I was caught by the powerful combination of pace and voice in “Six Plastic Bags”—and the skill it shows in balancing buckets of information to create an immersive, textural world. However, those strengths aren’t yet matched when it comes to the story’s plotting. This month, I’d like to talk about what we want from our readers, how to help them get there—and how to evaluate if we’re providing them a worthwhile interaction.

There’s a lot of skill in how the world of “Six Plastic Bags” is built. Indra’s world is the kind of grim, brutal setting that’s easy to lay on far too thick, but “Six Plastic Bags” handles its worldbuilding and information with a thoroughly deft hand. It’s full of fascinating little tidbits folded in organically enough to create texture without overwhelming—the sheer amount of worldbuilding information in the fourth paragraph, parceled out so it’s only the quick sprint through a night-long chase, is an incredible example of how to do verisimilitude with a light hand. Every detail is just important enough, and matters later. The details of Indra’s world (the tinted skin on “ski-slope nose”, the fish guts) are precise, unexpected, and visceral.

Indra also works very well as a protagonist: glib and halfway immoral (the “clever thing to say” line is deeply funny), but never crossing the line into outright awfulness. He’s quirky and a little crappy in true Neal Stephenson style, but still someone I’m able to cheer for, and his self-regulated, artificial lack of terror at the situation he lands in is a clever way to make the more horrific action of the story readable; it’s a wonderful balancer.

But while it’s very well-executed on that prose level, as above, plotting is a point where “Six Plastic Bags” could be worked on. When I step back to summarize the piece, the plot is very straightforward: Indra does something stupid in the first paragraphs—for no discernible reason, with no motivation—and in the end he is punished for it, or what the creepers thought it was for some reason (not discernible, no motivation), in the same exact way as the last guy who actually did that thing.

Unfortunately, when I step back yet farther and start to test the logic of this world, the entire story falls apart: the creepers had him in custody. Why not just kill him then? Why bother with another chase—the main action of the story?

I’d suggest there are two approaches to consider when taking a look at what’s not quite firing in the plot of “Six Plastic Bags”: character motivation and emotional arc.

Whenever a critiquer finds themselves asking “Okay, but why?” it’s a good diagnostic for a motivations problem. I think motivations are a source for some of the trouble here, and on a certain level the story is aware of that:

He had known that he would keep going until he’d passed all reasonable limits, brought down the wrath of the slum lords and for what? One night and seven shags? It doesn’t make sense, even to himself. Except of course that perhaps he wants some wrath.

Indra’s motivations don’t “make sense, even to himself”. The creepers’ motivations for disbelieving his multiple protests and insisting this was personal are opaque and arbitrary as well—and two parties with no real motivations make it very difficult to infuse a plot with weight, meaning, or stakes.

This is a question that runs through the entire piece, even into the endgame. Indra goes to the Lighthouse—but why? He risks Constant Rex, who is a risk for him—but why, and why is that a risk? That threat isn’t well-defined, and is truncated before it ever has a chance to develop into a meaningful plotline. The whys pile up, the narrative tension—the sense of progressing through a plot, answering questions to find new ones and raising the stakes—falls away, and then “Six Plastic Bags” abruptly stops.

I think one route to making this story work more effectively would be going back to the beginning building blocks of its plot to consider some of those questions about motivation and choice. Why our characters do things is fundamental to why they matter to us as readers, and why the action of a story is important, and not just actions—which brings me to the question of emotional arc.

When it’s boiled down, readers read stories to satisfy something: to feel whatever question is opened in the first paragraphs resolve in a way that makes it feel complete. There’s a reason the end of the story is called a resolution. That sense of completion is something we can play with as authors, but it’s always worthwhile to consider our plotting in terms of its effects. If readers pick up a story to feel something, plot is the engine by which we, as writers, create the feeling. What feeling are we creating, how, and why? And is that why a good reason?

So the second route I’d suggest is to ask what readers are meant to feel by the closing bars of “Six Plastic Bags”? Which plot points or pieces of information are the stepping-stones to get them there? And most importantly: Why do you want them to feel this way about this information?

