Monday, January 21, 2013

Critique on "One Night: 750 Words and Then Some"



Sara Angela Rodriguez
A415-002/Chambers
Student Critique/ One Night: 750 Words and Then Some
21 January 2013

I really liked your work because it seemed like it was very stream of conscious. I assumed that there was only one person speaking throughout the entire piece, well not necessarily speaking, but transcribing. I felt that the first paragraph, the only one that seems to have any definite structure, is an introduction to a night of typing. The whole piece, I thought, was a conversation that you were typing as you heard it. But, there were some instances where I felt that a few key images could be teased out. One example of this is when you/the narrator/the typist mentions moving in with Joaquin after having a fight with “your husband”: there is a whole story written into this one sentence and I believe that if it were explained more the piece would be more solid. This isn’t the only instance where this occurs: the “whole mermaid and Muslim thing”, the voices inside the parenthesis, the countdown of words, and the sentimental story at the end are all images/concepts that can be focused, expanded, and explained in greater detail (I wish you would expand on these because they seem so interesting and you only mention them in passing. Though, now that I think about it that might be the intention of your work.) I also think that you could make the piece a lot better by clarifying who is talking, how many people are talking, and how much time has passed from one big scene to another. (There are a lot of time where the narrator/typist/you say that a lot of time has passed and you have written no words but I feel that it would be more definite, more focused, if the audience knew it had been four hours since you wrote because something, or someone, got in your way. But, that’s just a suggestion.) I really enjoyed reading your work and I look forward to your next piece.

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