Writing Exercise #2: Arrival in Port

[Roney]

The test this time is to write an interesting chunk of text that's nothing but description.  No dialogue.  No interior monologues from viewpoint characters.  Just objective description of the world that the story is taking place in.  It's a vital skill even in short stories, and there's no way you could pad out a novel without it.

Guidelines:

• Despite what I just said, the objective isn't to practise writing padding.  Practise writing incisive, interesting descriptions.  You want people to read and critique your post, so it's better if it doesn't go much above 250 words.
• If your exercise turns into a proper story and you think you might like to try selling it, that's great -- but please don't post it here.  This is a public forum and posting here may make your story unsaleable.  We wouldn't want that.
• Honest, supportive criticism of other posters' contributions is always welcome, whether you've written your own or not.

Your writing exercise, should you choose to accept it, is...

Topic #2: A vessel arriving in port.

It could be an interstellar explorer ship arriving at a space station.  It could be a train of camel-equivalents arriving at a sorcerer's fortified desert city.  It could be the return of the first steamship to circumnavigate the globe guided by a Babbage Engine.  Or it could be entirely non-Speculative.  What intrigues you about ports and the vessels that stop there?  Describe that in a way that intrigues your readers too.

[wintermute]

Well, I'm hardly a writer, but the "no dialogue" thing gave me an idea I thought I'd try out. What do you think.?
----
The superluminal passenger ship Zeno's Arrow fell back into alpha-space and slowly glided towards the transfer station orbiting New Mars. A brief burst of radio chatter passed between their respective computers as they negotiated docking protocols. Zeno's Arrow slightly adjusted its trajectory to a spiral matching the station's rotation, simultaneously reducing power to the grav emitters. Internal gravity stayed at exactly 1G, just as it always did. Internal speakers throughout both ship and station announced the impending arrival. Both great machines followed their programming exactly; they would accept overrides from a human operator if neccessary, but for machines of this generation, that had never been necessary.

The slow ballet continued for another hour before Zeno's Arrow mated airlocks with the station, gently enough that vibration sensors barely registered the impact; the seal as airtight as the day the couplings had been constructed. Pressures equalised and the airlock doors opened. Each noted that the argon concentration in the other's air was off from their own by a couple of parts per million (the ship's too high; the station's too low), and subtle adjustments to the atmospherics were made. Both machines examined each others systems, and concluded that they were in perfect working order. Zeno's Arrow took on those few supplies it couldn't fabricate in the void between the stars, and ticked away the seconds to departure. Its time of departure and next port of call were announced at regular intervals.

There was no-one on the ship to disembark, and no-one on the station to board. The same had been true for the last thousand ships that had docked here, and for the last thousand stations that Zeno's Arrow had called at. But neither machine's programming accounted for such an eventuality so, as the depatrure time approached, a final round of spaceworthiness checks were made, and Zeno's Arrow decoupled itself, and began the next leg of its itinerary. Exactly on schedule.

[slic]

Well, wintermute, I liked it. You even managed a clever twist at the end.

I liked the ship's name - good greek references related to infinity are always enjoyed.

There are a few word choices I would have made differently, but I think that's true of just about everyone.

A couple of places seemed repetitive or redundant
"they would accept overrides from a human operator if neccessary, but for machines of this generation, that had never been necessary." Perhaps - that had never happened.
Airlock, airtight, airlock doors, air - all in one paragraph

And now the nitpick - Really an hour to finish docking? That seems horribly long.

[wintermute]

Well, an hour for the approach. *shrug*

[slic]

Not sure if I cheated by having so much about the character.
I’m trying to turn the old adage of any port in a storm on its head.
---------------
She stands on the deck of the strange vessel and searches for the docks.  Gliding over the fiery surface through the rough-looking swells, they approach the shoreline.  The spires of the glass towers are visible now. The sands out of which they grew silently awaiting the approaching storm.

