Blood Line, Ch. 1-2

by Michael Keyton

Coming in to the second book of a trilogy is always a challenge.  It’s clear that the first book has established a rich, magical world co-existing with our own, and that Elizabeth and Elsie have already been through a lot.  These opening chapters have some vivid, unusual descriptions of magic, such as the description of Jack’s vision–“Figures moved, stick-like and flat”–the blood going into Elsie’s mouth even though she closed it, and the silverfish burrowing for information.  The magic also seems to have some interesting rules, such as the difficulty of it working over water.  The fact that Emma can rummage through Elsie’s mind while she’s knocked out and gain information from Elsie against her will is disturbing.

Judging just based on these chapters and not on anything in the first book of the trilogy, I think the opening of this second book could be improved in several ways.  As a reader, I’m not finding myself grabbed by any of the characters so far.  They seem to be kind of standard, familiar characters so far.  If I knew and loved them from Book 1, I might feel differently.  But with this as my introduction to the characters, I’m not pulled in.  The main issue, I think, is that both Elizabeth and Elsie are reactive rather than active characters.  Elizabeth seems to have no strong goal in this opening scene.  Wanting to see if her flowers are at the funeral doesn’t seem like a strong goal.  If Gwyneth would disapprove of the ceremony, then why would Elizabeth care if her flowers were there or not?  Since Gwyneth wouldn’t care about the flowers, it seems like Elizabeth wants the flowers to be there to thumb her nose at the other mourners.  Yet the other mourners don’t seem to notice, and she hides herself, so her actions have no consequence and she seems to have achieved nothing.  So her actions seem unimportant.  I would like her much more if she had a clear goal she had to struggle to try to achieve.   She would be more active and her actions would have consequences (she’d either achieve her goal or not).   For example, she might want a pin that she gave to Gwyneth as a keepsake, so she might approach a family member at the funeral to ask for it.  Or maybe she wants to slip something into the coffin for Gwyneth to remember her by.  Then she could struggle to achieve that, and I could get involved, and she could succeed or fail.  Right now, I’m just watching a girl watch a funeral, and that’s all pretty passive.  The only thing of consequence that happens is Elsie being kidnapped, and that is unrelated to Elizabeth’s actions.  So both Elizabeth and Elsie are victims, and Elizabeth simply reacts to the kidnapping rather than driving the actions.  This makes me feel that the author is manipulating events rather than that the character is driving the story.

In Elizabeth’s second scene, Grey seems to be in charge and Elizabeth is simply doing what he tells her.  She doesn’t seem to have any ideas about what to do on her own, and there’s no conflict between her and Grey.  Elizabeth might have her own goal, somewhat different from Grey’s, or she might have a different method she thinks they should use to find Elsie, so she’s not passive and reactive but is instead fighting for what she wants.  For example, perhaps Elizabeth tries to book a ship on her phone in case they miss the one with Elsie in it, and Grey could argue that’s not a good idea for whatever reason.  I’m not sure why this particular scene is included in the book at all, since it doesn’t show them missing the boat, which would be the exciting part, and the part that shows something of significance changing for Elizabeth and Grey.  As it is, that scene merely provides information; it doesn’t show a change of significance for Elizabeth.  Each scene in a story or novel should show something of significance changing for the main character of that scene.  This scene, if you shifted it to showing them arriving at the Port Authority and finding the ship already gone, would show Elizabeth going from having hope to losing hope.

Similarly, Elsie is mainly reactive.  She is reacting first to Emma and then to Emma and Jack.  I don’t feel her having any goal of her own that she’s struggling to achieve.  She doesn’t try to attend the funeral despite Elizabeth telling her to stay in the car.  She doesn’t try to escape.  She doesn’t try to avoid the needle or to focus her mind on some other memory.  She’s mainly a victim reacting to what others do.  I like it when she swivels her mind to try to hide the information Emma wants, but for me, that’s not enough to make Elsie a compelling, dynamic character.  Because of that, I can’t really care about her and can’t get pulled into the novel.

Another area in which I think these chapters can be improved is point of view.  The chapters seem to be trying for a third-person, limited-omniscient viewpoint, but they often drift out of the viewpoint character’s head.  In Chapter 1, we’re in Elizabeth’s POV.   We learn that smiling is “the last thing she wanted to do,” which is fine and establishes we’re in her head.  Yet in the next paragraph, we’re told “Elsie was younger than her,” which is not something Elizabeth would think.  Elizabeth already knows this.  This is what I call an “As you know, self,” when the POV character thinks something to herself that she already knows.  People don’t really think like this, so it undermines both POV and character when an author does this.  I understand the author is trying to get information to the reader, but instead of having the character think  the fact, the character should have some reaction to the fact.  For example, Elizabeth could think, “With her hair in braids, she looked even younger than thirteen.”

Another POV problem occurs two sentences later, with “Both sisters had inherited their mother’s raven black hair.”  Elizabeth wouldn’t think of herself and Elsie as “both sisters.”  This is the voice of an omniscient narrator commenting on both of them.  To stay in Elizabeth’s head, this would need to be rephrased;  for example, “Elsie had the same raven black hair Elizabeth did.”  This, and the following descriptions of their eyes raise another POV issue.  Would Elizabeth, at this moment, be noticing their hair color and eye color?  We’re actually told that no, she wouldn’t–“Elizabeth barely registered them”–in which case those details shouldn’t be given in her POV.  For a characters POV to be strong, it’s really important to limit description to those details the POV character would notice–most likely because they concern her and relate to a goal she’s trying to achieve.  Further, these details need to be described in the way that the POV character would think of them.  So if Elizabeth’s goal is to slip something into the casket for Gwyneth to remember her by, she’s going to be noticing who is near the casket and whether she has a chance to slip past them.  She’s not going to be noticing other things.  Strengthening the POV in this way will also strengthen the character and allow us to feel the character’s goal more intensely.

A final area I’d like to discuss is the characters’ emotions.  For readers to feel what the characters are feeling, emotions generally need to be shown and not told.  Any word that labels an emotion (helpless, unease, fear, bothered, horror are some I see in the chapter) is telling the reader that emotion rather than showing it.  One way to show emotions is through the character’s internal lifesigns, such as a pounding heart or a catch of the breath.  These things should be used sparingly, and it’s good to try to find fresh ways to say them, since they’ve been used a lot by authors.  Other ways of showing emotions are through actions, dialogue, reactions from other characters, objects/setting/appearance, thoughts, viewpoint, style, symbols, and similes/metaphors.  Since I discussed POV above, let me go into that a little more.  Using some of the techniques I discussed above to keep the POV close to the viewpoint character can help convey the character’s emotions.  If the viewpoint is close to the POV character, everything she thinks and sees will be colored by her emotions (rose-colored glasses).  She will notice details that reinforce her worldview and emotional state. For example, if you have a character who loves a city, she will notice all the great things about it and describe things in a positive way, and that will reveal her emotions.  If you have a character who hates the city, she will notice the bad things about it, and describe things in a negative way, revealing her negative feelings.  Everything the viewpoint character notices can help to reveal her emotional state through how she describes it.  Developing this more could make the story more intense and involving, and make the reader feel closer to the characters as well.

You’ve set up a very interesting magical world that carries many dangers for your protagonists.  I hope my comments are helpful.

Jeanne Cavelos–editor, author, director of Odyssey

This month OWW welcomes our new Fantasy Resident Editor, Amal El-Mohtar.

Amal El-Mohtar is an author, editor, and critic, a Locus Award winner for short fiction, a Nebula nominee, and a three time Rhysling Award winner. She edits Goblin Fruit, a quarterly journal of fantastical poetry, and is a contributor to NPR Books and the LA Times, and a member of Down and Safe: A Blake’s 7 podcast. We’re thrilled to have Amal join us at OWW.

