I heard the sound of the helicopter. It never ceased. I entertained the possibility of the descending machine never ceasing. By god, it never did. My pupils widened; I felt them swallow the spectacle of my collapsing ceiling.


I heard the helicopter. I entertained the thought that the sound might not cease... And by god, it never did. My pupils widened; swallowing the spectacle of my collapsing ceiling.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Feb 7 2010, 4:54 pm by eprec.

'the sound of' is wordy. I would just say 'I heard the helicopter', personally. 'the descending machine' is really wordy. Just use 'it' or repeat 'helicopter'. I like the last two sentences best. Also the 2nd and 3rd sentences work a little awkwardly. The repetition of 'cease' doesn't really work. And the second sentence should be something more like 'It wasn't ceasing/stopping' (the 'never' you have there should be saved for the 4th sentence's use - otherwise it doesn't make sense). Or you could change it up and just say something like "Continually." for the second sentence.

I liked this - it was good/interesting.

I heard the helicopter. Continually. I entertained the thought that it might never cease . . . And by god, it never did. My pupils widened; swallowing the spectacle of my collapsing ceiling.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Feb 7 2010, 7:06 am by Dapperdan.

Maybe, but "descending machine' conveys meaning that 'helicopter' or 'it' does not, since if we say 'it' we have no idea that the helicopter is moving downwards in space.

Hah. Damn dan, you nailed just about every aspect of that paragraph i was uncomfortable with

ceiling.

i think 'sound' instead of 'it' wraps it up pretty nicely. you think?

it works. using 'the sound' instead of 'it' flows better rhythm/language wise. though i do think i like the idea of thinking that the helicopter (thus the previous use of 'it') might never cease more than thinking that the sound might never cease. it's up to you.

haha, on the other hand it almost seems like a synesthesia(sp?) of the sound indicating relative distance to the helicopter from where the author's sitting. i just imagined the loudness of the helicopter really alerting the senses.

Without a more defined context, "collapsing ceiling" doesn't necessarily refer to the helicopter. It could, but one could just as easily picture the hellicopter shooting a missle at the ceiling which causes the collapse of a literal ceiling, instead of infering that the collapsing ceiling refers to the descent of the hellicopter.

No.

You could at least entertain the idea that I'm trying to help. There doesn't even have to be a missle involved, the collapsing ceiling could simply refer to a collapsing ceiling.

Why should he? He comes off sounding a lot cooler by giving you a cold 'no'

Oh yes, I'm quite sure he's trying to be cool in a media art and literature forum on a website filled with angsty teens who like to link to facepalms, 4chan, xdck and play starcraft. More likely he simply doesn't agree with what I've said and hasn't given it much of a thought.

well, im pretty sure what you said more or less came off as a joke. i thought so anyway. but yeah heather i do agree that its not the most precise word choice. still pretty obvious in meaning though

I did entertain it. There's no reason to believe it's a missile that's coming into the ceiling, or that the ceiling is just collapsing on its own. It is an extremely short piece, and the reader wouldn't be expected to create strange extrapolations that the writer didn't mention or hint at in anyway. And even if the reader did take it one of the strange ways you are saying it could be taken, i don't see how that is that big of a problem. But


i was hoping a simple 'no' would have done. cause you were way off base and i didn't want to type all this.


i can see how you thought it was a joke, now that i look at it, but i didn't take it that way at all. not coming from vrael. he always takes literature in strange mathy-logical sort of ways like this. i'm glad he's trying to help but i find that he presents ideas that just throws people off-base sometimes. meh.

