Safety Net by Bryan Andrews

“Safety Net” caught my eye this month with its observant but not cynical portrait of a cashless company-town in a post-ecological-disaster world and the difference between indirect and concrete aid. It’s an interesting—and deliberate—update of classic hard-boiled tropes which just underlines how relevant those tropes are to us right here and now. However, in sticking a little too close to the tropes it’s, I think, underselling its own conclusion. So this month, I’d like to discuss where tropes help us—and their limits.

The most obvious strength in “Safety Net” is how every element of craft is working together to underpin its themes. Hardboileds are absolutely, completely about precarity, class, and a certain idea of how integrity stands or falters in the face of everything else. And “Safety Net” pulls that question into play from every direction, explicitly and implicitly.

Precarity is everywhere in this story, and it’s been built in a way that doesn’t feel overexposited or underintegrated. The worldbuilding sets the tone with zeppelins, greenhouses, lack of real wood hinting at an ecological catastrophe in progress quietly in the background. There’s also a great dose of people working with their environment: the multiplicity of transit modes is both a great way to show class disparity in a multicultural, ecologically ravaged context, but also, it’s just pretty fun.

On the next layer, how people interact with this environment and each other underscores that tension. There’s a lot of playfulness in things like the casual death of gendered dress codes, but underneath it lurks a visible scarcity of human connection and trust—between Greg and his son or bodyguard, between the businesspeople on the zeppelin, between the father and his robot-tended baby. Horace’s almost gleeful reactions to having expense accounts make him a part of this system, even as he tries to resist it, in a very believable way.

And that’s what cements the precarity of this world: the ways people try to resist their it. Behind the roiling, oppressive atmosphere of labour unrest and harsh policing, everyone in this piece is covertly trying to help someone else: Greg’s management business, Crayg’s unsatisfying advocacy work, Horace’s quasi-detective career. They all mean well, and they all come up hard against their own limits in this system, and that pulls the tropes of hardboileds and noir through absolutely.

The prose is fairly clean and transparent, although there’s a distinct habit around comma splices, which can really throw a lot of readers. I’d suggest putting some attention into that not out of a prescriptive idea about grammar, but because there are a lot of ways punctuation can slow, speed up, mediate, or move the rhythm of a sentence, and sticking so closely to one (and one that frequently hides the meaning of the sentence) takes tools out of our hands as writers.

But there are some great descriptive moments here. “Face like an arrowhead” is a unique, concise description, and Crayg being defined by a beard he’s yet to grow into says a great thing about his relationship to adulthood and what he’s striving for without having to explicitly say it. But there are also a few instances where the thought hasn’t entirely made it onto the page. What “Safety Net” means that Ross “made four right turns in a row” is interpretable, but it takes a minute. I think it’s possible to slightly build out some of those moments and phrases that are only sketched in at present to make this a smoother read.

The main thing I’d suggest as a focus for the next draft, however, is that the ending of “Safety Net” strikes a little lightly. Despite the little bit of a crush he’s nursing, Horace exposes Greg’s corruption to Crayg and resolves that he’s going to take a beating for outing Greg as being behind the crackdown. But as a reader, I’m left a little unsatisfied: how does this ending resolve, comment on, or extend the questions “Safety Net” has been asking about precarity, change, how people mash up against systems?

This is where, I think, the modern story has run into the historical tropes and lost a little: the idea of a detective figure who ghosts through others’ lives, setting things right and then moving on, is pretty foundational to the genre. But when it’s ported into this context, things change. It takes on a certain tone when Horace is the precarious-living, poverty-struck expert on how people really live in Cable—stuck in his situation, cheerfully resigned to everything staying the same—and the people who experience change and resolution are the hyper-rich plutocrats. The loneliness of a person with a code, when it’s set against the labour protests, the stacked game, and the reasonable doubt that a rich son is actually going to entirely ruin his rich parent or their platform—tips into something like futility.

It’s a moment to perhaps step back and ask: What is this story saying in the now, outside the references, and what do I want it to say?

