A Cure For Witching: Part Three by Lyndsey E. Gilbert 

It’s an interesting experience to jump into a story in progress for critique.  There are obviously disadvantages, since one doesn’t know what’s been previously established.  But there are also advantages, since the nature of this section can stand out more clearly by looking at it separately.

I haven’t read the other parts of this story, but I was quickly drawn into this part with the sense of change, with the narrator having to adopt a new wardrobe; and the sense of conflict between the narrator and her husband.  The excerpt has several strengths.  The world, with the Time Devoured and the Righteous Era, is quite intriguing.  I can feel the narrator’s concern about Cillian, which makes me feel tense about what he might do.  There are some moments when the story conveys well what the narrator is going through, such as, “It was less than a week ago but it feels like an age has passed. Like I am a silly mortal girl who stepped into a faerie ring for but a moment, only to stumble back out and find a thousand years has come and gone.”  The story conveys the strong bonds between the narrator, the mother, and Cloda well.  The mother comes across as a compelling character here:  “She smiles wanly, but some mischief sparks in her eyes. ‘I was no lady, nobody of any consequence at all before I met your father. I know how to survive in rags as well as I do in ballgowns.'”  Sorcha also intrigues me.  Many things remain uncertain and mysterious, which makes me want to keep reading to find the answers.  The story also has some evocative description, such as, ” I picture Father’s face, his wry smile and sharp features, his kind eyes alight with love and pride.”

One area that could be strengthened is the scene structure.  Each scene should show a change to a value of significance for the protagonist.  While things change in the three scenes included in this part, I don’t feel a strong change to a value of significance.  Such changes give us a feeling of the story moving ahead, provide a reason for the scene to be included in the story, and get us excited about what has been gained or lost.

In the first scene, the narrator seems to already know she must wear new clothes and get rid of her old ones, so that’s not a change.  She plans to send the clothes to her sister, and instead Cillian burns them, so that is a change.  But what value of significance to the narrator changes?  It’s not clear.  One possibility is that the narrator starts out feeling that her past will survive in some sense with her clothes going to her sister, and she ends the scene feeling that her past is being wiped out with the burning of her clothes. I get some hints of this, but it isn’t conveyed strongly.  To do so, we need to clearly understand at the beginning of the scene that the clothes represent her past, and by sending them to Cloda, the narrator feels her past is being preserved. Right now, the first indication that the clothes carry strong memories is given after Cillian starts throwing the clothes into the fire:  “But all I can think of is how each outfit carries memories, both good and bad, memories of Father, memories of my life before now.”  That is too late.  And it is telling us of the connection between clothing and memories without showing us the connection.  What is shown is this:  “I busy my hands folding an emerald gown with sumptuous silk skirts.”  This makes it sound like the narrator has never seen this gown before.  It is “an” emerald gown, not “the emerald gown I wore to the spring dance when I was fourteen.”  It is not “the emerald gown with the golden clover Cloda embroidered on the bodice for me.”  We aren’t seeing memories attached to the clothing before it is burned.  So the burning of the clothing doesn’t carry a strong impact or seem to show a change in a value of significance.  We need to feel that embroidered clover (or whatever) and all the sewing sessions she had with her mother and Cloda burning, and we need to feel her memory of the dance burning, etc.

This issue is connected to another one, which is the protagonist struggling to achieve a goal.  A story generally shows a protagonist struggling to achieve a goal, and in the process she’s changed.  In this context, each scene generally shows the protagonist either moving closer to achieving the goal or moving farther away from achieving the goal (or both, such as progress with a new complication).  These often comprise the changes to the values of significance.

Throughout this excerpt, the narrator’s goal is unclear to me.  The narrator feels passive and reactive rather than active.  Rather than struggling to achieve a passionately desired goal, the narrator reacts to the various things that happen to her.  That means I don’t know what values have significance for her, and that means I don’t know what would comprise a change to a value of significance.  Returning to the first scene, if I knew that her goal was to pack up her old clothes and get them sent on their way to Cloda before Cillian found out, and I saw all her efforts going toward that goal, then it would clearly be a change to a value of significance when Cillian interrupts the process and burns the clothes.  So giving the narrator a clear goal (or a series of goals) she is actively struggling to achieve in the story would strengthen the story and each scene and make these changes of significance clear and strong.