She urges the ship faster, ever faster, and the bizarre craft responds as best it can.  Vertical sails flap rapidly while the scoop shaped oars push through the flaming sea.  Technology could never have made the ship she rode on.  Its internal workings would mystify the most learned engineer.   Clearly, this bizarre craft has been conjured up through magic.  As a master at turning imaginings into realities, empresses and seers earnestly request her services, nevertheless she propels herself to this backwater village.

Nearly there, nearly home, only to have to turn around again and flee the killing storm.  Already it has consumed the Cities of the Plains; the only hope for safety out in the uncharted reaches of Cauldron Bay.  There is no time to go looking for him, he has to be there waiting for her.
She takes her eyes off of the shoreline and looks again at the blinding whiteness on the horizon, the line of grim oblivion streaked with black sores that flies across the land and annihilates order.  A vast destroyer rebuilding the world in its own image of chaos.

She sees him! Stooped from age, but waving vigorously, she sees him standing on the jetty.  With a sudden wave and a spoken word, he is lifted delicately into the air and brought to the ship even as it turns back out to sea.

[alllie]

The superluminal passenger ship Zeno's Arrow fell back into alpha-space and slowly glided towards the transfer station orbiting New Mars. A brief burst of radio chatter passed between their respective computers as they negotiated docking protocols. Zeno's Arrow slightly adjusted its trajectory to a spiral matching the station's rotation, simultaneously reducing power to the grav emitters. Internal gravity stayed at exactly 1G, just as it always did. Internal speakers throughout both ship and station announced the impending arrival. Both great machines followed their programming exactly; they would accept overrides from a human operator if neccessary, but for machines of this generation, that had never been necessary.

The slow ballet continued for another hour before Zeno's Arrow mated airlocks with the station, gently enough that vibration sensors barely registered the impact; the seal as airtight as the day the couplings had been constructed. Pressures equalised and the airlock doors opened. Each noted that the argon concentration in the other's air was off from their own by a couple of parts per million (the ship's too high; the station's too low), and subtle adjustments to the atmospherics were made. Both machines examined each others systems, and concluded that they were in perfect working order. Zeno's Arrow took on those few supplies it couldn't fabricate in the void between the stars, and ticked away the seconds to departure. Its time of departure and next port of call were announced at regular intervals.

There was no-one on the ship to disembark, and no-one on the station to board. The same had been true for the last thousand ships that had docked here, and for the last thousand stations that Zeno's Arrow had called at. But neither machine's programming accounted for such an eventuality so, as the depatrure time approached, a final round of spaceworthiness checks were made, and Zeno's Arrow decoupled itself, and began the next leg of its itinerary. Exactly on schedule.

It was very good, especially in the sense that I wanted to know more and wanted you to go on.

(I'm jealous.)

[ryos]

Better late than never, right? I can never seem to hit the 250-word limit; this one runs to 294. Let me know what you think.
---------------------------
It happened every day, sometime in those bright, hazy hours between early morning and late. Every morning, the sea would take strength from the sun's rays to grapple with the land for control of the wind, striving to turn it inland; and for a moment, while the heavens were so contested, the air would stand still.

For the fishers who hunted oilfish in the faint light of dawn, catching the tail of this transition was key. Their prey played host to a parasite that would migrate into the bulbs in its armor a few hours after its death, consuming the fuel they contained before they could be cured enough to burn. To burn wood was an offense punishable by imprisonment, but the oilfish were plentiful enough to feed the fires of men.

Today, the captain of the Oil Slick had missed the mark. The God in the Sea had blessed her crew with a bounteous catch; she was struggling under the load to tack into the harbor when the calm struck. There was no time to wait for the sea to win the wind, and so her crew brought out the sweeps and began to row.

The Usurper in the Land fought mightily now to keep the wind at bay, for he hated the God in the Sea and the life he had wrought. On the edge of the great inland desert, a scant six miles from the harbor, cascades of sand fell like rivulets of sweat running down the dunes, exposing the cooler earth beneath.

Now the ship had cast a line, and the dockhands were hauling her in. Soon they would work frantically to separate bulbs from oilfish. It happened every day--save the catch, get paid, and live to work another day.