“Nobody Walks” by Blaine Theriot

This is a smoothly written piece that is well-paced, well-structured and very readable; where I see the need for improvements is mostly at the level of voice, character and world-building.

I’ll start by answering the author’s immediate concerns:

Am I being over / under descriptive? The level of description is fine, but its use and direction could benefit from further scrutiny.

Does the dialogue flow? It does! Congratulations!

Do you care about the MC? That depends on if the main character is Leolen or Takari. I despised Leolen and really didn’t want to see him as any kind of hero, not even anti-, but thought he could make an interesting antagonist to a disillusioned or conflicted Takari.

Now to unpack that.

On the level of world-building, I’m always a bit annoyed to see obvious real-world analogues to fantasy ethnicities and cultures done to no purpose; in “Nobody Walks,” I winced at the evocation of Japan in the names (Takari, Mujakina – so far as I can tell these are words that approximate meanings in Japanese but aren’t actually names at all, any more than someone would be named “Extortion” or “Without Guile” in English) as well as in the “slanted eyes” remark that Leolan makes. Immediately I ask: what is the purpose of this analogue? What are you trying to achieve? Why are you trying to associate Dacian with Japanese in your reader’s eyes? Are you deliberately setting out to make Leolan reflect some dire racial politics for reasons of setting?

These are complicated questions with many potentially valid answers, and it’s entirely possible that there are indeed answers that will be developed in further chapters, but the material presented in this one gives me pause. I like that Leolen is set up first to be generously saving the day but then is revealed to be a ruthless butcher – but the text as written makes me uncertain about whether I’m supposed to see him as a villain or a successfully dangerous protagonist. I’m left with two potential readings:

•  That Takari is meant to be the protagonist, eventually, one who’ll be shocked and disillusioned by the massacre of legitimately angry farmers;
• That Leolen is meant to be the protagonist and that we as readers are meant to read his brutality as efficient, single-minded loyalty to his troupe, Empire or command.

If it’s the first scenario, we need a lot more of Takari’s voice and thoughts, and indeed I’d argue the scene would be far stronger, more nuanced and complex from his point of view; imagine experiencing the fear, the relief, then the horror from his perspective, instead of from Leolan’s coolly removed and entirely self-assured one. You’d have a good opportunity to really build up both characters in layers; as it is, your introduction of Leolan seems to promise some glimpse of the inside of his head, given his memory, but then you abandon it in order to have the ending be more surprising.

If it’s the second scenario, I urge you to question the whole project from the ground up, even if the world-building isn’t what interests you, because your answers will and should inform every character decision going forward.

Again, it comes down to what you are trying to accomplish. Where representations of imperialism and its attendant wars are concerned, I confess I take a lot of persuading if you’re trying to argue anything but Imperialism Is Bad (and trust me – all fiction is arguing something, consciously or not, whether it’s fast-paced adventure fiction or slow lyrical fantasy, whether it’s high-minded allegory or grimdark realism). There are many variations on this! Imperialism Is Bad, But People Try to Do Good; Imperialism is Bad, But [Some Alternative] Is Worse; Imperialism is Bad, Let’s Tear It Down. But to begin from the premise that Imperialism Is Kind of Okay Because Our Protagonist is Good at Being Bad is a shaky foundation for a story.

If you want to keep evocations of Japan in the story, I’d  recommend doing a lot of reading and thinking about why, and I’d also recommend these resources:

Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s Writing the Other: http://www.writingtheother.com/

G. O’Neill’s Japanese Names: https://t.co/sxaO75FRv1

If this seems like overkill for a fantasy story, just bear in mind how dislocating it would be for a reader fluent in Japanese to encounter these names and representations in a story, how jarring; it’s certainly often happened to me with Arabic, where I can see the shape of a language I speak twisted out of true because it looks pretty or scary to someone who doesn’t actually expect anyone who understands it to also read in English.

A few more technical observations: I think you could very usefully cut the opening paragraph out of this story. It muddles the perspective by beginning with dialogue, as if someone present is speaking it, only to pull away from that, indicate the speaker is actually remembered speech, and introduce Leolan in a very different light immediately afterwards: first we see Leolan as a boy, then as someone who stumbles, after which he is suddenly someone who is coolly in command at all times. The way it’s presented just seems like a contradiction, not like Leolan himself contains contradictions.

A little later,  there’s this passage:

 The headman was yelling right back in Dacian but it wasn’t hard to pick up the gist. I’ll stick you bastard, I’ll kill you fucker or something to that effect. The two men bellowing in different languages might have been funny under different circumstances.

This seems to imply that Leolan can’t really understand Dacian, but shortly thereafter he’s offering to speak it with fluency. I’d suggest making it clear either way.

To recap: this is a genuinely engaging piece that demonstrates strong command of pace and dialogue, knows how to raise and lower tension very effectively, and was enjoyable to read. I think there’s a lot to work with in terms of asking the right questions of your project and world-building, but also that those questions and their answers will be in service of richer characters and settings.

“Matched Set” by Aimee Ogden

“Matched Set” caught my eye this month for how efficiently it’s layered. In just 1500 words, it tells a complete story with a significant thematic and emotional punch—without ever feeling rushed, irregularly paced, or awkward. So this month, I’d like to talk about small stories, layering, and how to pack the most into every sentence without slowing the reader down.

While “Matched Set” isn’t spinning out an especially new idea—there’s a whole body of work on bad relationships and their power dynamics out there—the strength here is the smooth execution, where each element of the story boosts and supports the others and most of what’s said is said in the readers’ conclusions, not explicitly on the page.

There’s an art to getting the most said in the smallest space possible—the art that makes poetry work. When we write stories that fit more on the inside of a sentence than the space it takes up on a page, there’s one major tool we use: tapping into the buttons readers already have installed. While it means knowing your audience well, we all carry around cultural presumptions, set ideas, and assumptions about How Things Work. In linguistics, there’s a term for this concept: scripts. And working with those scripts can evoke a whole idea in just a few words.

What “Matched Set” does so well—and how it fits so much story in such a little space—is effectively work to not just evoke cultural scripts about men, women, and relationships, but undermine them instantly. It shows up in places large and small: Evelyn’s refusal of a mixed cocktail in favour of a beer, the way she rattles off baseball stats and is good at math and it impresses him, because he doesn’t expect it. The explicit statement that she doesn’t care if she chips a nail. Evelyn only outright says, once, that she’s Not Like Other Girls™ but these little moments—and his reaction to them—add up, like silt, to not only advance the plot and flesh out her character, but to say basically everything about the story’s thematic message and build a tangible atmosphere.

“Matched Set” spends a lot of its small space actively evoking stereotypical scripts about What Women Are Like at the same time that it completely undermines them. And then, with Evelyn’s slow cornering into her tie-pin self, completely undermines that—takes the notion that by being One of the Guys her story would end differently, and sets that notion on fire.

The effect of having the story so often set up your assumptions and then twist them is subtly and pervasively unsettling. Reading “Matched Set” feels menacing and tense, and that driving emotion is underscored by how obvious it is how this affair is going to end, and how much Evelyn stays still because she doesn’t want that to be true.

That tension’s further ramped up by the nice touch of leaving the man unnamed. He’s undefinable and thus powerful; he’s the man, the centre of the story, but simultaneously, “Matched Set” does its dislocation trick again by pulling the centre of the story back to Evelyn and the other discarded women, making them the real people in this narrative. They are named, and he is just “the man”; he’s an accessory just as he’s worked so hard to make them his accessories. The tug-of-war embodied in just the naming conventions supports the overall off-kilter feeling in this piece, and contributes to the tight feeling of a relationship that’s war.

