>>57502623I'm gonna theorycraft cuz i really enjoy theorycrafting this kind of stuff. I apologize in advance because I am really adhd, and the chances of this being helpful are about fifty fifty.
A lot of times, I've noticed that what makes something "work" or "not work" is more of a uh... resemblance thing. Which is to say, I think that honestly if you take the same logicogrammatical approach to a passage, what will make it work or not work is not syntactical, or even semantic, but its resemblance to, for example, a form of speaking. That's the most concrete one I've noticed, when passages are strongly charactervoice influenced, and therefore sound to our earbrain like a speech. But I also think it can be helpful to think loosely about like...resemblances to patterns of perception? If that makes sense? Like if you're walking down a trail, or if you're running down it at race pace, or if you're being chased by a serial killer, or if you're pissed off while you're walking it, there's an overall throughline that dominates the way you're gonna perceive the trail.
In this case, because the perspective character is sitting around musing, and he's drinking and having a fanciful time to himself, I think the passage reads much more strongly as conscious musings on his part. By contrast, earlier in the story:
>"Your gaze moves towards the horizon, the sun has almost completely set, and a fine red line is all that separates the orange vestiges of the day from the dark blue of night. Caught between the two, that fine red line blazes, like a fresh and bleeding wound in the sky. "This reads almost like an old school CYOA, where it's like a narrator separate from the perspective character. When it's coming from the narrator-as-separate, I think there's a little more credence the brain is willing to give toward being fanciful. But, really, I feel like a specific thing happens in that paragraph, which is that... the moment is like... washing over him. That's what it feels like. It's like when you stop a moment and take a deep breath of salty sea air, and it sort of takes over you, right. And I really really feel that from what you're writing.
"There is not a cloud in the sky, the moon is at its zenith - full and lurid with ethereal white as it looms above the open water like a spotlight. The grains of the beach seem to glow white underneath the cold radiance of the moon. You stare out into the ocean, dyed a black-blue like a mean bruise from the night sky. Your gaze starts on the tides as they ebb and flow like time-caught ink spilled on a canvas. Your eyes begin to trace up the waves until they rest in the deep black of the distant horizon."
I really think this is ninety percent 'there.' Funnily enough, I feel like the fact that he's drunk makes his use of artistic metaphors strain just a bit, but I don't think that's the fundamental issue. I feel like what's happening is that the metaphors don't feel uh... flowy and contiguous. It feels very like... segmented. One, then two, then three. Instead of washing over him it kinda feels like he's playing an adventure game and he clicks one part of the screen, then another, then another.
So, I think it's a matter of a slight mismatch between rhythmic schema (one and two and three and four) and scene, where actually the scene has very contiguous elements. The moon is white, which makes the beach glow white, but the water is still so very dark next to it, so dark that it looks like ink. The wavey motion of that ink makes your eyes trace the waves back and back and back to the dark horizon, right? So at once, the approach seems to me to a. adjust the rhythm to the scene and b. take note of the contiguous aspects of the scene, and be judicious in how you want to express their relations.
Anyway, I hope this at least gives you something to springboard off of. Thank you for indulging my theorycrafting.