The second scene feels especially scattered, with the narrator reacting to many different things but having no goal she is struggling to achieve.  One possibility could be that the narrator has seen ghosts at church before and her goal is to behave as Cillian would approve (not act weird when she sees the ghosts she know will show up) because if she acts weird, Cillian will say she’s ill and prevent her from attending the rest of the funeral activities, where she wants to remember her father and bond with her mother and Cloda.  This would allow the narrator to continue to have the goal of honoring and preserving the past, as in the previous scene.  In this case, the ghosts would need to show up sooner and be more difficult to ignore (perhaps they would hover around her father and torment her father’s ghost), so the narrator would have to struggle to achieve her goal.  She might succeed at achieving her goal with the complication that she realizes the ghosts are after her father, or that the ghosts are after her, or that her vision of the past world is growing.  In that case, the change in the value of significance would be that she goes from thinking she can ignore the ghosts to realizing the ghosts are more powerful and threatening than she knew.

In the third scene, the narrator again seems reactive and without a consistent goal.  She might start the scene with the goal of having a good time, but that seems forgotten when the various monsters show up.  And it seems inconsistent with her previous desire to not provoke Cillian.  So I have a hard time understanding why she does what she does, and I don’t know why the monsters show up when they do, seemingly become more numerous, and then she either goes back in time or sees events from the past.  Things seem to happen for no reason, and I don’t know what the narrator is trying to achieve.  If she was trying to behave in a way Cillian would approve of but also have a chance to talk to her mother and Cloda, that could provide both external and internal conflict, and behaving well could become very difficult when the monsters show up.  I’d love to see her going through that struggle rather than seeming to forget her situation and screaming and running outside.  She could still fail to maintain self-control, if you want her to fail, but seeing her trying would make me understand her and like her more.

One other area I wanted to discuss briefly is that the exposition often feels like the narrator is thinking information to herself that she already knows (what I call an “as you know, self”).  For example, the narrator thinks, “In the Time Devoured the dead were mostly buried. Remains were exhumed when our new world was built. A world dedicated to clean living and faith. For thousands of years gravestones were erected, places to go to remember a loved one, to lay down flowers and keepsakes.”  The narrator knows this; there is no reason she would think it or explain it to herself.  In first person past tense, writers can often get away with this because it can feel like the narrator is speaking to a reader throughout the story.  But first person present tense generally gives us the feeling that we’re going through events with the narrator, not being told of the events by the narrator.  In that case, it’s usually better to include necessary exposition by having the narrator think about her opinion on the information rather than simply thinking the information.  For example, the narrator might think, “The fact that the dead in the Time Devoured were buried disgusted me.”  The story actually offers something like this immediately after the sentences I quoted above:  “I feel drawn to this idea but in truth I cannot bear the thought of lowering Father into the ground, allowing him to rot away. For me our way is preferable.”  Phrasing exposition in this way makes it feel more like a real thought the character would have.

I enjoy the world and feel growing tension over the situation.  The unanswered questions make me want to keep reading to find out the answers.  I hope my comments are helpful.

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

The Shearing by Jamie Boyd

“The Shearing” caught my attention this month with its clear, accessible handling of complex relationships, an evolving Galician ranch community, and a character arc that transcends binary ideas of the world. It puts forward a nuanced set of questions to tackle, handles them with grace, and keeps the entire read thoroughly satisfying—mostly by how it deploys its most complex elements. So this month, I’d like to dig into interpersonal dynamics as worldbuilding—the worldbuilding that’s not about unicorns and mountains, but relationships—and how we can think about what readers expect to make it really work.

The best thing about “The Shearing” is, surprisingly, not the wild, spotted unicorns in the Spanish hills; it’s how the community around them lives in an interrelated web of choices and relations with those herds, each other, and the land. It’s a story about the consequences of unicorns, both personal and far-reaching—and because of that, one of the more unique and thoughtful unicorn stories I’ve read.

It’s also a story that employs a kind of worldbuilding seen more consistently in character-driven literary fiction: one that has no reason not to show up in genre fiction (see: Lois McMaster Bujold, Connie Willis, Rivers Solomon), and which can give genre fiction a gut-deep emotional realism that creates lasting impact. Most of the worldbuilding in “The Shearing” is done between people, and it’s the textures of their relationships that we explore for plot, conflict, and resolution.

Technically speaking, everything we understand about worldbuilding on a more geological or magical scale applies to the universes of our fictional relationships. Readers learn a lot about what kind of worlds to expect from the facts everyone in those worlds takes for granted and the way those facts telegraph the underlying systems of our stories. For example, “people need The Spice to travel in space” gives readers a whole lot of information about what logic Dune runs on.

One of the core systems of “The Shearing” is that everyone in this story is a messy human being, no questions asked; that complex motivations, competing priorities, and different relationships with others are how people normally exist. It’s an important system and assumption to establish, because it’s where the core conflict of the story comes from: Maruxa’s struggles with that complexity, rooted in her yearning and resentment for the father she loves deeply to “for once really [see] all of me”.

