\"Writing.Com
*Magnify*
SPONSORED ITEMS
BY ONLINE AUTHORS
Printed from https://p15.writing.com/main/profile/reviews/edgework/sort_by/r.review_creation_time DESC/page/6
Review Requests: ON
1,085 Public Reviews Given
1,108 Total Reviews Given
Review Style
Unsentimental. I focus on the kinds of craft issues that will keep a writer from being taken seriously and prevent them from fully expressing their vision. For more information, see "Writing Hurts: Review Forum" Open in new Window.
I'm good at...
Analyzing the written word and determining where a piece is not accomplishing what it wants to accomplish.
Favorite Genres
Short stories and poetry are my forte. Novels, not so much. Usually I only need to read a chapter or two to determine if it's going to go off the rails. Sometimes I'll keep reading.
Least Favorite Genres
I'll read anything.
Favorite Item Types
Anything.
Least Favorite Item Types
Pieces from authors who have never considered that writing is a craft, who nonetheless think they're great simply because they have penned the words, and who take offense when I don't agree.
I will not review...
Useful things don't always occur to me with a given piece. If I don't think I can offer insight into how the writer might become better at the task, I won't say anything.
Public Reviews
Previous ... 2 3 4 5 -6- 7 8 9 10 11 ... Next
126
126
Review of ---  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: E | (4.5)
Sig for reviews

Sweet.

Strong prose and nice imagery that's never overdone. Plus, I like the songs you referenced.

As I was reading this I was thinking maybe this was really a prose poem and that you might want to pull back a few steps from the actual moments, bend them through more of a subjective prism that would allow you to expand the scope. Otherwise, it was just a nice bit of descriptive writing.

Then I got to Dad doing the dishes and everything fell together. Again, nothing overdone and all the more powerful for it.

I like it. I'm sure there's an editor out there trying to fill a decent magazine with decent writing who would would agree. I hope you're looking for him.
127
127
Review of The Lake  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: E | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

This is cast as a fable, although the time frame is a bit confused. The natives seem to be from a timeless perfect past, while the outsiders are clearly from today, most likely with BP logos on their shirts.

Here's the problem that arises whenever you enlist your writing in the service of a political position, argument or agenda; worthiness of the message aside, the writing always takes second place. It is the message that counts. But this is always about the writing first. Messages, such as they are, will either express themselves through the dynamics of a well-crafted story, or not, but you don't get extra points for being on the "right" side of history, however you think that is defined.

Here's a basic rule of characterization right out of the Writing—101 textbook: when half your characters are all good, and the other half are all bad, you've been lazy, and none of your characters are real. James Cameron might have paid a bit more attention to that rule when he came up with "Avatar' but he too had a message he fell in love with and felt its inherent rightness exempted him from the need to craft three dimensional characters. As have you.

You sense that this is true already, in the way you've considered the chief. There's an actual arc hidden away behind all the cookie cutter situations. He starts out being optimistic, thinking of the good of his people and wanting to embrace new ideas, and he ends up being greedy. We know he's greedy because you tell us so. How much better would it have been had you gotten out of the way, let the interaction between the chief, the shaman, perhaps one of the leading warriors, and the spokesman for the outsiders play itself out in real time, front and center, where we can see the characters working through the situation you've crafted for them, and letting the consequences of their actions define the themes you are concerned with. That's where themes do their best work, seeping into our consciousness as the actions unfold and the narrative works its way through its arc. When you take the reader by the hand and literally spell out your theme for them... well, all themes are simple, a little trite and banal when exposed to a literal explication. It's when you find unique characters in a unique situation, forced to make decisions, take actions, and deal with the implication and unexpected consequences of those actions that the true power of a theme is revealed, as a force field guiding and directing all the elements of the story and given them cohesion and focus.

Right now this story is strictly about your message. I make no judgement or comment about that message, understand, only to point out that writing that has as its first priority the propagation of a specific message is, well... propaganda. By definition it will appeal to those who already agree with you and be dismissed by those who don't. The power of art is that it can appeal to people who don't agree with it, thereby holding out the possibility of transformation.

Make this story about someone, and tell their story. Give them a goal, a quest or an imperative that they cannot avoid. Throw them into conflict with events surrounding them. GIve the an opponent. Make them work. And make yourself work, as well. It will be worth the effort.
128
128
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

You've set some ambitious challenges for yourself in this story. You have a couple of compelling characters front and center and some cameo walk-ons that pop out of the background and grab our attention while they're on stage. What's missing for me is a clearly established point of view for the story itself, a force field that will organize and define the various thematic elements that are in orbit around each other. At the end I was left unsatisfied, not in the sense that the old vaudeville veteran meant when he said "Always leave 'em wanting more, kid." In this case, I just don't think you've done your job fully. You've given us the characters, and you've done a good job of setting them in motion (although nothing much actually happens); what you haven't done for the reader is answer the question "So what?" You've offered sketches of an answer, suggestions of what it might all amount to, but I think you'd fare much better if you came up with more of a narrative arc that would show us the implications of your themes, rather than simply having Hyacinth think about them.

Part of the problem is that you have more than a few issues that you're playing with, and there's an unfocused approach to the question "What's this story about?" You seem equally divided between the various oppositions you've set up: successful writers vs. those still aspiring to success; celebrity vs. true accomplishment; the experience of American blacks vs. the British black community. Beneath those themes is the question of the possibilities of political change, and the relevance of the American Civil Rights movement to present day conditions. What you seem to be doing is using the initial theme, the aspiring writers seeking insight and guidance from one already estalished, as the surface vehicle through which your other concerns can slip in and guide the story in its true direction. Nothing wrong with that approach, in theory; in practice, I think you have a rewrite or two ahead of you.

When you use one level of narrative as a conduit to project deeper levels into the story, you have to make it seamless. When the deeper themes begin to assert themselves, we need to be able to think, "Ah... yes. This what the story is about, and what it has always been about." In order for that to happen, you need to create a container large enough to hold all the elements from the first word. At the moment you seem to simply be juggling smaller containers as you go, focusing first on this, then that. While you may be getting the full range of your own concerns onto the page, for the reader the experience is of a piece that is internally inconsistent, lacking a single core movement from start to finish.

For instance, I would suggest that the issues relating to black culture, on both sides of the Atlantic, historical as well as current, are in fact what the story is about. That you come at this from an oblique angle rather than beating us over the head with didactic insistence is effective and makes for a stronger impact. To a lesser extent, the question of celebrity vs. actual accomplishment certainly figures in strongly. Betty is the focal point for both themes, yet by the end of the fifth paragraph we have nothing to prepare us for these concerns. As far as we're concerned, this story is solely about creativity, finding success as a writer, and having ones works critiqued. We don't even know for sure if Hyacinth is black or white. In story in which black identity is a major concern, keeping this bit of information from the reader serves only to confuse, with no dramatic payoff for the withheld information. Imagine trying to turn this into a film, and keeping the audience confused as to her ethnicity. Cameral angles from the waist down, close-up shots on her back, a specific avoidance of hands, face, possibly even hair... all of which would call dramatic attention to themselves as a device to keep us from knowing crucial information about the character, the kind of device that would need to justify itself as the narrative unfolds.

You aren't really creating a story here where racial ambiguity is a point you are trying to exploit. As we continue reading we are allowed to intuit the fact that this is a fairly conventional set-up: famous black writer with a civil rights pedigree lecturing in a predominantly black venue to a predominantly black audience. About predominantly black themes. So why not just show us who we are dealing with at the outset? If you leave your readers without crucial information, it needs to be for a purpose and it needs to pay off later in dramatic impact.

Betty is handled a little better, though the only clue you offer at the outset is the word "activist", which certainly does nothing to establish a thematic concern with the black cultural experience, but neither does it preclude such a concern. The bigger issue with Betty is that Hyacinth, on the evidence of her internal musings at the opening, seems unaware that the lecturer has a past. And that's what I mean by not setting us up for the real themes of the story. In paragraph six you get down to Betty's resume in some detail, but that's you the author talking to the reader, filling them in on crucial information. Hyacinth, in the preceding paragraph is thinking only of the generic issues of writing, talent and pathways to success. That's not how an aspiring black author would think as they prepare to encounter someone who they consider to be a legendary figure from the civil rights movement. Hyacinth's awareness should become the reader's awareness, freeing you of the need to step into the middle of the action with information as you've done in paragraph six. Hyacinth is not just there to hear a writer; she's there to hear this writer, for reasons that include but also go beyond mere creative writing aspirations. That's the fuller context of your story, and making it part of your story from the start allows you to seamlessly and effortlessly shift focus later on as we realize that Betty comes to the table with some serious problems... both as a writer and as a celebrity.

Which brings me to your start. Kill the first two paragraphs. Please. Don't rewrite them. Don't find a different way to work them into the narrative. They are pointless, accomplish nothing and totally waste the opportunity that you have in your opening to guide your reader's attention and direct their focus in the way you want. Come on... it's not a story about shopping, and public transportation has zero relevance, as does her invalid mother. Your readers will trust you, at the outset anyway, and so will attempt to fit everything you throw at them into a growing sense of what the story is about. If they discover halfway through that things they've been holding in their minds are irrelevant, they're going to get cranky and stop trusting you. And then they will stop reading. The two opening paragraphs are extreme examples of the same thing I said about the opening creative writing theme. That theme, while far more relevant than the shopping spree, still is not what the story is about. Prepare us for what the story is about, so that when you go there, we don't suffer whiplash.

A note about Hyacinth as a character: you've unquestionably given her an arc of sorts, in that she ends the story with a very different sense of who Betty is, and her importance. But what you haven't really done is make this Hyacinth's story. You have an admirable set-up just waiting for something to actually take place between Betty and Hyacinth. But nothing ever does. Hyacinth remains inside her thoughts and Betty is always seen from afar. That missing interaction is what keeps this from being a strong story. It is what would give Hyacinth an opportunity to take an action, make a decision, face a complication, overcome an obstacle... you know, all that plot stuff. We need more from her in the way of facing a situation and engineering her own path through the complications. It doesn't need to be much. But right now, she and Betty remain in their own bubbles, never coming into contact. They need to. And, of course, it is in the unfolding, development and resolution of plot concerns that your themes are able to express themselves, from behind the scenes where they belong.