I think there are ways to create that modern narrative satisfaction—to write a workable end for this story—while still sticking to the mission of inverting, updating, and commenting on hardboiled and noir tropes. It might require stepping back from what the genre does and thinking first about what “Safety Net” does, and what it’s supposed to communicate to readers, and then tying that idea back to how its genre talks.

But I think this piece is well on its way, and with some thought, some polishing on the sentence level, and a few more rounds of revision, should be ready to send out into the world.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

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

Bee Houe Rising – CHAPTER 1 by Keby Boyer

I was drawn to this submission by its title (even with the typo on the website) and by the author’s voice in the introductory note. It’s concise and confident, with a distinct edge of humor, and it says precisely as much as it needs to say about the novel and the chapter. I’m impressed. It’s not easy to make it look that effortless.

The chapter, for me, met the expectations set by title and note. It’s tightly written, sharp and focused with a distinctive, wryly funny, yet lyrical style. It knows just how fast the story needs to move, and just how much the reader needs to know in order to ride along with the shaman and her companions.

If the rest of the novel keeps up the pacing I see here, and the overall structure of plot and development of character is as solid as it is in this first chapter, I think it’s just about ready to go to line edits. Characters, setting, and story are strong and sure of themselves. The minutiae of the prose are where the ms. needs work.

That’s especially important when the rest of the writer’s craft is as accomplished as what I see here. The structure is beautiful. Cleaning up the prose will apply the last layer of polish.

The first question I would ask is, why is the main character persistently referred to as “the old shaman woman”? A shaman can be any gender or none. Is there a plot-related reason why we have to be told, repeatedly, that the shaman is a woman? If so, maybe a phrase or a line could clarify this, or point toward a later explanation?

I think too that I would have liked to know how much taller and broader she is than Joe Ironhorse, right at the point when we first see them together, rather than toward the end of the chapter. There’s a hint of it when she teases him about his height, but we don’t see the full contrast between them. It seems as if that detail might be more apposite there than later on in the scene. Then when he performs his feat of strength, we’ll be even more impressed by it, because we’ve been getting the visual all along.

The writing in general, the imagery, the vividness of description and phrasing, is very, very good. There is however a particular habit that might bear rethinking, and that is the tendency to dangle phrases. For example:

All scraped knees and missing her two front teeth, the intensity of the girl’s aura crackled like lightning through the desert heat. 

This is a wonderful image, but the structure of the sentence is broken in the middle. The knees and teeth belong to the aura rather than the girl.

The same applies to

A stoic, stooped-shouldered old man dressed in a red plaid shirt and worn Levis, his long white hair fell straight down

Syntactically, the sentence says that the hair is a man dressed in a shirt and Levis. It’s inside out: hair contains the man, rather than the other way around.

In a subtler way, a similar thing is happening here:

Joe pulled a handkerchief that smelled of wind and spice and magic from his back pocket,

Gorgeous imagery, inside-out phrasing. Wind and spice, and magic from his back pocket. Which is actually a lovely image, but I don’t think it’s what the sentence wants to mean.

One last thing that struck me as I read was that when Joe and the shaman are talking, they seem to be completely alone. The chanting and drumming disappear. It’s summed up pretty clearly here:

The sounds of drums, bells, and chanting continued as they drank the scotch, smoked the weed, and enjoyed the comfortable silence that often happens between two very old friends.

On the one hand I love the juxtaposition of noise and silence. On the other, I feel as if I want just a little more. Another phrase or two layered through the scene, that establishes how they can be alone together no matter how tumultuous their surroundings are.

I think what I may be missing is the sense that the other people in the scene are real; that they have independent existence. Eddie and the little girl and the dog vanish once Joe and the shaman meet. It feels as if they, and the rest of the people gathered there, need to be more perceptibly present, even if they’re far in the background. The writer’s craft that I see here is strong enough to do that, without losing the tight connection between Joe and the shaman.

Overall, this is a beautiful piece, and promises some strong, witty, deft writing as the story unwinds itself. It just a needs a little shining up here and there.