Thinking about this piece’s plot in terms of what effect you want it to produce is a great diagnostic for finding why each component of action is there, and where they’re all taking readers together. But it’s also a useful tool for evaluating our own motives as authors, because when stripped down to the emotional movements, it’s easier to evaluate what we’re saying in terms of the emotional context of the time we’re in.

Ultimately, I think there’s a lot of skill in play here: more than enough to discover where “Six Plastic Bags” wants to take readers—and what effect it wants from their going there.

Best of luck!

I like the idea of this novel. I love the range and variety of aliens that share the universe. There’s so much potential here for developing characters and cultures, and building cooperation and conflict.

When the draft comes closer to final, I would suggest a thorough and careful copyedit. Make sure the words mean what they want to mean. Pay attention to the bits and bobs of spelling and grammar and syntax—dangling phrases, you’re for your and vice versa, punctuation and paragraphing and all those nitpicky essentials.

In the meantime, I was particularly struck by the author’s comment that the novel “needs more soul.” I take that to mean that it needs more depth and layering of emotions, and stronger character development. More sense overall of people being people, living and breathing and moving together and apart through a complex universe.

The draft makes a good start on these things. Focusing on Wiltar at first and then shifting to Yindi allows the reader to see events from two very different perspectives. I like that we start with a small person, literally and figuratively, before we shift to one of the senior officers.

I have questions about Wiltar. What species is he? Is he Ariol? I don’t know why I thought he might be human—maybe that’s my innate human bias showing. I wondered as I read, how and why he came onto the ship, and how he could have been there for as long as he has without receiving any apparent training or, despite his having been in multiple engagements in some capacity, being aware of the ritual with daggers and the prisoners. If he has no training, what is he doing in armor and apparently serving as part of a fighting unit? How has he achieved that status despite being extremely small, young, and uneducated?

His scenes are potentially quite powerful. In revision I might think about pruning the prose considerably. Note how often the same thing gets said two or more times:

He had survived! His first boarding and he had lived.

A child. It must be a child.

…these Traluians were scared and their eyes were alive with pink veins flashing across them and their flat noses opened and closed rapidly. They were panicking.

Repetition can be effective if used sparingly, but in general it makes for clearer, crisper prose to cut out the duplications. In the last example particularly, the first sentence does a great job of getting the point across. It’s clear they’re panicking. We don’t need the extra explanation.

Think too about shifting passive verb constructions to active. This is especially true in action scenes. Short, active sentences and paragraphs speed up the pacing and heighten the tension.

I would also suggest rethinking a couple of things about how characters present themselves to the reader. The first is what I call viewpoint tagging. These are all the little reminders that we are seeing the story through the eyes of a particular character. Words like thought and saw and heard and knew.

While it is important to establish the viewpoint, as with pretty much everything else about writing, a little goes a pretty fair distance. A character’s viewpoint can come through in more subtle ways: focusing on one character, showing how they move through the space, what they’re doing, how they see the world around them—not just by telling us they see it, but by giving us their camera angle so to speak. If we see clearly through a character’s eyes, we don’t need regular reminders. We’re right there, living in their head. We think the way they think, use their vocabulary, react to things and people the way they would.

One thing to watch here is a habit that writers tend to fall into, which is to present a character’s thoughts as a series of rhetorical questions.

Was that enough? If he froze or was killed and blocked the corridor would the fourteen crewmen in front of him be enough to storm a Traluvian battleship?

Was this an apprentice like Wiltar? Did the Trivs even have such a thing[?]

Some questions may make sense in context, but whole series of them slow down the story. There may be other, more active ways to get the information across, maybe through action and reaction, maybe through actual dialogue between characters. Or maybe just by making a simple declarative statement: If he froze or was killed, the rest of the unit would have to do the job without him; maybe this was an apprentice, if the Trivs had such a thing.

It might help the novel’s emotional affect to think about the way non-viewpoint characters appear in the narrative. There are a number of vivid personalities here already, notably Nux and Shint and Kesh, but there are quite a few generic characters as well. We’re missing a sense of Wiltar’s unit as a group of individuals.

He must know them well if he’s (presumably) trained with them, but we only see Nux as a distinct personality. While there’s no time or space to get to know every single person on the ship, we can catch a glimpse here than there—give us a name or a characteristic or a very brief description in place of “a crewman.” Even a word or a short phrase can bring the character alive without slowing down the action or adding to the word count.

I wonder if it might be worthwhile to recast the opening to show the unit waiting in ambush together rather than separately, or if their hiding in individual tiny spaces is essential to the battle plan, to put Wiltar together with a mentor or buddy of sorts. Nux seems like a possible candidate here. This would move the opening sequence out of Wiltar’s head, make it more active (and interactive) and less introspective. It might speed it up, too, if we pick up some or all of the exposition through some quick verbal and physical byplay between the veteran and the kid. Then along with tighter prose and more active action scenes, the whole chapter will pull us swiftly into Chapter Two.

There are some interesting things happening in this opening chapter. We have a classic fantasy setup, the small, prosperous, isolated village in which our unusual hero happens to live. He is, in the tradition of fantasy heroes, an orphan and a foundling. And now, it appears, he’s about to learn what and who he really is. I’ll be interested to see how the evocative title manifests in the story.

When the ms. reaches the state of line and word edits, I would recommend a close reading and a thorough copyedit to make sure all the words mean what they want to mean. (Including one of my favorites: locating a frown around the jaw instead of the forehead. A frown used to mean a drawing together of the eyebrows, but in recent years it seems to have slipped downward to the mouth and chin. When Haley furrows her brow, that’s another and perfectly acceptable way of saying she’s frowning.) At this stage however, there are more general issues to think about, so I wouldn’t worry too much. Just keep it in mind for a later draft.

The first thing to think of here is whether the story has begun at the right point. By this I mean, is it opening as close to the end as it effectively can? Are the events of the chapter absolutely essential to the movement and development of the story and the characters? How is the pacing? Is it fast or slow? Are we getting to the point of this section of the story, or are we waiting for something to happen?

The key event here seems to be the arrival of strangers in town. At the end of the chapter, we see what appears to be one of them. He’s nicely sinister and mysterious, and the ending does a nice job of encouraging us to keep reading to find out what happens next.

Before he shows up, there’s quite a bit of introductory material. We meet Dryden, our viewpoint character. We learn what he does for a living, meet his boss and some of his family, and find out what Dryden’s position is in this world. Then we meet his girl crush, Haley, and one of Haley’s would-be suitors. Dryden and Haley show us some of the landscape, including the very dramatic seashore. Finally the sinisister stranger comes into the picture, and we can tell things are about to get complicated.

One suggestion I would make in revision is to think about what dialogue is and how it works in fiction. In real life, most of what we say to each other is what I call filler. Stock phrases, small talk, a kind of social shorthand that people use to keep in touch. For the most part it doesn’t convey much real information. When it does, it tends to spell out what we’re doing now or what we’ve done or what we’re planning to do.

In story terms, it’s a kind of null space. Story is what happens, as it happens. It can be told in flashback, as something that happened before the story’s present, and it can manifest as characters planning what they’re going to do in the future. But the main line of story is happening as if we, the reader, are living it.

The tricky part here is that if we wrote everything that happens, novels would be thousands of pages long, and there would be no way for the reader to tell which of the innumerable happenings were more important than the others. That’s why I like to think of a novel as the “good-parts version.” Stories condense everything that happens in the characters’ lives and focus on the parts that matter the most. They pare away the manifold details of daily life and focus on the ones that develop the characters and move the story from one main event to the next.

The same applies to dialogue. All the social lubricant, the standard phrases, hello-goodbye-how are you-what are you up to-where are you headed and so on and on, act as speed bumps for the story. The reader is looking for Stuff That Happens. Filler dialogue, dialogue without new or essential content, gets in the way of that Stuff.

When writing dialogue, the questions to ask are: Is this conversation conveying new information? Does it move the story forward? If it’s meant to develop character, does it define that character in a clear or memorable way? Does the reader (and the story) need this particular set of phrases, or can they be left to implication while we move on to the next bit of new information?

Or, to put it another way, Is this passage of dialogue absolutely essential for the movement of the plot and the understanding of the reader? Can I take it out without sacrificing plotting, characterization, or clarity? If my characters are conveying information, can that information be more effectively conveyed through a dramatized scene? Are my characters talking about something that happened offstage, and if so, would the story be more direct and immediate (and the pacing faster) if that event happened onstage?

Think too about what the characters are doing while they’re talking and interacting. Do their speech and movements have clear purpose in the story? If they need to be in a particular place at a particular time—as here, Dryden and Haley happen to be by the seashore when the dark stranger comes by—are they getting there quickly enough, or does it seem as if they’re wandering around aimlessly?

If the story requires that Dryden encounter the stranger at this particular point, does it make sense for that encounter to be apparently random? At first it seems as if he leaves work with a plan to scope out the strangers, but then he seems to make a random decision to stop by and see Haley, and then Haley decides they’re heading for the beach. He doesn’t seem to be acting with volition—or agency as we might say in writing class. Other characters are making his decisions for him, and deciding where he should go. Is this a plot element, in that Dryden is naturally passive and over time will be forced to be more active?

I would ask too if he would have any concerns about being hunted at this early stage. He knows he’s the only druin in town. Is this a dangerous thing to be? Or is he just concerned about casual racism? How complex is his situation, and how well aware of its full implications is he at this point? It doesn’t all have to be spelled out in this first chapter, but thinking it through might affect how Dryden thinks and feels, and how he reacts to the stranger.

It might also change the structure of the chapter. Do we need all of the introductory material, or might the opening be stronger if Dryden’s perambulations are shorter and his actions more focused? Maybe he asks to leave work so he can catch up with Haley and take her somewhere. Maybe he goes to town, and the stranger passes them on the way.

If he does go to the beach, what specific thing can he do there, or plan to do there, that makes it essential for him to be in that place and nowhere else? Or, if it’s Haley’s decision, what specific thing does she want to accomplish by going there? How can Dryden be more actively involved in the decision? Is he just following her because he wants to be with her, or does he have his own agenda?

The main thing to keep in mind is that whatever goes into the story is essential to the story. It develops character. It moves the story forward.

If Dryden is on the beach when the stranger shows up, how he gets there does matter, but we don’t necessarily need all of the different stops he made or the conversations he had on the way. Just the ones that are directly relevant to his being in that place at that time. We might not even need those, if there’s enough setup in the scene on the beach. If we know he got the time off work, and if we know Haley manipulated her father into letting her go with him, we may not have to see those things happening, just know that they did. Then the chapter begins with them on the beach, Dryden reacting to the ocean, and the stranger showing up. And that moves us on to the next section of the story.

The interesting setting of this story draws me in immediately.  I actually enjoy imagining living with a cemetery in my backyard.  The plot is nice and tight, with the ending set up in the first two paragraphs.  The term updig makes me curious, so I want to keep reading to understand.  The ending feels satisfying.

There are some elements, though, that could be strengthened to give the story more impact.

Some events feel rushed over or not clearly described, and this weakens both the story and the narrator.  Part of the reason for this may be the desire to keep the story to flash length.  But I’d love to feel more vividly in the moment with the first-person narrator.  The narrator digs up the corpse of Elenore Heckerson, since she’s had no mourners visit her grave in years.  He’s planning to dump her body in the lake and re-sell the plot, as taught by his deceased father:  “No mourners, you get the lake.”

As he takes her body to the lake, he hears Elenore’s voice, but I don’t get any clear sense of how he’s hearing her.  Does he actually hear a voice?  Or is it more like a thought planted in his mind?  Or does it feel like he’s just imagining what she might be thinking, if she could think?  Has he heard other corpses speaking?  Or is she the only one?  He responds nonchalantly to her at first.  Later, he thinks he’s going crazy, but that reaction belongs earlier.  Why would he respond nonchalantly and later think he’s going crazy?  I also don’t understand why he calls her “darling.”  That doesn’t sound like the narrator’s voice.  He seems concise and clipped in most of his thoughts.  He’s an isolated man who has never been close to anyone except his parents.  I don’t think the word darling would even be on his radar.  I’d like to feel much more of an emotional reaction to this interaction; I think this could be very chilling or disturbing, or it could reveal some fascinating connection between the narrator and the dead.  Right now, I don’t feel much except a bit of confusion.  My belief in the narrator’s character is also undercut by his reaction.