You write well; your words sound good. But until you start paying more attention to the structures upon which you drape those words, they will fail to land with the force of which they are capable.
129
129
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: E | (2.5)
Sig for reviews

Judson Jerome, for many years the poetry editor of The Antioch Review and a quite elegant writer on the art and craft of poetry, once observed that if good prose consists of words in the best order, good poetry would be the best words in the best order.

As with anything so simplistic and all-encompassing this both misses by a mile and hits the target dead-center. Poetry is, first and foremost, about the words, how they intermingle, what they do linguistically apart from the meaning that they are intended to convey. You have an intuitive sense of this; no one's going to suggest that this poem is simply prose broken arbitrarily into lines. But as to whether or not they are the best words you could have chosen, I think not so much.

The first line, while tight and precise rhythmically, is lazy in its content. If one is wandering, there is a suggtestion of unfocused direction, an aimlessness in ones purpose. If one is on a quest, the opposite is suggested. Quests are focused and intentional. No one wakes up one morning, slaps themselves across the face and thinks, "Oh shucks! I've been searching for the Holy Grail for the past ten years!!! How the heck did that happen?"

So right off, while we might not consciously think you're lazy, or careless, neither do you avail yourself of the opportunity a first line offers to set the tone, direction and intention of the your poem, and face us in the right direction.

Much of the rest suffers from the same lack of precision, but the problem is more specific. You have totally ignored the expectations you set up in the first two lines as far as the rhythm that you will be following.

In these post-modern times it's safe to say the rules are dead. Except that's not exactly true. There are rules. Every poem has rules and from the first word they encounter, the reader is attempting to both discern the rules and also measure the extent to which you follow them, or, should you violate them, whether you do it well, or clumsily. The catch is, they're your rules. You get to make them up. That's the good news. The bad news is, you have to make them up. And then you have to follow them. The extent to which you establish a consistent set of rules for your poem, and follow them, is the degree to which the poem will present a coherent, internally consistent experience for the reader.

The rules entail balancing the relationships between subject, content, structure, form, and whatever real-world analogues contributed to the content. Some poems use their subjects like silly putty, running them through a gauntlet of linguistic transformations so that it's difficult to say exactly what the poem is "about." If the language is well considered, though, the poem will succeed on its own terms, not based on how well it captures some element external to it. In your case, the relationship between the content of your poem and events in the external world is very close; you are talking about things that actually happen, and we are to interpret them as such, not as metaphors or allegories, or some other such stuffy literary term.

But not entirely. There are linguistic structures suggested that can only exist in the poem. The real world doesn't rhyme, after all. There's no rule that says your poem must rhyme either, but if you go the the trouble of setting up a rhyme scheme in your first stanza, it's not very productive to abandon it halfway through, for no reason. You sense this, and, of course, you don't abandon it.

However, your first two lines are fairly strict in their meter. Both scan effortlessly into four metrical feet:

My mind's / been wan / der-ing out / on a quest.
my way / ward thoughts / have so / di - gressed

So effective is a concise rhythm that it can make up for deficiencies in content. Despite my comments on your first line, the rhythm carries the day and we move though it without much of a stumble.

Ah, but then we hit line three, and stumble we do.

There is a way to read this line that shoehorns all those syllables into a four-foot scansion, but it sounds stupid and doesn't work. A natural reading of the line gives us six feet.

Spring - ing / up - on / my mind / ma - ny / a fan / ci - ful thought.

It's not wrong in itself, understand. It just thwarts our expectations for the no other reason than that you didn't realize you'd established expectations in the first place. Never good. Thwarting expectations is a fine technique when under your control and done for dramatic or poetic effect. Here... not.

Okay, we think, maybe this is the form being established. Two lines of four beats, followed by a line of six, followed by... whaddaya know, two more lines of four beats. Okay. We can live with that. Structures and forms, after all, exist to be laughed at, for the poet to show that they won't be bound by any restrictions, that they can make their poem do whatever they want, regardless of the dictates of the form.

Then we hit stanza two, and things get really muddied. The first line fits. The second, alas, collapses into pure prose. Eleven syllables and only three strong beats in a truly natural reading of the words; four if you fudge. It's hard to interpret the third line's scansion; it's rhythmic but not in a way that fits what you need here.

The rest of the poem confirms what we've begun to suspect. You are loosely thinking in terms of four-foot lines. Emphasis on loosely. You need to get tight. The kind of poem you are writing depends on those structural aspects for its strength and for its effect. When we spend all our effort trying to force lines to fit the scansion for which they were intended, and failing, we loose our connection with the language and the poem.

I suggest rethinking each line in terms of its meter. In some cases you can drop a word, or a syllable. in others you will need to rethink the purpose of the line and the images and perhaps come up with a different way of saying what you want to say. That's often the result of addressing a sloppy meter. You find that in order to achieve the necessary precision, you have to look for sharper images that do more, with less. The old adage "A picture is worth a thousand words," may be a cliche, but in poetry, a concrete image will definitely save you from wasting syllables.
130
130
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: 18+ | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

This tale has at its core the kind of guaranteed emotional trigger that can cloud judgment and cause everything else to be viewed in the glare of the harsh events being chronicled. Nonetheless, some issues suggest themselves.

FIrst, the opening and closing paragraphs, which serve as a framing structure for the story proper. The structure adds nothing to the story and, in fact, dilutes its effect, since we read the entire thing holding on to the possibility that all this is backstory, or supplemental material to events in the present that will somehow complete the material from the past. This never happens. The present action material is largely irrelevant and simply places a narrative buffer between the reader and the story proper, which, I note, is not conveyed as backstory at all, but, rather as simply the story. This is as it should be. It's not backstory. It is the story and should be left alone to do what it is there to do.

I found the time frame unconvincing. You place this in 1969, and if it actually happened then, and you were there, there's not much for me to say, other than to point out that stories aren't history, and the event didn't seem to be the type of thing that one could so easily get away with in 1969, even in Mississippi. By that time, Black Panthers were all over the south registering voters, media awareness had been fine-tuned through seven years of covering the unfolding civil rights saga, the FBI had actually become vigorous in its focus on the KKK, and while racism still flourishes, in and out of the south, by 1969, it had ceased to enjoy the easy comfort of open expression that previous decades had allowed. The high-water mark of such open racism came during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964 when Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman were murdered for their civil rights work. After that, lights shined a bit more brightly in dark corners all over the south; perhaps not brightly enough, but times changed rapidly in the 60s, which, according to your bio block, you certainly recall. Even placing this in 1966 would ring a bit truer, certainly 1963, at the dawn of the struggle. As I said, it may have happened just this way, but that's a thing for history texts. For a story, it doesn't feel correct. If it did happen in 1969, there would have been repercussions. I don't doubt that there would have been pillars of the community who shared the judge's beliefs, but it would have been difficult to gloss over the whole event as if it never took place, a conclusion we're forced to intuit in the way you've portrayed it now.

Emotionally wrenching events aside, I note that your two primary characters are both cast in situations where they are powerless to affect their fate. The thing that makes a story compelling is a character who involves us in their particular odyssey as they confront the issues facing them, struggle to solve problems, engage foes in combat and, basically, try to win, however the particular dynamics of the story defines winning. What is needed is a story-judgement on the events. If a character fails, it still needs to have counted for something as far as the story is concerned. All we're given here is despair and futility as a fait accompli, without comment. It's not enough to say "But that's how it happened." Like I said, you're not writing history and you owe nothing to historical accuracy in the crafting of a compelling plot and engaging character arcs. Your only responsibility is to the reader. Gotta think of the reader, out there somewhere; theirs is the only judgment that counts.

My last point is a hornet's nest waiting to be kicked, and I'm not really in the mood to kick it: much. It's an open question whether or not women can write honest, believable male characters and men can write honest, believable female characters. Certainly fine-tuned powers of observation will suffice in the creation of believable behavior in ones characters, regardless of gender. But whether one believes that internal psychological and emotional drives and instincts can be intuited through mere observation depends in some part on whether one believes there to be fundamental differences in attitude, perspective, life priorities and behavior that are gender-based, or merely socialized effects of ingrained biases. This is certainly not the place for an examination of the topic in all its multifaceted complexity; suffice it to say that I did not find your main characters particularly believable. Not wrong, understand, just too idealized, missing echoes and overtones that would have made them much more realistic portrayals of young men trying to find their way in a turbulent time.
131
131
Review of Wayne  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

Let's cut to the chase, shall we?

Here's your first sentence:

As he does every morning, Wayne Jarvis wakes up when his ex-girlfriend’s black cat stirs on his chest and begins wailing that breakfast is long overdue.

Here's a possible rewrite:

Once again Wayne Jarvis wakes up with his ex-girlfriend’s black cat sitting on his chest wailing for breakfast.

I submit to you that, while you might quibble over the exclusion of this element or that element, the second version trips much more easily off the tongue, puts us much more directly in the midst of the action by paring away the narrative buffer between text and reader, and does so with eight fewer words. According to the "Writin' Real Good" manual, these are all noteworthy improvements.

You have to make a choice regarding your priorities: is it reader appreciation you seek, or indulging yourself and listening to the sound of your own narration?

Personally, I think you're far too in love with your own voice and figure that more is better. Don't get me wrong, it's a strong voice and you're a good writer, but I'd say you could probably carve excess flab out of each one of your sentence, as I've done, retain the core and deliver a much greater impact for the reader. Your guy's mourning the loss of a relationship, okay? But the way you're presenting him, he's hopelessly lost in his head, intellectualizing everything until it's smothered in a blanket of interpretive explanation that chokes the life out of whatever events lie at the center. No wonder she left him.

