at 14:21 on 24 January 2005
at 15:45 on 24 January 2005 |
Nelly, something very strange happened whilst reading this story - when reading the second paragraph that details the damage to the car, it reminded me of that Michael Burke TV show, 999 where people have incredible escapes from such tragedies. All of a sudden, I was reading it in his style. I guess that means you've made it sound convincing, and indeed with impact. All the best, Ben |
at 16:31 on 24 January 2005 |
Nelly A great description of a car crash. After the first four para�s I thought that the storyline might be from a man looking down on what had just happened as he made his way to the next life. However, you kept the suspense going very well indeed. I felt that you used David a lot which I found distracting, e.g. three consecutive paragraphs begin with his name and I think that the word be is missing from para four� �lucky to BE alive.� I liked the nonchalant ending. Regards Jim |
at 18:28 on 24 January 2005 |
Good stuff Nelly. An entertaining read. Best, Nik |
at 19:08 on 24 January 2005 |
Hi Neil, Glad you didn't let him die, that would've been cruel. It's a great ad for mobile phones, I'd say. Does the story belong to a longer piece, or as part of a set of stories about David Rice's luck? At the very end, in his condition, would he really talk to his mum like that? Wouldn't his first words be 'get someone?' Becca. |
at 22:08 on 24 January 2005 |
Hi everyone, Cheers for the great responses you have all given. I will take it all under review and see what I can manage. DB4's dont have airbags, so it was a little artistic license to put one in and the same for the explosion but if it's good enough for the movies then it's good enough for me. Cheers again Neil. |
at 08:27 on 28 January 2005 |
Neil, An Aston Martin DB4 only has two doors so I think simply �passenger door� would be better. Adjective overload! Rocky is hard is unforgiving� and you�ve already told us the car fell onto rocks. They don�t have a back, do they? And I�ve seen your comment about the airbag. I�m wondering why you specify a DB4. They�re not a car you see every day, so I�m wondering why? What�s the significance? If I owned a DB4 I�d be distraught at wrecking it � no matter how injured I was! IMO, if you use something like an Aston Martin, you need to include it in the story more, in the sense that it means more to its owner than your average motor. If you don�t want to do that then I�d recommend you change it to an ordinary car so that it doesn�t detract from the main theme of the story, which is your MC surviving the crash. Hope this helps. Was going to add more but I�m late for work!!! Dee |
at 11:29 on 28 January 2005 |
Hi Dee, Obviously I need to research my cars more before including them in short stories. Before writing the piece I ran a quick Google check for old cars and came up with the DB4. I thought it looked the type and so put it in. The car I imagine though throughout, has to have four doors and so it would seem the DB4 is the wrong one for the job. I'll run another check on the super highway of information and see what I can come up with. I also agree with that sentence and I'll have a bit of a shifty to see what I can do. Cheers Neil. |
at 15:51 on 28 January 2005 |
Neil Real cliff hanger, excuse the pun. Should driving wheel be steering wheel? Two foot of steel back into the car? Couldn't quite follow which bits of metal. Parts of the engine? The continuous round of things stopping him getting out and then the explosion damaging even more was great, if pain and anguish can be great. I thought the final straw was going to be the tide coming in and almost drowning him, fortunatley you spared him that! Pacey story, Indiana Jones flavour. Enjoyed it. Andrew |
at 18:49 on 28 January 2005 |
Neil, sorry if my comments this morning seemed a bit negative. I was going to add more but realised I had three minutes to get out of the house � and I was still in bed! James Bond had a DB5 in the films, although it was a DB3 in the books. Aston Martins are such special cars that, if you use one in a story, someone is bound to know whether you�ve got your facts right. I would sell my soul for an Aston Martin. In the next novel I�m planning, the MC drives a DB7 although, by the time the manuscript is finished, it might have to become a DB9! Good luck with this. Dee |
at 12:06 on 29 January 2005 |
Hi Zigeroon, I'll change the wheel line around and with by two foot of metal I mean the whole thing becoming a compacted lump. I had thought about the tide getting him as well but opted for the "mum" ending as I only intended this to about the 1000 word mark. I can just imagine Harrison Ford doing that type of thing, maybe I should add a hat and whip? Neil |
at 14:27 on 29 January 2005 |
Hi Neil, a great read. Don't panic, I know nothing of the Volvo S80 nor the peculiarities of its safety systems. Lots of great drama and detail. A simple story, well. I liked the understatement at the end. Great stuff. Bill |
at 12:01 on 05 February 2005 |