Finally, there is a tension to knowing exactly which terrible end something is heading for, and watching it fall, and fall, and fall; it’s the driving emotion of a lot of horror fiction. “Matched Set” exploits that feeling amazingly well, and paired with the constant, slight destabilizing of readerly assumptions being tweaked and corrected, it jumps past being another story about bad relationships into something intensely effective, that makes its point and gets out of there before belabouring that point.

There is one point which could potentially be trouble for readers or editors: ultimately, “Matched Set” is at its core what the Strange Horizons editorial team used to refer to as a Bad Man Learns Better story.

Evelyn’s internalized a lot of misogyny: She’s certain the other women her unnamed partner wears were inadequate, confusing the pendant’s attempt to protect her with possessiveness or competition. She cracks jokes about other women’s weight, certain it’ll prove she’s one of the cool ones. While “Matched Set” evokes a very real personality type—the woman who considers herself Not Like Other Girls—the plot of the story is functionally an illustration of how that person’s ideas are wrong and she is promptly sorry.

I think the ending spikes that somewhat—Evelyn is still a fighter, and she’s learning the subtle ways in which the women who are his jewelry fight back. The dominant emotion isn’t a narrative smugness; it’s rage. But generally, regardless of how well-built a machine this piece is, it’s still a machine whose purpose is something that is sometimes hard to place with magazines or readers. There isn’t really anything I’d suggest to change. “Matched Set” does its job well. It’s just a job that might take a few tries to complete in the submissions pile.

Overall, an extremely strong example of how building a piece on the littlest things can produce a story that’s highly effective.

Best of luck!

–Leah Bobet

Author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (October 2015)

“Donnie” by Angraecus Daniels

Is the relationship between a singer and his audience symbiotic? And can that relationship survive when the singer is now only a ghost? This is the very interesting idea behind “Donnie.” I become very involved in the story with the explanation of this relationship and the science behind it. The idea feels fresh and different, and the relationship between ghost and audience poses a difficult challenge for the first-person protagonist. The plot has some nice escalation when the audience breaks into the stadium to be with Donnie.
I think there are several ways the story could be strengthened, mainly involving character and plot. The protagonist seems inconsistent to me, and I have a hard time understanding him and caring about him. Apparently, before the story began, he was so upset about the relationship between Donnie and his fans that he shot and killed Donnie, the one violent act of his life. This confuses me for several reasons. First, the protagonist seems to be a spellcaster of some kind, focused on magic. Why would he kill someone using a gun? More than that, the protagonist I see within the story seems not to care much about Donnie at all. When asked to stop Ghost Donnie from calling out to his followers from the stadium, the protagonist says it’s not his problem. He seems to have no desire to stop Ghost Donnie for half the story. If he was upset enough about the living Donnie to kill him, why isn’t he equally if not more upset about what Ghost Donnie is doing? I think he killed Donnie in the first place to free the fans trapped in this relationship with him. Doesn’t he care about the fans now?

If I imagine myself in the protagonist’s place, and I’d killed Donnie to stop this destructive relationship, then I’d be really angry at myself and upset that Donnie had come back as a ghost and was causing an even worse problem. I’d be begging for a chance to go to the stadium and destroy Ghost Donnie, especially if I knew spells that might banish a ghost. So I feel a major disconnect between the backstory and the present character.

I also find it difficult to care about the protagonist. One key reason we care about a character is that we see him struggling to achieve a goal. When he doesn’t have a clear goal for quite a while, that makes me not care about him. Once he does take on the goal of stopping Ghost Donnie, he doesn’t seem to struggle that much or to be terribly invested in the outcome. For me, he seems fairly detached. He seems to be most upset at the stadium owner for making money from concerts, which is not the focus of the conflict or the story. I also have a hard time making sense of this, because stadiums are built and events are held in response to demand, and as you explain, it’s human nature to form these sorts of relationships. Even without the stadium, Donnie could sing and others could become his fans. So the protagonist seems concerned about something that’s unrelated to the conflict and something that doesn’t concern me, which puts me at a distance from him.

The fact that the protagonist has no clear goal for the first half of the story has important repercussions on the plot. The protagonist’s goal drives the plot, and if the protagonist doesn’t have one, then the story tends to meander and lack focus. That’s what happens for the first half of the story, up until the protagonist says, “Get me a bag of rock salt and an internet connection.” If, instead, the protagonist is struggling from the opening of the story to be taken to the stadium so he can attempt to destroy Ghost Donnie, I would be much more involved in the story and would care more about the protagonist. He could have many obstacles to overcome–maybe the stadium has hired someone else to banish Ghost Donnie; maybe the prison officials won’t allow him to leave. Maybe he tries to destroy Donnie remotely and fails. Finally he convinces them, but maybe one of the guards who accompanies him is a fan of Donnie’s and very angry at what the protagonist did. That could provide more problems and conflict later.

Then as soon as the protagonist arrives at the stadium he can struggle to use his skills to banish Ghost Donnie. In addition to pursuing this goal sooner, he could also struggle more. When magic is used to solve a problem, the author runs the risk of making the solution seem convenient. That’s what happens here. I don’t know why the magic would succeed or fail at banishing Donnie; I don’t know what key requirements need to be satisfied or how this challenges the protagonist. Right now, he seems to try several things and then Donnie creates a vortex that ends up sucking him into oblivion. That seems pretty convenient. If I knew that the protagonist was struggling to create a vortex from the beginning to suck Donnie into oblivion, then I could feel satisfied when this happens at the end. Instead, it seems to come out of nowhere. So you could set up that the solution is a vortex. Then, in the midst of the protagonist’s struggle to create this, I think the plot also needs a turn when the protagonist takes a radically new approach to achieving this goal. This will create a third act to your two-act story, which will make the plot more surprising and emotional. He could try all of his techniques and fail. Then he could realize Donnie is too powerful for the protagonist to create the vortex. He needs Donnie himself to create the vortex. How? By letting the fans into the stadium, so Donnie will try to suck them in by creating a vortex. Then the protagonist could fight off the police and the owner to open the doors and let the fans in. And Donnie could create the vortex to suck in the fans and unintentionally destroy himself.

Another possibility for a third act would be for the fans to break in, break the circle, free Donnie, and Donnie could form a huge vortex to suck them in. Then the protagonist would really have to struggle to stop Donnie and save the fans.

Suspense is another aspect of the plot that could be strengthened, by establishing dangers in advance. For almost the entire story, I don’t know what’s at stake besides the stadium owner’s ability to book more events into this venue. If I knew early on that Donnie wanted to suck all the fans into him and take them all into the afterlife, that would be something I could feel suspense about. But I don’t know that danger exists until a few paragraphs before the end. Also, if I knew that breaking the circle would free Donnie, I could worry about that, particularly if there was some threat, such as a fan loose in the stadium, or a guard who loves Donnie. But I don’t know that’s a danger until Gardner has already blocked the threat from breaking the circle. Establishing threats earlier could make the story much more involving.

I hope my comments are helpful. You’ve set up a fascinating, fresh situation that illuminates the whole fan/celebrity dynamic in a new way.

Jeanne Cavelos–editor, author, director of Odyssey

THE FALL CHAPTER 2 by Seona Churchward

Much writing advice focuses on crafting elegant and purposeful sentences. An equal amount of attention is given to the structure of scenes, stories, and novels. But one tool that is the most overlooked is also the most important.

Paragraphing.

The paragraph is the basic unit of storytelling.

