Doesn’t Look Like A Hero by Shannon Walch

I was drawn to “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero” this month by its non-traditional perspective on quest stories, the rather gentle point about heroism and change, and the light sense of fun it brought to all that. It’s got the bones of a very successful cozy fantasy story, but there are still places where this draft can improve and solidify. This month, I’d like to talk about ways we can let readers move with our characters and make the experience of a story feel more satisfying.

Taking an alternate side of the classic Hero’s Journey situation isn’t a new way to generate a story, but as a wider strategy, it’s a good one. Aside from this story: especially when we’re working with ideas that are essentially formulas—and quests, heroic journeys, and folktales are formulas we use to say things about the world—it’s a very good idea to think of every character in them as a whole person with a subjective experience. Rejigged fairy tales do that as their centrepiece; writing them can be a great way to practice that wholeness and bring it into every piece we write.

And “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero” opens strong in terms of characters with whole personalities: with a stalemate between Maida and the House that implies a great deal about what the House does, doesn’t do, and is for. It’s working off a template of a world that’s familiar to a lot of fantasy readers, and doing something fun with it; leveraging those ideas well.

I’m also personally fond of fantasy stories that look at the sheer amount of work that sustains a fantasy world (yes, there is laundry!) but I also like the instant Ghibli-esque characterization of the House. It comes across like a cat or a stubborn toddler, which I think really works: something with a mind and definite opinions, but missing the language to communicate them. The first word we have about the House is “sulking” and the first metaphor Maida’s small cousins, and that makes a huge impression.

That said, I do have two major suggestions, both to do with deepening the situation “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero” already creates. It’s started some ideas: What I’m suggesting is taking this draft and spending the next draft or two exploring, setting, and finishing what’s been started.

The first is sense of place (and this is something that came up in this author’s last Editor’s Choice!). The House itself is a place—and I think that would be more vivid, believable, and impactful if attention went, on the next draft, to deepening that sense of place. There’s discussion early on about the House’s usual hiding places when it’s in a mood: a false roof panel, a grotto at the back of the cellar. But we never see or taste or smell any more about those spaces; they’re ideas, rather than concrete places, so they vaguely float in readers’ awareness but don’t give us a stronger sense of the House as place and character.

Likewise, we get a somewhat timeless and vague sense of where the House is situated: a little pocket universe somewhere near Bremen, in a pre-industrial era. While that’s along the lines of fairytales, a few concretizing details would bring this world into colour—and because it’s a folktale world, you can choose the concretizing details.

There are already some good sites for adding grounding into “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero”. When Maida is “really listen[ing]” to the creaks of the house, its state as a building, that’s a perfect time to let readers join in on that activity and really listen: give us a share in that awareness of it as space. What kind of sensory details does she notice? What is the House in terms of smell, colour, organization, height, roominess, structure, permeability? Which of these are usual, which of them new? What does she associate with those details? It’s tailor-made, as a plot development, to let readers in too.

(There’s a broader principle in here: When our characters do certain kinds of actions and the readers can follow along—perceiving something, feeling something—it’s satisfying for us. There are a lot of technical, neurological reasons for why that makes us feel closer to other human beings, and it doesn’t work differently for characters or stories. (If you’re curious, look up mirroring.) But the short version is: opportunities to meld together what the reader’s experiencing and what the protagonist’s experiencing are always good ones. There’s a great opportunity to do this with the House as a space in “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero”, and I think it would really anchor this piece.)

The second suggestion is to pick up on the way the House is being written as capricious, intelligent, almost childlike, and lean into that idea: how it communicates, what it cares about, and why. What goes on between Maida and the House is a full-on relationship—but it’s not entirely being written like one yet.

There are relationships throughout “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero” that aren’t yet being picked up on and developed: with the messenger bird, with the tomcat, with Guion (it hints a few times that Maida low-key thinks he’s irresponsible, and that might actually be her problem with boundaries, and that’s an interesting thing to explore! What’s that about?). Because this is a story fundamentally about relationships changing—Maida’s with the House not being what it used to be; her relationship with herself not being what it was; Hans’s relationship with the House beginning—I think it’s important, again, for “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero” to do what it’s talking about: look at relationships.

I think there’s a great deal of depth and poignancy to be gained here if the story spends more of its space thinking about—for Maida, for Guion, for Hans—what their relationships with the intelligent House actually look like. How they’re different; how they treat it and each other differently, and what those approaches bring them, or don’t. And what those relationships say about their relationships with themselves—which, considering this is about Maida’s self-image changing, we never quite hear enough about. A problem’s getting solved here that’s never been stated: Maida is becoming a hero. But why is that important to her, and where did she start, and where did she get stuck? Why is this the answer?

There are spaces, likewise, to develop this idea: the little hints about Maida’s cousins, her leaving home. There’s room in her emotional reactions to certain incidents to think about why she feels that way. But it’s work that I think would make this piece make more emotional sense.

I think looking at the sense of place, and looking at the relationships between all these people and magical entities would solve one of the structural problems in “Doesn’t Look Like a Hero”: a slightly dragging pace in the middle. There are a few too many problems being repeated—the House not doing what it’s supposed to, little acts of sabotage which Maida never really moves forward with an answer on—and substituting the repetition of the problem (House misbehaves, Maida doesn’t really cope) with more emphasis on the relationships and spaces can take the same amount of plot and make it feel like it’s moving forward more effectively.

All in all this is pretty structural work, but I think (like the House!) the bones are absolutely there. It’s a question of thinking differently about the draft you’ve got, and finding the places those new perspectives can fit.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

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

The Village Of Proof by weeg bree

This an interesting story. The title in English has so many meanings—from mathematical proof to legal proof to culinary proofing (activating the yeast or other agent that causes bread to rise). I think it has a handle on the voice that signals a fairy tale: omniscient narrative, with a hint of the narrator’s views and opinions. There’s a strong moral tone, and a lesson to be learned from the characters’ actions and reactions.

It’s even more interesting that it’s translated from the original by its author. Translation is an art, and it’s a rare writer who can render a text clearly and faithfully from one language into another. Respect to the author for the effort, and for mostly succeeding.

There are a few points at which the structure of the original language seeps through into the English, and a few words that don’t quite mean what they want to mean. Here are some examples:

some children in the village inexplicably had such that they were immediately given to the milkman to grow up as artist’s models in the far-off city.

“Inexplicably had such that” is hard to parse in English. Perhaps “children who had such hair were given to the milkman” and so on.

Or:

differing at most into shades of green and yellow might read in English as “differentiating at most” and so on.

Other words are just a hair off the English: Machinists I think want to be “mechanics;” overview perhaps would be “oversight,” or else a word that has to do with authority—some sense that everything is done to code, and follows specific rules; dense bins may be either “heavy” or “numerous,” depending on the original meaning of the translated word. Would the whole village spoke outrageously be rendered more clearly as “The whole village expressed their outrage”?

Zulma’s eyes are described as hazelnut forest ponds. The original image, in which we’re told at more length what color her eyes are, is lovely, but English doesn’t quite condense into so concise a phrase. Forest ponds might work better, but it’s still a little odd. Strange speckled gaze? Penetrating green-gold stare? Pools of green and hazel?

I would recommend running the ms. by a native speaker before it goes out on submission, to make sure all the translations work in English. Sometimes odd or unusual phrasing can be striking and memorable, but if it’s a choice between deliberately unusual phrasing and clarity of meaning, I tend to come down on the side of clarity. For example, while this is correct English syntax, I’m not sure what it means: statistics had shown that mothers almost invariably had daughters and fathers had sons.

Do people in this world not tend to reproduce sexually? Are they cloned, so that the offspring will be of the same sex as the parent? I’m curious too about how marriage works in Proof—it seems as if Zulma’s mother has had consecutive spouses. Are the people of the town not monogamous? Do people pair up for specific periods or specific reasons? Is it marriage as we know it, or is it another form of relationship?

The flow of the story could be a little smoother, as well. First we meet Zulma, then we learn about Proof, which is a reasonable progression of the narrative, but there may be a missing paragraph break between the cannibalism during the famine, and the reference to gossip and backbiting. The concepts don’t quite follow logically. I found myself wanting a line or two more about the cannibals, and a more coherent segue into the backbiters.

I quite like the ending. It’s nicely portentous, and it has a good sense of universal justice coming, at last, for the people of Proof. The one thing I might ask is for a tiny bit more detail about the squirrel’s tail. I would have liked to know the exact direction in which it turns. That would bring us back to the beginning, when we’re told how the tail turns to the East. If we get the same image in the last line, the same slow, inevitable shift, we know for sure the prayer has been heard. And we know what’s going to happen next.

Best of luck, and happy revising!

— Judith Tarr

A Cure For Witching: Part Six by Lyndsay E. Gilbert

Novels can so often get stuck in the morass of the middle with scenes that don’t move the story ahead; or scenes that make an episodic side trip; or scenes that churn with conflict, struggle, and action but are ultimately meaningless to the story.  When you’re deep into the novel, it can be hard to avoid these pitfalls and find the right path forward.  While I haven’t read all the previous excerpts of A Cure for the Witching and so can’t comment on the big picture issues, it is clear to me that the two scenes that comprise Part 6 accomplish several things that scenes in the middle should:  they each show a change to a value of significance to Etain, show that events have an effect on Etain’s character arc, and build the conflict toward a crisis point.

The first scene turns on the value of proper behavior.  Proper behavior seems to be something Etain tries to outwardly maintain (hiding her improper behavior internally).  Yet at the end of the scene, she agrees to behave improperly in an obvious, external way, reading with Cloda and the others.  That is a change to a value important to Etain.  She is taking a risk, rejecting the accusation that she’s a hypocrite, and supporting Cloda.  This is also a change to her character and seems to be moving her character arc from passive, internal resistance to active, external resistance, which will increase conflict and likely lead to a crisis.

The second scene turns on the value of control.  Etain begins the scene in control of her emotions and her words.  Since she seems to have been hiding her improper behavior from others, control must be very important to her.  But when she sees Kate locked in a cage, about to be taken away, she loses control, grabbing Kate’s dress and speaking hysterically. At dinner, she tries to swallow her feelings and her words but fails.  She confronts her husband with his hypocrisy, smashes bottles, and barricades herself in her room.  She goes from having control to losing control, a clear change to a value that matters to Etain.  This takes her character arc another step forward.  After taking a risk in a safe setting in the previous scene, she is now taking a much bigger risk in a dangerous setting.  She’s rejected her own hypocrisy and is now attacking her husband’s.  She definitely seems to have taken the next step in her journey from passive, internal resistance to active, external resistance, and we seem headed toward a crisis.

These changes indicate the story is not stuck in the doldrums, with scenes that don’t move the story ahead.  These scenes also don’t seem to be episodic side trips; a scene is episodic when you can remove it from the story and it wouldn’t really matter (like an episode of an old TV show, like the original Star Trek.  You don’t need to have episode 2 to get the characters from episode 1 to episode 3; they aren’t connected and don’t build on each other).  And these scenes don’t appear to contain churn, which provides conflict and struggle that is ultimately meaningless to the story.  It seems central to the story that women are oppressed and Etain comes to fight against that, and that’s what we see in these scenes.

Are these the best scenes to show these changes for this novel?  I can’t answer that without having read the rest, but these scenes are definitely accomplishing much that they should.

One area that could use improvement is subjective description.  The excerpt has some vivid description, but it doesn’t feel like it’s coming from Etain, whose POV we are in.  It feels fairly objective.  Subjective description allows us to experience the world through the unique perspective of the POV character.  Because of that, it not only describes, it reveals character, provides a compelling perspective, and gives readers a more emotional experience.

If, at the beginning of the excerpt, Etain is truly someone who values proper behavior, then I would think she would be uncomfortable going through this castle filled with improper items and would see those items through a disapproving lens.  In that case, a “splendour of silk hangings” might instead be “expensive silk hanging from the walls in a wasteful display serving no useful purpose whatsoever.” Or if Etain found the improper items tempting, she might describe the hangings as “lustrous, sensual silk draped to invite stroking and indulgence.”  If she inwardly longs for the beauty of the silk but knows it is forbidden, she might see the hangings as

I think she has a deep appreciation for the beauty of the castle yet fears the consequences of being in that place.  But that’s not really coming through in the description yet.  I feel appreciation in “a splendour of silk hangings,” but not the fear.  And I don’t feel either appreciation or fear in most of the other details.  “Somewhat bawdy stories carved in frescoes” doesn’t convey appreciation or disapproval, fear or excitement.  “There are statues of many armed men and women raised on pedestals” also doesn’t convey those qualities for me; it feels like objective description.

I’m very interested in the “dark corridor, lit by swinging lanterns at wide intervals.”  Is she frightened by the swinging lanterns?  Excited?  In her mind, is darkness where sinners hide?  Or is darkness a source of reassurance and safety, a place where her transgressions are hidden?  We could be so much closer to Etain if we were experiencing things as she did.  Because we don’t, her issue with women reading seems to come out of nowhere.  She sees many objects that are forbidden or at least disapproved of, and seems to have little reaction to that.  Then she sees women reading, another forbidden thing, and has a big reaction.  Allowing us to more intensely experience things as she does can help set that up better.

In the second scene, the description of Connor being “invisible” is a good example of successful subjective POV.  A subjective description of Cillian here could be striking and illuminating.

The description of Kate, for me, is weakened by providing first the vision of Kate as she appears to others, and then the vision of Kate as Etain perceives her.  I think this would come across much more strongly if Etain simply described Kate as Etain perceives her, as a “small, sweat-drenched girl . . . trembling uncontrollably.”  That would create a clearer, more vivid image.

I hope my comments are helpful.  These scenes create some strong anticipation about what’s to come.  I wish you every success with the novel.

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

The Sealing Of Scars by Chanon Wong

“The Sealing of Scars” stood out this month on the strength of its emotional arcs and worldbuilding: a pair of aging people trapped in their own loop of love and hurt and stubbornness, and the breaking of it, all in physical, beautiful prose. It’s a powerful story already, but I think there’s some space for the author to get what they want in terms of more subtext, less explanation, mostly by shuffling things around structurally. So this month, I’d like to discuss how we organize ideas in our sentences and scenes—and how diversifying them gives our writing texture.

First and foremost: “The Sealing of Scars” is a deeply beautiful story. It establishes a complex history between Sekha and Suriyan even before he lands, and pays off that promise in a way that’s heartbreaking but necessary. It’s hard-won, but it feels like tangible progress.

The visual metaphors here are spot-on, evoking characters in quick, effective ways: Suriyan is first introduced not as a person, but a body in a shroud, “leaving a long stubborn trail.” It’s a perfect way to instantly encapsulate his grim, rigid endurance: what defines him, and what’s caused all the trouble for him, and for Sekha. That there is a trace of joy in Sekha’s face that can vanish, even after her harsh words—it says everything.

The author’s asked if this works as a standalone piece or if establishing the world is too ambitious a task here, and I think it does work. The centre of the piece is the emotional loop Sekha and Suriyan are caught in, and the details of the three killings only build that loop. It’s working toward the problem that’s been spotlit for readers—the hurt between these two people—so: it’s working.

The author’s notes also ask about writing from a Thai perspective toward an international audience. I think that’s functioning well too. I don’t by any means imagine that readers unfamiliar with Thai culture are going to catch all the nuances here, but as someone who also writes from backgrounds and experiences that aren’t typical, I’ve learned: largely what readers recognize is human motivation. When we’re reading, we connect to people. There is only so much any given reader—especially fantasy readers—needs in terms of concepts if your characters are well-rounded enough, their needs are real enough, and their lives textured enough.

That said, I do get what’s being asked here: it’s a question of managing information. What should “The Sealing of Scars” assume readers already know, and what needs to be explained, or won’t be recognized? I’d like to offer a suggestion about how that information’s organized, versus how much, that might help manage that load. It’s a bit of a sideways strategy, but it’s a way to lighten readerly work in other parts of the story so that there’s room for what “The Sealing of Scars” wants to do with its world.

Generally, I think there’s space in “The Sealing of Scars” to say less. There are instances through the story where the narration is saying the same thing—or using the same structure, or establishing similar ideas—a few times over, and not all of them are necessary, or getting the maximum rhetorical effect. Trimming some of those repetitions down (intelligently, though; thinking about where they’re working and where they work less) is, I think, a simple way to tighten and sharpen the story.

As an example: Sentences like “The prow breached the sand with a crunch and the figure rolled out of the boat, splashing limp into the shallows.” There are a lot of ideas around movement for readers to keep track of in this sentence (breached, crunch, rolled, splashing, limp, shallows). It’s a coherent chain of events, but everything in this sentence is movement—all one kind of idea.

Sometimes we do need a lot of things happening in our sentences, but there can be a benefit to making them different things. Three movements and a smell, for example; a movement, a smell, a sound, a movement again. These set up slightly different rhythms in our sentences that readers won’t explicitly recognize—just the feeling of not too much happening, of manageable information and a rounder world in that moment.

This applies a little more broadly, too: I think I would qualify Sekha’s impressions less in the first scene. She comes across with a bit of a tendency to overthink and overguess others’ motives—a technique to get worldbuilding information in, yes, but one that splashes back on the sense of her as a character and the pace of the scene.

This is the place where we establish our world, our characters, our situations, and it does build characterization and voice. By the time she asks Tortoise Father whether he could sink the boat, I’m starting to have a sense of her—wry, and pained, and a little funny—and the sense of an oral storytelling rhythm: it was not this, it was not this.

But while it’s a useful technique to establish our worlds—and how our characters think—by listing off what something is not, I’m finding that in “The Sealing of Scars” that repetition undercuts my sense of the world. Each of those denials has the same shape, as a sentence or idea: “It could be this, but it isn’t.” And I think that would matter less if the shape wasn’t no. It’s starting the story by telling readers a lot of no, and very little yes, without the benefit of the call-and-response an actual oral story would have (“was it…a turtle? No!”) and that starts to build up into a barrier.