Enough for style. You'll agree or not but there's no point in me going through each sentence only to say the same thing, which I would.

Let's move on to structure. Once again I think you are stumbling over your overwhelming narrative voice that keeps everything in a hammerlock, refusing to allow any of your characters, or the events which concern them, to break out on their own. You insist on mediating the entire affair for the reader, and at times, it's necessary for the author to step in and collapse a sequence of events into a narrative paraphrasing. Other times, you want him to step out of the way and let the characters take center stage and show us what's going on. You never let them do this.

There's a reason for this: they have nothing to do. You have no story in the present, even though you narrate in present tense. Your entire piece is an internal reflection on an amorphous past where nothing happens, since it's already happened, and time has no flow, since the past is with us all at once, all of it at the same time. Some of it could be remedied, as with this passage:

All of his fellow policemen are frustrated middle-aged men who like to think that Wayne is out in the world doing all the f***ing for them. ‘Hey blondie!’ one of them will call and then laugh uproariously when Wayne walks in (ten minutes late as usual).

This is cast as a generalized example of a type of activity, a description of a condition, the type of thing that tends to happen. What we want is what is happening now, this moment, in the present, and we want to know what happened just before, that lead to this moment, and what happens right after, that flows out of this moment. What we want is a plot of some sort, to go along with the internal characterization, the kind of thing that Lawrence Block has described as "One damn thing after another." The only thing you let Wayne do is dwell on the past, which you gamely try to channel into the present with a detailed flashback, but by then it's too late. We don't know when or where we are. That's the trouble when all your narrative takes place in the past. There is no when. It's all foggy memory.

You're close to a real story here. What's needed is an actual arc in the present, something that takes your character from Point A, deposits him at Point B after putting him through some form of transforming process. That transforming process is called "The Story" and it's what keeps the reader wondering "Gosh, I wonder what's going to happen next?" Giving your character concerns, problems, decisions and actions in the present will release some of the burden of the past, which can then take its proper place as guiding force, informing attitudes and actions rather than trying to substitute for them.

To make your backstory relevant, something needs to intrude into the present, much like the cat in the first sentence. Some vestige of Mary's character and who she is and what type of relationship Wayne thought they had together needs to be the thing that creates whatever is happening to him in the present. But without something actually happening in the present, we won't really care.
132
132
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

Great idea at the center of this story. However, you're going to have to carve away the irrelevant material (or find a way to make it relevant), the bad dialogue and all the back story and create dramatic tension out of the present action.

What we have now is two people talking about things they mostly already know, simply to feed information to the reader. It never works, and it doesn't work here. People don't talk like that. And the back story, while all about explosions and stretches in third-world prisons and death and destruction, is powerless to channel that energy into the present. It's just two people talking. The fact that they're talking about nifty stuff just makes us wonder why you didn't make that stuff your story instead.

It's a question of scope. Right now you're trying to shoehorn a novel's worth of narrative into a short story sack and you can't do justice to either the material or the story format. That's a shame, because if you'd settle for the story that's right in front of you—a man murdering a former lover for the sake of God and Country—and grant us access to the myriad conflicts within as he goes about his business, you'd have us right where you want us.

But that means you'll have to find a different structure to present the elements of the tale. Consider little Mandy. Right now, she appears, does her dance and then she's gone with no effect on the proceedings at all. Yet, I can imagine her being significant, internally to Buck, and thematically to the story. I can also see her in a movie scene as our mysterious main character interacts with this image of innocence while the somber overtones and undertones and echoes ripple through the surface action. Movies get to do that sort of thing with editing, music, timing, lighting, camera angles and cuts and all the other bits of cinematic language that you as a writer of prose have no access to. You have to use the unique elements of prose to embed the texture.

Here's an example, a small thing, but I think it's actually crucial, particularly if it's repeated over and over in the course of a story. In the third paragraph we have this:

"Hi, Mister," a blonde, curly-headed little girl's cherry-cheeked face peaked over the back of the black plastic booth surprising him.

In a movie, we might well hear the sound of her voice, while the camera is focused elsewhere, a close-up of his pack of cigarettes perhaps. But unlike this paragraph, we would already know much more about the voice, including the fact that it belongs to a little girl. We'd also know something about her personality (cheery, exuberant, optimistic, as opposed to dour, depressed and fearful, for example). By the time the camera actually brought her curly hair and cheery cheeks into the frame, we have been well prepared for the meeting.

None of that happens in your paragraph. We hear a disembodied voice that has no context at all. That you quickly provide the supplemental information in the next sentence doesn't change the fact that for a moment, however brief, your reader has no idea what is going on, and the writing, rather than serving as a seamless conduit into the universe you've imagined, instead gets in the way, calls attention to itself and breaks the mood. Sometimes writing calls attention to itself through a breathtaking image or tour-de-force description of this or that, but usually it's because it's not really doing its job. This is an example of the latter case. It's actually a particular flaw that I call Screenwriter Envy and it pops up a lot. We see our story unfolding on the movie screen in our mind and let our imagined camera and microphone transcribe the events. It provides the actual sequence as they unfold, both internally and externally, but in prose that's not always the way you want to present things, particularly when it leaves out all the texture that gives us the real material that you're concerned with. In this case, that would be the abrupt intrusion of a naive innocent standing in stark contrast to the grim work Buck has ahead of him. Something as simple as inverting the order in which you present the information in that sentence would go a long way to keeping us in the moment.

Another place where the language calls attention to itself, to the detriment of the content, is in the opening sentence. Quoted internal thoughts are always awkward, particularly in a third-person restricted narrative. We're on safe ground assuming that you're not going to meander from one character to the next in the same scene, so we'll know who internal perceptions belong to. They can be effortlessly woven into the narrative itself eliminating the need to stick a first-person sentence into third-person text.

Poppa Gino's: the perfect location for his mission today.

This strikes me as accomplishing the task with a lot less intrusiveness.

As for the rest of it, do we really need all the details of the backstory? No, not if something compelling is happening in the present. We'll wait to find out where they all came from if we're busy wondering what's going to happen next. We'll even forego certainty about who they are, settling for hints and suggestions. But we need something in the present to occupy our focus.

The problem with the setting you've chosen is that there really isn't anything for them to do but talk, and sip cocktails. It's inherently static. How about an afternoon tryst between old lovers? They would know they're there for other business, of course, but the reader won't, and part of the arc you provide would be the reader's own discovery of the growing implications of the activity, and it's seriousness. A casual mention of scars and evidence of past brutal treatment will accomplish far more than having them simply mention Iraqi prisons, talking about bombs and spelling everything out for the reader. Besides, all those things are past. They really aren't part of the present story.

Your challenge is to make their interaction realistic, without making it real. Real interactions, even between double agents, are usually pretty boring. You have to let the reader believe they're reading one story, while allowing the real story to slip in between the lines. You do this in the way that you highlight the cigarette pack, but you need to be doing this sort of thing with everything they say to each other. It's misdirection, really, and you're thinking in these terms, but what you are using to misdirect us doesn't work. You need an actual story in the present moment.

The ending is really an example of "phoning it in," (literally). Again you miss a chance to keep the reader wondering "What's going to happen next?" He should follow her. We've already seen him select the cigarette. We suspect dire consequences, but we still don't know for sure. It won't be until he watches her collapse on the street that he, and we, have the certainty that the story has been building towards. It will pack a much bigger punch that way.
133
133
Review of The Believer  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: 13+ | (2.0)
Sig for reviews

You say you've hit a wall writing this. I'm not sure that's how I would characterize your problem. I'd say that you've accomplished what you set out to do here, which is to talk about some of the themes embodied in the story you intend to write. My suggestion at this point is to now actually write that story.

The proper place for the type of material you've presented here is out of sight, tucked away in the background, never calling attention to itself save for the ways in which it provides a force field driving your characters through their various transformations. Themes are not stories and, sadly, no matter how profound or weighty, they all sound banal and trite when actually spoken aloud, forced to stand on their own. "Love is good. War is bad. You reap what you sow. Don't take any wooden nickles." Themes are simple, by nature and that's how they come across when they try to carry the responsibilities properly assigned to plot, characterization and the unfolding dynamic when the two mingle.

You've suggested that some things have actually happened to your unnamed character, that he's gone out in the world and performed acts of research, questioning strangers as to their beliefs, and that he's drawn certain conclusions from this activity. Okay. We'll take your word for it because what's the point in arguing? You say it's what happened, fine. But do we care? Of course not. We don't know your character, other than through his self-involved monologue that never actually defines anything concrete, other than the TV. Alas, that is merely a momentary prop, having no bearing on any of the action because there is no action. Only thought. Thoughts about the theme.

A person trying to discern meaning in an uncaring world, and coming away disillusioned might well make a compelling character. It all depends on what you actually give him to do. And, once deciding on things for him to do, you really need to let us in on the action, showing your character as he goes about his business rather than just recalling that "something, sometime" took place. It would also help if something personal were at stake, so that he might need to take a risk in order to resolve his quandary. That's the way you involve your reader and get them thinking that magic phrase "Gosh, I wonder wha's gonna happen next?" In which case, they will most certainly keep reading to find out. That, of course, is the only hard and fixed requirement you have as a writer, to compel your reader to keep turning the pages. Otherwise you are merely playing solitaire in the dark with a deck of blank cards.
134
134
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

Ah, those demons from the dim past, lurking in the shadows of consciousness, waiting for any opportunity to sabotage our efforts in the present. The twig bent at an early age really does determines the way we grow and reach maturity. It is so fused to our sense of self that we scarcely are aware of the ways in which we've been influenced.

That's the situation that this story gathers around and I must say I found the early childhood incident to be subtle, believable and a bit of kick in the gut, emotionally. Well portrayed.