Paragraphing controls the pace of a narrative and can make it move faster or slower, without changing a single word. Paragraphing can hide information and reveal it. Paragraphing can ease the work of the reader or challenge them to pay more attention.

But paragraphing isn’t just important for the impact it has on readers. Paragraphing is a tool that can help writers too. Changing the paragraphing of a scene can show a writer where we’re missing story beats and character reactions. It can reveal places where we’re repeating ourselves and can make cuts.

And the thing about paragraphing is this: there isn’t a prescriptive way to do it, a single right or wrong way. A good writer develops an awareness of how paragraphs affect the story and then plays with the paragraphs to get the effect they want.

Different paragraphing can even take a good story and make it great. Chapter 2 of THE FALL, this month’s editor’s choice, is an example of good writing that I think could be made stronger just by working with the paragraphs.

For an example, let’s look at the very first paragraph. It begins with Kiah and ends with her. Presented as one block paragraph, it creates a very still and heavy moment, focused on Kiah, and gives us a strong sense of how much the story’s main problem is weighing on her.

Kiah sat down opposite her father’s still form. His head remained bowed over the reader and made no move to acknowledge her presence. She wanted nothing more than to knock the monitor from his hand. Desperate for him to react, she blurted out the words. “Jai’s family will run out within two days.” His brow creased, though he kept his eyes on his work. Determined not to let him avoid the topic, she grabbed his hand. “We can’t let them die. We’ve got to share.” When he didn’t answer, she squeezed his fingers tight. “Please.” Despair creased her father’s forehead then and she held her breath.

But if we look closely, the paragraph contains three distinct pieces of dialogue broken up by several actions and reactions. Breaking up the paragraph to emphasize those things will give it a different effect.

Kiah sat down opposite her father’s still form. His head remained bowed over the reader and made no move to acknowledge her presence. She wanted nothing more than to knock the monitor from his hand. Desperate for him to react, she blurted out the words. “Jai’s family will run out within two days.”

 

His brow creased, though he kept his eyes on his work.

 

Determined not to let him avoid the topic, she grabbed his hand. “We can’t let them die. We’ve got to share.”

 

When he didn’t answer, she squeezed his fingers tight.

 

“Please.”

 

Despair creased her father’s forehead then and she held her breath.

Nothing has been changed except the paragraph breaks. But this version emphasizes the back-and-forth between Kiah and her father. It reads faster and feels like it’s building toward the moment where she pleads.

Now look what happens when we combine this last sentence with the first one in the next paragraph to create new paragraphing.

“Please.”

 

Despair creased her father’s forehead then and she held her breath. He looked up and laid a hand over hers. “We can’t help them Kiah.”

The series of long-to-short paragraphs ending with the one word, “Please,” emphasized Kiah’s desperation and her pleading. Following that with a paragraph that includes both Kiah’s tension (“she held her breath”) and her father’s gentle (“laid a hand over hers”) but firm response (“We can’t help”) creates a sense of finality about his “No” that makes it more effecting.

Breaking up a paragraph this way will change how fast the story reads and what we focus on. Two different writers will break up the paragraph that starts this chapter differently, and both of them can be the right way. It’s all about what you want to emphasize in the story and how you want to emphasize it.

Some editors and writing teachers I know treat it as a hard-and-fast rule that there should be a new paragraph every time a new person speaks. This makes sense in certain kinds of thrillers and page-turners, when you want a fast pace matched with constant clarity. But there are occasions where it makes sense to have two characters speak in the same paragraph: if they’re talking over one another, if one of them is finishing the other’s thoughts, or if the paragraph as a whole contains a single block of information or a single effect that the writer wants the reader to focus on.

Let’s consider the second paragraph of this chapter, as an example of one where two characters speak.

He looked up and laid a hand over hers. “We can’t help them Kiah.” Stunned, Kiah swayed on her feet. She grabbed onto the table in an effort to steady herself. “What do you mean?” The sound of her voice was shrill to her ears. “They’ll die if we don’t do something.”

The characters aren’t talking over each other – there’s clearly a pause while Kiah reacts to her father’s statement. They aren’t finishing each other’s thoughts – their opinions are in direct opposition to one another. So the final word – Kiah’s – is strongest. If we take one thing away from this paragraph, it’s Kiah’s reaction. Just like the first paragraph of the chapter, the father’s presence is de-emphasized.

When we break the paragraph up for different speakers, it changes the whole effect.

He looked up and laid a hand over hers. “We can’t help them Kiah.”

 

Stunned, Kiah swayed on her feet. She grabbed onto the table in an effort to steady herself. “What do you mean?” The sound of her voice was shrill to her ears. “They’ll die if we don’t do something.”

Now there’s uncertainty. The father’s calm “no” is opposed by Kiah’s desperate plea. A simple paragraph break creates tension that can drive the story forward – if that’s how you want to drive the story.

Both of these are examples of ways paragraphing can help a reader take something different away from a scene. But there are also cases where playing with the paragraphing can reveal something that’s missing. Any time I find a paragraph that contains three or more separate pieces of dialogue from the same person, interspersed with actions, I look for missing reactions.

Here’s a good example, with five pieces of dialogue broken up by five separate actions:

Kiah yanked her hand from his grip. “No,” she hissed, stepping backwards. “You’re got it all wrong.” She pointed in toward the sector where Jai’s family lived. “They’ll be the ones choking to death, if we don’t share.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re willing to let them die, while you still have a choice to do something about it.” She took a step backwards, away from him. “You always talked as if you were so different from the rest of that bigoted council, and I believed it.” She shook her head. “But you’re not. You’re just the same as they are.”

Let’s break this paragraph up and see what we have:

Kiah yanked her hand from his grip.

 

“No,” she hissed, stepping backwards. “You’re got it all wrong.”

 

She pointed in toward the sector where Jai’s family lived. “They’ll be the ones choking to death, if we don’t share.”

 

She shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re willing to let them die, while you still have a choice to do something about it.”

 

She took a step backwards, away from him. “You always talked as if you were so different from the rest of that bigoted council, and I believed it.”

 

She shook her head. “But you’re not. You’re just the same as they are.”

Two things jump out at me when we do this. First, we’re missing her father’s reactions. She’s clearly moving in response to him but we don’t see him at all. Let’s fill in those blanks:

Kiah yanked her hand from his grip.

[Father reacts.]

“No,” she hissed, stepping backwards. “You’re got it all wrong.”

[Father reacts.]

She pointed in toward the sector where Jai’s family lived. “They’ll be the ones choking to death, if we don’t share.”

[Father reacts.]

She shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re willing to let them die, while you still have a choice to do something about it.”

[Father reacts.]

She took a step backwards, away from him. “You always talked as if you were so different from the rest of that bigoted council, and I believed it.”

[Father reacts.]

She shook her head. “But you’re not. You’re just the same as they are.”

There’s clearly a missed opportunity here to develop their relationship and build toward the dramatic moment where Kiah decides to make a break from her parents. But because we only have half the story here, we don’t see that happen on the page.

My strong sense is that developing the scene with Kiah’s father at the beginning of the chapter, and placing them in separate paragraphs to emphasize their opposition, followed by drawing more attention to Kiah’s relationship with her father here, and her increasing distance from him, has the chance to give more emotional power to the final line of the chapter: “You’ve a little of your father in you, if I’m not mistaken.” The more these paragraphs isolate them and push them apart, the impact we get from that final line.

The second thing I notice when we break up the paragraph this way are the repetitions – she steps backwards twice and shakes her head twice. That indicates to me that there is duplication that may not be advancing the story. Perhaps a set of three reactions here instead of five would build more effectively to the dramatic moment.

Here’s a very similar paragraph from near the end of the chapter that does the same thing. As an exercise – for anyone reading this and not just the author – I would suggest breaking it up to see what it reveals:

The man stared at the ground. “Two days ago we were ordered to organize the last of the endalium supplies to be delivered,” his monotone voice droned on, “Only Peers and Cardinals were to be supplied. The lower classes were to be cut off completely, except for a few key personnel. I operated the planning protocol from the house. Jaia and my son Ranus were among those who accompanied the deliveries. Toward the end of the day, some in the lesser classes realized what was happening.” He paused. “They waited till the shipment was as on the outskirts of the Peer neighbourhood before they hit it…” His voice cracked. “Neither of them survived.” He was silent for a moment. “Nothing like that has ever happened before. Nobody expected rebellion, but I should have known. I should have realized.” He was shaking. “There’s never been a situation as dire as this. Of course people would break the rules and risk their own lives for a chance to survive.” He put his head in his hands. “I should have been there to help them.”

I want to end this review by making one more observation about paragraphing and how they can effect pacing and reader focus.

A series of really long paragraphs followed by a short one will lull the reader and then draw the reader’s eye. A sequence of short, sharp paragraphs followed by a longer one will signal to the quick-paced reader to slow down and pay more attention. A series of one word paragraphs can bring the reader to a full stop.

There’s a scene later in this chapter, where I felt paragraphing was used very effectively to create some of these effects.

With one hand holding her bag securely behind her, she crouched down and peered under the sleep pod, relieved to see the box of canisters actually there. This whole endeavor had been based on an educated guess. Very conscious of the presence of her parents sleeping in the pod above, she slid onto her stomach and edged toward the box tucked in at the head of the pod. The sound of her clothes sliding across the floor, made her cringe. As she crept forwards, a bead of sweat trailed into her eye, the salt making her blink. The thought of failure terrified her.

 

If her parents caught her, they would watch her like jailors. Jai and his family would die.

 

She was half way under the pod when a snort made her freeze. Wide-eyed she looked upwards, waiting.

 

The snoring stopped.

 

Kiah held her breath. This had to work.

 

Tonight.

 

A delay could lead to disaster. She tried not to picture what might happen to Jai.
Kiah focused and inched forward on elbows and stomach, her eyes on the box. She didn’t stop until her nose was almost touching the metal of the container.

Here in a 7-paragraph sequence, we have 1 longer paragraph, 1 medium length paragraph, 2 short paragraphs, 2 very short paragraphs, and 1 single-word paragraph. This kind of variation keeps a story interesting and creates different foci and effects – here the single word “Tonight” in the middle of the action creates a sense of urgency, which is developed in the next paragraph. On the whole, I found this sequence to be effective and it gives me the sense that the writer has a sense of paragraphing that can be developed and improved with practice.

There’s much more to be said about effective paragraphing, and the ways it can be used to create strong narratives. Perhaps I’ll return to this topic in future reviews.

For the meantime, I thought this was an interesting chapter with a strong emotional arc – Kiah’s break from her father to “you’re like your father” – and meaningful actions that develop the characters and move the plot forward. With some different paragraphing choices, and filling in some of the gaps that would reveal, I think this chapter can be even stronger.

Good luck with your revisions and with the rest of the book.

Best wishes,

C.C. Finlay
Editor, FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
sfsite.com/fsf/

“Weed is Just Context (Part 1)” by Mary Agner

I was drawn to “Weed is Just Context” this month because of its fascinating worldbuilding, terse and intense narrative voice, and rather original conflict. However, the amount of information required to build that worldbuilding in that terse narrative voice means it’s a piece that is, scene by scene, constantly compromising between tone and showing off the richness of its world. This month, I’d like to look at when it’s a good idea to take a short story longer—and what the signs are that it’s time to go deeper into a narrative.

“Weed is Just Context” does a great job of making its science feel internally consistent. Nara’s pea plant experiments connect to her genetic modifications, which connect to the climate change and food and water scarcities worldwide, biological and physical solar panels, the relative plenty on the Farm, and the shadow of Greg, Suzanne, and Chris’s obviously stormy personal and professional history. Every piece of this world echoes well off every other piece, and the whole feels scientifically rich without falling into a technical treatise.

The character dynamics are just as complex. Having Nara tangle with the mystery of her parentage and the history of the Farm as well as her friends’ personhood, safety, and ability to fight back makes for a story environment rich with possibilities, and there are already strong indications that all of those questions are connected.

With a great concept, layered storytelling, and a distinct and brisk protagonist, there’s a lot already going well in “Weed is Just Context”, even without the second half. But there are elements that it’s hard to evaluate well: This is part of a story, not an entire one, and so there’s no real way to say if the structure works, if all the clues line up to a cohesive thematic argument, or if the piece is going to stick the landing. As well, the author’s mentioned this is a middle draft, and there’s a lot of fine-tuning to do over some very solid bones. With that in mind, I’ll keep my suggestions this month to scene-by-scene craft.

“Weed is Just Context” has a lot to say, and it’s overall quite dense through the first half, when most of the setting and character information is being established. My main piece of advice is to, on the whole, let some air into the story—let it be long.

I’ve mentioned in previous months that my most frequent reason for writing a rejection letter was that the story was too long for its plot: the amount of words didn’t match the amount of matter there was to talk about. However, it’s entirely possible to get that equation the other way around, and have more story, more interesting world and interactions, than the amount of words on the page is really doing justice to. There’s enough material in “Weed is Just Context” to merit a novelette or novella length, and taking more time with the pace, fleshing out details, and narrating through rather than over some of its events will, I think, help readers fully engage with it.

What are, well, the tipoffs? “Weed is Just Context” has a lot of little, crucial clues that are easy to miss or skip over—for example, the comment about hacking brains instead of feet. On my second and third read, I picked up multiple pieces of setup for later events that didn’t register as important the first time, slight as they were, or embedded in other context.

Putting more space and air into “Weed is Just Context” will also solve the issue where some scenes—notably the opening one, and the entire sequence with Nara’s kidnapping—are abrupt enough that they’re not appropriately impactful; they feel outlined, rather than a whole and complete part of the story. Nara’s entire kidnapping, servitude, and escape barely register, they’re narrated through so quickly. Her tears over the others not following her out make sense, but they’re not something I’ve even had time to feel. More time spent with those events could deepen their impact and make sure readers feel there are stakes in that sequence.

A related issue to that density is how we meet the characters. There are a lot of character names introduced very early, and “Weed is Just Context” might benefit from spacing and thinning them out. Names aren’t in and of themselves significant. While we can say a lot about a character with their name—notably touch on readers’ built-in cultural assumptions, for good or ill—it’s frequently a better strategy to limit the amount of new names in a scene and spend more time giving readers a subtle detail about who that person is to let each character anchor well in the world of the story. A focus on the characters who end up proving important to the plot might be a good approach; more depth, differentiating details, and dialogue variety on fewer people—especially Suzanne, who comes across as a little too flat of a villain—rather than the degree of breadth we’re seeing now. While it’s realistic that people who aren’t plot-central would be around, sometimes they create unnecessary noise as readers balance them against all the other information we introduce, and I’m feeling like this is currently the case.

On another note, there’s some beautiful language here without compromising the terse, wound-up tone of Nara’s narrative voice. I particularly liked the description of light (“photons making free everywhere”) and the physicality of a lot of Nara’s metaphors (“looks squashing me into the main house and classes”). However, it’s not always a strategy that’s working in favour of the story. I’ve referenced this insight from OWW grad Rae Carson before: If everything goes up to 11, 11 is actually two. Or, more plainly, intricate language can really lend weight to the moments we really want readers to spend time on, but if everything is intricate and dense and ornamented, it’s frequently hard for readers to pick out what in the story is supposed to be important.

To pull out an example, “I don’t need more than twilight to see he blushes” can be easily simplified and still get across the same information: It’s twilight, and Faro is blushing. Simplifying sentences that aren’t conveying crucial information—shortening the commitment of reader-seconds devoted to them—helps indicate what’s important now, and lets us create the effect where small details come out and become important later.

While there’s limited value I can provide, critiquing only part of a story, all those points suggest that giving “Weed is Just Context” a little more space to breathe, pace itself out, and engage with its material would help spread the worldbuilding into an absorbable consistency, show readers which information is important, and ultimately, improve emotional engagement with Nara, her plight, and the mission she’s about to go on.

I look forward to the second half!

–Leah Bobet
Author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (October 2015)

The Last Road, Ch. 1, by Helen Rena

A major subgenre of horror involves a protagonist with a psychological disorder and keeps the reader wondering whether the horror is real or only in the protagonist’s mind. This is one of my favorite types of horror, so I was very excited to read this. The opening chapter has many strengths. The situation, with Mara trying to convince her psychiatrist that she’s all better, is intellectually engaging and builds tension through the chapter. The chapter gracefully flips back and forth between present and past without ever confusing me. In those past segments, the interaction between young Mara and Haley is very believable, and I’m quite intrigued by the “king of little things.” The descriptions in the chapter are strong and evocative, such as “I frowned, feeling fear rising up my spine like a spark rushing up a fuse” and “his handwriting loopy and small, his letters like tiny rings that were strung together into chains.”

That said, I think there are several areas that could be improved. I have a hard time relating to and understanding the protagonist, and I feel a number of things are set up but then fail to provide strong payoffs. I’ll talk about the protagonist first. I feel Mara is being manipulated some by the author rather than doing what she would actually do. First chapters are very hard, and the author is often anxious to include certain information, which then requires characters do and say certain things. I feel that this chapter is more focused on getting out certain information about Mara and her past, and less focused on exploring how Mara would interact with this psychiatrist. Mara spends much of the chapter working to convince the psychiatrist that she’s healthy so she won’t be prescribed more anti-psychotic medication. But she seems to be living outside of any institution, so I think she could avoid taking any pill that is prescribed. Many people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other disorders refuse to take their medication or fake taking it. So I don’t understand (or really believe) that this is so important to Mara.

Through most of the chapter, Mara is thinking back to what happened with Haley. While I find the flashbacks very involving, I don’t believe Mara would remember all of this now. It feels forced by the author to get this exposition into the chapter. If she is sent into a flashback this easily, I think she would be remembering this incident multiple times each day. And if that’s the case, then we should see it through the rest of the novel, which would be quite repetitive. Also, her memories don’t seem like those of a mentally unstable person. They seem clear and believable. So the chapter undermines the idea that she has a psychological disorder. I think you could build more suspense by withholding this memory until later in this novel, until Mara reaches some major crisis that forces her to think back on this event she works very hard to avoid. And when she does remember, the memory could be more chaotic and less clear, so we can see how traumatic it was. This chapter could describe Mara struggling to hold back the memory, so we get only her false account to the psychiatrist and the name “the king of little things.” That would make me want to keep reading to find out what happened. The chapter could also intensify the conflict between Mara and the psychiatrist, having the psychiatrist try harder to get Mara to explain what she thinks happened, and Mara trying not to think about it. For example, the psychiatrist might bring out a ring, honey, and bread, which could alarm Mara. He could also show a picture of their old house and Haley.

Mara completely shifts her attitude toward anti-psychotics near the end of the chapter. I’m afraid I really got lost in those last seven paragraphs. When she thinks, “So who cared if I had to take these pills? Not me,” she seems to be confusing herself and Haley. Yet nothing else in the chapter suggests she confuses the two of them. So this new psychological symptom seems to come out of nowhere (meaning it seems like the author made her think this). Similarly, the thought about the boyfriend at the end seems to arise with no setup and to be forced.

I think part of the problem is that Mara seems pretty sane through most of the chapter. She has a goal she’s pursuing, and her flashbacks are clear and coherent. I don’t really believe she’s got mental problems, except for trauma over what happened, and then she suddenly has several very irrational thoughts near the end. So the chapter’s attempt to introduce a lot of exposition (background information) undermines the premise that Mara is mentally unstable.

These issues with the protagonist tie to the other area I mentioned, which is setups that don’t provide strong payoffs. The chapter places a lot of stress on Mara’s name tag, so much that I think she must have written her sister’s name on the tag. But all she’s done is include her middle initial. This is a let-down and fails to provide the payoff we anticipated. Her middle initial may become more important later, but the effect in this chapter is disappointing. The desire to avoid anti-psychotics is also set up as a major struggle, yet Mara drops it at the end, the chapter failing to provide a strong payoff. The chapter tries to end with a payoff to the whole story of the king of little things with the idea that Mara’s boyfriend will help her to save her sister, but that doesn’t seem strongly set up. All I know about the boyfriend is that she hasn’t told him about the king. So she just seems delusional here rather than planning something exciting. If we knew a few more things about the boyfriend, such as that he wears rings on every finger and that he does whatever Mara asks without questioning it, then we could be worried about him at the end of the chapter with the idea Mara might be planning to use her boyfriend as bait for the king.

I hope my comments are helpful. I admire your description, and I really enjoy the dynamic between Haley and Mara, and the story of what happened to Haley with the king.

–Jeanne Cavelos, editor, author, director of Odyssey

Subliminal Shrapnel CH 1 by Boz Flamagin

I’ve seen a bit of writing advice floating around social media lately, attributed to Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov:

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

Chekhov never actually wrote that. It’s a paraphrase of longer, more specific advice that Chekhov wrote in a letter to his brother, who also wanted to be a writer:

“In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.”

(For all the details and citations on the history of both quotations, if that sort of thing appeals to you, I enthusiastically recommend Quote Investigator, which is the source I used to track down these words: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/07/30/moon-glint/)

Honestly, this advice, in either its original or summary format, should be even more famous than Chekhov’s Gun.

Because it’s that much more important.

This is one of the simplest, most effective skills a writer can develop to improve their writing. Chekhov’s advice applies to every setting, not just nature.

A reader comes to a book like an eager kid in a swimsuit arriving at the pool.

The writer who uses too many mediating words, who relies on clichés and familiar images, who creates the experience at one remove from the reader, leaves that kid standing on the edge of the pool waiting for the lifeguard to blow the whistle.

The writer who practices and learns how to choose the right details bounces the kid off the diving board with a joyful whoop and cannonballs them into the icy water of the story.

That’s why we call it immersion.

And readers like to be immersed in their stories.

All of that is by way of introduction to this month’s Editor’s Choice submission, Chapter 1 of Subliminal Shrapnel by Boz Flamigan.

This chapter caught my eye because in spots it’s very close to being that kind of immersive. With a few small refinements, I believe the writer can make this a more compelling chapter. None of these are big changes, but are a series of small changes that I think could have a transformative effect.

Let’s look at the first sentence:

Velvet knelt, shivering on winter-chilled kitchen tiles, arms buried up to her elbows in potting soil.

If the writing makes the readers shiver, that’s more powerful than telling us that Velvet is shivering. I would suggest some small tweaks:

Velvet knelt, her bare knees on winter-chilled kitchen tiles and her arms elbow-deep in cold, damp potting soil.

Don’t pay too much attention to the exact words in my example – you can probably do better. But notice the effect. We’re not looking at Velvet shivering or seeing her arms buried any more. We’re experiencing it, just like she does.

