Manor in the Woods

The torturer stepped back instinctively. Not out of mercy. Out of surprise. The prisoner laughed. Not loudly. Worse than loudly. Softly. Like he had just remembered a private joke older than civilization.

“You still think pain is a language,” he said.

Another blow. This time across the mouth. Teeth cracked. Blood sheeted down his chin in long ribbons.

The interrogator hissed through clenched teeth. “Tell me where God went.”

The prisoner turned his head slowly. There was blood in his smile now.

“There are organisms,” he said, “living beneath Antarctic ice that have never seen the sun and have still learned how to eat.”

The room had gone very still. Somewhere in the dark, machinery groaned.

The interrogator grabbed him by the jaw hard enough to bruise bone.

“You think this makes you immortal?”

The prisoner spat a clot of red onto the floor between them.

“No,” he whispered.

“I think it makes you temporary.”

The torches flickered.

For one impossible second, the interrogator became aware of his own pulse. The heat in his veins. The soft wetness of his eyes. The damp animal electricity inside every living thing. The prisoner watched realization bloom across his face and smiled wider, blood running between his teeth.

“You cannot threaten a creature from the dirt,” he said, “with returning to the dirt.”

I haven't written in years. Decades, probably. I know I don't do it for the "right" reasons, and anyway, nobody ever seemed to be able to find the time to read anything I sent them.

But when I do write, I sound like this. I always have. Because I wrote to impress my father, an unempathic and unhappy man who admires literature but believes he knows more about it than he does, and so my writing was tailored to his taste. It was the only thing I ever got praised for, even though it always came paired with unsolicited critique.

I recognize now that I only ever wrote so that I would be told I was good at something.

Sometimes when things are bad, I liked to imagine I could write again. After all, we live in a time where people are reading often and all kinds of books - maybe this time, I could find readers.

My career was the only other thing in my life I was ever told I was very good at; It collapsed in 2021, and I haven't heard anyone say that to me since. Sometimes I liked imagining that writing could be a way I would get to hear it again.

Again, I know that's not the right reason to make art. I should be content to make it for nobody except myself, and that should be enough - i should be satisfied that the story is now extant in the world, that I have read it should be enough for me. Alas I am a flawed person; I need to feel like I am doing a good job at something.

So, in a way, I am grateful to OP for this post. I can't imagine how destroyed I would be if I had taken a chance and posted a story, only to have eight thousand people all agree that its some kind of eye-melting slop. I would rather write and share nothing, than have thousands of people all casually laughing about how bad my writing is. OP has spared me from that.

if you look through the replies and tags, you'll find you're far from the only person who felt personally targeted— but you'll also find plenty of people saying they genuinely liked the original excerpt and wanted to read more. that's a good thing!! clearly, there's an audience for that style, and i don't have any interest in arguing otherwise!

what bothers me isn't the vocabulary, or even the (imo overly) lyrical prose itself. when i say “tumblr prose” i mean a particular trend where nearly every sentence feels optimized to sound profound rather than communicate something. beautiful prose isn't the problem! ambiguity isn't the problem either. my issue is when atmosphere begins cannibalizing the storytelling instead of supporting it.

with the original sample, even as the author, i came away knowing very little beyond the mood. i don't really know who these people are, why god is apparently gone, why the antarctic organisms are relevant, or what materially changed over the course of the conversation. there are lots of striking individual lines, but they don't really build into a coherent or particularly interesting whole. it feels like each sentence is trying to be The Line people screenshot and say "this goes hard," rather than working altogether to tell a story. that's ultimately what i was parodying, not people who enjoy this style, and certainly not people who just wanna write! just a trend in online prose that i personally find frustrating as an avid reader

And for a while, reading his posts started to make me really paranoid about my own writing, and to think anything I wrote could be dissected to that level. I almost never saw him compliment a cover, either - those he tended to only post when he disliked them, and it was a lot of covers where I actually liked the style.

Anyway, then one day he posted two covers he'd made for his own WIP, and I'll be honest lads, I thought they were dog shit. Bland, tonally mismatched to the genre, just bad. Absolute casserole. And instantly I was like, oh yeah. You're eloquent and passionate and good at critique, and you're also one person with human opinions that are going to diverge from mine. And that's okay.

And instantly, I no longer felt any insecurity about my own work from him lol.

Aw, thank you! I'm delighted my nonsense and rambling is useful to someone somewhere

So, access courses - I'm actually at a uni that doesn't require them, because we include a first year module on every course that covers academic skills anyway. Even the fresh-faced eighteen-year-olds straight from school don't have uni-level academic skills, let alone the mature students who have been out of the loop for a few or more years. So, for us, that tends to level the playing field.

