Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: storytelling

14/Jan/2014

Opening Sentence

I’m opening all my books to read the opening sentence out loud, then closing them again. It’s becoming a disjointed story that doesn’t care about characters or theme or even language, having switched tongues three or four times already. Some of its sentences are very short, trying to make an impact, and others are several lines long, desperately trying to get me to stay for as long as possible. But it is very concerned with introductions, like someone who obviously has something important to say, who keeps stretching their hand out to shake yours, but doesn’t get further than that.

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28/Jan/2013

Open Letter to Ken Woodruff

[Trigger Warning: rape, bad police officers, torture]

[Spoiler Warning: uh, season 2, episode 14 of The Mentalist]

Hello Ken,

I hope you appreciate feedback. This open letter concerns an episode, Blood In, Blood Out of the hit show The Mentalist, an episode which you wrote. More specifically it concerns the ending of it, which I felt was handled very very poorly. I know it is an old episode, and I hope that your writing has grown since.

When you (general you) do writing, you generally write about what’s important to you, and ignore what is not important. I think there was a scene in your episode where you (specific you) overlooked something very important, and I am going to explain why. Do excuse all this build-up before I get to my actual point. It is here so that you (or other readers of this letter) do not misconstrue my critique.

It was a well-told story; you explored a new side of Kimball Cho [an agent of law]; you tied everything together nicely at the end; there were some cool scenes with guns in them.

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