This is where I think varying the shape of the ideas might also come in handy. In the same way we can mix up a sentence from all movements, could get across a firmer impression of either Sekha or the island and give readers a yes into the story. The oral cadence is already there in other places, like Tortoise Father’s questions; I don’t think it’d be lost entirely.

This is kind of abstract, structural work to suggest, but it’s a tool I think could deliver some interesting results for “The Sealing of Scars” if you’re willing to play with it a little, manage the information a little differently, and see what you get. It’s a great piece: emotionally honest, complex, and gorgeous. I think either way, it’ll go far.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

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

Silver Star (Silver Star Series Book 3) by Carol Masser

The author’s introduction to this submission addresses a question every writer has to ask when writing a series. How do we provide enough information about previous volumes to bring the new reader up to speed, while at the same making sure we keep the interest of the reader who has been following the series through previous volumes? How much is just right, and how much is too much? Where do we draw the line?

Every book and every author is different, but there are a few basic guidelines that may help. As with every opening, whether it’s volume 1 or volume 20, it should draw the reader in, and keep them turning the pages. A little exposition helps orient them to the backstory, but it should be as concise as possible, and it should be directly relevant to what’s happening in the novel’s here-and-now.

Sometimes a prologue can be useful: a flashback that sums up what came before. Most times, it’s a good idea to plunge right in, and let the backstory fill in as it becomes applicable. Front-loading the backstory tends to backfire, because the longtime reader has already seen it, and the new reader is waiting for the story to start. If they really want or need to know what happened in the previous volumes, they’ll read or reread those.

Readers are busy people, and there are literally thousands of books calling for their attention. Once they’re invested in the book, they’ll settle in for a slower ride. But at the very beginning, the writer has to convince them to make that investment.

My question about this submission would be, Is this the best place for the book to start? In many ways it’s a transitional passage. Allison and Silver are coming back from a trip to Mali. Allision touches base with her old friends and colleagues at the dolphin research center, and informs them that she’s leaving Earth with Silver. There are blocks of exposition and backstory, filling in who these people are and summing up the story to date. The latter part of the submission sets up the plot of the novel, and points us toward what is going to happen next.

If the novel proper is going to take place in space and then on Silver’s homeworld, do we need this interval on Earth? Is it important to the story that we meet each of her colleagues, and that we know what they eat and where it came from? If it is essential for story reasons, would it make sense to convey the main ideas later on in the novel, when the specific characters and events are relevant to what’s happening at the time?

Allison’s relationship with Rob for example could develop in this novel through instantaneous communications at key points in the main plot. Allison might start to miss him fiercely and we’ll get a flashback to a cherished moment; or she’ll be so pissed off about the quarrel they had before she left that she’s still seething over it days later. That way, we get to see and feel it, but it happens as part of the story we’re in now.

What would happen if the novel began, say, as Silver’s ship begins the flyby of Mars? We’d get Allison’s feelings about it, and a few key details about who she is and how she got there. Maybe a glance at Silver, seeing him now in humanoid form and a flash of him as dolphin; then maybe a quick call to Earth to show her friends what she sees, and a quick exchange with Rob that gives us a taste of how they feel about each other. They might not be speaking because he’s so upset about her leaving; one of the others might try to intercede, which nearly scuttles the experience of the flyby. And then we see how that’s resolved, or not, as the story requires.

And then on to the next important event in this novel. Events in previous novels crop up as they’re relevant to what’s happening in this one. It’s not necessary to summarize previous volumes, especially at the beginning, before the new story gets started. Concentrate on the new story, and bring in the old one when and as it’s needed for clarification.

The usual guideline for any narrative is, “Start as close to the end as you can.” This is as true for a later volume in a series as it is for the first one. Think of dropping hints about what happened before, rather than going into detail. The reader should get the gist, so as not to be confused, but their interest now is in what’s happening at this point in the timeline. They’ll be looking forward to what happens next, rather than looking backward to what happened in previous volumes.

Best of luck with this novel and this series, and happy revising!

— Judith Tarr

When We Defied Heaven Ch 1 by Eugene Hayman

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

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

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

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

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

This paragraph for example:

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

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

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

Here too, there’s a lot going on:

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

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

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

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

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

— Judith Tarr

A Piece Of The Quiet by RJ McCarthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Charm-Smith by Bronwyn Venter

–Judith Tarr

Pigeon by weeg bree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

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

The Museum Of Average Days by Kate Ellis