The Killing Floor - Week 10

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

Our weekly journey into constructive criticism is back!

If there are still people interested in having their turn at submitting something, who haven't already done so, this is your chance!

The First 5 eligible submissions will be our "honored guests" this week! :)

Comments

[marjory.livejournal.com]

Hayulp? (http://marjory.livejournal.com/277238.html)

[kickthehobbit.livejournal.com]

All right—things that do work, then things that don't.

Your powers of description are fantastic—the imagery that you choose is really spot-on and puts your reader right there. It's really wonderfully evocative. From the first paragraph, you've got people hooked—"a lone island of asceticism amidst a sea of melting gelati", and you've nailed what everyone else is doing vs. what your protagonist is doing—something that's not easy to pull off—description and characterization done subtly, in a way that has to be appreciated.

The characterization in this is also good—you make it easy to identify with your nameless protagonist, and you capture a lot of the neuroticism that defines her without making it the defining feature of the piece. We get her issues with how she's perceived, but it's handled in a way that maintains tension and doesn't bludgeon the reader over the head.

As a piece that's light on plot, it works well. The pacing is good, and while there's no groundbreaking revelation at the end, there really doesn't need to be.

On the whole, this is quite good as a first draft. The things that are detracting from it are less to do with the usual big things (characterization, pacing, description) and are more minor.

The first thing that hit me is that there are a few typos, here and there, that could stand to be corrected—sherds instead of shards, for instance, existance versus existence. There are also a few small errors of grammar and punctuation—mismatches in pronouns and their uses (using singular pronouns to refer to multiple objects—all nit-picky errors). These could be fixed by doing a careful readthrough by yourself—they're things that are easy to catch, when you have time to go back and self-edit. :)

The second is a little more complicated, and it's something I'm guilty of myself: you tend toward these long and windy sentences that can be difficult to parse, as a reader. Looking at your opening line in this light:

The coffee tasted like swill, but then it was the cheapest of the cheap and had been barely even baptised with the faux cream which even now swirled upon its dirty brown surface.

There's a lot going on in this opening line. The first clause—The coffee tasted like swill—is really good. After that, we get: but then it was the cheapest of the cheap, which still fits with the idea that the coffee is awful. Next is: and had been barely even baptised with the faux cream—which takes us in a slightly different direction. "Had been barely even" reads awkwardly. It might be a different in dialect, but somehow I don't think so—the phrasing is strange, and trying to read it out loud, I trip over it. I like the idea of 'baptizing' your coffee with cream, and I don't see any issue with that particular image.

The final part of the line: "which even now swirled upon its dirty brown surface"—is fine by itself, except that you've repeated "even" here—it's repetitive.

The whole effect is a sentence that's somewhat difficult to read. If I were editing, I would suggest splitting it up, maybe like so:

"The coffee tasted like swill, but then it was the cheapest of the cheap. It had barely even been baptized with the faux cream which swirled upon its dirty brown surface."

That's still not perfect, but as a reader, it's easier to figure out what's going on, and it's a little easier to read.

The best, fastest thing you can probably do for your writing (because you're already quite good!), beyond careful self-editing, would be to go ahead and read your piece aloud when you're finished writing it, and find areas that you stumble over, reading. Even if it's your own writing, reading something out loud versus reading it on a page can change what you see—and phrases that you expect to read as being really smooth on the page may not be as smooth once you're actually reading them aloud. Note the places that you stumble, figure out how you want to read them (is your brain flipping words around? make a note of it!), and start the editing process there.

Overall, you're quite good—if you want a line-by-line dissection, PM me.

[icaruslived.livejournal.com]

..okay.

Hit me. (http://icaruslived.livejournal.com/2798.html)

[bleodswean.livejournal.com]

First and, I believe, most importantly is that I tell you how very, very, very much I love the words you craft. Your metaphors are wonderfully done, fresh, thought-provoking, unique, skilled, and exactly what a metaphor should be. Lines such as this one - They were in a train, or a car, or on a conveyor belt — it matters little; the firmament is built of metaphors. are swoon-worthy.

I will speak to you in metaphors.

What is obvious to me is that you exist alongside or within or locked in a wrestling pose with a HUGE imagination. And that's where the work is required. You can write! But with a piece like this you need to wrangle the imagination into a shape that is more substantial to the reader, that has a hidden or revealed, obvious or cryptic, point. You must make the work you are requiring of your reader worth their while.

The first part of this piece is very worthwhile. It works fantastically. (I would add another metaphor to the first paragraph in 1. Intuition, rounding it out to three rather than the two.) And your opening line before your stanzas is just a killer and flawless.

Then it starts to lose some of the exacting control. The angels are wonderfully done and that bit works. Her examining the firmament does not work. We need dialogue, internalization there, not more 3rd person poetic observation. The town works, but the inhabitants and their goal does not. Again, we need to see this and the MOTIVATION.

Ultimately, I was left with the question of WHY? Why storm the gates of Heaven, tear it down and rebuild it as Paradise? Is this the Paradise of the Garden of Eden? Are these two meant to represent a modern Adam and Eve? I could buy that but I need to be sold it. What about Heaven does not signify Paradise to these denizens? Tell us. If you're going to work with biblical proportions, perhaps a nod to the angel who took on Heaven with his own legions and lost?

I realize this was written to the "Yes, and" prompt but perhaps you could lose those bits? Or expand on them?

I know this isn't a mechanically helpful concrit. I don't believe you need a word wrench. You need an enclosed track upon which to race your engine.

[icaruslived.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Thank you not only for the crit, but for the effort and coherence you put into it. I'm humbled, that someone would consider that, well, worthwhile.

