Writers of the Revolution, July 21

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Featured by SilverInkblot
Reading work from doughboycafe is a matter of investing your time – her pieces are often dense and long, but your investment will be returned tenfold. I, as a matter of personal taste, have never cared much for war stories, be it in my literature or my movies, yet the works below sucked me right in.

Becoming BrianThe soldier coming up on him was swaying, limping, climbing wearily up the stony street towards the terrace. He walked like an old man, thought Brian Strong, though he was scarcely older than Brian himself. He dragged himself along, tripping over the cracks in the cobblestones, hauling behind him a filthy rucksack all covered in gray trench clay. Pausing by the café, the old boy took off his garrison cap and worried it between his black-tipped fingers.
"Well, hey," said Brian Strong. "Sit down and have a drink on me."
Regarding him for a moment, the soldier conceded and sat.
Brian Strong ran his hands over a perfectly polished uniform and propped his shiny-shoed feet up on the trumpet case under his table. The fellow soldier opposite him rested his head on his hand and, though his eyes seemed hollow, Brian thought with a good night's sleep and a shave he'd be right as rain. He looked like a man who had seen things, thought Brian, and done things. A worldly man. He saw now that t

Becoming Brian
"He crawled on his belly through the thick jungle of the Argonne Forest and he covered himself in the gray French clay. His fingertips went black from cleaning his rifle. He tripped while running over a field and looked up just in time to see the rest of the squad mowed down by machine gun fire - they landed one by one on the hard ground, nothing but tatters and holes. He shot a boy in the head. He ran out of bullets and gored a man with his knife, and his fingers touched the insides of the man's belly. "

One of the things I like about this piece is the ambiguity; I’m not entirely sure what happened. Post Traumatic Stress? A changeling story? Mental exhaustion? Something totally different? Regardless, it’s a fantastic story.


Analiese
"It was about three in the morning, that was when he woke up. Three nineteen, that's what his watch said. He put on his housecoat and went to the balcony. There were no lanterns lit in the little town of Kaysersberg, only the dim outlines of the gabled rooftops and the echoes of the doves hiding somewhere in the bushes below. Three weeks ago when he got there he had been a stranger to the town, and he didn't suppose he was familiar with it now. It was a good place to hide. A good place to wait."

My personal favorite piece from doughboycafe. I love the softness and subtlety and the way it looks at war from a distance. Most of all, I like the way it doesn’t really end – just stops. Happy endings aren’t always a reality for soldiers.


Yellow Brick Front
"I don't know how long I stayed like that but when I stood up and looked around the empty room, my eyes were dry, my palms were red, and I understood. I put a nickel on the counter, and I walked out. "

I adore slice-of-life stories and this is a wonderful example of why. Gentle and bittersweet, it feels so real, yet just a little magical; I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it categorized as non-fiction.


Soldiers
" We were soldiers with our sharpened sticks and our boots we borrowed from our fathers, and we charged up hills towards our victory. We read letters from our loved ones writ on oak leaves by our imaginations and we shared our stories and our triumphs, becoming one another's heroes. "

A shorter piece, but with no less impact. A snippet of a journal from the life of – what else? – a soldier. But read all the way though – the ending may just surprise you with its cleverness.

We :heart: doughboycafe



Featured CRITIQUES

on Little Crayon Child by Venry
Insert I've never seen people break their stanzas with underscore lines before, but I'll be honest, I don't like it; it looks aesthetically unpleasing and it seems like bad poetic feng shui. I would recommend just regular stanza breaks or alternatively, you could use the method of Roman numerals to break sections in your poem up the way you would like.
[Read more here]


xlntwtch

on stay alive so I will never find you. by DwellingInWonderland
I like the loose structure and pacing of your stream-of-conscious style. It didn't feel chaotic to me.
[Read more here]




Featured RESOURCES


Anyone can write poetry. Writing good poetry though – let this guide help you out a little bit. Covering everything from sieving out unnecessary words to the different types of rhyme, you’ll find something new to learn.
Tips For Editing Poetry
***Tips For the Novice (and otherwise) - Editing***
The blanket statement, "Editing/revision harms poetry," is simply wrong.  It's akin to a photographer claiming that focusing the lens ruins the emotion of the photograph.  It is the details, and the appropriate attention paid to them, that separate a photograph from a snapshot.  Imagine a film maker slapping every frame he shot up on the screen without editing for continuity, for pacing, for effect.  What a disaster.  That is not to say that editing can't be destructive - there is such a thing as poor editing, just as there is poor writing.  But done correctly, done well, it is one of the most important tools in the poet's shed.
Never shy away from editing/revision.  Some young writers feel that to revise is to kill the spirit of the poem.  This notion serves to sacrifice the potential of a poem for an ideal that


We’re authors here – sometimes we need a little help with the non-writing stuff too.
(Lit) Author Tag Tutorial . . . by Kalen-Bloodstone

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SedahLiah's avatar
Fascinating stuff. :thumbsup: