The Editors’ Choices are chosen from the submissions from the previous month that show the most potential or otherwise earn the admiration of our Resident Editors. Submissions in four categories — science fiction chapters, fantasy chapters, horror, and short stories — receive a detailed review, meant to be educational for others as well as the author.This month’s reviews are written by Resident Editors Leah Bobet, Jeanne Cavelos, and Judith Tarr. The last four months of Editors’ Choices and their editorial reviews are archived on the workshop.
Perfection by Sarah Kanning
t’s a tremendous challenge to write a science-fiction story under 2000 words: to build a world and people it with characters and develop the structure of a plot. To do it backwards ups the ante even further. I love that this submission tries to do all that, and I think the characters and the basic conflict take up plenty of space. There’s definitely a story here.
I do agree however that the structure needs some rethinking. The straight backwards organization of events starts to feel strained about halfway through.
Maybe it’s me with my linear brain and long familiarity with stories that run in the other direction, though I don’t find I want that to happen here. There’s interest and intrigue, for me, in the unfolding of information, in not knowing everything exactly as it happens chronologically.
At the same time, I think the order of events needs some shaking up. Start with the killing, yes—I like the shock of that—but weave the backstory in through the immediate sequence of events that leads to this conclusion. Maybe play with verb tenses: present for story-present, past for backstory. Mix it up a little bit. Let revelations spark as they become relevant—a flash of memory, connections made as present events or sensory input recalls earlier incidents. The stress of knowing what Hayden was in the beginning, versus what he’s become. Word-echoes, echoes of concepts, as memory and immediate action merge. The prose, the choice of words and the juxtaposition of ideas, might do even more than it currently does to link events and characters.
It’s doable, I think, within the limits of the current word count, though some of that might be recast a little bit, for clarity. Such phrases as
the hacked gash and the darkening contusion precisely centered on the solar plexus
are almost too concise—and at the same time, seem almost redundant. Perhaps just a gash, with hacked left to implication?
And here too,
come manacle and haul me away
feels slightly overcompressed but also overly specific. Do we need to know exactly how he’s bound? Is it enough that he’s hauled away?
The answer could of course be Yes, it has to be this way. And that’s the author’s right and power. Especially when writing very short, every word has its carefully chosen place. Everything comes together into that perfect, single point, which here is the nature and cause of the death that (at least for this draft, and I think possibly for final as well) begins the story and ends the relationship between its main characters.
–Judith Tarr