In fact, you handle a lot of craft elements well. Your lines sound good, for the most part. You move from external description to internal reflection without calling attention to the narrator, your images are easily visualized if, perhaps, a little overbaked, as if you're trying too hard to sound "writerly." Best of all, you are working with a genuine narrative arc here; you're thinking in terms of story and how a character's transformation creates the movement that tells us one has taken place. So you're on the right track

So now I'm going to complain, which is my job, after all. My first reaction when I read this was "There's no story here, just a situation," said situation being the demons I mentioned at the beginning of this review. Situations are not stories, they are the fertile ground in which the seeds of a story take root. Rather than allow a real story to grow out of your situation, you mostly have your characters talk to each other about the situation itself.

I changed my mind on subsequent readings, having to grudgingly acknowledge the clear arc you've provided. My feeling now is that you're not really dealing with a short story at all. In terms of scope, your material is begging for a much longer format, maybe not a full blown novel, but certainly something that allows for more development than the piece you have here. Jasmine moves through several distinct stages, but you never really let us inside any of them, giving everything a "touch-and-go" treatment that tells us things have taken place, but which doesn't actually offer the emotional experience that will allow us to empathize with her and share in what she's going through. Having your characters talk about "the problem" is no substitute for showing us a character with a problem behaving in ways that are consistent with that problem and allowing us to discover the reality in which she exists. Actually, the problem here is "the problem," itself. You've done a good job of presenting the underlying incident that affects her later in life, but you're not handling the implications of it in such a way that we believe it's really a problem for Jasmine in the present.

A childhood incident such as you describe will either serve as an indicator of a generalized condition—the lack of motherly nurturing evidenced here suggesting a childhood devoid of motherly love—in which case, it would not be that one incident that would stand out, but rather the overall pattern of neglect. Or, it could stand alone, an anomaly nested away in the subconscious causing unsuspected damage to the adult as the unresolved child keeps seeking completion. In either case, the incident itself would be the kind of thing that drives people into therapy as they seek to uncover hidden time bombs and bring them into the light of objective awareness where they can be assimilated.

This where you falter. Jasmine has way too much objective awareness of the situation for it to be capable of doing hidden damage. And since there seems to be no suggestion that she suffered from a general pattern of emotional abuse, we're left with this one moment that she's totally aware of (as are her friends, it seems). Basically, she's just stuck. I don't deny that people get stuck on stuff like this all the time, and that some of them derive a perverse satisfaction out of their intellectual awareness of what has them so stuck, but it doesn't really work here as the major roadblock in Jasmine's life. When she talks to Aurelia about it, it comes across as if she was complaining "Oh, gosh, I went off my diet last night."

Which brings me back to my earlier suspicion that you're not really working with a short story here. In order for you to make this real for the reader, you'll need to take a bit more time letting us get inside Jasmine's head. This isn't a plot driven story. The relevant arc is the shift in Jasmine's life and world view, and we get very little of that. You're going to need to craft believable moments in Jasmine's present with sufficient dimension that we believe them, care about her and want to see how things turn out. That process is your job as the writer; it can't be outsourced to phone conversations between your characters assuring the reader that all this is so very, very important. You have to make it important. That's the only way you're going to get over the hurdle of a seemingly trite problem. All problems are big to the person experiencing them. You need to show us Jasmine in the midst of grappling with a problem and discovering for herself the nature of what's got her blocked.

Stories that use the creative process itself as the primary action can be tricky. There are two groups of people who will read this story: people who write, and people who don't. The first group will have experienced their own struggles with writer's block and will be decidedly unsympathetic as a result. "Been there, done that, get a grip," is probably the reflexive response you can expect. People who don't write and who don't understand writer's block will be likewise unsympathetic for the opposite reason. Their reaction will be "Come on, if you want to write, just do it," as though everything could be distilled down to a Nike commercial. If you're going to use the process of writing, you will, again, need to take more time to make it something we experience. Amadeus was able to reveal Mozart's mind in the act of creation in ways that made us think "Wow, that's really interesting," but it is because Mozart was a fascinating character himself, with a story running parallel to his creative endeavors that hinged on his ability to create. I don't suggest that you provide Jasmine with a genre-type plot to occupy her time and keep the reader's interest, but you need to provide us with a lot more of Jasmine if we're going to care about her.

Right now you seem uncertain whether its a character study you're working with, or a plotted narrative. Either way, for the purposes of a short story, the entire last third is really a different story altogether and feels grafted on. It's like you realized "Uh-oh, getting close to the end. Gotta get a plot going." You don't need it. Neither do we. All we need is Jasmine, the three-dimensional version, the one we can get to know, empathize with, and cheer for.

135
135
Review of Inanimate Demons  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: ASR | (3.5)
Sig for reviews

Interesting idea. I think your narrative approach is diluting it's potential effect, however.

With all those drip, drip, drips and tick, tick, ticks and beep, beep, beeps, you are working on an experiential depiction of the process of encroaching madness. What you want to do is to capture that state for the reader, put them inside a mind going mad. You can't do that when there's so much narrative—sane, logical, clear narrative, no less—acting as a buffer between the reader and the experience.

I'd suggest putting it in present tense. Past tense, coupled with the narrative voice, suggests that the whole thing is being recalled from a later point, one that permits an objective perspective. We don't want objective. We want madness. Not a description of madness, but the thing itself. Let the language reflect the tattered state of your character's mind. Let it break down, as his own ability to understand what is happening likewise breaks down.

That's what will make something like this memorable—language that does the unexpected, that takes risks, that breaks out of the box. Otherwise, all we have is a rather pedestrian description of what we're told is an extreme moment, but we'll have to take your word for it.
136
136
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with Let's Publish!  Open in new Window.
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
Reviewed for "Let's Publish!" Open in new Window..

You call this a prose poem. That's tricky. On the sliding scale that links poetry and prose, prose poems have no fixed address. At some point prose leaves the realm of transparent form that characterizes objective journalism and begins to adorn itself with elements that call attention to not just the topic and subject that the language conveys, but to the language itself, and we pause and think "Wow, that was a nice image." Because of such adornments we gain a deeper appreciation of the topic or the subject, and the "meaning," of the words, such as it is, gains multiple dimensions of interpretation. But however elaborate, decorative or complex, the purpose of the words remains prosaic: that is, there is a point to be made, an argument to be rebutted or a narrative to unfold, something external to the words themselves.

At some point further along the scale, the form of the language begins to assert primacy, demanding more of our attention than the subject, until finally, we reach a place where poems are turning subject and meaning into silly putty, twisting and toying with them while the poem goes about its true business, which is letting language dance and perform and do all manner of acrobatics that are possible when it becomes unfettered from the need to create cause and effect connections to an external topic.

And somewhere in there we have poems that use the structures of prose, and prose that looks and feels like poetry. Which brings me to this piece. The writing, as is your style, is both vivid and visual, musical in its rhythms and seamless in its narrative flow. But I'm not sure that it's a poem, prose or otherwise, The reason is that despite the fact that pieces of the picture are missing, they remain conspicuous by their absence and we know that whatever it is that is going on here, the "aboutness" of the piece, exists in those missing links. An incomplete subject is still a subject and it is still the point of the words you've written. Everything points to that unattainable conclusion and so the language has not managed to evolve beyond its prose DNA. Don't misunderstand me: it's good prose, even poetic prose. But were it to be located on that sliding scale, we would find it somewhere in the same region where we find other writers whose prose rises well above the simple journalistic requirements of telling us what happened.

What would make this a poem? Hard to say since the possibilities are infinite. But whatever the direction, it would turn our focus away from the plot questions of "Gosh, who's coming back, anyway?" and toward a landscape that is possibly pure linguistics, elements that might borrow from the imagery you've already provided but which take us in other directions according to logic that prose cannot mimic. And when it reaches it's conclusion, we won't be any more concerned with who's coming back than you seem to be, because we will have been given an experience, not of narrative story telling, but of language doing a linguistic dance, and subject be damned.

I like the writing, but I think you need to let this piece commit itself. Either tell us the story, or let it go wholly subjective and leave logic behind; follow the impressions, sensations and images wherever they lead and don't be cute and coy with a story that's not quite a story. Either way, it would be a good bit of writing.
137
137
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
Rated: ASR | (3.0)
Reviewed for "Invalid Item" Open in new Window.

There's a good story in here, but you're just skirting the edges of it. Mostly the problem is structural; you've referred to the conflict and transformation of your main character, but you haven't actually given us access to the events themselves. Keep in mind: two characters discussing a dramatic event is still, for the reader, two guys talking. Try as you might, you can't channel the drama and tension of the original incident into a second-hand narration of that incident.

More on that in a minute. But first a few other points. I think your opening would be dramatically enhanced if you swap your first two paragraphs. The trick of beginning the story at some point after the beginning of the action proper is a good one, if it drops the reader into the middle of action, then rewinds the narrative to catch the reader up on the backstory. On the surface, this is what you do, starting at a tense moment as they watch the dear that is about to be shot. But you break the tension for the second paragraph recap and gain nothing in doing so, other than to break the tension. The second paragraph is too wordy, for one thing; we can assume that the father has been training David for a long time and in a real exchange would not need to be so descriptive and informative in the things he says. Characters don't know that there are readers out there needing to be informed of important details. They don't want the job of having to burden their conversation with stuff that is already known between them, just to get information onto the page. Your job as an author is to let that information slip in between the lines, unnoticed by your characters, and to also recognize what to leave out, trusting the reader to fill in the blanks for themselves.

I admit it's a personal preference; yours might be different. But I think the perfect opening line is a distillation of your second paragraph: "We're not trophy hunters, son. We take what we need and that's all."

That line alone crystallizes everything we need to know about the father and his philosophy. We intuit that a man who thinks like that is not careless or thoughtless. We know that he takes his craft seriously, and that he takes just as seriously his obligation to pass his knowledge down to his son. By that opening, you frree up a lot of unnecessary wordiness and explanatory discourse that follows. This is good because you will need the space to add the actual story that you are now just referring to.

This sentence:

"“You really proved yourself this year, Dave. The way you sat patiently for hours waiting for that doe, the way you knew, instinctively, that she’d be coming out of that thick brush any minute and hushed. You’ve worked really hard this year.”

is the story you are simply referring to. Hidden inside that affirmation is the entire process of David proving himself to a demanding father who will not tolerate slipshod technique in such a life and death situation. By picking up the action after all the actual story part is over, you let yourself off the hook with a TV solution (that's when there's not enough money in the budget to stage the actual scenes, so they just have a couple of characters talk about what happened, after the fact, so they can get the important information to the audience), but you deny the reader of the experience of David proving himself. Without that, we have nothing in which to involve ourselves. We take the father's word for it, but we don't really care, because we're just observers. You want your readers to be participants, and that means creating the crucial moments on the page, allowing them to unfold in such a way that we want to know what's going to happen next. Without that bit of curiosity, you won't keep your reader reading, which is, afterall, your primary obligation as a writer.

You close with a scene involving a knife. Showing David mishandling a knife in some way and facing his father's stern rebuke. Thats what will let us know that David has moved from Point A to Point B. The distance between them is the story you need to tell.
138
138
Review of Mr. Tibbs  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
Rated: ASR | (3.5)
Reviewed for "Let's Publish!" Open in new Window.

You asked for some comments regarding the structure of your piece. You would ask that, wouldn't you? The story presents some interesting issues and I've had to do some thinking to make sure I knew what I wanted to say.

As always, you come up with strong characters who stand apart from each other. Dialogue is good and you manage to characterize through their interactions, always a plus.

The way you've presented the story so far, it seems that you could go two different ways with it. At the moment, you seem to be toying with both directions, without fully committing yourself to either. I would normally say that you have a strong protagonist, Larry, around whom that action gathers itself, and who definitely takes action himself when he summons help for the sick woman he finds in the alley with him. And you would seem to have a good candidate for a main character in Jenna who is ripe for some kind of transformation as a result of her interaction with Larry and the impact that he has on her.

Except that you are clearly telling this story from both their perspectives, switching back and forth, which forces you to take a different approach. You really have two separate stories, each of which needs to come to the table with characters who each have their own goals, obstacles, conflicts and desired resolutions, even before they start to bump up against each other. Think of two separate vines each crawling up the same fence post. The problem is that while Larry's story is fairly well-formed, Jenna doesn't have much going on, nor does she have much impact on events. A parallel structure like this requires that both Larry and Jenna fill the roles of main character and protagonist in their separate narratives. That means that Jenna not only needs to want something (always a good place to kick off a change character) but she has to have a story of her own, an agenda that is in some way complicated by the introduction of Larry into her life. There's no question that she presents a complication in his life even though you don't really let it develop. But Jenna, and her arc, are still unformed.

The dual POV can tricky in a short story. Right now you only have one point at which Larry and Jenna interact. You get away with the dual POV because you're not straining it overly much in that one bit of contact. However, were you to fill out the narrative and have their separate tales truly interweave and influence each other, you will most likely find that jumping from one mind to the other, in the midst of, say, an actual conversation, becomes clumsy and counterproductive. I realize that Larry doesn't seem to be the talkative type, but you will still have to cope with the artificial nature of keeping a dynamic situation moving along naturally when you need to present both perspectives. That sort of structure works in novels, of course, because you have room to move from character to character, and time to let each arc develop on its own. It's difficult in a short story, simply because you don't experience individual interactions ping-ponging back and forth, and you're unable to present the two perspectives simultaneously. But I'll leave that to you to work out. It's certainly not a story killer, just a challenge.

The real problem is finding something for Jenna to do besides look out the window and want to help. She has to have a purpose and an agenda and it needs to come from the circumstances of her own life. That's what will make her believable, and what will give her believable reactions when she and Larry get in each others' way.

They really need to get in each others' way. That's what makes for development, and what will kick your story into a third act. Right now the third act, such as it is, has nothing to do with Jenna. A well-structured story would take the separate concerns of each character and allow them to play out in a joint context. An example using the elements you've already come up with would have Larry feel so concerned for the woman in the blankets that he relents and actually makes tries to make contact with Jenna, seeking her help. His lack of communication skills presents a good opportunity for the kind of complication that rises naturally out of a set up that's already been established. And if Jenna's first attempt to reach out to Larry turned out badly, much more so than having him simply run away—maybe he got angry when he misinterpreted her efforts, and she found herself in fear for her safety—you would now have double the complications fed by the energies from both narrative arcs. And you would have a nice juicy scene to write as they try to figure out what's going on with the other one. In fact, a situation like this just might support a series of quick shots bouncing back and forth between each person. I don't want to try to tell you want to write, only suggest the kind of development that will take full advantage of the set up you've presented.

I think there's a good story here. I don't think you've found it yet, but I don't doubt that you will.
139
139
Review of The Camp Out  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: 13+ | (4.5)
Sig for reviews

Yikes! You said this was a revision! I don't think so. You've come up with an entirely new story, and while you were at it, you traded in Leave It To Beaver for and exchanged it for Tales From The Crypt. You got the better end of the bargain, believe me.

When I reviewed this the first time I suggested some revisions that were intended to make the story you'd written feel a little more internally consistent, and also allow it to capitalize on the set-up you'd provided. What you've done, instead, is to revisit that set-up, turn your characters loose and let them go where the story wants to take them. I began reading thinking I knew where I was heading. I didn't. The surprise was most welcome.

I don't have a lot more to say, other than well-done. There are plenty of magazines that love this sort of writing. One of them is waiting for you to submit it. Get to it.
140
140
Review of Alison's Find  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with Let's Publish!  Open in new Window.
Rated: ASR | (4.5)
Reviewed for "Let's Publish!" Open in new Window.

I can think of dozens of things you could do with this. But they would all be different stories. Meanwhile, the one you have is just fine as it is. Entertaining, clever but not too cute, and the way you prepared us for the climax with Tim, a casual aside that was humorous in passing, then returning to be the crucial pivot on which the plot turned, was masterful.

Submit it.
141
141
Review of Edge of Reality  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

There's good news and there's bad news here. The good news is you've got a real story cooking, and when you stop taking shortcuts and get down to the business of letting it unfold, you do a decent job. The bad news is you've given us tons of stuff we don't need to know, and the stuff we do need to know has been compressed into three or four sentences that obliterate all the action that would make this a compelling read.

You have all the materials at hand to get the job done. Now you have to do the work of an author— arrange them in the best order; decide what to compress, what to portray in close-up detail. You have to decide how to make this a dramatic process of transformation for your main character in order that we might actually have something with which to become involved. You have to make us care. Face it, cheating husbands and vengeful wives are all around us. The situation isn't new. You have to make it new but making your characters three-dimensional and giving them thoughhts, words and deeds that show us a familiar situation in a way that makes us think , "This is real. These are people I want to know more about."

Let's start with basics, then move on to the details. Short stories, by definition, are excerpts carved out of some larger context. The larger context is important but only in as much as it defines the attitudes and perspectives of the characters and gives the things they think, do and say an inner cohesion. It's the excerpt that counts, and it has to stand on its own. It's important for you to know the backstory, the larger context, because that's how you get to know your characters and make them believable; it's much less important for us to know it. If you give us believable characters, we'll accept them without knowing everything about them, or anything in particular about them. What counts is the story at hand. Backstory needs to be fed in as sparingly as you can get away with. Keep in mind that every time you as author pause to tell us backstory, or your characters pause to reflect on something that has already happened just to make sure the reader is up to speed, nothing is happening in the present. So break that flow only when you absolutely have to, and find a way to slip in the relevant material at appropriate points, places where the action naturally has a pause, so that the time flow remains consistent.

What this means is that your first 16 paragraphs or so have nothing whatsoever to do with this story. Truth is, we don't care about all that stuff. We'll follow along for a while because we trust you and trust that you're not going to put anything in front of us that doesn't impact on the story at hand, but once we begin to suspect that you haven't provided the structure that the story requires, that you're just throwing everything at us, none of it will stand out in importance. Particularly since you've chosen the artificial trick of starting the story after the beginning and then backtracking. This can be a good technique when you want to grab the reader's attention. But you want to save some of the actual story for the present action. You've started your story after everything has taken place. So there is no story in the present, other than your main character lying on a stretcher and watching the gurney being wheeled out of her house. That's it for action in the present. Everything else, the entire story, is relegated to backstory. Major flaw, because no one really takes backstory seriously; we know it's just bits of business that need to be dealt with so the present action can make sense and the real story can get moving again. When there's no story, the backstory has no purpose and remains forever removed from the kind of immediacy that allows us to crawl inside the universe you've created and experience it, rather than simply contemplate it.

For my money, the story begins when she starts trying to get pregnant. This is a natural starting point for her arc, which will take her from hope and optimism to shock, denial, horror and tragedy. You might have some references to Cliff's former behavior but only to let us know that for Leah, this is a new beginning.

For it to be meaningful for the reader, we need to actually make the journey with her. That means that instead of a passage like this one:

In the last three months leading up to this night it was an argument they repeated almost daily. As days turned to weeks they quit trying to get pregnant because they quit sleeping together at all. Cliff and Amy, who had always had an oddly uncomfortable, confrontational relationship began to argue quietly, but in depth. Leah turned inward, becoming quieter, more withdrawn...

you actually unlock all the scenes that you've carelessly referred to in passing and show them as they happen. The developmnet section of your story is hidden away in those generalized summaries of what transpires. You need so show us the argument, and show how it affects Leah. You need to show them as they stop sleeping together, and let us experience the significance of this as Leah experiences it. Don't tell us they begin to argue quietly, but in depth (whatever the heck that means)—show us what an argument like that looks like.

Keep in mind all the while that your job is not to simply tell us what is happening around Leah and to Leah, nor what she is doing about it. Your job is to keep the reader turning the pages. So you need to cast each plot point as some form of difficulty for Leah to deal with, and each one needs to come at her with greater intensity than the one before. That's how you reel your reader in and keep them wondering what's going to happen next. If they stop wondering that, they'll stop reading.