You're absolutely right that I didn't even consider their motivations worth explicating. That's ... probably something of a mental block on my part, actually - it was stronger than just assuming it would be clear, it was more this SHOULD be clear goshdurnit, if that makes sense.

And yea, the story is really too big to tell within the device I had shackled it to; the characters are bigger, the situation is bigger, the dreams and even mechanical details are bigger. I needed to realize that. The essence of their story probably gets through, but there are definitely weirdnesses everywhere from that mismatch.

I don't believe you need a word wrench. You need an enclosed track upon which to race your engine.

Not only is that excellent criticism, not only is it beautifully phrased, but it's also shockingly humbling. Thank you.

[bleodswean.livejournal.com]

You are welcome.

Here's two authors I think would resonate for you, one writes short one writes long -

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" Raymond Carver

"Vellum" Hal Duncan

Read those like textbooks. There is a Carver online here -

http://nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/6/carver/cathedral.htm

[kickthehobbit.livejournal.com]

Obligatory: you're fucking amazing, and I will e-mail you a dissection of this later.

The imagery in this is really gorgeous, and I love how it's structured. Characterization and voice are good.

The complaint that I have, as I have about other pieces of yours (and I've talked to you about this before!), is the opposite of what I have with most people:

TELL US MORE.

I know that the motives of your characters must be clear to you, and I realize that telling too much makes a piece irritating to read, but you've got these gorgeous, evocative settings, and a plot that's moving forward...but it's difficult to understand why.

Your writing is very technically sound—honestly, you write beautifully—but there's a bit of a disconnect, inasmuch as the why is missing from some of what you do.

You got really good feedback from bleodswean. Consider that, to start. :)

[kickthehobbit.livejournal.com]

http://kickthehobbit.livejournal.com/620447.html

Specifically, I'm not sure how well the ending works. It feels a little tacked-on, to me, as the writer.

[reckless-blues.livejournal.com]

She’s fifteen and looks upon the marriages that they have made in horror, or pity, or does not think of them at all - I'm not sure what this means here. Are her parents professional matchmakers and have done this before? I couldn't parse it. If "they" is humanity in general, it's not as clear as it could be.

I think the beginning is a little disjointed. For instance,


A quirk of an eyebrow, so delicate you almost cannot see it, and you cannot read her thoughts, you cannot know how she must feel, as she nods slowly and stares down at her hands as she says that she will do it.

Ignore the feeling in the pit of your stomach, the guilt, quietly gnawing. You have done what must be done, and after all, the others must not starve.

You sell your daughter for a fistful of silver and a promise that you will survive the winter; that your farm will flourish again. “We wed her,” you correct your husband, when he slams his fists on the dinner table, in grief, “for the hope that we would all survive. The farm was failing. What else could we do?”

That's three different things happening at once. The daughter's feelings about it, the mother's feelings about it, and the father trying to justify it after. You've kind of crammed the daughter's feelings in edgewise earlier. ("She's fifteen and ... ") You're jumping back and forth here, in particular because it's told from one character's point of view, and especially, I can't get a sense of what is happening chronologically. Personally, I would do something like deal with the daughter's feelings about the concept of marriage at the opening of the story - this could even be something that the mother is privately dreading, which would be a fine way of segueing into her feelings about it and how this bear comes up and presented her with a choice. The father's rage and guilt can come after, when they're discussing it.

I think that this story is about the fact that this woman has done something irreversible and irreconcilable. (And obviously there's shades of the emotions that a mother feels when her kid is grown up and out in the world and the kind of person that she is and the life that she has is now out of the mother's hands.) To have her daughter appear at the table all of a sudden is a little weak, it takes away the emotional crux of the story. It's darker, but - I'd end the story with her waiting, maybe, to see if she can complete these trials. There would be a sliver of hope (and of course we know what's going to happen since we know about this fairy tale), but that's all.

Anyway, that's only what I would do.

[kickthehobbit.livejournal.com]

Thanks for taking the time to respond. :D

You raise a lot of good points about some things I hadn't thought about, and I'm really grateful for that, especially considering how much I like your writing. I'll definitely be thinking about how to segue into the daughter's feelings about marriage—it's something I didn't like when I wrote it and you've given a good suggestion.

[icaruslived.livejournal.com]

Okay.

So the biggest problem with this piece, I think, is that it leans too hard on the original fairy tale. In some sense, you haven't written an original story, but fanfiction - there are a lot of details in it that seem extraneous to the story you're telling, that seem to only exist because East of the Sun, West of the Moon used them as plot elements.

But that can be a benefit as well as a problem, which is why I think your ending works pretty well. You think she hasn't earned the happy ending, I'm guessing? To a reader who hasn't read the original fairy tale, though, it's clear that the daughter's story is a separate story, that she and her husband come back due to events that were never in the mother's control in the first place. (And I'm guessing that readers who have have even less reason to worry.) So we don't ask you to provide that information; we simply ask that you complete your character arc.

And you do! That's where your story shines, of course, in its careful, detailed treatment of her quiet anguish. To my taste, you occasionally bludgeon us - her everpresent cry gets a tad too everpresent once or twice - but on the whole it works really well. By the time she goes on her pilgrimage, we're invested, and when we're told that she can't follow her daughter, for she is in her own story, our hearts crash with hers.

So the ending feels not like a reward for her penance - in which sense, yes, it would have felt tacked on - but as a happy ending she is now worthy of - in which sense, we are glad to see it, even if her story is over.

[kickthehobbit.livejournal.com]

Heh. Thanks! :)

It does get really heavy-handed, in parts, is something that I realize, re-reading it, and something else I probably should have addressed in my initial comment.

We talked a little re: leaning too heavily on the original story elsewhere...ideally, the rewrite shouldn't rely on it nearly as much. Who knows. Maybe I'll end up posting it when it's done.