When We Defied Heaven Ch 1 by Eugene Hayman

I love the setting and the concept of this submission. It’s an unsual cultural choice, to reproduce ancient Mesopotamia in a science-fictional context, and I am there for it.

What I want to talk about for this Editor’s Choice is an aspect of craft that has been pinging my radar for a while. Sometimes I call it “stage business.” Sometimes I refer to it as “framing.” It’s the things characters do in and around their conversations, and the things they do in general: their body language, their tone and expressions, how and when they move within a scene.

Many writers draft dialogue without framing. The lines of conversation float in space. Likewise, when characters move within the narrative, they do it without context. They walk, they look, they talk, but we don’t get the sense of how they do it. What vibe they’re sending off. How they’re feeling about it all.

Other writers go in the other direction. In place of one action or tone or expression, we get two or three or more. We see every stage of a movement. Transitions happen in layers, one action following another into or out of the scene.

This level of detail can be very effective in small doses. Sometimes we do need to see exactly what happens. But when it’s the rule rather than the exception, it can slow the story down. There’s too much detail; too many things happening.

This paragraph for example:

She closed her eyes and frowned as if struggling to remember what she should do next. For a moment, she stood motionless. Then she was running down one particular row of shelves out of many. She turned right, proceeding another dozen paces. Closing her eyes, she furrowed her brow a second time.

This paragraph reads like stage directions, like a list of actions in a script. Prose narrative can leave more to the reader’s imagination; can imply rather than state everything she does in the order in which she does it. The prose writer can choose from the array of possibilities, and focus on the handful of details that are essential in that moment.

What do we absolutely need to know here? What two or three details are essential for our understanding of what’s going on? Do we need two frowns? Do her eyes need to close twice? Does she need to run down two sets of rows? Can we get the sense of both her purpose and her confusion in half the number of actions, and half the number of sentences?

Here too, there’s a lot going on:

His right hand rested against his forehead. He stared at the floor, shaking his head as he spoke.

Is it essential that we know which hand he is resting against his forehead? Does he need to stare, shake his head, and speak, or is there a way to combine these three actions into one single, definitive gesture?

The challenge I would set would be to go through the ms. and choose one action in each set of two or more. When there are two iterations of an action close together, pick the one that most clearly defines the moment. Then see if the narative needs any of the others.

In some cases, the actions themselves might be a little more clearly defined. When the draft talks about a worried look or an irritated expression or a fearful expression, what does it actually look like? What is the character’s face or body doing? How do they show their emotions? It may be a visual, it may be auditory—a tone of voice, for example, or the click of a tongue, or a wordless sound.

It’s all about balance. Balancing actions and words, defining expression and tone. Choosing the exact right detail, the right word or phrase. Making the story as strong and clear as it can be.

— Judith Tarr

A Piece Of The Quiet by RJ McCarthy

One of the most powerful methods of drawing readers into a story is to raise compelling questions.  They may be big questions or small ones, as long as they are questions that compel readers to keep reading to find the answers.  “A Piece of the Quiet” successfully drew me in and made me want to keep reading with intriguing details that raised compelling questions in my mind.

In this story of a mother and son going on vacation, the first compelling question was raised in the third paragraph, when the mother, who is the first-person narrator, thought, “somehow that made me feel like a better person than I really am.”  The story is telling me that the mother is not a good person, which makes me very intrigued.  How bad is she?  What has she done/what is she going to do that is bad?  Compelling questions that make me want to keep reading.

In the next paragraph, the mother and son arrive at the cabin in a clearing in the woods.  The mountains “make it look like a giant painting propped up in the background.”  This tells me there is something false about the surroundings.  What is the true nature of this place?  Why is it disguised?  Is it a threat?  More compelling questions.

A circle of trees surrounds the clearing: “It felt more like a circle of hiding places.”  Who or what is hiding?

For me, these thoughts and descriptions that raise questions are the strongest aspect of the story.  They drew me in and made me want to read to the end of the story.

Here are some thoughts about how the story might be strengthened.

For me, the answers to the questions don’t provide as much pleasure as the questions themselves.  The questions drive me through the story, but the answers leave me somewhat disappointed by the end.  The answer to what bad things the mother has done is not fully clear to me.  From that opening clause I quoted above, I was expecting the mother to be much stranger and more unreliable than she was.  In retrospect, I guess she was feeling bad about not being able to afford a better vacation, or perhaps about fleeing from the creature in the woods instead of fighting for her child, though this is never stated.  So this seems like an example of the reader interpreting a statement differently than the author intended, in a way that sets up strong expectations, and then leads to reader disappointment when those expectations aren’t fulfilled.

The other details I quoted above seem to raise questions/expectations the author wants to raise.  Those questions are answered:  a mysterious creature/force hides in the woods.  It is a threat, seemingly killing and absorbing or mimicking the dog and the son, and then tormenting the mother by planting the voices of the dog and the son into her mind.

For me, the answers to the questions and the way those answers are revealed feel kind of familiar.  The dog vanishing first; a pale hand with long, bony fingers; the son going after the dog and vanishing; and the mother/survivor being haunted by the evil creature in the woods and the loss of her child—these are elements I’ve encountered before.

Does that mean that no stories can be written with an evil creature in the woods?  No.  Most stories have some familiar elements in them.  The world is full of stories retold and retold.  To provide satisfying answers to the questions raised, the author needs to make these familiar elements feel different and fresh.  Perhaps the elements are shown through an unusual viewpoint; for example, the story might be told from the dog’s viewpoint.  The dog might run into the woods to retrieve the ball to save the boy from the evil the dog detects.  The dog might then struggle, after being absorbed by the creature, to stop the creature from absorbing the boy.  Once the dog and boy are together inside the creature, the dog might be very happy to be with the boy, and the boy might want to be with his mother, so they might urge the creature to absorb the mother.  This leads the creature to pound on the door, but the mother resists, not understanding she has the chance to be with her boy.

Perhaps the creature in the woods is different than what we might expect.  Since the mother seems afraid of the woods, perhaps the trees themselves are evil and close in on the cabin until they crush it.  Perhaps the mother has been to this cabin before; it’s where she killed and buried the boy’s father.  And the boy’s father has turned into this creature, who is reaching out to claim his son.

The characters might be unusual, or the setting (e.g., “woods” on another planet), or the voice/style in which the story is written, or the plot (the mother could absorb the creature in the woods).

The earlier part of the story feels more fresh and different to me (the mountains like a painting, the mother fearing the woods, the mother missing the brick walls of the city and feeling like she’s looking at a wall that’s missing a painting—this painting imagery might be tied together in some way).  It could be helpful to think more about those details and see if they might develop through the story in a way that brings that freshness to the later elements.

One other area I want to mention is pacing.  Pacing is more important in horror than in any other genre.  To build suspense and fear, the pace needs to be slowed down, or dilated, to intensify those sections and trap readers in those moments.  The story tells us about time slowing down (e.g., “It felt like an hour passed in the two seconds it took for our dog to jump out of the tangle of branches with the ball in his mouth”) but doesn’t show us time slowing down. To help readers experience this dilation, the moment needs to be described in great detail, so the amount of time it takes readers to read about the events will be longer than the actual time the events took.  That’s how you create the feeling of slow motion or a moment being stretched out, or even frozen.

Here’s an example from “Sandkings” by George R. R. Martin, in which the main character, Kress, goes down into his basement to kill an alien creature called a maw, gets scared, and runs back up.  Martin’s description of this takes significantly longer to read than mine:

“He had to go down into the wine cellar and use the ax on the maw.
“Resolute, he started down. He got within sight of the door, and stopped.
“It was not a door any more. The walls had been eaten away, so that the hole was twice the size it had been, and round. A pit, that was all. There was no sign that there had ever been a door nailed shut over that black abyss.
“A ghastly, choking, fetid odor seemed to come from below.
“And the walls were wet and bloody and covered with patches of white fungus.
“And worse, it was breathing.
“Kress stood across the room and felt the warm wind wash over him as it exhaled, and he tried not to choke, and when the wind reversed direction, he fled.”

I enjoyed reading your story and remained engaged throughout.  I hope my comments are helpful.

–Jeanne Cavelos, editor, author, director of The Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust

The Charm-Smith by Bronwyn Venter

–Judith Tarr

Pigeon by weeg bree

“Pigeon” caught my attention this month with its atmosphere, its finely detailed world, and its potential. While it’s in translation from Dutch—and there are places the translation still does need help from a native English speaker or translator—it has a lot of potential because of its interesting, communal, domestic future world. But there’s also still a lot of work to be done on pacing, structure, and plot. So this month, I’d like to talk about what scene pacing can do for us, and how we find the story within our worldbuilding.

The strength of “Pigeon” is absolutely its worldbuilding. Its future Rotterdam is a fascinating place: a world that’s divided on political and ideological grounds, but not the stereotypical English-language science fiction ones, and grounded in an intricate social structure that quickly makes sense. It’s a very quiet story in some respects—how all these historical forces and social currents affect Brem’s little also_house on one Sunday morning—but one that makes that idea work through careful attention to people’s interactions, body language, and surroundings.

While it has a certain amount of invented terminology, most of it is very easy to understand on first contact: the invisible NihiLibs are absolutely clear (and more than a little funny—and tells readers more than a little about Brem’s politics), and the tek_house, also_house, grow_house, and spirit_house designations are quite clear.

The also_house itself is a cozy mix of mutual aid community-building, old-school survival skills like canning and gardening, diverse experiences, and high-tech know-how. It’s also an interesting blend of rules, restrictions, and freedoms that aren’t always where the genre shortcuts would take you. The most basic way to think about tropes is that they’re the times a story does, for whatever reason, what you expect. The times stories don’t do what a reader expects can be either jarring or delightful, depending on how we handle them, and the ways “Pigeon” combines ideas absolutely didn’t do what I expected. The combination of concrete practicality and elaborate coding skill that makes the explosive pigeons so dangerous—and weird, and intriguing. They’re not all machine or all modified bird; it’s in how the idea of natural world and artificial have been combined, and where.

“Pigeon” leans very heavily on that worldbuilding, though, to the point where other elements of the story—characterization and plot—are still figuring themselves out, and there are more than a few ways to address that situation.

One of the major suggestions I’d make is to rethink the story’s structure. “Pigeon” is organized in timestamps, some of them only minutes apart, and it can create a very choppy, interrupted reading experience. There are scenes in “Pigeon” that I think would benefit from being allowed to flow longer, be combined together, or transition into each other so that they feel more cohesive.

For example, while the first scene break emphasizes the threat of the pigeon, the break between the 7:21 am and 7:24 am timestamps probably doesn’t need to happen—or perhaps that 7:21 am scene isn’t needed at all. It’s not necessarily moving the narrative forward, and shorter scenes—ones that increase tension—don’t do the best work when they’re not building to something specific. The next major piece of action that happens is Karla’s arrival, and connecting some of the scenes that lead up to it would help pace “Pigeon” according to what’s happening in the story—a pace that’ll feel more organic.

Scene pacing is a tool like anything else, and while tying our stories closely to their structures can make us work more creatively to tell a story within those restrictions, they can also take good tools out of our hands. Having a flow of longer and shorter scenes lets the author set a pace that tells readers what’s important here. It also lets us use the length of scenes as a tool—like short and long phrases in music—to keep readers’ attention on the plot. It’s a tool worth having, I think, especially in a story as subtle and atmospheric as “Pigeon”.