But, with that said, one thing an access course does do - and this might sound like a cop-out, but I fully believe in the value of this - is give confidence. University is a challenge, no doubt about it. A crazy, wonderful, worthwhile challenge - but a challenge nonetheless. And a lot of mature students who are contemplating it are genuinely concerned about the workload, the rigours of it, whether they could possibly keep up, etc. Access courses are worth their weight in gold for helping to demystify it, as well as offering the entry level soft-to-medium skills that will very much be needed once you're in. Absolutely invaluable in that regard.

A-Levels are a bit different, though - they're good for showing what baseline subject-specific knowledge a student has coming in, but they're losing their efficacy for showing us how good a student someone is likely to be in the age of AI (schools are simply not doing their due diligence in getting ahead of that; way too many 18-year-olds are coming to us now thinking they can get away with it because schools and colleges are explicitly allowing them to.) Still valuable, don't get me wrong; but, similar to how we teach academic skills in first year, the baseline knowledge is also taught in first year (a little more in depth than A Level, but not by much at that stage). A Levels are an advantage, but not compulsory. Ditto access courses.

Here's what I will say, though:

The most successful students - not the highest scoring necessarily, though there's significant overlap; but the most successful - are the ones who understand that university is not school.

By that I mean: You aren't here because you have to be; you're here because you want and choose to be.

Firstly: The bulk of your learning is down to you. In school, it's 90% down to the teachers, and 10% on you doing your homework. That homework is just checking you understood what they told you in lessons.

In uni, it's about 30% down to the lectures/seminars/etc. Those will impart the fundamental knowledge and skills. But 70% of it is then on you - you should be reading around the subject, exploring differing angles, and looking to see how this is applied in the real world. And you should do this because you're here to learn, not to be taught. My job is a facilitator, but we're copilots in this thing. You should want to learn for the joy of it, not because it's a thing in your life that you're required to do.

If you aren't curious, you won't learn as much.

Secondly, successful students therefore read every word of feedback, and actively try to improve. The others will just look at the number on the grade, and move on. You should be actively wanting to improve. If necessary, this should include you coming to see me to talk through the feedback to make sure you understood it (my KINGDOM for the students who want to talk it through with me...)

Thirdly, though, is the classroom learning culture.

This is something that lecturers can control; nor can any one student, really. But it only takes two or three of a similar mindset to get the others on board. Basically, though, this is where you as students collectively create an environment for yourselves where you all want to improve and do your best.

When I did my teaching qualification a couple of years ago, this was a big thing. We had a group chat, and in the week (sometimes more, but the final week in particular) leading up to an assignment, that chat was busy. It was full of this sort of thing:

You see what I mean? Comparing notes on the requirements, whether people thought referencing XYZ would be appropriate or off-topic, how the formatting was being done, etc

After marks and feedback were returned, the same thing would happen, but this time discussing feedback and how we should have done it instead. After one assignment, one of the others said she was incredibly frustrated, because her feedback was the latest in a line of her being told she needed to do X, and she was so certain she was; so, she asked to see mine, because I'd gotten a high mark. I sent it over, and for her seeing an exemplar was what she needed. Suddenly, she got where she'd been going wrong, and it was something she immediately corrected and never got marked down on again.

This is an example of good learning culture. Worth its absolute weight in gold if you can get that going, even if only with one other person. The most successful student groups always function like this. The lower effort ones will suddenly put the effort in if the group is doing this, and it does raise the marks.

But, finally: the single most important point.

If you need it, ask for help.

I know I say this every time, but it bears repeating every time. Always. Ask. For. Help. If we get to exam board and you have missing marks because you struggled and missed the deadlines, the Academic Office will say, "Did this student engage with us about any struggles?"

If the answer is yes - you told us the issues, you've been working with student support, etc - they will work out a plan for you to make up the missing work.

If the answer is no - couldn't get a response from you, barely seen you, no work submitted and no reason known - you will be withdrawn from the course. If you're lucky, they'll say you're allowed to resit the whole year "with attendance".

ASK FOR HELP.

And then there's a bit right at the end of the story as the wife and the husband are walking out of court:

Jill turned abruptly. "What is your name? Your real name."

The man's gray eyes flickered. He smiled a little, kind, gentle smile. "I'm afraid you would not be able to pronounce it. The sounds cannot be formed..."

Jill was silent as they walked along, deep in thought. The city lights were coming on all around them. Bright yellow spots in the gloom. "What are you thinking?" the man asked.

"I was thinking perhaps I will still call you Lester," Jill said. "If you don't mind."

"I don't mind," the man said. He put his arm around her, drawing her close to him. He gazed down tenderly as they walked through the thickening darkness, between the yellow candles of light that marked the way. "Anything you wish. Whatever will make you happy."

And I. God. There's something there. A soupcon of monsterfuckery. To tell your partner in a moment of intimacy that yes, you're something so inhuman that the lips you're stealing can't speak your actual name. You're a parasite that not only had the ability to burrow under this man's skin and take over his life, but you were so desperate to escape a dead, dry, blasted planet that you did.

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