The second sentence and the rest of the first paragraph wants us to know what woke Velvet and got her out of bed:

The nightmare that had chased her from bed rose again in a disjointed image: She hesitates before a door, breath caught on the dream-certainty that two men wait behind it. The door shouldn’t be blue, not that vivid, cheerful blue. The wrongness of the color makes her eyes ache. When she’s finally forced to draw a raspy breath, the chalky, solvent smell of new paint makes her cough. Her head smacks the cement steps, as if the cough propelled her through the door, and they drag her to the bottom.

The nightmare is great, full of vivid, visceral details. But the transition could be too. You ever notice that if tell yourself not to think about a clown with an axe, you immediately visualize a clown with an axe? The same principle works for characters.

She refused to think about the nightmare.

 

She hesitates before a door, breath caught on the dream-certainty that two men wait behind it. The door shouldn’t be blue, not that vivid, cheerful blue. The wrongness of the color makes her eyes ache. When she’s finally forced to draw a raspy breath, the chalky, solvent smell of new paint makes her cough. Her head smacks the cement steps, as if the cough propelled her through the door, and they drag her to the bottom.

It puts us right there in the scene. We can feel Velvet’s agency and also the power of things beyond her control. The writer doesn’t have to tell us that a disjointed image rose if they make the image rise for us.

Skim down a few paragraphs:

Fortunately, the grumble of the approaching metro train wouldn’t wake her loftmates. Nor would the bluish light from cars flickering into the loft’s windows. The train skimmed into view, a quarter floor down, half a broad avenue away. Exhausted workers slumped against handholds, bundled in coats in the barely heated cars.

Notice how vivid and immediate the last two sentences are. A couple small tweaks makes the whole paragraph just as strong:

The metro train rumbled as it approached. Bluish light from cars flickered through the loft’s windows. Her roommates kept sleeping as the train skimmed into view, a quarter floor down, half a broad avenue away. Exhausted workers slumped against handholds, bundled in coats in the barely heated cars.

In fact, so much of this chapter has that mix of telling detail with, well, just telling. There’s a place for telling – for summary – but there are also missed opportunities to keep us immersed in the experience of the scene. Like here:

Velvet plunked the tea bag in the mug. Relishing the heat radiating from the ceramic to her palms, despite it being too hot for comfort. She sipped and burnt her tongue.

The first and third sentences drop us right into Velvet’s experience. But the one in the middle pulls us out, and gives it to us second hand, when an easy edit could fix that. Or here is another key moment in the chapter, a turning point:

The nightmare cut through her nostalgia, like vulture beaks rending her physical world, as if reality had no more solidity than dream. Through the rents, the nightmare rushed at her. Two uniformed men grabbed handfuls of leather to hold her down. She’d worn that jacket in her nightmare, and with a whimper, knew she’d never wear it again.

 

She ripped the jacket off and hurled it across the room.

That first paragraph would be more effective if we experienced the PTSD flashback happen, triggered by a sensory memory like scent, if we heard the whimper, felt the frantic attempt to get out of the jacket, and then saw it hurled across the room.

This chapter is all about Velvet’s internal memories and struggle. There’s no external conflict, no external action, no external big idea, driving this chapter. It’s a risk starting a book this way. The only thing that we have to grab us and pull us into the story is the immediacy of Velvet’s experience. There are a lot of great details here already – the cactus, the train, the leather coat. Make the rest of the details vivid and tactile, invoking all the senses. Put us into the experience as it happens and we’ll keep reading.

Good luck with this chapter and the rest of the book.

Best wishes,

C.C. Finlay
Editor, FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
sfsite.com/fsf/

“A Brief History of Alien Invasions” by Paul Marino

“A Brief History of Alien Invasions” caught my interest this month because of how effectively it exploits a simple-looking structure to tell much more story—and communicate much more context—than strictly appears on the page. What looks like just a narration of how tropes have changed in stories about aliens blooms into a nicely subtle story about fear, illness, courage, and a phone call being avoided. However, from the author’s notes, “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” isn’t quite connecting with its potential audience, and this month, I’d like to explore both what makes this sort of oblique narrative style work—and where it might jump that last gap to connecting with readers.

The major misconception about pieces like “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” is that they’re stories that run on tone: a distanced, serious intonation on a slightly random topic or situation that creates, somehow, a profound narrative. What actually tends to make a highly abstract story work is its very lack of randomness—its structural strengths—which “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” has in spades. The piece is essentially a puzzlebox, the kind of narrative that grabs the parts of our brains that evolved for pattern-matching, and uses readers’ instinct to take that puzzle apart to lead us to uncovering a piece of story.

What makes “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” very much catch my interest is that it’s a box with not just one, but two puzzles: the game of calling out which movie or TV series is being described in each vignette, and then the slow uncovering of the story’s actual plot, the protagonist’s grapple with an impending diagnosis, found through matching the tropes and mood of those shows and the hints left in how they’re chosen and discussed.

It’s a highly effectual way to give readers that feeling of discovery—one which will be familiar to anyone who’s worked in game design and ever written a tutorial. Setting up the guessing-game of “Which movie?” primes readers’ brains to the fact that yes, this is a puzzle—and there’s something else to guess at, so it’s important to be looking. It provides the crucial element of a puzzle—a clue—upfront, leading with “The aliens came to escape their own problems” and telling readers, right in the first sentence, what this story is about and what to look for. That narrative Rosetta Stone is reinforced by the later clue, right on the page, that the aliens are metaphors: it’s a chance to shift one’s reading if the puzzle has left a reader behind.

In short, we’re shown what kind of story this is so we can find our way to the emotional payoff, and it’s a highly effectual emotional payoff, largely because of the way the puzzles interact to bolster the thematic level of the story. We’ve talked in previous months about tapping into the preexisting wiring that symbols and ideas have for our readership, and how effective hijacking or remixing an existing set of readerly assumptions can be. “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” works something its readers are guaranteed to recognize: The idea of science fiction as escapist—the place people go to get away from their problems—drifting inevitably back to social problems and anxieties in the way both the genre and the protagonist have.

It’s an almost inadvertent, brilliant little effect: A protagonist who’s telling us a wild story to try to escape the fear of diagnosis that’s plaguing them, but can’t help but get dragged back to those thoughts again and again and again. Who inevitably finds them self back in the story about that phone call.

The result is rawly emotional: Because the fear seeps up from between the cracks left for it in “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” the piece feels absolutely unpolished and visceral and real, and even more so because readers get to find it ourselves.

So there’s a great deal of smart, effectual structure work here, but it’s not quite connecting with readers so far. Why not? I’d diagnose two major issues: One with the story, and one with potential reader expectations.

No matter what we do as writers, the factor we definitely can’t control is our readers and the ideas they bring to the table. I will say that one of the pitfalls of a workshop environment is that we as writers, conscious of reading to evaluate or fix a story—and bluntly, sometimes a little too conscious of the perceived social hierarchy of a workshop—can frequently be much too quick to chalk an effect up to ignorance or incompetence, rather than digging in to find what a colleague is trying to achieve and help them achieve it better. I will quite frankly state that I found some of the existing critiques on this piece—the ones that contributed to the author’s note and its upsettingly defeated tone—to be quite dismissive, and dismissal is not very conducive to helping either the author or the critiquer learn more craft. We’re not here to dismiss each other. We’re here to learn, and while “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” is a great example of structural work, its author’s note and some of its existing reviews are a great example of why condescending to our colleagues is not just useless, but damaging and small. I’d ask everyone to take that example to heart, and remember what we’re here for: learning and community.

While that’s not a controllable issue, it does one useful thing: Points out where readers are straying off the proverbial garden path, and where a writer might put a fence or a helpful signpost to keep them going forward.