That's because the best literature is logical. War & Peace is not renouned for an ambiguous depiction of the napoleonic/russian struggle, Crime & Punishment isn't famous for a wishy washy interpretive view of human psychology, and Shakespeare isn't famous for using just any old word in any old place. A common thread in all great literature is careful attention to meaning, sentence structure, word choice, ect, and all the greats share in these common threads. The english language is a lot like math, whether we realize it or not. I know I wasn't taught many things in gradeschool that I should have been, like what an antecedent is, or what the acusative case is, or what a past participle is, or what many of the other grammatical structures are. I don't mean to throw people off base, and I know I'm not the best writer in the world either, but I also know that you can't just throw a bunch of sorta-right almost-meaningful words together in a heap and expect something great to come of it.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. There's no reason to extrapolate that the helicopter is descending, because the context of the sentence is so limited. Say we knew that the person in the piece was outdoors, then we could infer that the helicopter is descending because we know there is nothing else overhead, no literal "ceiling" to speak of, except the sky or the helicopter, and its more likely that the helicopter would be descending than the sky. Without the information that the person in the piece is outside, however, there's nothing in the piece to link the helicopter to the ceiling. For example, the verb "collapse" is not something commonly attributed to a helicopter, but it is commonly used in conjunction with "buildings" and a ceiling is part of a building, so we could reasonably say that the building the person is in is collapsing. "swallowing the spectacle" could refer to a helicopter, true, but in the context of a collapsing ceiling I imagine the poor fellow looking at a chunk of steel about to smash him in the face. Of course, even this isn't a definite scenario, because we don't have context to draw it from. There were no explosions or cracks that we know of, and we don't even know where the fellow is. It's only slightly more likely than the helicopter falling on him because of the word choice "collapsing ceiling."

You're preaching to the choir. I'm a creative writing major. I suppose what i mean to say is you become too technical for your own good (or something like this). It can make the writing choppy and wordy and awkward. I feel like your always focusing in on the wrong things. Like you just aren't good at understanding what meaning is actually going on in the poem beneath the surface. The unspoken language of the poem.


If he's staring at the ceiling then he's inside, no? I don't really know what you are talking about.

He hears the helicopter. It doesn't stop (and this is what he focuses on - the helicopter not stopping). He watches the ceiling collapse on him. (ceiling = he's inside) Therefore we can assume the ceiling collapses due to the helicopter not stopping.

I think I'm done with this ceiling/descending machine stuff because i have no idea why it is so complicated to you and i think i just made it as clear as i possibly can.

Maybe I am overcomplicating things. My point was that I can think of an alternate scenario in which the helicopter is not actually descending, but still fits fine in the passage he just wrote.

Yes, I do have a problem with this sort of thing. To complete my mathiness analogy, "the unspoken language of the poem," to me, is like saying X + Y = 3, solve for X. Well, X could be a million things and the equation could still hold true, in the same way the helicopter could be taking off from the collapsing building, saving its passengers but leaving the poor fellow under the collapsing ceiling to die, his last sensory perception the loud drone of the rotors, or the helicopter crashing into the room the poor fellow is in, or some other possibility I haven't thought of. Maybe I'm still missing something though. Originally I thought the helicopter was descending onto the poor fellow and "collapsing ceiling" was figurative (this was before his edits), but both the alternate scenarios I mentioned above seem likely as well. Or maybe, me being a math folk, I'm just not meant to understand this sort of thing? lol

Thoughts like that are a bit masturbatory, no? I don't mind though. I think its rather fun/interesting. However, it is a "journal entry" so i would assume the "writer" would know pretty explicitly what he's writing about and probably wouldn't be regarding any readers.

That reminded me of this poem: Cosmopolitan Greetings - Allen Ginsberg

I get your journal entry point, but the fact that you've been revising it shows how you are regarding readers to some extent, even if the writer happens to be the only reader. There's a reason he's not writing something like "Helicopter made noise didn't stop ceiling fell i died" - cause he would know explicitly what that means too.

@Vrael: Let's say that the "Y" can come a lot from the tone of the piece and the way words are strung together. It's possible to understand what the writer is emphasizing and then go from there. Also literature has no definitive answer "3", the answer could be 5 or 7 or 9 or 11 or whatever, as long as the reader is drawing his conclusions correctly from specific language of the text.