–Judith Tarr

Hell Kitchen Chapter 3 by Anneloup Roncin

This chapter has a lot of energy. It’s hectic, almost frenetic, even though Clay’s voice is tired and jaded and seen-it-all. It moves along briskly. There’s no slack in it; no dead air. It keeps the pages turning, and ends on a note that pulls the reader along toward the next chapter.

For me, the exposition works. It explains where it needs to, without stalling out the movement of the story. If it repeats information conveyed in the earlier chapters, then it might be worth deciding which iterations to keep, but on a cold read, straight into chapter 3, it does what it needs to do. There are some quietly startling bits, and I like those: the freezer full of human meat, for example. That sums up this world in a single gut-punch of information.

One thing I would suggest when the ms. gets to the line-edit phase is to pay really close attention to the meaning of words and the framing of idioms. I had to stop here and there and try to figure out what the words were trying to say:

watching Cleo take a Fang’s order with a crisped expression,

for example. I’m not sure what crisped wants to mean.

his back to a wall, his baskets that clash with his suit.  

The same with baskets. Maybe I’m missing a reference in an earlier chapter?

The one other thing I might ask is more of a structural question. Clay notes that the staff have been making a point of staying after hours, but he doesn’t seem to wonder why they’re doing it. It’s an inconvenience, but he isn’t making an effort to find out what it means. Nor does he seem perturbed by it, though it’s clearly a major departure from normal behavior. That needs a bit more clearing up, I think, and a bit more attention on his part. Or if he has a reason not to care, that could be clearer, as well.

As for the introduction of Mia Herrera, it is certainly dramatic. Clay doubles down on her being angry. Angry is her defining trait. She might show a few more layers of personality here, a little more complexity. Not a lot—it’s clearly the prelude to an action scene, and it needs to move along quickly. But she could show another trait or two that enhances the anger and hints at who and what she is apart from the fiery temper.

Overall I think it’s a pretty effective chapter. It builds on the situation established by the opening chapters, adds further complications to the plot, and moves on quickly toward the next stage of the story.

— Judith Tarr

A Gift Of The Spirit by Michelle Dupler

It can be difficult to pin down exactly how a character is developed in readers’ minds, which details, which actions, and which thoughts stand out, and how they combine to build a sense of character for readers. In “A Gift for the Spirit,” the protagonist, Marit, is defined primarily in two strong sections:

“Marit liked the feeling of driving, of being in control and leading the way on the winding dusty roads.”

“Marit was an attractive young woman. She knew that, knew it was part of the draw. She had movie star platinum hair and red bow lips and made sure she was always immaculately dressed for them in pure white. Truth was, she enjoyed how they revered her, revered her gift. She had become more than some pretty girl that men wanted to use. Now, she was these folks’ angelic touch of Heaven, and their spare dollars and coins kept her and Mama Jo and Papa Luke well fed.”

While more information about Marit is provided, particularly in exposition about her past, it’s these passages that most strongly define Marit in the present of the story, the type of person she is and what is important to her.  Each of these passages accomplishes multiple things, making them both efficient and effective.  In the first one, we get description of setting, an evocation of the sensory experience of driving that attaches us to Marit, and the emotional effect of driving on Marit.  The second passage provides a vivid image of Marit’s appearance, Marit’s assessment of how others see her, Marit’s feeling about that assessment, several aspects of her motivation for becoming what she is.  The interaction of the different elements within these passages gives a sense of reality and depth to them, so Marit’s character comes through strongly.  They also provide density to the prose, so each sentence and each paragraph is accomplishing multiple purposes.  That’s an important technique for all fiction, and especially for flash fiction, which this story is.

An area of the story that could be strengthened is the plot, which is about Marit’s deal with a dark spirit that has consequences she didn’t expect.  The story provides exposition about the formation of the deal and the price Marit has agreed to pay:  giving the spirit a good memory for every time she receives his power.

As Marit holds her latest session showing her power to the people, she realizes she’s giving her last positive memory to the spirit.  At the end of the story, the spirit blasts fire over the people, killing everyone but Marit.