Hi Nelly, My heart sank a bit when I started reading this because I thought it was an exercise in description, but by the time I was halfway through I was gripped. A lot of what you are describing is fairly standard in the sense that there is a finite number of options once a car's rolled over, but you have made the action your own and that's really good. I think you should clip some of the sentences to give it more of a sense of immediacy, for example: The metal of the car groaned, a wounded beast's final cry, before shuddering and falling slowly onto its side. The ending was terrific: it was unexpected and I liked his laconic delivery in the wake of so much drama:-) Shyama |
at 17:52 on 06 February 2005 |
Cheers for taking the time to review I'm glad you liked it. I'll have another look and see if I can reflect your comments into the piece. I'll never look at an Aston Martin in the same way again. |
at 08:55 on 28 March 2005 |
Late to comment, I think this work does well for the short sentences you use in places and the snappy paragraphs. I would still encourage you to do a more rigorous check on each adjective and every adverb. For my taste, there are still excessive qualifiers which don't serve the text optimally. I imagine this would be publishable if you could be truly ruthless on that point. Good luck. Do a rewrite and then send it out. Liesl |
at 21:44 on 09 May 2005 |
An equally late response to your late response, Thanks for reading it, I haven�t considered sending it out as such, but I'll take another look and see what I can manage. Cheers Neil |
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What are some words that can help me vividly describe a motorcycle accident as if it was being seen by the reader? What are some words that can describe that crash, with such detail that the reader can listen to the noises, smell the air, and really visualize what happened...?
As one who has experienced three (fairly mild) motorcycle crashes (two front-wheel lockups, and one caused by changing lanes over a lane divider curb), one with mild injury, I can tell you one fairly realistic way would be to jump-cut from the instant before the crash (after it's inevitable, but before anything hits the ground or the rider), to after everything stops sliding.
I recall all three of my own crashes in great detail, but that would likely be best handled in flashback, since the actual event took less than five seconds from "Oh, crap" to picking myself up. If you try to describe the events as they pass, you'll spend four or five pages covering as many seconds. That can be done, but many readers won't want to read in that level of detail for that long. If you write memory snippets later, a paragraph or two interspersed with other story material, you'll be less likely to cause readers to "work too hard."
The human perceptual system runs on anticipation. We understand things that play out in predictable and foreseen ways. We are disoriented by things that happen suddenly, violently, and out of the blue. We come away from those incidents with a jumble of poorly integrated memories of light and noise but no clear recollection of the specifics of the event because it was entirely outside our system of anticipation and therefore hard to interpret and remember in real time.
In a movie, you can create this kind of experience for the audience. You can strap a hero cam to the handlebars of a motorcycle and run it into the side of a wall and you will create a cinematic experience quite similar to the disorientation that we feel when we are involved in or witness a crash ourselves.
But it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to create this same effect in prose. There are two main reasons for this. First, while a movie is recieved directly, by the same sense that receive input in a real event, prose has to be interpreted. Some writers try to create the impression of confusing events with confusing words, but the problem with this is that the confusing words interfere with the interpretation of the text, so that rather than receiving an impression of confusing events, the reader receives an impression of confusing words, which is in no way a recreation of the impressions of the event.
Secondly, while film is a synchronous media, in which multiple sounds and images can be presented in real time, prose is an asynchronous media. You can only read one word at a time and therefore things that happen simultaneously in life happen sequentially in prose. By spreading out the events into a sequence, you inherently make them less abrupt and confusing, thus lessening the impact.
Because of this, while movie are a medium of direct experience, prose is much more a medium of recollection. Stories are told after the fact (and using present tense does nothing to change this). They are recollections of events.
This does not in any way prevent them from being vivid. Our recollections can be very vivid. But our recollections are also reconstructions of events that impose and order, significance, and importance to events and sensations that was not present in the raw data of experience. This is well borne out by studies of memory and the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. It is also why the novel is a fundamentally more powerful medium than the movie.