“The Shearing” sets up this expectation in the first paragraphs by handing readers a balance of little contradictions: details that look like basic character and worldbuilding introduction but carry a lot more, because of the pattern they repeat. Maruxa hates how her body is treated, but is proud of it and insists she can do anything a boy can; her father is stern and emotionally distant, but devoted to stewardship of his land, traditions, and children; the rapa is dangerous, but draws necessary tourist money and prevents financial dangers; sacrificing colts prevents more loss through overgrazing and overpopulation. Maruxa’s brothers are having entirely different complicated relationships with their father just out of view, and every time one of them makes a major choice, it inflects how she and her father interact—just like in real life. There are unicorns—and everything readers bring to that word!—in a world where they’re ordinary animals; where there is no unique bond that grows just by being a unicorn and a girl, and then one grows anyways.

People are sensitive to patterns, whether we know it or not, and by consistently showing that each character is living in a space of contradictions—two things which are both at least a little true sitting together—”The Shearing” establishes the rules of its world, and shows readers what to look for: the space where those complexities develop.

As the pattern of complexity’s introduced, “The Shearing” grounds—and counterbalances—it with another classic worldbuilding strategy: supporting something newer or stranger with something quite familiar.

At its heart, “The Shearing” shows a clear, simple conflict familiar to genre readers: duty, tradition, and community versus individual needs, difference, and exploration. It’s basically the Spider-man question, just leading to a different answer, down different roads. While that world of people-are-complex is being established, beside it this very familiar conflict is built as Maruxa’s urge to warn the unicorns collides with her duty to her family. Genre readers are left with one very familiar thing to treat as a narrative “home base”, from which it’s possible to solidly explore what might be an unfamiliar setting and unfamiliar community needs.

The most crucial thing “The Shearing” does, though, is use that familiar conflict as a stepping-stone—and start to work it and the complexity of its world together. Once readers are in familiar territory and primed to look out for complexity, it’s quick to establish that the path of individual needs, fleeing, and freedom has consequences. Maruxa’s pressed into the rapa because her oldest brother has left “without a backward glance”—and there’s a world of her own hurt embedded in that phrase. And likewise, the world of tradition and duty isn’t even close to static: the rapa’s evolved from quasi-mystic stock breeding ritual to almost a public health measure. Both paths are real, vibrant, and potential positive choices.

As the piece slowly layers considerations and consequences—habitat protection, and then gentrification and Maruxa’s generation’s flight to the cities—at a pace that lets readers digest the last one before adding another aspect of the problem, all those questions continue to develop and evolve together. Having Demo changes Maruxa’s feelings toward her body; her changed sense of self affects the fate of the ranch; the ranch’s fate affects Demo and the family; Demo’s plight changes Maruxa’s reading of what her father’s chosen. By establishing needs and consequences on all sides, “The Shearing” remakes this fairly traditional binary conflict into something more like a real choice—and a much more compelling read. And it’s all because information’s managed at a digestible, sensitive pace for the audience—and because the story’s grounded in those endless interactions.

As always, other layers of craft have a real role to play in making that approach work. The organic complexity of the thematics and plot is supported by the sentence-level prose: a style that’s on the whole clean, transparent, and factual, but sprinkled here and there with phrases like “a wild blessing” and precise sensory details which act as the verbal unicorns in this space—a touch of wildness and grace.

The images and ideas “The Shearing” puts forward are also ones that work with the question it’s asking, rather than against it. How Maruxa thinks about her own tall, strong—indelicate—body (echoed in the wild unicorns’ less-valued colorings) inflects her choices when it comes to her family, her career, and the land around her: she thinks back to her own physicality and draws from that lesson to make the choices that come next. And ultimately, her relationship with her father explicitly parallels with Demo testing his limits and her realization that Demo’s discontent.

But what keeps it from being didactic is something important to point out: it’s Maruxa’s authentic experience with these questions. As readers, we see Maruxa reflecting, considering these similarities, and learning her own way. “The Shearing” doesn’t feel heavy-handed because readers aren’t being asked to consider the moral of the story; we are being asked to watch this one person struggle, think, and learn something a little larger than she had before—something that’s satisfying to watch because she earns it through active struggle. Letting Demo free and hoping the herd will have him isn’t the answer, but it’s an answer, and in a world where questions proliferate, an answer can definitely be enough.