The climax could profit from dilation, slowing the pace by describing events in great detail.  Let’s look at this paragraph:

“The scratching becomes a pounding, boiling hot water splashes up and scalds my arms.  I lean into the coffin, push hard–it slides.  I lose my footing, try to catch myself–that jagged metal corner swipes me, sinks into my jeans.  I wriggle and pull but it’s got me good.”

The narrator has previously noticed the bubbles in the water and compared them to boiling water, but he doesn’t know that the water is actually boiling.  He should be startled when the water scalds him, have some reaction to the pain, and realize it is boiling.  He might then panic, or frantically try to figure out why it’s boiling, or consider different actions he might take.  He has very little reaction, just continuing his plan.  In the third sentence, I don’t know why he loses his footing.  Is he being clumsy?  Is the barge wet?  Are supernatural forces at work?  How exactly does he try to catch himself?  How does that lead to his jeans getting caught?  Where are his jeans caught?  By the ankle?  By the thigh?  On the belt loop?  This needs to be more specific to allow me to experience it along with the narrator.  Making it more specific will also better define the personality of the narrator.

One element that arises in the examples I just discussed is the causal chain.  The causal chain isn’t as strong as it might be, so events sometimes feel manipulated by the author rather than arising out of a chain of cause and effect.  If he’s never heard a voice from a corpse before, why does he hear Elenore’s voice?  Why does the water boil as if the corpses that have previously been dumped are demanding justice?  Why does he slip?  At the end, we see that the narrator, whose mother died the previous month and has no one who cares for him, gets dragged into the lake, suffering the same fate as Elenore and others.  While the main parts of this have been set up, other parts have not, and they feel kind of forced as we approach the climax.  A dead body with no mourners gets the lake, but the narrator is not dead.  He may have no mourners some day, but not this day.  So the story hasn’t quite set up why he’s pulled into the lake now.  The story seems to be drawing on other stories in which someone doing wrong gets his comeuppance.  That’s a plot structure I enjoy.  But usually the comeuppance is triggered by the character’s wrong actions growing worse and worse.  In this case, the narrator is simply doing something he’s done many times before.  The story is mixing a plot about a character caught in a rule that now works against him and a plot about a character getting his comeuppance.  There’s nothing wrong with mixing plots; it can lead to something fresh.  But the author needs to be clear about the story he’s telling.  If he’s used this rule to cruelly abuse the corpses in the cemetery–then a mix of the two plots could make sense.  If he’s using this rule only when he must to make enough to survive and keep up the cemetery, then the comeuppance plot isn’t appropriate.  Right now, the story feels more like the latter, so the corpses rising up to demand justice don’t quite seem to fit.

I wonder if the narrator perhaps only did updigs with his father.  After his father died, perhaps his mother convinced him to stop that practice, telling him he should respect and honor the dead and make a living some other way.   Perhaps, because of that, he didn’t have much money for her healthcare when she got breast cancer.  So she died.  Now, driven by grief, he might feel fed up with respecting and honoring the dead.  He might decide to do a bunch of updigs, sell a bunch of plots, and then take off with the money.  Elenore might be the first.  In that case, a plot that combines the rule working against him and the narrator receiving his comeuppance could be appropriate.

If the comeuppance plot does not belong in the story and it’s about a character who lives by a rule that turns against him, then I think the rule needs to align a little better with what happens to him–the word mourners doesn’t quite fit, since he’s not dead–and probably the narrator needs to be more of a sad sack, loser character.

Finally, all of these points tie to the character of the narrator, which I think could be better defined.  He claims that living with a graveyard in his backyard has prevented him from making friends or finding a wife.  I don’t think the graveyard is what’s stopping him from finding companionship.  It might be a factor, but there must be other factors.  What are they?  Thinking out his character some more may help clarify the story, as discussed above.

