Honest Critiques, Please ( :

[daijinahito]

Still working on this passage. I really want it to sound ominous towards the end, and I'll tell you guys why, at the end of the passage, to see if anyone can understand what I'm trying to do here.

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A big ink blotch covers the paper.

"What do you see?"I take one look at the pad and that's enough for me.

"This is stupid."

"Chase, I'm doing this for you. If I could just get your honest response to this. I know you like to draw, and that's why I thought this test would be better, rather then me asking questions that you don't want to answer."

"Fine. Someone dropped an ink pot." She seems hurt, but turns the page, nonetheless.

"What about this one?" This time I really stare at it for a while, squinting my eyes, to give off the impression that I'm really looking at it.

"What is it?" She seems worried by my expression. It's really cute.

"Someone went kersplat."

"Chase." Her tone dramatically drops. Her eyes close for a moment, as if to sigh, and then the pad snaps shut in her hand. She pinches the skin between her eyebrows, while I get up to get a cup of water. My mouth has gone dry and it's really uncomfortable. "Ok, Chase. We're finished."

"For today?" Shit, I think she's pissed. She just stares at me with that unpleasant look that makes me look away and shrug for no reason. I'm trying to break that habit. "I'll come back tomorrow." I really don't want to, but she looks mad. I mean, I really don't want to come back. But, she likes it when I come to her office. She likes trying to fix me, I think. It's okay though, I'm fine with this relationship.

I gather all my sketchbooks and my journal, and I walk out, closing the door quietly behind me. The secretary looks up, acknowledging my face, then her eyes redirect to the clock on the wall. She has a worried expression as I leave. I'm not even supposed to be here, why does she care when I leave?

I start to walk home. The last of the evening sun has melted into a hazy blotch at the other side of the earth. Hues of red descend over the streets and reflect across the windows of passing cars. My eyes dart across one of the windows, and the shape of an ink blotch appears. Tomorrow, I'll ask Sarah if she has time to talk to me in the morning instead.
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So, the main character is seeing a psychiatrist that's actually a friend from college whose found he has a lot of issues. She's a professional psychiatrist and continues to take him in for free. The main character is really hard headed though and tries to remain playful or smart mouthed. He lost his family in a car accident, and the ink blotches resurfaced some of those memories, while the red of the sun serves to further give a clearer image in front of his face, making his thoughts seem more realistic.

If you're willing to let me know what you think, and let me know if this all makes sense, then if you send me a link to any of your critique threads, I'll gladly take a look and give some advice in return. ( :

[ArachneJericho]

My first thought is that this is a really incompetent psychologist (not psychiatrist; they are the ones that assign you medications, not so much talk therapy). Showing impatience at your patient is no way to gain their trust, and really, I hope this woman gets fired. If this is the impression you're going for, you succeeded.

ETA: The second thought is that this scene is way, way too short and doesn't give good enough support for your character's personality as you describe.

[Mad Harlequin]

Arachne covered most of the issues here, but I also want to add that I doubt a professional psychologist would get away with seeing a client for free, especially when that client is an old friend. If anyone found out about favors like that, the psychologist would be in big trouble.

Secondly, if you're writing about these sessions, you'll want to do something besides use Rorshach tests. They're not employed very often nowadays.

[ArachneJericho]

Yeah, Rorschach tests are out of style. They weren't really very informative in the first place.

Here's what my psychologist does.

- When he first met me, he asked me to talk about my situation and establish background. You really can't start good therapy without that. If the person isn't ready to talk about the situation, they plain aren't ready for therapy, and no amount of pushing and shoving is gonna work all that well, if at all. So your character must, in some way, want this.

- For me, at first I was resistant. But it works like the call to adventure; eventually something came along that forced me to seriously engage in the option of talk therapy (and even meds at all): a blackout that resulted in me threatening friends because I believed they were helping my parents to stalk and kill me. Anyways. If your character isn't willing, something should make him more-or-less willing.

- My psychologist sometimes begins our sessions with small talk. In fact, he began our first session with asking me about what I did for a living. Instead of making it a stressful interview, which is no way to carry on the kind of deep probing most therapy must do, he turns it into a conversation. In essence, the kind of conversation you might have with a friend who didn't mind getting a bunch of stuff dumped on them.

- Hence trust is really important to establish. No trust, no therapy. And any psychologist worth their salt will know that with some people it can take a while to establish enough trust to go deeper. They won't rush it.

- You might want to look up cognitive behavioral therapy, which tends to be used a lot these days. It's fairly flexible, and I got assigned work books to understand the process better (as well as work books to work through, to understand PTSD better).

- You probably also want to establish exactly what your character is suffering from, from a psychological point of view. That will help you with your storytelling in general, because you'll know better what to research. When writing about psychological stuff, research is always your friend---but also remember to take into account anecdotes from patients who actually suffer from the condition(s) too. Sometimes the clinical description is too clinical.

This is a lot of detail, but if you want to write something convincing for this sort of situation, this is the kind of stuff you need to research.

[daijinahito]

To: ArachneJericho

Thanks a lot for the very detailed post, Arachne! It really helped me re-think this. I really didn't think about what really happened in therapy, because I was so focused on getting past the intro and into the fun stuff. This is only the opening of the story that is a means of creating some background information on the main character, as well as a ploy to get the main character to go on the hero's adventure. Sarah was going to ask a favor of Chase that would cause him to go on a journey, and being interested in Sarah, he'd go along with the idea. He would then end up having to face his problems at full force with someone who was also on the verge of a mental breakdown after a severe trauma.

Yeah, didn't even think about the ink blotch test being outdated. I'd recently played Heavy Rain, which had a scene using the test, and just automatically wrote it in without much thought. Your post made me think, wow, I really just made up a bunch of crap that I know nothing about. I'll have to be more wary about these kinds of things in the future, and do my research. I'm really sorry if what I wrote offended anyone.

I'm really interested in getting to the characters, to be honest. It's a story about the loss of the ability to love, paranoia, and self loathe. Maybe I could find something that has a medical name for this, it would be neat to know if there is something that fits the bill, but maybe it's not even necessary.

The main focus will involve two characters who are forced together, who have no interest in being together, and how they learn to love again, even with all the corruption, family issues, that continue to destroy them from the inside. They are both good people, but also bad people. This is the story about how two people, against the odds, learn to accept themselves and love.

You're right, I see that this sample isn't large enough to give much of an image on the character's background or personality and so I'll re-write this after I think about it a little more and then re-post the revised passage. I will try for a new approach to the psychiatrist, and use the information you so kindly supplied me with. Thank you so very much for that. I think I'll make Sarah more understanding and patient, this time around.

[ArachneJericho]

You're welcome. And this stuff is hard to get right, so no worries.

If you want some more about me and my discussions with my bartender (what I call my psychologist, but he doesn't serve alcohol ) there's also: http://spontaneousderivation.com/ptsd-and-bipolar/ - scroll down to the "Dancing with Psychologists" section, where I cover like the first 20? 30? something? of my sessions with him. Warning: I'm pretty blatant about the trauma I went through as part of this stuff.

Hope that helps!