Pacing is especially important for “Pigeon,” I think, because the story’s about a certain kind of social cohesion. If the structure of the story isn’t reflecting that idea—if the way the story is told is chopped-up, separated, and atomized—the structure and theme will pull against each other, and readers will feel lost—but might not know why.

Most importantly, it’ll also force “Pigeon” to stop covering over its weakest point: falling into explaining some aspect of its world, and then just interrupting that with the scene break instead of finding a way to integrate its worldbuilding information into the story proper. “Pigeon” spends a lot of time telling readers about its world instead of moving its characters within that world. It’s a technique that gets more and more visible as it’s repeated, and it means “Pigeon” slows down, wanders, and loses steam in the middle—after the pigeon threat is dealt with.

For the same reasons, I’d also suggest creating stronger ties between the different elements of Brem’s Sunday. Brem’s friends, guests, and companions are a community; what connections can “Pigeon” show between them, and not just to Brem? They have relationships that don’t involve him, but as it stands, mostly they interact with Brem—and not each other, or the house by itself. The secondary characters aren’t getting to be people right now.

Building this space into an actual community with those interacts would add some nuance and texture to some of the more generalized character descriptions. For example, Fariq gets pushed into a stereotype a little too easily: “Fariq grew up during the first decades after the crash and lived in a small flat amidst a lot of domestic violence, but despite everything, he has a curious and cheerful personality and boundless energy.” It’s a little more like how a social worker or work manager would talk about a staff member than how someone talks about the people they care about and live with. Being able to see Fariq interact with others, and through others’ eyes, would give him a stronger personality without having to add too much more to the story.

I think those major points will get “Pigeon” to a middle draft—one where the structure is better set, the characters feel more like a community, and what’s important in this plot is clearer. They won’t yet get it to a state where it’s ready to submit to magazines. But sometimes working on our fiction is a process of dealing with the most obvious fixes first, and then seeing where that gets us. I’m pretty sure that once the fundamentals are dealt with, “Pigeon” will emerge into the unique story it is.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

–Leah Bobet, author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (2015)

The Museum Of Average Days by Kate Ellis

Shadow of Karma Chapter 1 by Channon Wong

I like the idea of this chapter very much. I love that it’s set in a non-Western world, with non-Western culture and assumptions. It’s good for the fantasy genre to widen its horizons.

In the later stages of revision, I’d recommend a careful copyedit and a close line edit. Check the grammar and syntax in particular, and make sure words and phrases mean what they’re intended to mean.

At this point, there are a couple of structural issues to think about. The overall line of the plot is clear, but there are a lot of characters speaking and acting. It might help the pacing to combine some of the characters, and focus on one particular story in each scene as Malai passes through the ruined town.

It might help to rethink the order of some of the information as well. The story builds up to the revelation that Malai is a kiarh. That’s a nice bit of tension, a little mystery with a dramatic payoff, but we don’t know enough about what a kiarh is in order to get the full effect. Instead we get a block of exposition right at the climax. The tension dissipates; the moment fizzles.

If we’re given more information earlier, if we know what a kiarh is even if we don’t know that Malai is one, we’ll be ready for the climax when it comes. We’ll get the full effect of the Aha! moment.

Another piece of information that comes in late is the existence of Malai’s former husband. He’s introduced suddenly—with that actual word. It almost reads to me as if the author just came up with him at that moment, to serve that portion of the plot. If he’s introduced much earlier, if he’s part of Malai’s world from the beginning, he’ll be more solidly grounded in the story. He’s a nice foil for Malai; he’ll be an even better one if he’s woven in from the start.

This is a good opening chapter. I’m looking forward to seeing how the novel develops from here.

–Judith Tarr

Dead and Buried by Dylan Edeal-Smith

— Jeanne Cavelos, editor, author, director of The Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust

Spidersick In San Francisco, 2049 by Chuck Saul

— Leah Bobet, author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance Of Ashes (2015)