My advice is that, as you explore these issues through revision, that you put the length of the story out of your mind.  I don’t think this needs to be a long story, but it may need more like 1500 or 2000 words.  A good goal is to allow the story to find its ideal length rather than trying to force it into a particular length.

I really enjoyed the setting and the tight plot.  I hope this is helpful.

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

I like the voice and style in this excerpt. It’s deft and sure of itself, and it knows what it wants to accomplish. There are a few things that might benefit from a little polish, but overall it’s a solid draft.

One thing I would point out is the need for close attention to small details. It’s not a huge problem in a draft, when getting the words down is the first priority. In revision, really think through the individual lines and paragraphs and scenes, and make sure everything fits together.

For example, the opening sequence is careful to make it clear that the dark ship is difficult to see, but the first line refers to it as a “hideously mutated shark.” That’s a great image and fits what Tamra eventually sees through the viewport, but in immediate context it’s a viewpoint slip. What other image can convey what’s needed while still staying within Tamra’s field of vision?

Another thing to take note of in the next draft is a quite common tendency (I’m guilty of it myself, I freely confess) to drop lines of dialogue into a sort of null space. One of my editors calls it “floating heads.” There’s nothing to frame the interchange. A little bit of stage business–tone, expression, gesture–might add a layer or two of emotional complexity and round out the characters just a shade more.

Tamra’s character in general could use a few more layers as well. She’s primarily a viewpoint here, and there’s not a lot to distinguish her as a person. The exposition about her background and her enhancements could be woven in more organically from the start: give us a clearer sense of how those enhancements work for her as the dark ship comes in; let us experience it with her in a more immediate way.

The same applies to Jaelyn’s explanations in the latter part of the excerpt. It’s important information, but Jaelyn functions as a device to deliver exposition. Think about how to round out her character a little more, and how she can convey the information organically.

Maybe Tamra is more involved in eliciting it. Maybe she pushes in and compares tattoos, and insists on knowing what they mean. Or maybe some of it is left for later in the story—Jaelyn is called away to take care of an issue with the ship or crew, or opts for Reasons (to be hinted at or stated outright, whatever works) to leave Tamra wanting more.

These bits of friction should help develop both their characters. It doesn’t have to be a whole long chunk of story. The right few lines, the right words or actions, gestures or expression or tones of voice, would convey a great deal in a small space.

That in fact is my philosophy of revision. If you find the right words and fit them into the right place, they resonate through the whole story.

This story does a great job of presenting its premise clearly and compactly in the first seven paragraphs.  Alice can receive a dream (a wish) in exchange for a tooth.  A mysterious girl who seems almost an echo or reflection of Alice offers her the deal.  This opening scene quickly draws me in and makes me want to keep reading to see how this premise develops and what consequences it has.

The story continues by delivering on what it has promised, showing various instances of Alice exchanging a tooth for dream as she goes through life.  It’s interesting to see her wishing her crush would notice her in one scene, being mocked by her crush-turned-husband in the next scene, and having lost her husband through divorce in the next scene.  We see how Alice’s dreams are fleeting. One intense wish, after being satisfied, simply leads to another.

All of that is very nice.  Of course this magic is necessarily limited.  Alice has only so many teeth.  And at the end, Alice has no teeth left, though she still has dreams.

While the story kept me reading, I’m afraid I wasn’t satisfied when I reached the end.  I felt a bit cheated, because the story had only shown me three exchanges, yet Alice suddenly had no teeth left.  I think Alice needs to become aware, at some point pretty early on, that her wishes are limited.  In the second scene, in which Alice is in high school, it would be helpful to give a paragraph or two of exposition, letting us know what happened when her baby teeth fell out (do they not provide wishes like teeth pulled out by choice?), how she used a flurry of wishes in childhood (it would be great to list some of these quickly–they could be very revealing of her character), and when she realized the number of wishes was limited and started being more selective (or whatever happened to use up so many teeth).  This will put more at stake with each tooth she barters.  We could also feel her trying to get her ideal life into place before she runs out of teeth–a husband, a profession.  (I’d also like a clear visual of whether she’s having these teeth replaced as she loses them, or if she has holes in her mouth.  And does the wish creature gain teeth as Alice gives them up?)