The relationship between Cliff and Amy is, of course the primary conflict and the major obstacle facing Leah. You have planted the seeds of this situation early on, mentioning that when Amy came to live with them, Cliff changed his cheating ways, but you need to integrate this into the tapestry of their relationship, show the growing doubt, the warning signs, the red flags. Give Leah a real-world response to the idea of her sister stealing her husband away from her in their own home: casual dismissal changing to nagging doubt, transitioning into shocked disbelief and denial, finally moving to grim acceptance. The timeline for this process is crucial. Spill the beans too soon, you have no climax. Wait too long, you have no third act.

Like I said at the beginning, all the elements are here. You now need to discover the difference beween simply letting us know what they are, and using narrative technique to craft a process of transition—development, climax and resolution—that will keep the reader engaged.
142
142
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: 18+ | (4.0)
Sig for reviews

You say you've revised this poem. I beg to differ. This is hardly a revision. It is, in fact, an entirely different poem, complete with an utterly different set of rules that it conforms to. It's also a far superior poem. However, as you are doing something totally new, a host of new issues suggests itself.

Keep in mind that some of this stuff is going to get really picky, which is what you need to do as your poem approaches a state of completion. The difference between a poem that is 95% "there", and one that does its job completely is a long span indeed. However, as you leave the realm of rookie blunders, any commentary will also pull away from objective critique and approach aspects of personal preference, and my preferences aren't necessarily yours. I can make a good argument for mine; that's why I'm here. Part of your evolution as a poet is to likewise make a good argument for your own, and if you can't, figure out why not. That said, a few things nonetheless come to mind.

Visually it's strong, but more important, it's interesting. Lot's of rich words jostling up against each other. Be careful of obvious redundancies like "a cacophony of noise"; cacophony is, by definition, noise. Likewise, "Lost in a maze of dead-end emotion"; if you're in a maze, you're probably lost. As for the "dead-end" emotions, I'd bet there's something else you rather say but haven't yet thought of it. Keep looking. HINT: don't settle for literal description. There's nothing wrong with making sense, but it's certainly not required, and in any event, sense in a poem is something very different from prosaic, logical cause-and-effect sense. You don't always want your images to form a direct link to the desired effect, in the same way that you don't really want your poem to be "about" what it appears to be about. You will engage the reader more forcefully if you creep up on the effect or come at it sideways.

Another thing to look at is your line breaks. RIght now there is a one-to-one correspondence between the specific elements of your poem and the lines in which they appear, one line for each. Setting up a counterpoint between line breaks and content can make for a more interesting read, and choosing your breaks carefully can engineer shades of meaning into your lines that the surface content of the words does not suggest. Consider the first line:

Asleep behind the wheel

It's sharp and crisp, and nicely imagistic. Nonetheless, it's a line of description referring to some state, condition or situation outside of itself, which necessarily calls into being a narrator who is doing the describing. This isn't wrong, but it does place a buffer between the reader and the experience itself. Rethinking the wording, as well as the line breaks, you might come up with something like this for the first stanza:

behind
the wheel,
sleeping through
noise—this numb
maze, solace
sought in vain.

That's a quick shot off the top of my head, but one thing it does is bring the reader closer to the experience itself, placing them in the midst of the event as it unfolds, allowing them to make your experience their experience as well. Another thing it does is run elements over line breaks, a process that pulls the reader forward as they attempt to resolve the counterpoint between rhythm and sense. And by ruthlessly edting out any expendable elements and tightening up the ones that remain, you sacrifice a bit of prose sense, but what you gain in immediacy more than makes up for it. Sure, it's a judgement call whether or not "numb maze," captures the essence of "maze of dead-end emotions," but something along those lines would give the reader something to do in the way of providing interpretation themselves, instead of having it spelled out for them.

Note stanza four. Again, lots of images and no flabby abstractions. However, keep in mind that for something to happen, for things to unfold over time, it takes a verb, and the two you have in four lines are "gives," and "is". Neither are particularly dynamic. When your verbs aren't working hard enough, your images just sort of hang around, being what they are, but not doing much. There's no rule that says these particular elements need to be doing anything, but in general, language that pushes forward through time and space will allow for more natural transitions between elements and offer a framework on which the reader can drape their interpretations.

I think you're moving in a great direction with this. Keep at it.
143
143
Review of Twinkle  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: ASR | (2.5)
Sig for reviews

You asked for an in-depth critique of the first three chapters of your novel.

I read the three chapters; well, I skimmed the third to see if it confirmed my suspicions. It did. More on that in a moment. I think your idea is good; but, then, all ideas are potentially good. It all comes down to the telling. In my estimation, you have to reconsider some of the elements you're juggling, and you're going to have to force yourself through a learning curve to discover the difference between simply telling us what happens and bringing narrative technique into the equation.

First, the structural stuff. You don't have four protagonists unless you have four separate stories. I don't see that happening and would advise against it if you did. You have one protagonist and he is Sean. You have an antagonist in the person of his father. You have an objective story line that involves the cult they are battling each other for control.

Zoe is your main character. She is the point of access to everything that happens, the person with whom the reader will identify. She has her own storyline, apart from the objective story line. That doesn't mean she has nothing to do with it. Far from it. But she is the anchor of your subjective storyline which involves the challenges, conflicts and desires in her own life, and which are complicated by her collision with the objective story. Her realtionship with Sean is the intersection between the two story lines, and it is this co-mingling that allows them to influence each other.

This is nothing more than the classic structure of all good stories, novels or movies, that work. If you think of any stories that stuck in your mind, there is an elegant simplicity about them. A main character we identify with, a protagonist we root and cheer for, a serious conflict for the main character and a complicating situation that forms the larger story and makes things difficult (and interesting). Sometimes the main character and the protagonist are one and the same. Not here.

You have all the elements ready to be used. You just need to use them correctly. If you try to balance your story between four different people, your story will be about none of them, and don't fool yourself that you can make it about an idea. Stories aren't about ideas, and the ones that try to be are called propaganda. Stories are about things happening; things happening to people we are interested in becoming involved with. We don't even have to like them, but we have to want to know what's going to happen next, and whatever happens next needs to have flowed organically from what just happened and flow just as organically to the thing after that, whatever it might be. That's the elegant simplicity. An unbroken chain of events and people causing them, responding to them and interacting because of them.

You also have another important element in the character of Sophie, which is The Buddy. Every main character needs a buddy. It's not artificial or a cliche because everybody everywhere needs a buddy, even if it's a cat or a goldfish. Buddies not only relieve you of the need to put all of your main character's impression into internal monologues (during which nothing happens), but they also are a useful resource when plot points are called for.

You also have another crucial character in the Uncle, who would be {i]The Mentor. Sometimes the mentor is also an Obstacle Character who is not the same thing as an antagonist is in relation to the protagonist. The obstacle character is the person who stands in the way and forces the main character to reevaluate her assumptions, who questions her motives and who plays devils advocate. In Star wars, Obi Wan Kenobi was Luke Skywalker's mentor and obstacle character.

When you assign your characters their proper roles, you'll have a much less cluttered path before you. When you realize that Zoe's story is a separate arc from Sean's, that they serve two totally different functions in your story, you'll be much more focused in how they interact and influence each other's arcs.



Here's the difference between telling us what happens, and using narrative technique. You have an interesting situation brewing, which I know because I asked for your summary. However, I'm at the end of chapter three and there's no sign of it. You've performed some utilitarian functions—established some backstory, introduced the important characters, but whatever the issues are that will form your story are so far no where in evidence. Meanwhile, in Chapter Two you refer to the fact that Uncle Sunday isn't one of the insiders in town, but all you do is refer to it. That's not how you hook the reader and make them think that if they put your book down, they're going to be missing the time of their life.

Truth is, you need to dump the first chapter entirely. It exists for no other reason than to tell us that Zoe's parents were killed unexpectedly and she went to live with her Uncle in Maine. Anything else, if you find you really cant live without it, like the stuff about the philosophy/theology dichotomy, can be slipped in between the lines as you work through the opening passages—in between the important events that you will be telling us about instead.

The first sentence of Chapter Two is a natural opening line. Then follow that with a few sentence condensing everything else in chapter two, until you get to the stuff you are now condensing that needs to be opened up and turned into the scene proper.

Something like this:

The tears were hardest for Uncle Sunday to handle. There wasn't anything I could do about them, however. It was still too soon after my parents deaths and I hadn't accepted that cold reality. I was grateful to have a relative who cared enough to let me come live with him, and I suppose Crucible Point was a pleasant enough town, but at that point in my life, I didn't want to live anywhere.

Or some such. That pretty much takes care of everything from Chapter One that the reader needs to know at this point; it also kicks things off at a gallop; it will make the reader want to at least move on to paragraph two, whereupon you most definitely will not want to smother him, as you do now, with abstract reflections on the nature of men, life in general and lots of mundane activities like wiring cable and internet, and Uncle Sunday's utility service. You want to establish the situation. You want to define the energy field out of which your entire story will evolve. That means, down towards the end of Chapter Two, when you get to passages like this,'

It was a fairly even town. Creepily even. The make up of denizens of Crucible point was divided into three main groups, each with a third of the population. There were the fishermen and their families, the Townies and their families, and the "Flash," who were the ultra-rich elite that didn't really live in the city full time but kept it as their main address.

and later on, the three sections where you tell us that the three groups didn't like her uncle, you will close your eyes and imagine Zoe and Sunday interacting with various towns folk, interactions that will show the situations that you now just refer to. Situations in which people do and say things that strike Zoe as off-kilter, not right. Situations that alert her (and the reader, gotta think of the reader) to the fact that there is more going on than first meets the eye. And then you will write those scenes, action and dialogue, so the reader can see the tale unfolding before them instead of simply tossing them off in quick asides, like you do now. Those odd interactions are the proper beginning of the situation that will concern the rest of your novel. You have to know what to condense, what to focus on.