[ryos]

Hey slic, nice job! At 276 words, you've come very close to doing something compelling within the 250 word limit. I like your premise and the world you've alluded to; I like the flashes of character development you snuck in, which I wouldn't call cheating at all.

However, the mechanical execution isn't quite there yet IMHO. I'd like to dig in and just critique the mechanics. IMHO mechanical problems are the easiest to fix--you've already got the difficult stuff down. Nevertheless, I think nailing the mechanics is an important part of writing.

She stands on the deck of the strange vessel and searches for the docks.  Gliding over the fiery surface through the rough-looking swells, they approach the shoreline.

This sentence reads awkwardly to me. I'd stick "they approach the shoreline" at the beginning instead of the end. Also, who is "they"? We only know about a "her".

The spires of the glass towers are visible now. The sands out of which they grew silently awaiting the approaching storm.

Again, this last sentence trips my awkward alarm. I think it's a fragment, but it's been so long since I took an English class of any sort that I'm not quite sure about that. "They would soon be consumed by the approaching storm" might fit the bill.

She urges the ship faster, ever faster, and the bizarre craft responds as best it can.  Vertical sails flap rapidly while the scoop shaped oars push through the flaming sea.

Minor nitpick: as you've omitted the preposition before "vertical" I'd also cut the one before "scoop", if only for the sake of consistency.

Technology could never have made the ship she rode on.  Its internal workings would mystify the most learned engineer.   Clearly, this bizarre craft has been conjured up through magic.

You've already used "bizarre" to describe the ship; having it here feels redundant. I also feel like these three sentences could be condensed to two, cutting a few words in the process, but it's just a gut feeling; I'm not sure quite how.

As a master at turning imaginings into realities, empresses and seers earnestly request her services, nevertheless she propels herself to this backwater village.

At the very least, I'd turn the second comma into a semicolon. Then again, I tend to abuse semicolons, which should be obvious from my piece above.

Nearly there, nearly home, only to have to turn around again and flee the killing storm.

I'd cut either the "around" or the "again". Stylistic preference and all that.

Already it has consumed the Cities of the Plains; the only hope for safety out in the uncharted reaches of Cauldron Bay.

Unless there's some reason for it to be a proper noun, I wouldn't capitalize Cities of the Plains. Also, it sounds like there should be an "is" between the "safety" and the "out".

There is no time to go looking for him, he has to be there waiting for her.
She takes her eyes off of the shoreline and looks again at the blinding whiteness on the horizon, the line of grim oblivion streaked with black sores that flies across the land and annihilates order.  A vast destroyer rebuilding the world in its own image of chaos.

I think the first sentence here works better as the start of the next paragraph. I'd revise the second sentence like so:

"She takes her eyes off of the shoreline and looks again at the blinding whiteness on the horizon. The line of grim oblivion, streaked with black sores, flies across the land annihilating everything in its path."

The last sentence I would cut entirely. It doesn't carry its weight enough for a word limit this tight.

She sees him! Stooped from age, but waving vigorously, she sees him standing on the jetty.

The second "she sees him" is redundant, but to cut it you'd have to restructure the whole sentence. "He stands on the jetty, stooped with age but waving vigorously."; something like that.

With a sudden wave and a spoken word, he is lifted delicately into the air and brought to the ship even as it turns back out to sea.

The passive voice softens the impact of this, the final sentence.
---------------------
Finally, I'm not sure if present tense was the right choice for this. It may be that I've just read too much advice to aspiring writers, but I don't think present tense is a good choice for most fiction. You need a really good reason to use it, and I'm not sure this piece gives you one.

Whew. This turned out longer than I thought it would be when I started. I hope I haven't offended with my nit picking; if you're feeling put upon, feel free to tear apart my piece.

[slic]

and for a moment, while the heavens were so contested, the air would stand still.

I'd change this to "...and for that moment..."

Their prey played host to a parasite that would migrate into the bulbs in its armor a few hours after its death, consuming the fuel they contained before they could be cured enough to burn.

I got lost with the "...in its armor..."  Breaking it down I figured it meant the oilfish, but perhaps new wording would help. 