Another element that could be built up through the story to make the ending stronger is Alice’s nature as a dreamer.  This is mentioned several times through the story, but my understanding of what this means doesn’t grow with each mention.  I think this is connected with another aspect of Alice’s character, that she seems to be unable to succeed without having a wish granted.  What makes her a failure?  Her inability to ride her bike as fast as her older brother seems a matter of age.  Her inability to get the attention of her crush seems due to shyness.  I don’t know why she can’t get an assistant professor position.  And I don’t know why she can’t get published, builds up credit card debt, or loses her husband to divorce.  If the reasons for her failures were connected, so the story slowly built up a pattern that was revealed in that final scene, that could provide the emotional punch that, for me, is missing right now.  For example, maybe she always wants things that others have.  She wants to ride her bike fast because her brother can do that and it makes him happy.  She wants her crush because some other girl, who seems super happy, has him.  She wants a full-time English literature teaching position because her English lit professor in college seemed so happy.  She wants to be published because all her colleagues are published and it makes them happy.  So at the end, she not only has fake teeth but a fake life, a life made up of other people’s interests, things she thought she wanted at the time but were not really her at all.  She has made herself into something she’s not, and now she’s stuck in this position, with no way to get more dreams, and more than that, no way to even understand what she really wishes for.  This would add another layer to the character and the story.

Together, I think these two elements could create an inevitable yet surprising climax, which is the idea.  Charting the loss of teeth would make the ending feel inevitable, and the revelation about her character could feel surprising.

Other than that, my mine suggestion is to look more closely at the sentences.  Little things pretty regularly tripped me up as I read, throwing me out of the story.  For example, the verbs in the second and third sentences should be lying and lies, not laying and lays.  The four sentence should read, “She wants to be fast,” not “She wants to be as fast.”

Some word choices also distracted me.  The word pressing to describe her sitting up seemed odd and was hard to visualize.  I also had a hard time visualizing “two braids topped with blue ribbons,” when the girl is wearing a helmet.  I don’t think I can see the tops of her braids under the helmet.  I could see the bottoms of her braids, but that’s not what’s being described.

Sometimes the prose doesn’t flow from one sentence to the next.  For example, “Alice follows, tossing her plastic cup into the trash.  The cafeteria is dark, and Alice squints to see as she crossed the dance floor.”  It jars me to get the description of the dark cafeteria here, when she has already been standing in for five paragraphs.  The first paragraph does a good job of setting the scene, so it seems unnecessary to repeat that the cafeteria is dark here, and it doesn’t seem like something Alice would notice again at this point.  Instead, you might describe the whirling lights of the disco balls centered over the dance floor and how disorienting they are.  This paragraph is also confusing because the girl starts leading Alice toward a door, and I think the door is very close, and only later do I learn it’s all the way across the room.  Also, Miles was in a corner earlier, and now he seems to suddenly be in the middle of the dance floor. Spending more time thinking about details and the order in which they appear could be helpful.  The description of the bathroom in the next scene is much clearer and more effective.

I enjoyed the compact nature of the scenes and the progression they reveal of Alice’s life.  I hope this is helpful.

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

I was drawn to “Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea” by its storyteller’s cadence, its powerfully simple speculative element, and how much it’s able to say about human relationships, power, responsibility, and ethical assertion in clean, uncluttered lines. It’s a great example of doing the most with every word and how we can, as writers, convey a perspective without making ourselves and our work smaller.

The first spark for me with “Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea” is the idea: how soon the story presents it, and how it keeps its magic simple, precise, and deep. Miyohtwaw’s talent feels like the equivalent to describing something in one right detail instead of five iffy ones—one fantasy element with lots of thematic range instead of a complicated system—and that tidiness made this story’s focus clear, relevant, and powerful from the first lines. The potential of “clothes so powerful they made you become the person you needed to be” is instant and intriguing—because who you need to be might be very different than how you think of power, or what you want, and that’s an idea and set of values that bring great range to a discussion of power. Structurally, this means space for the story’s narrative conflict and growth is created inside three lines, and without much fuss at all: as a reader, I know what the stakes and the potential are immediately, and that they’re going to be nuanced and interesting to me.