But what this means is that the recollection of a traumatic event, such as a motorcycle crash is far more orderly than the sense impressions that occurred at the time it was happening. Whether we acknowledge it or not, our memories of such an event are really reconstructions which draw heavily on evidence gathered after the event.
So you are not going to be able to create the immediate vivid experience of a motorcycle crash in prose the way you could in a movie. That is just not what the medium is good at. Rather, if you want to portray it vividly, you must work with the recollection of the event rather than its immediate sensations.
And remember that prose depends heavily on memory in all cases. It paints no pictures and makes no sounds. Rather, it drags the memory of pictures and sounds and other sensations out of the reader's memory by a kind of leading process, which walks the reader up to the precipice of a traumatic event and then lets the reader fill in the sensations of the event from recall of events in their own lives. Most of the strong sensations produced by literature, therefore, are not produced by the prose of the moment, but by the way the writers has build anticipation in the reader. Anticipation is the source and heart of all drama. Build the anticipation to a fever pitch and you can trigger the emotions in a few words. (" Reader, I married him. ")
As a writer of prose, therefore, your tools are anticipation and recollection. Don't try treat subjects the way a movie would treat them. You don't have the tools for that in prose. But you have fundamentally more powerful tools. They simply must be used in a different way.
My approach to this, which I stole from other authors, is to not worry about time or space and describe the action of the accident in detail, use as much space as you want.
There is an actual real life phenomenon in which adrenalin floods the brain in an emergency and it seems to slow down time. I have felt this in a rollover (car) at 75 mph, and my best friend in a separate incident was in a car crash where a coked up driver of a stolen car broad-sided him, in an intersection, traveling at over 110 mph. This threw him him through the closed driver side window of his car, which shredded both his clothing and his body, causing dozens of cuts, and sending him flying through the air to land in the street in front of another car stopped for the light. He said it felt like it took sixty seconds to complete, but in that time he could barely move his arm up so his face hit his forearm instead of the pavement (which he doesn't remember happening, but his face did hit his forearm instead of the pavement).
Regardless, just describe the scene, moment by moment, cut out what is not necessary (like any other scene). Keep track in your head that you are taking many seconds to describe something that may happen in literally less than one second, so while your narrator can take the time, don't let your fictional characters move or think at super speed.
Think of it as if you saw, in a movie, a super slow motion video of a motorcycle crash. Pick around three key points in that slow motion video to describe. How much of the broken bones, flesh left on the pavement, dismemberments or impalements or spurting ripped open arteries you want to describe is between you and your audience and what you think they can handle or expect from you, from PG to porno-horror film explicit.
I agree with those who say the briefer you are the better. You want to make it realistic, you need to keep it short. A paragraph, maybe two (for me 1 is enough), imo. An accident is an action scene and action scenes are fast moving with short, choppy sentences. If it's a flashback, then it can be slightly longer. As one pointed out the senses of smells and sounds are important. Also, don't forget the feelings of the MC, his thoughts in that split second. The accident might be part of your story but it's not the real plot, it might just lead to the real plot.
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3. The Power of Slow Motion. In high-stress situations like a car accident, people often report that time seems to slow down. This can be a powerful tool in your writing. By describing the events in slow motion, you can increase the tension and drama of the scene.
1. Set the stage: Before the crash occurs, it's crucial to create a vivid picture of the scene. Describe the weather conditions, the time of day, and any other relevant details that set the tone for the impending chaos. This sets the stage for your readers and prepares them for the impact that is about to unfold. 2.
"The tragic car accident that took place earlier that week killed three people." "Even months after the tragic car accident, it was difficult for her to recover from the fear and grief she felt." How it Adds Description. A car accident may be tragic because a character or multiple characters in your story died.
Writing about a car crash can be both a challenging and rewarding experience. It presents an opportunity to evoke emotions and feelings through vivid descriptions. This article will explore how to effectively describe a car crash in writing using narrative, dramatic, metaphorical, technical and investigative descriptions. Narrative
car crash. - quotes and descriptions to inspire creative writing. One moment the road is there, wide open and safe, the next there are loud noises, acrid smells and pain that you may or may not recover from. A car crash comes as a shock and that's an aspect he movies and novels aren't good at showing. It is the equivalent of looking without ...