For my part, I’d suggest that there are definitely places “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” could be tightened to make it more narratively effective and separate the clues from their settings. While I know it’s one of the things I always say, this kind of story is probably most effective when it’s lean: get in, do the work, and get back out, leaving enough setting and mood work to keep the story feeling rounded out, but not enough words to send readers down false trails or confuse them as to what the focus of the story is. Even at 1,000 words, there’s narrative drift here, especially near the end of the piece before resolving for a frankly killer last line.

I’d suggest a pass through the piece for focus, thinking of the trope-puzzle material through the lens of the plot itself. Which pieces of the trope conversation contribute to the plot clues? Which of them are pieces of the puzzle? See what the rough percentage is—plot clues to fluff—and adjust that a little in the direction of the plot clues. A tighter focus will help readers pick up and keep the trail.

As well, the metaphors in “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” do complicate at a certain point—once we hit the superheroes, I’m not sure where the connections go anymore. I’d suggest keeping an eye out for complication and/or drift between the layers of the story, and minimizing it as necessary. This might be a multi-draft operation: finding a balance between information and subtlety.

Either way, there’s something profoundly moving and structurally intelligent at the heart of “A Brief History of Alien Invasions”, and while it’s still a few drafts away from finished, it’s worth pursuing.

Best of luck!

–Leah Bobet
Author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (October 2015)

Tales of Rona, Chapter 1 by Alissa Bumgardner

This is a promising first chapter, although it will take significant work to bring it up to solid publishable standard. The good news: the prose is competent, the sentences well-constructed, and the line of direction is mostly straightforward. This is a good foundation to work from.

Before I begin to make any substantial criticism, let’s lay out what takes place in this chapter. We can divide it into roughly three parts.

Part one: opening. The viewpoint character, Mara, and some other (apparently young) people are racing in a wood. The mood is playful, even though Mara loses to her friend(-rival? romantic interest?) Talin. There is no hint of potential danger. A number of characters are introduced by name, but the reader gets little sense of personality from their interactions.

Part two: threat. Mara and Talin have another solo race to a mill on a road. Here they encounter soldiers from a group called the “Nasaru.” The soldiers take them for rebels (which they are) and attack. Mara and Talin escape, but Talin is wounded. Mara uses Magic (capitalised throughout) to speed both of their escapes, and they return to a city in the middle of the wood that is apparently home to the rebellion. Brief exposition is given on Mara’s relationship to the leader of the rebellion (said leader is Mara’s mother).

Part three: collapse/recovery. Mara collapses from the expenditure of Magic. She wakes up days later in the presence of her sister. She then gets up, finds Talin, has a conversation with him about his social status and obligations (he’d be Mara’s near-social-peer without a treasonous relative, but some mystical connection to the Land still acknowledges his status while people do not: this part is not particularly clear), kisses him, and has a minor confrontation with her mother over her actions and her untrained Magic.

There are three things in particular that need work in this chapter: tension, emotional intensity, and getting well-rounded characterisation onto the page. These things are naturally interrelated, and part of why they’re not here up front has, I think, quite a bit to do with how this chapter is structured.

(An aside: the author would do well to consider logistics as well. A not-insignificant collection of people – a town/city – in the middle of a forest? A city whose inhabitants are at war? How are they supplied with food? Premodern towns, even villages, rely on their agricultural hinterland, due to the problems of transporting perishable goods over any distance, and agriculture is labour-intensive at certain points of the year. How is the city defended? Walls? Magic? If a nearby road is commonly used by the enemy in small groups, the city is not exercising control over the surrounding countryside  —  and its inhabitants should be able to deny the area to an enemy that is not present in force: this is one reason that invading armies commonly laid siege to towns rather than bypass them and leave them in their rear, because that leaves the army’s supply line vulnerable. I digress, but logistical considerations can provide interesting sources of narrative conflict and tension)

(I may have something of a Pet Cause in logistics.)

The chapter opens in the middle of a race. We have very low stakes here, and very little time to get to know the characters  —  and we don’t know why they’re racing except for the hell of it. This segues into another race that lands the characters right in the middle of an encounter with an armed enemy.

One suggestion for establishing the stakes is to begin prior to the race. Allow a little time to establish the characters’ individual personalities. Establish the political situation also, and the potential for an encounter with an armed enemy. It might go far towards establishing character to let the young people be a little reckless and ignore any potential risk in favour of having their competition? Why are they racing in the woods in the first place? Training? A bet? Escaping from other responsibilities? Set the scene a little more, give the reader some more context for these people, and it will be a little easier to fall into sympathy with them.

And it would help to spread out some of the information that the reader receives as exposition in the part of the chapter I’m referring to as Part Three, and intersperse it with more character action.

In terms of combining characterisation and emotional intensity, we need to get down to the prose level to kick things up a few notches. Let’s take an example. Look here:

“Go on,” Talin said quietly behind her, his hand brushing gently across her back and resting for just a moment on her waist. “I’ll see you later. Promise.”
Mara glanced over her shoulder at Talin. He smiled at her. She wanted so badly to kiss him again. Instead, she sighed and headed for the door. Damien leaned over and whispered in her ear as she passed.
“Best tell her about the kissing later. She’s got enough to handle for now.” Then her uncle kissed her temple and let her pass. Once outside, she could hear her mother yelling at Gideon. Mara groaned and trotted across the street and pushed open the door with a sigh. Adella, standing in the middle of the kitchen, whipped around, eyes flashing with anger. Gideon stepped out from behind his wife and lifted an arm in Mara’s direction.
“You see, Del, she’s fine. Over seeing Talin, just like Damien said she’d be.”
“What in the hellfire were you thinking?” Adella demanded striding across the room, ignoring Gideon. Mara crossed her arms across her chest. “You should be resting.”

Here, in common with much of the chapter, we have a lot of what I’d like to call “stage direction.” We get action verbs and very straightforward description of what is happening. What we don’t get is any tactile sense, any full-sensory-experience, any hook of emotional reaction and feeling to what’s going on. You can take out some of the verbs and change the sentence structure to fit more detail in. Here’s an example:

“Go on.” Talin touched the small of her back for an instant, his hand briefly brushing the curve of her hip. “I’ll see you later. Promise.”

The quirk of his lips made her stomach do something warm and complicated. Mara wanted so badly to kiss him again. But Damien’s waiting presence — and amused expression — reminded her of her waiting mother. She sighed. She couldn’t put it off.

As she passed him in the doorway, Damien caught her arm and pressed a dry kiss on her temple. In a voice pitched for her ears alone, he said, “Best tell your mother about the kissing later. She’s got enough on her plate right now.”

Mara could hear her mother’s raised voice from the roadway. It meant she wasn’t surprised when Adella confronted her as she entered the kitchen, eyes bright with anger. “What in hellfire were you thinking? You should be resting!”

Or something like that.

Connect feelings  —  physical sensations, sensory impressions, emotional reactions  —  to a description of what’s happening, and it helps give a more rounded, a fuller impression of what’s going on. It helps the reader connect more with the characters. It fills out the world. The other thing is to not give too much stage direction. You have to trust the reader to fill in a few blanks  —  you don’t have to give them every step on the route to where you’re going in a paragraph or a scene, just the important ones. Every statement is a signpost.

Good news! The signposts here are pointing the right direction. The reader is not going to get confused about what’s going on in terms of straightforward events. But there are lots of them, and they leave out useful emotional and sensory data that builds characterization, reader connection, emotional intensity and tension. Work on that, and there’ll be a solid foundation there to move forward on.

–Liz Bourke
“Sleeps With Monsters” columnist at Tor.com
Book reviewer for Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Ideomancer