There are a lot of small, smart choices that come in to support that question of power and its handling as the piece unfolds. I especially appreciated how the narration shows terms like “queen” in phonetics: it seats the story absolutely in Miyohtwaw’s perspective without breaking the fourth wall for explaining, and what we explain, who we centre, when writing about non-white, non-Christian cultures (especially our own!) is definitely a question of power. The story’s narration is enacting the lesson/realization it’s talking about—about not giving away your own power—in the way it chooses its words, and I found that form-function resonance very effective.

Likewise, the ending, with Miyohtwaw conveying finally to Victoria in a visceral way her own perspective, is a mirror for some of the work the story itself is doing, and the way content and form run in parallel is again, really strong craft work.

The other really strong point in “Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea” is how it treats its situation with such thorough dignity. The slow deprivation of Miyohtwaw’s resources and work—until it’s her own clothes being demanded—is a crystal-clear allegory but not one that falls into melodrama, and the flickers of how Miyohtwaw has handled her own interrupted, disrupted relationships with parenting, priests, and relationship throw a really thoughtful parallel up, in terms of understanding the mess of 19th-century British colonial policy in a fully Cree perspective: a problem seated in relationships. It refocuses the crisis Miyohtwaw’s here to address as a larger, more dangerous echo of how Victoria handled her own mother, and treating these dynamics as people pinging off their cycles of abuse until they can grow feels astute, compassionate, and wholly invested in human dignity across the board, without obligating certain ideas of sympathy or forgiveness.

The history’s come through just fine for me as a reader (caveat: I’m familiar with Queen Victoria and something of the history of Canada’s treaties, so I might not be a totally representative reader on this).

The author’s asked specifically if there are logic jumps, and for me there was one significant skip of logic near the end: when Miyohtwaw reaches out to her relations’ power in her dress and it strangles Victoria. I didn’t find a turning point in this piece between “clothes so powerful they made you become the person you needed to be” and the laces moving at her request; there’s a change in both how this magic works and what it’s for—magic for being seen switching to magic for doing violence—and the sudden jump in both worldbuilding and tone is jarring. A piece very much worked in dignity and relationship and cycles feels like it might have just stepped back into a cycle of getting things done through inflicting pain, and that feels like it’s pulling against everything Miyohtwaw has said and done before. Because the story has already drawn that parallel, pulled attention to Victoria’s abusive upbringing, her pattern of relationships and the cycle she’s running, what might have glossed as pushing back at power just reads to me like falling back into the script of hitting someone abused to get results because it’s the language both parties seem to understand. It put a decidedly sour tinge into my reading of this piece.

It had me pause, go back through the story again, and ask whether the conditions the story sets up in the beginning hold up, or were to be believed: if any of those incarnations of Queen Victoria was the person she in fact needed to be. That’s a powerful word, and one that can be used to great narrative effect. What Miyohtwaw’s own dress seems to show Victoria is what other people’s perspective is, what her impact is on others. The narrative definitely argues that she’s not being who she needs to be at all, and it reopens basic questions on how that power works.

From a fantasy worldbuilding perspective, I think this is mostly a telegraphing problem: what is the framework the story sets for how this works, and how does she work within it, and if she breaks it entirely, is that underlined as a break? If this power was always supposed to be wider and deeper, then it might be a question of building the bridge between how it’s described and what the story needs it to do. If it’s a breach of consistency—if the power itself drifted in the writing—it might be a question of rethinking how the ending happens.

But as it stands, that jump has an impact: I think it creates a risk of the end of “Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea” being read as a revenge story (less interesting) rather than something about slow work, and slow learning, and what power and relationships are and can be—which is what I got from it. Or of that ending forking somewhat into two very opposite readings, which could probably be resolved into an ending that keeps the rest of the piece’s balance of assertion, not weakness or violence.

There’s a ton of accomplished work in this piece, and while it’s a sticky issue to solve, this piece feels to me like it’s very close to ready. It’s deliberate, thoughtful, engrossing work, and I look forward to seeing it in print!

Best of luck!

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