Today, the captain of the Oil Slick had missed the mark. The God in the Sea had blessed her crew with a bounteous catch; she was struggling under the load to tack into the harbor when the calm struck. There was no time to wait for the sea to win the wind, and so her crew brought out the sweeps and began to row.

Is bounteous a word? What about bountiful?
I quite liked this paragraph.

The Usurper in the Land fought mightily now to keep the wind at bay, for he hated the God in the Sea and the life he had wrought. On the edge of the great inland desert, a scant six miles from the harbor, cascades of sand fell like rivulets of sweat running down the dunes, exposing the cooler earth beneath.

This paragraph didn't work for me.  "The Usurper in the Land" didn't make sense, too vague I think.  The second sentence didn't match the first.  I liked the imagery of the sand and the sweat, the common theme of heat tying them together.

Now the ship had cast a line, and the dockhands were hauling her in. Soon they would work frantically to separate bulbs from oilfish. It happened every day--save the catch, get paid, and live to work another day.

I think it is the shortness of the work, but the last couple of paragraphs were disjointed.  We knew they were rowing ashore, so I think that the description of the Usurper's "battle" needed to be before the rowing.  But then I liked the captain's decisiveness.  She knew not to wait while gods worked out their differences.  You could remove the Usurper paragraph and the last two would link together much better.

[slic]

Hey slic, nice job! At 276 words, you've come very close...

Thank you ryos, and thanks for the time you took to read over my piece.

All your comments are very welcome.

[underwoodfive]

Phew.  Hitting in at EXACTLY 250 words, and I had to be ruthless to get it that.


***

   Calling it the dead of night is something of a misnomer.  Even at three in the morning, the airdocks were moving constantly.  Much of it was automated, causing what had been blessed silence to be filled with the sounds of clockwork and steam engine.  Gears ground together, tooth after tooth scratching against each other.  Springs unwound themselves, providing life to the cranes as they moved massive, iron shipping containers, rusted flaky red from exposure to the high atmosphere air moisture.
   However, Dawn's Sorrow was using it as smugglers of old used the dead of night.  Their ship wasn't one of the smooth, sleeker pleasure craft that nestled quietly in their warehouses.  She was an enormous behemoth of a clunker, made mostly out of other ships and held together with cheap soldering iron and sheer bloody determination.  Her dirty gray envelope was taken from a shipping vessel, while five out of her twelve cannon had been pilfered from downed military airships.  The other seven had been salvaged from a Sky-Junk of the Middle Kingdom.  For their prow, they had taken the device of the famous lost airship Gibson's Fury, a sky goddess resplendent in battle gear.
   Three in the morning at this automated sky-dock was a loud and cacophonous din, the people of the city having simply grown used to the noise of metal and steamwork.  Dawn's Sorrow was simply unable to sneak quietly into the city.  So they masked their approach in the discordant symphony of the night.

[wolvesdread]

sounds fun..  I'll have a go:

...listing to port and creaking under the strain of twice again too much cargo the jut of her rotted prow angled toward the pier.  A trick of tide and crosswind giving the correction the impression of purpose where none was present.   If there had been an ear to listen, the incessant buzzing of flies busy amongst the dead would have been her only sign of crew.  As the shadow of her masts rippled down the worn planks of the pier the illusion of graceful intent lasted only a moment longer before her hull slammed roughly into the barnacle studded pilings and that peace was abruptly replaced by explosions of splintering, rendering and cracking.  The bodies topside flew from their final resting places breaking apart as they did and angering the gathered host of insects who'd passionately been indulging in that putrescent feast of decay. The mountain of deck-bound cargo snapped it's lines launching carefully-packed boxes, barrels of wine & ale and bags of seed and grain smashing across her decks and tumbling overboard to splash in to the the bay...

