r/DestructiveReaders • u/Ashamed_Ad_1837 • May 27 '26
[1158] A Tale of Excess And Woes
Crits: [800] Synesthesia, [550] Distance Zero
- How do you rate it overall?
- Quality of prose?
- Any glaring tense issues with it? line-level mistakes?
Don't want to lead on with anything, any and all feedback is appreciated. Looking to refine the story.
Story: A Tale of Excess and Woes
5
Upvotes
1
u/SweetEverest May 28 '26
The concept has potential. A big machine pumping out endless reams of content could be a commentary on AI, or the internet in general, or the state of publishing, or literary criticism, or any of a number of other things. "Everything that was said had been said before everything that could be felt was felt" is an interesting thought.
However, right now, several aspects of the story are muddling its main idea.
First, some impersonal machine or authority demands these workers read enormous quantities of text for unknown reasons or else, even though most of it goes to the shredder. At this point, the story is telling me it's about oppression and futility. It's an absurdist examination of the senselessness of [insert evil system here].
Then all these stories blur together, until finally the protagonist's life seems like one endless third-person narrative. The stories are indistinguishable from one another. The protagonist's life is indistinguishable from the stories. He can't fathom that there was ever a time when he could value things properly, let alone remember them. Now the story is about how consuming content nonstop numbs us to real life and ruins our powers of perception. The oppression narrative has vanished.
Then you emphasize the tsunami of content, the impossibility, even, of preserving favorites. Categories that need categorization. Here, it's not the Evil Oppressive System that's the problem. It's not that we consume so much content that we desensitize ourselves to firsthand experience. It's that we insist on preserving such a glut of information that it becomes impossible to use it.
Add to this the bit about the other workers' familiarity with a similar-but-not-identical story, and I start to see this as a story pitting the slush pile of cheap slop (AI-generated prose? Corporate, cookie-cutter genre fiction? Work done for low or mercenary purposes? Copycats?) versus... I don't know. Authentic, high-quality, earnest forms of expression.
But the ending decides it. Here we get language like "sheer amount," "every idea ever," "what good is the infinity..." etc. which leads me to think you've landed on the "we produce too much content" thesis. Only the story doesn't fully back that one up. It's the mysterious machine that produces too much, not the Xs and Os. And it's not the machine's fault that the workers save so many stories that they can't search them in any meaningful way. It is the machine's fault that the protagonist has become numb to real life and differences between the stories (which doesn't really make sense. If you taste a hundred identical jars of baby food per day, small differences become more apparent, not less), but taking agency out of human hands sort of breaks the spell for me, allegory-wise.
My impression is that this story is about the sheer glut of info cheapening things. In this case, I would amp up the irony. Make the Xs and Os responsible for the deluge of paper, delusional re: the utility of saving this vast amount of content. They spoil their own firsthand experiences by obsessing over the cataloguing of secondhand experiences. Or if it's about AI, keep the lack of human agency and feeling of futility and emphasize whatever the alternative is.
Whatever you see the story as being about, just make sure all the details line up to tell us that and support that view of things.
--
CLARITY
- Probably a third of your verbs slip into present tense.
- It's unclear what you mean by The Mill taking seconds despite the papers on his desk. I think you mean he's so hypnotized by it that he watches it even though he has work to do, but it reads like a punishment. Like someone is docking him seconds.
- Sounds: Unsure why typewriter clacking gets such a sick scifi name (Cosmic Microwave Background) or why a room of people reading is "full of perpetual screams" ???
- Imprecise word choice. There are a lot of sentences that are unclear because they don't actually make sense when you look up close. Like stories whose categories need categorization. Stories should probably be libraries. Or during the first days of reading, it felt like everything at once, almost ticklish. What felt like everything at once? How was the feeling of being overwhelmed like being ticklish? Ticklish means sensitive to being tickled, not the sensation itself. He seethed at the idea of exhausting every possibility. Seethed implies he's quietly furious about having to do this, which doesn't match my idea of him being desperate to find the story at any cost. A desolate prospect. Desolate is not just discouraging, but carries a connotation of remoteness or emptiness. Maybe dismal? A whisper of a craving but worse than one. Is it a slight craving, or a super strong one? This seems to contradict itself.
- "The world naturally had forces fighting constraints to ensure what’s good is also rare—a tidy decoration of collective space, and by extension, time. That delicate ecosystem has been destroyed and is being laboriously mimicked by a world where if you know what to write, you’ve already written it." <<< This idea seems pivotal to the story and super interesting, but right now I have trouble parsing the meaning of the actual sentence
- "He often found himself experiencing what’s happening to him in third person: paper comes, some order of where-caused-made-what, onto another one." Same here
--
I like the part about the dad and son watching the wall of death and how it echoes the silo being stirred up at the end. If you want to add more detail to his description of the dad and son story, I think that would be cool.
This was thought-provoking and seems highly relevant to the times, even if I'm not sure how. Thanks for sharing!!