Talk about how the character's senses are compromised. Once the accident occurs, what can he/she see, hear or smell. Write it as expressively as possible. » A. Make it gruesome if you really want to impact the reader. This is a very significant event in your novel. It might even be the climax of the story.
TIP #3: Shock (acute stress reaction) occurs after witnessing or being in a traumatic event. Common reactions are numbness and detachment. You can have your character go into a state of shock after their accident, which typical wears off in 24-48 hours. When it does pain becomes present and emotions run high.
When you're describing the car, look at a picture and write down every feature you see (door, spoiler, rims etc.). After that, write down every non-feature you see, glare of the sun, reflection in the window, shine of the tire, etc. Take all of this info and start crafting, using everything from the tips above and below.
How to Write a Car Accident Description (Examples)?
Crash on landing or takoff, you are quite right - most survive. Concussion: death can occur hours later even after the character says "I'm fine.". Hanging: without a drop, as you say, 8-13 seconds of hideous pain. (Or a little longer if a sheet or large diameter rope is used, and that's how most suicides occur.)
Suggestions: Make a draft where it's one character's perspective through the whole event. Then do this for ALL the character in the event/scene. Write in the first person for each character. Last step - write the scene as the narrator/godmode. this one will be difficult, but since you have three or four different perspectives already ...
1,374. Location: A Place with no History. A car crash is a car crash. There can be little damage to a heavy person but lots of damage to a skinny guy or vice-versa. Yes, physics takes into account all these things but either way every sort of injury is possible to having none at all no matter what your body type.
accident. - quotes and descriptions to inspire creative writing. One moment there was ground under my the wheels of my bicycle, dark ground yet to feel the kiss of the light of dawn, then there was water. Then, in a moment that felt so stretched... I sank beneath the cold surface, arms dragging along the bottom of the canal.
How to Write a Motor Vehicle Accident Report (with Pictures)
For example, a description written in the style of an 18th century novel uses more formal language, longer sentences, and more descriptive language compared to the response written in the style of a child writing a letter, which uses simpler vocabulary and sentence structures. A description in the style of a politician making a speech uses more
car. - quotes and descriptions to inspire creative writing. The car has a personality of its own with those raised and rounded headlamps. By Angela Abraham, @daisydescriptionari, December 30, 2020. The car sits as if it were formed from flowing metal, aquatic, yet feminine with its curves.
Car Accidents Causes and Effects. The reasons for them are different, and the consequences of accidents also differ; therefore, it is possible to describe the most common causes of crashes on the roads and the effects that they have. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts. 185 writers online.
Car Crash Creative Writing. Ignoring the fact that I wasn't in my proper bed was getting old. I was inhaling a musty smell of old carpet and I was mildly cold as I sat on a ruff wood surface that will probably give me splinters if I move. As I opened my eyes I was somewhat intrigued to find that I couldn't see anymore than I could when my eyes ...
The car crash. Summary: A quick short story about the luck of David Rice. The Car Crash. The Volvo S80 ploughed through the guard-rail and fell fifty feet onto the rocks below. Its front end crumpled with the force of impact thrusting two-foot of metal back into the car. The windshield imploded, showering the insides with deadly slivers of glass.
11 3. The smells and sounds (rubber burning on the pavement, screaming of metal, etc) are your friends more than the images. For the actual images, I'd suggest using metaphors/similes. Motorcycle accidents are horrific because of the near certainty of being maimed/killed. Oftentimes family members are terrified when the person gets the ...
Creative Writing Road Accident. "I 'm going straight home," I said to my roommate, Alex. "I 'll see you there." I started the engine of my Toyota Camry. I put it in reverse and exited the parking lot. As hit the brake before getting on the main road, my car died. It had been doing that for a week now, I still hadn 't got it checked out.
Car Crash Creative Writing. My car had slowed lights flickering and the engine cutting out every so often. I pulled off to the side just as the sound of the car running cut out. I turned my keys over and over only resulting in the car spluttering and cutting off. I got out of my car the sound of the woods surrounding me being the only noise.