[bluerequiem]

The three dorsal fins of the scout craft align with and are grasped by the underbelly of the mother ship.  There is a sound of pressurized gas escaping into space as the tiny craft is absorbed into the hull of the giant ship.  Inside, the bubble like stasis pods containing the latest specimens are being removed from the glowing strip that rings the scout vessel.  Pods one, two and three contain strange bi-pedal creatures with matching red and black patterned skin covering the top half of their bodies, while the bottom half are in matching blue.  Antenna like appendages flap lazily from the sides of their heads, the inside fuzzy and the outside smooth like cured hide.  Pod number four contains another biped of a different species.  Its skin is smooth and white with inset glittering stones, and strangely doesn’t grow to cover the entire front chest region of the creature.  Dark reflective surfaces cover, or are its eyes.  And the hair of this fourth specimen is dark, tall and grows down the sides of its head to just below the aural cavities.  Number four lacks the antenna like appendages of the other three.   After a survey scan of each pod is complete, red characters begin to glow on the outside of each, indicating that they are not satisfactory and should be returned to origin.  The pods are loaded back into the scout craft and it is expelled out of the belly of the mother ship and returns to earth.

[Sylvan]

Let's give this a try...


Long past closing, the dull red lights of Catastrophe 1 washed out into the star-peppered blackness of night-side Earth.  Seams were invisible between plates of the outer hull and a three-centimeter-thick grey polymer made the radiation-proof material seem glossy.  Within that layer, small sparks were born, traveled in a Gaussian pattern, and died every moment of every day.  While a necessity of power regulation, the light show never failed to look impressive upon approach.

This was the view as Captain Terra flew up from the south Indian Ocean.  Her hair was tucked back for the zero-G travel and her skin had turned a dusky blue in response to the high radiation and low temperature of extra-Terran flight.  Her approach was slow by space terms and the junction port didn't seem to register anything awry.

Flotsam and jetsam drifted by the departure point station every day, much of it the size of a human being or larger.  One more object, one that had little to no metal or non-organic parts, was virtually undetectable.

She stayed with the rotation of the satellite, eyes on the high array.  It's green lights remained off.  Inside the control room, only the late night adjunct would have been able to see her at all, and even then only if alerted to one of the bay of eighty-five monitors in the spherical control room.  This is how it was; this is how it had been for the past seven years.

The "villains" had won and those who hadn't been killed -those who only now realized the futility of fighting on- made their way here, sooner or later, for "the Great Exodus".

Catastrophe 1 orbited, well-defended but largely forgotten, above a brown and diseased world, waiting for the last soldiers to come limping home.

[Sylvan]

Very nice opening.  I like the "Flying Dutchman" feel of it.  It also seems to be a bit reminiscent of Dracula's ship landing, empty, in port in Great Britain.  This opening would definitely pull me into a longer story.  If you keep an eye on your overall tenor and tone -along with the nicely specific terms such as "pilings" and such descriptive phrases as "feast of decay"- you'll have a great tale, here.

My negative critiques follow:

As the shadow of her masts rippled down the worn planks of the pier the illusion of graceful intent lasted only a moment longer before her hull slammed roughly into the barnacle studded pilings and that peace was abruptly replaced by explosions of splintering, rendering and cracking.

This sentence seems a bit long.  It runs on and loses the immediacy and grace of the passage immediately before it.  I would suggest breaking it down a bit and slowing the transition into the crash by a sentence or two.

The bodies topside flew from their final resting places breaking apart as they did and angering the gathered host of insects who'd passionately been indulging in that putrescent feast of decay. The mountain of deck-bound cargo snapped it's lines launching carefully-packed boxes, barrels of wine & ale and bags of seed and grain smashing across her decks and tumbling overboard to splash in to the the bay...

For some reason, the phrase "the bodies topside flew" seems both comical and awkward.  I think it's because the past-tense verb "flew" is so dynamic and action-oriented that it runs contrary to the beautiful and slow approach that you crafted, previously.  I envisioned an almost cartoony eruption of bodies flying overhead as the ship crashed into the pier.  Although it would make the voice more passive, perhaps something like "the topside bodies were exhumed from their resting places, angering the gathered host of insects indulging in their feast of decay."

I think almost any verb that was softer and less dramatic than "flew" would work.

Do my critiques help, at all?

Yours,
Sylvan (Dave)

[wolvesdread]

Do my critiques help, at all?

Yes.  Absolutely.  Thank you for taking the time to share them with me.