There’s a lot to like here—and a lot of great, thoughtful craft being used to convey it. I think with just minor polishing, it’ll have little trouble finding a home.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

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

Girl Who Died In The Mud (Chapter 2 of Unnamed Novel) by Oliver Benedict Charles Townsend

–Judith Tarr

Distant Stars Chapters 1-3 by Stephan George

This submission has an intriguing idea: people space-traveling virtually or telepathically when they can’t do so physically. The execution needs some work and some rethinking of how story works. What is here is primarily a form of synopsis, what the author’s note is calling exposition. It is that, but it’s also a summary, and a form of notes on worldbuilding.

The rules of writing are like the Pirates’ Code. They’re really just…guidelines. However, when a writer is learning their craft, or working on developing it, it can be useful to accept the challenge of a set of rules. Synopsis and exposition, for example, can be effective if they’re done well, but as with most aspects of the craft, a little goes a long way.

Here I would present the challenge to avoid synopsis and exposition, to find other, more direct and immediate ways to tell the story. The reader should feel as if they are experiencing events with the characters. Let us see and hear and engage our emotions in what’s going on. When there’s a passage of exposition, think about how to turn it into the lived experience of a character. Let the character act and react. Show us how they feel, what they see, what the world is like for them.

Dialogue is a particularly good place to practice transforming synopsis into story. It’s often misunderstood as a means of conveying exposition, but what it really is is a combination of character development through engagement and interaction, and movement of the story forward both in what the characters tell each other, and how they tell it. There’s a further problem for the writer, in that really good fictional dialogue doesn’t resemble real-world dialogue at all.

In the real world, most of what we say is filler. It’s stock phrases and conversational white noise—hello, how are you, I’m fine, what do you think of the weather. It doesn’t contain much if any information. It’s like background music: it fills up the silence.

Fictional dialogue is a very different animal. A skilled writer can turn filler into art. But a writer who is learning the craft has to learn to write dialogue first without filler. Whatever the characters say to each other, along with the choice of venue for the conversation and the “stage business” of action and reaction that surrounds it and serves as a frame for it, has to be directly relevant to what’s going on with the story at that particular point. It has to show the personality of each speaker, and it has to move the story forward.

In this submission, for example, the encounter between Arax and Darium consists almost entirely of filler. In real life, yes, they would go through the formulae of greeting and conversational throat-clearing, but a novel is the good-parts version. It zeroes in on what’s immediately relevant to the story. It lets the reader assume that the filler happens without actually having to devote bandwidth to it.

The reader is a tough customer. Their time is limited and the world is full of stories. If the novel in hand does not get to the story quickly enough, or if it circles around the story without actually getting into it, the reader goes away.

The writer’s job is to keep the reader reading. To keep the pages turning. And that means giving the reader the good parts, the chewy bits, the things that move the story forward—and trusting the reader to fill in the things that aren’t relevant right then and there.

It’s a delicate balance between telling the reader enough to avoid confusion and therefore frustration, and not telling them so much that they get lost in minutiae. The writer has to develop the skill of choosing scenes that develop the story and the characters, and choosing the details within those scenes that best convey the information that the writer wants the reader to know.

The conversation between Arax and Darium is our first meeting with either of them. What we need to know here is something of their relationship to each other, both personal and professional. We also need to know why this conversation exists in the narrative. What purpose does it serve? How does it move the story forward? And the toughest question: Does it need to exist at this point in the novel? Does it need to exist at all? Or can the story begin with Arax’s arrival in the Transport Tower? Is there anything in the conversation that can’t be conveyed in a later and more compact scene?

The same applies to the conversations between Taia and Flavia. How much of what they say to each other is relevant to the story right then and there? Are there other things they could be talking about? Might the progression of the story be clearer if they said more about where they’re going and why, and what is going to happen there?

We do get a sense of the characters from their gossip, but we might also benefit from further layers of emotion in both Taia’s internal reactions and Flavia’s external ones. Can we get more of a sense of how they feel about each other, and about what’s happening today? Can we go deeper into Taia’s feelings?

It’s not a matter of adding word count so much as of making every word count. If we dispense with the filler, there’s lots of space for the good parts: thoughts, feelings, emotional and physical reactions. A skiller writer can convey a tremendous amount in a few words. A look, a gesture, a physical reaction. Maybe Taia’s head hurts or her hands are cold or she’s twitching inside; maybe she feels she has to be there, but she hates it. Maybe she wishes she had the courage to refuse, or to walk out. (Or is that not allowed? Is this event compulsory? Can she stay away, or can she leave?)

The more direct and immediate the story is, the more engaged the reader becomes. Then they’ll be drawn in, and they won’t want to leave until they turn the last page—and they’ll be sad that it’s over. Always leave them wanting more. That’s as solid a rule as you’ll find in the Pirates’ Code.

–Judith Tarr

Melisandre With The Good Hair by Kate Tyte

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