but will try to keep my criticism pointed towards your three questions (also only counting my responses below for word count):

1. The prose is on life support. Exposition is on line 3 and I can't tell them to hold any longer. I see two avenues to address this: 1) develop characters inside-out (exploring their thoughts) or 2) develop them in relation to one another, through dialogue. Quite a missed opportunity for Lucy and the "dirty man" to reveal their personalities to each other. It doesn't *seem* as though they're exactly trying to hide anything, but rather that they... don't have personalities.I don't need to tell you that this is a problem for the reader. In what/whom could I be investing? The cow? Lucy? Something

One mark that helps move a story along is a well-defined and described character. This comes from the reader clearly knowing what the character thinks (Snape is always a little pissy, so when a pissy thing happens, the reader knows they're attention is on Snape) or what the character does/how they move (Ahab has the peg leg, so he's constantly using it, it thunks along the ground).

Your story has plenty of interesting parts, but tracking the characters is like watching two white boards talk back and forth. The dirty man. What does he smell like. Does he have cow shit in his mustache whiskers. The girl with the letter, is she wearing a clean dress sticking out like a sore thumb? With this lacking in the story, it's hard to build that image in my head of who, what, and where I am. 

My favorite part is the description of the cow new born. It gives the story the payoff of having gotten through the bits leading up to it.

With that in mind, I am genuinely interested in why this girl poppe

 Hey,

This is a potential beginning for a much longer piece. I would really appreciate any and all feedback, specifically:

1. How is the prose/narrative voice?
2. Does it come across as a bit heavy-handed/overblown?
3. How is the dialogue?

Even if you don't fancy doing a whole critique, just one or two sentences would still be super valuable to me. Thank you for your time.

Link: [\[1200\]](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PAwCyMfN8xvY_1ZuXL2F1dJuu59-vM2G_HiFgPOdivQ/edit?usp=sharing)

Critique: [\[1300\]](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/n54fm0/1311_something_different_the_boy_who_follows/gx6x6ta/?context=3)

[1200] The Disappeared