In the course of these interactions (two or three is all you really need to set the scene and let us know what's happening), you will actually want to merge Chapter Two and Chapter Three. Right now, Chapter Three exists solely to let Zoe meet a couple of friendly faces. You need to integrate that into the overall process of her mapping out the territory in her own mind. Make it a natural part of her orientation process, and, while you're at it, begin introducing the actual conflict. It's the core of your story, after all. Right now it's no where in sight. Maybe in the real world she could go three or four months in a new town before she starts to get a sense that things aren't right; you don't have four months. You've got maybe a half hour, which is how long it will take your reader to decide nothing's happening and turn their attention to the TV schedule.

Every single thing you tell us has to count towards that central narrative. It's fine to take your time letting the reader get to know your characters, but you need to be working double time all the while, planting clues, making sure that when you begin revealing the deeper dimensions of your story it sounds like a natural progression, not something grafted on because it was time to get a plot going.

So now after all this surgery, you have a rich first chapter that introduces the four major characters, establishes some of the conflict and sets the stage for whatever comes next. You have to do that with every chapter and everything you tell us has to be used. Don't waste time on things that don't impact on the story. If Zoe has to stop and ponder or wander off into some abstract reflection on some topic or other, make sure it's a topic that's relevant to the situation and that she comes out of it with something to show for it in the form of insight, satisfaction, resolution.... something to let us know that the story is chugging along just as it should.

You write good dialogue and overall your prose has a nice crisp sound and it moves along at a good clip. You don't get bogged down in time flow issues; things are always clear. You just need to be more judicious in deciding what it is that you are going to put in front of your reader.
144
144
Review of Turning  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: 18+ | (2.5)
Sig for reviews

I've discovered two types of serious narrative flaws in the course of reviewing stories here on WDC, and they are exact mirror reflections of each other, perfectly opposite in terms of what they produce and what they avoid.

One problem—I've dubbed it the Stand Aside, I'll Fix This! Syndrom—can be demonstrated by this simple exchange:

"But then, you never really were all that smart, were you?" purred Veronica, claws scarcely concealed.

How dare she talk like that in front of the others! Who did she think she was? Darby was so mad, she could spit.

"That's just your opinion," she said, seething inwardly.

Here we have a writer who doesn't trust the characters they've created, blundering into the scene with all manner of interpretive narration, telling the reader what they're supposed to be thinking and understanding. Of course, had Darby been given a response that would have been appropriate for someone so mad she could just spit, the effect would be telegraphed much more forcefully, and in a way that the reader could involve themselves with. It would also open up a dynamic character exchange where (Gasp!) something might actually happen in the real-time space, instead of just taking place inside Darby's head.

You exhibit the other problem, which I've dubbed Screenwriter Envy. That's pretty much what you've written— a screenplay, but one that lacks a cameraman to show us what's happening, along with the myriad visual clues of body language and facial expressions that make up the language of cinema; without a sound editor to carefully control what we hear, telling us what is important and what is background noise; without a film editor to craft the sequence of visual cues, forcing us to see the scene in a way that delivers the maximum impact; and without a director to provide the oversight and guiding hand to lash everything into a single, coherent statement. All you've really done is stick a camera and a microphone in the middle of the proceedings and then transcribed the resulting data.

The langage of cinema is not the language of prose and you need to create all the supporting context that gives life, shape and meaning to the data presented through prose techniques. If the first example I gave shows a writer who can't get out of the way, your story exemplifies a writer who doesn't want to get involved. The result is a story with an impact that has remained largely in your own mind, since you've attended to none of the narrative tasks that tell us exactly what's going on and what we need to know.

It's the difference in what I call Phenomenological Narration and Interpretive Narration. The former presents data as it comes through to the senses, the latter wraps up the data in a neat little package with labels attached. Both are crucial to a clear narrative line. The trick is knowing when to use each one. Clearly the first example needed to rely more on a close-up portrayal of the events (assuming those events were imagined in a way that demonstrated precisely what was going on), whereas in your case, simply telling us what is going on isn't enough. It's one thing to leave ambiguous spaces in a story, opportunities for the reader to fill in the blanks with their own experience and make connections for themselves; it's quite another to ask the reader to do your work for you and put sense into a structure that is essentially neutral.

It might not require a lot of modification either. One thing you need to do is stop wasting your opening. In a short story you don't have time to put in anything that is superfluous. This is doubly so in the opening, your only chance to aim the reader's perceptions in the direction you want, telegraph the problem and alert them to the conflicts. It's also a way to tell them how to approach the story. Is this a tragedy? A drama. A farce? You establish the tone, and if you neglect that task, we have no markers to guide us on our journey.

In all your talk about beer, and the weather report (which really has no impact on the story at all—steamy windows happen on clear nights as well), you bury this passage:

"Still think a night with the ex is a good idea?”
Ben shrugged and turned the radio down.

This, in the middle of a fairly long passage that simply marks time and goes nowhere. And the reason it goes nowhere is you're not doing anything to guide us, to let us know what we need to be focusing on. Compare:

It was probably a dumb idea to spend an evening with his ex and her current boyfriend, but Ben was prepared. The six-pack at his feet would provide all the emotional support he needed.

That boyfriend, who also happened to be his own best friend, now turned onto the long driveway, a path Ben had taken all too often. Lights winked through the trees from the otherwise invisible mansion.

I don't suggest you write like that; I do suggest you write something like that. Give us context. That way, when Mike kisses Sarah, the tension is ratcheted up a knotch instead of us wasting time trying to put the pieces together. And the bland conversation that follows will have an undercurrent of tension that is totally lacking now. Who knows, you might even decide to stick an couple more narrative flourishes in at strategic points along the way just to keep things on course, and also give us some access to Ben's inner thoughts. Don't make the mistake of characterizing through interior monologue, of course, which is always just an example of the first problem I mentioned. But neither should you make the mistake of trying to narrate through conversation, which just results in characters saying things they wouldn't really say, for no other reason than to keep the reader in the loop. You have to know when to give us hard sense data, and when to give us interpretation.

That interpretation is what's called the author's perspective, and if it doesn't infuse the story from top to bottom, it'll just be what you've given us now: a bunch of people sitting around talking, and some stuff happening. Like real life. Real life is a bore. Stories don't usually happen in real life. And the things that do happen in real life are mostly random events. Stories are what real life would look like if real life had direction, purpose and everything counted. The difference is you.
145
145
Review of My Trusty iPod  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with Let's Publish!  Open in new Window.
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
This review is for your post on "Let's Publish! Discuss and Talk" Open in new Window..

Pretty damn quirky. And bloody. You're working with a good idea and you handle action and dialogue well. Your action, in particular, is clean and easily followed, a nice trick given that you're keeping several different characters in motion all the time.

I think, however, you might dial back the action just a little bit and add some connecting tissue, as well as fill in the preparatory gaps. I felt like I'd walked into the theatre in the middle of reel two. You give us about a paragraph of setup and then it's off to the Twilight Zone where we immediately encounter eviscerated assistants and stage managers who turn into fantasy monsters, all seemingly as a matter of course. Before we wander off the grid like that, we need to first establish ourselves on the grid, so we'll have some sense of how far we've travelled.

All your monsters are fully revealed from the our first encounters with them. So all we get to thinks is, "Oh. A monster." If you think about some of the really classic horror stories, there's always an element of the unexpected to be dealt with. A point where we shift from simply noting odd behavioral quirks, to reaizing OMYGOD the church organist is really the AX MURDERER!!!! or OMYGOD, the pretty teacher is really a SUCCUBUS!!!! or OMYGOD!! Nice Mr Jones next door has body parts ALL OVER HIS BASEMENT FLOOR!!!

You certainly have engineered the opportunity for this into the story as it is written; you simply haven't exploited it. What's missing is the set up scene where Hailey interacts with the Sirens and their manager and the two grouies are invited in to party with everyone, and we are lulled into thinking everything is as it appears except for the odd, off-kilter clues that don't quite make sense, of course. But those are necessary to show Hailey's progression from disbelief to the terror of acceptance, a movement from calm intellectual reactions to adrenalin crazed self-preservation instincts. And they are also necessary to facilitate the readers' misdirection. They start off thinking it's one story, and slowly realize it's a very different story. That's how you keep their attention and make them ask that Oh-so-crucial question "Gosh, I wonder what's gonna happen next?"

Don't be in such a hurry. You have some nice elements bumping up against each other. Give a little more attention to the developement, give Hailey a moment when the reader genuinely doubts that she'll survive, and then the wrap-up will come as a welcome relief. Let us get to know Hailey first, so we'll have something invested in her survival.

By the way, The Sirens are a nice touch. You can milk it for a much stronger effect. That, of course, is the primary reveal, that they really are Sirens. Right now, we first discover this second-hand in a casually tossed off comment about them. Not good for dramatic tension. We need to see them in action, and we need to see the whole process by which they engage in this ceremony that is referred to but never explained. Once you do the necessary prep work, you can turn things upside-down and descend into the depths of hell if you want. By then you'll have us hooked an we'll follow you anywhere. But you have to do a little more work first, before you can pull that off.
146
146
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with Let's Publish!  Open in new Window.
Rated: 18+ | (2.5)
I'm reviewing this poem for "Let's Publish!" Open in new Window..

Poems have a rough time justifying themselves. With prose, it's usually a straightforward equation: you have a point to make, an argument to rebut or a story to tell, and your language and the structure you choose either accomplish the task, or not. But in virtually all cases, the purpose around which prose gathers itself is something that resides elsewhere, with the words serving as a medium to convey us towards a specific conclusion or result.

The problem with poetry is that it's probably the most useless of creative endeavors in that poems serve no utilitarian function beyond their own immediate existence; nor are they expected to. This isn't to say that poems can't have subjects or that they can't be "about" something, but the surface language of a poem needs to function in a strikingly different relationship to that subject than what is found in prose. In prose, language is the servant of its subject. In poetry, subject is the playtoy of language. In a poem, language calls the shots and while there is no restriction against actually "making sense," neither is there a rule that says it must conform to a prosaic notion of what sense entails.

Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. You are restricting this poem to a prose sensibility. You want to tell us about the hidden illness, you identify this purpose in your title and then you move through a narrative treatment of the points you want to make, all in a linear, logical, cause and effect progression. This is not a failing of the writing; the writing is fairly engaging and the topic is certainly compelling. It's just not a poem. It's prose, and the fact that it's broken up into lines isn't going to fool an editor looking for poems that surprise, that take unexpected twists and turns and even bore wormholes below the surface of the words only to pop out in some unexpected place.

In fact, those lines are a good place to begin rethinking your approach to poetry. Nothing separates poems from prose more distinctly than the line. There is nothing comparable in prose structures. The line, and it's attendant break, is your single most powerful tool to create tension, engineer subtleties of meaning not present in the surface content of the words, and establish rhythmic counterpoints to the content and natural flow of the words. Right now you have a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of your content, and each line. But before you get to line breaks that have some punch, I'm going to suggest some brutal surgery on the words in those lines.

Right now everything is narrated. Despite the fact that the poem purports to be about madness, the narrative voice is calm, collected, clearly in control and in touch. Rational. Logical. Each element is described through a narrative shorthand that stands between the reader and the actual experiences. In a poem like this, when so much depends on conveying the tension that is affecting you, both emotional and psychological, you need to evolve a language of immediacy that will not just tell the reader what you felt and thought, but which will recreate that experience for them, allowing them to be present in those moments, feel what you felt, hear what you heard and walk the paths you walked. You need to make your experience their experience. You want them to be active participants, not passive observers.

These are some of the red flag lines:

Slowly recalling the turn of events, that brought me here.

How none of this is intentional, how my emotions are in command.

Emotions tumbling over one another, each jockeying for a spot,

Head reeling with inner voices, can't distinguish what's mine and not.

Leaving scars of my torment, my frustration.
I cry and cry, without knowing why
You think I'm being dramatic.
You think I'm just begging for attention.
How wrong can a person be?

In each case we get an expository distillation of what was clearly a moment of extreme drama, moments forever denied us, forced as we are to simply take your word for it that they were intense. This is one of those places where a misguided attempt to make sense forces you to avoid all the linguistic techniques available to you to actually capture a mind besieged by madness in the act of trying to express itself, comprehend what is happening and communicate with the sane world beyond its borders. That's not a mind in the midst of calm narration and the experience of such a mind wouldn't necessarily make sense. Would a poem that succeeds in capturing that state of mind "make sense?" Not for the logical circuits of the prosaic part of our brains, certainly. So? Poems aren't addressing those circuits. What this poem needs to do is slug us in the gut.

You need to go back to all those abstract generalizations like "...my emotions are in command" and swap all of them out for real images. Crisp, sharp images that crack the skull, make the eyes water and force you to catch your breath. In other words, you have to work. You have to dig for those hard nuggets of experience that will breath life into this poem and our reading of it. You have to sweat, and if you do it right, you'll force us to sweat as well. You are trying to capture an experience of intense pain and torment. To do so, you're going to have to gouge an open wound onto the page. That's something that will capture an editor's attention.


"Writing Hurts: Review Forum" Open in new Window.
"Invalid Item" Open in new Window.

147
147
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: E | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

You have some interesting things starting up here, which is good, given that it's a prelude and needs to snag your reader for whatever is to come. Of course, there's no way to know what's going to come yet, so we have to judge the piece on its own merits.

Right now, while you've done some of the important work of introducing your characters and provided the context in which your story will unfold, I'd say that the most this aspires to is conveying information to the reader. Nothing wrong with that, of course; it's necessary content, but content alone does not make a compelling narrative, even if, as is the case here, the content is about dramatic events with perilous implications.

What we have going on here is an elderly couple who clearly have a strong relationship, sharing breakfast with their grandson, who clearly thinks highly of them both, and who agrees to perform a task that his grandfather requests of him. He agrees, I might add, with no reservations, second thoughts or resistance.

This is a fair description of the surface action, apart from the content that action is trying to convey, which is that a major metaphysical war is looming upon which hinges the fate of the universe... or some such. Unfortunately, you can't channel the high-stakes intensity of your information to prop up the banal and pedestrian action that makes up your narration. If you want to grab us, from the first paragraph, you need to write a scene that captures that drama, not simply refers to it.

It doesn't have to be all thunder and lightning either. I mentioned the fact that your characters all seem to get along just fine and appear to hold each other in high regard. Great. Love it, I admire them for it. But you know what? People who get along, who enjoy each other's company and who don't seem to have any issues with much of anything are the people you want in your own life, not in your stories.

Stories are about tension, conflict, difficulties and problems that demand attention in one way or other. They are about characters who have to wade through the complexities of whatever situation you've conjured up for them. If you make things too easy for them, there's nothing to engage the reader, nothing to make them wonder what's going to happen next. Nothing, actually, to suggest that there might be a next to wonder about at all.

I fear that this prelude may speak to a fundamental flaw in your whole approach. Despite your innovative setup, to which you've obviously given some considerable thought, unless you imagine your characters in terms of what it is that needs to be altered in their lives, what conflicts they encounter, what difficulties face them, and unless you present them in the midst of the process of working through their problems in each and every scene, you won't have a compelling narrative to convey your ideas.

Understand, there's nothing wrong with a grandson liking his grandparents, or the two grandparents liking each other and their grandson. It's just not the part of the story you want to highight as the teaser and hook to capture your reader. Problems, problem, problems: that's the meat of a story. But that's only part of it. It's the struggle to solve them that will keep readers turning the pages. You want them engaged at the start, or they won't stick around long enough to see what you have in mind.
148
148
Review of Lunch  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: 18+ | (4.5)
Sig for reviews

I can't say much more about this, the third version of the story that I've read. You've done a lot of work on it and it shows. It's a solid story, well written with an ending that doesn't try to tie everything up in a neat tidy package but which definitely brings the story to a point of closure. Whatever happens next will be a different story, but we don't need to contemplate that potential development to appreciate what we have here. I hope you are planning to submit this. I think you will find a place for it.

Nice work.
149
149
Review of Lunch  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: 18+ | (4.0)
Sig for reviews

I reviewed the original version of this story and commented on the revision. Now there's this incarnation. I don't have a lot more to say about the revisions, actually, other than I think you have a strong story here. It's a complex relationship you are describing, and the two women have complicated reactions to each other. You manage to use their issues with food as a condition that affects both of them, without the story actually being about food disorders. It's about the two of them and their relationship.

I like what you're doing with the ending, but I agree that it's still in progress. I'm not sure what she's doing there, for one thing. I also think you need to explore further, find out what it is about that memory that is truly significant. It's the kind of subtext that can provide the completing link in the chain, but you haven't quite established the relationship. Nor have you really set us up for the scene shift. I don't mean you should fill the opening scenes with thoughts of her dying grandfather... but the images of the hospital stand in stark contrast to the superficial comfort of the food. Using cold, sterile, antiseptic images to describe what Leslie is experiencing would work subtly as a counterpoint to the surface activity, which we already understand isn't really something that gives her any pleasure. It's the kind of connection that exists outside the immediate narrative flow, but which helps establish the broader context in which everything takes place.

Just keep in mind that if you surprise us, it needs to be seen as inevitable in light of all that has come before. If you simply start with one story and then move into a different one, we'll be surprised but we won't be impressed. Make everything count and make sure there's a central core into which everything feeds. Hospital images could do that, making the point that whatever it is that we are witnessing here, it has little to do with health. If you set us up properly, you won't need to explain the ending since it will be a natural development. We might not know exactly what is going on, but we'll understand nonetheless.

I'm getting picky here, but i really like this story, and I'd like to see you submit it. I think, in its original version, you might have thought that it was just about the food. What you are evolving with it now is something that moves beyond its immediate topic and touches on some universal themes. In short, it's becoming the kind of story that a reader will remember.
150
150
Review of SECOND CHANCES  Open in new Window.
Review by edgework Author IconMail Icon
In affiliation with  Open in new Window.
Rated: E | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

I've looked at a couple other poems in your portfolio, having found this one quite entertaining. You're good. You can be better, and should start doing your homework.

This type of verse, when done right, looks easy. What is easy is finding rhyming words; English is such a cluttered closet of linguistic traditions that there's always a word to rhyme (okay, orange and door hinge}/i} is a stretch). What's difficult is to slip the rhymes into a natural reading of the words and make them sound like they belong there, that you'd have spoken the words this way in any event. You do appear to have a natural flair for this type of verse, and it's fun to read.

One thing I strongly advise is that you study scansion and apply it to your lines. Simply put, good scansion is a way to organize the syllables in your lines (not words, mind you, syllables) into strong and weak beats, making sure that you don't fall into patches of too many weak beats, as you do in the second and third lines of your fist stanza:

A LOVE / that WAS
re CIP / ro ca ted
she LEFT / and
I was / DEV as / TA ted

The first and last lines scan well enough, although the strong beat on was is asking a bit more of the word than it's able to provide, but the last line forms into three trochees nicely. But look at that patch of four weak beats in a row between the second and third lines. You lose the poetic flow there, falling into a lazy prose rhythm. What usually happens when you attempt to repair a line like that is that you will tend to come up with an image that carries a lot of the weight for you in a more concise package, instead of flabby interpretive words like reciprocated., and your poem is the stonger for it.

I's say that you apply that idea to the whole poem, actually; you need to match your facility with rhyme to an ability to come up with images that capture the essence of what you're trying to say, freeing you of the need to actually say it, which is never as satisfying. Your fourth stanza is the weakest for this reason; it is simply you telling us a result and feeding us a conclusion. Far better to offer us the experience of sadness and lonliness; we'll come to the right conclusion ourselves, not as observers but as participants.
251 Reviews • *Magnify*
Page of 11 • 25 per page   < >
Printed from https://p15.writing.com/main/profile/reviews/edgework/sort_by/r.review_creation_time DESC/page/6