While Marit’s personality comes across pretty strongly, she’s a fairly passive protagonist.  She knows she’s running out of positive memories, but she just continues using them up, down to the last one.  She doesn’t seem to have any plan for what to do after she has no more memories to continue her deal with the spirit.  She doesn’t seem to have saved money to sustain her after she can’t make money with her gift.  Perhaps Marit feels she has no options and feels trapped in her course of action, or perhaps she’s addicted to the reverence others give her and can’t resist this last fix, or perhaps she feels there’s nothing for her in life without the power.  But none of those are established or even implied.  While motivation can sometimes be left ambiguous, readers generally need several compelling possibilities to be implied that they can contemplate.  For me, instead of this, her motivation seems neglected.

If we had a sense that she feels there’s nothing for her in life without the power, so she just wants to experience it as many times as possible and then doesn’t care what happens to her, that could make her seem more active, since she’s making a decision to go ahead despite knowing she’s losing her last memory.  This could also give the ending more significance, since we would see that her selfish decision leads to harm for the people.

The plot also lacks a strong causal chain.  Instead of this final experience going as usual, black flames burst out and consume everyone.  Why?  When there isn’t a strong reason for something happening, it feels as if the author made it happen.  That undermines readers’ belief in the story and the emotional impact of events.  If Marit’s lack of positive memories makes her very angry and dark, and she gets jealous and even angrier when she senses the positive memories in the audience, maybe she would use the spirit’s power to burn everyone up.  That would provide a strong causal chain.

Without a stronger understanding of why Marit gives up her last positive memory and a stronger cause for the black flames that burn everyone, it’s hard to find meaning or emotional impact in the end of the story.  But adding those elements could make the story more powerful and resonant.

The story has many strengths and kept me engaged throughout.  I hope my comments are helpful.

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

The Talisman Plant by Bronwyn Venter

was drawn to “The Talisman Plant” this month because of its charming but substantial quest, the nuanced turn it took to its subject matter, and the question in its author’s notes: “Curious to know if the vocab is too difficult for a middle grades/YA audience”. It’s a question which opened a large door, and this month, I’d like to explore how we cut through standard writing advice to find deliberate approaches in our work.

(Yup, this is the meta-Editor’s Choice: the advice about writing advice!)

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Vasi’s quest for a hedgehog—to find the raskovnik, to free his father—is terribly sweet, in a Victorian animal drawings kind of way, and then deepens considerably in a way that feels organic as this piece gets into the realities of fairy-tale logic slamming into political worlds. Overall, it’s got a really tidy marriage between that fairy-tale logic and some sophisticated concepts, being tackled in a way that reads fairly clean and uncomplicated.

I think the goal of creating appeal to both younger and adult readers is being met right now: there’s a way to read Vasi’s quest as straight-up adventure for a kid, and an intensely bittersweet last gasp of heartbreak for an adult.

Pacing is something I do want to draw your attention to. There’s a huge section—once Vasi finds out his friend is a fae and before he goes to do something about it—which can easily be condensed down to a few paragraphs or cut. Not much action is moving forward in that space or new information being learned; it’s rather ruminative, and every character introduced is secondary or disposable. I think there’s room to reduce it and keep the story overall on target.

But most of all: The author’s notes ask if the vocabulary here is accessible for a younger audience, which is a good question to ask. Stories that are ostensibly written for kids but have all the structural assumptions of adult readerly knowledge are definitely a thing we can produce as writers.

Here’s the thing, though: My instinct is no, it isn’t. If anything, based on contents, this piece would be middle-grade rather than YA—the concerns of YA are much more relational and identity-related (who am I as an adult, how do I fit into my world as I change?), much less cute or soft-focused, and much emotionally sharper, harder, or more complex. This is definitely not a YA piece in what it’s talking about and how.

But what advice do I give to help realign “The Talisman Plant” into middle-grade conventions? I quickly realized I don’t confidently know: middle-grade has always been a weak spot in my own toolbox, because I was one of those kids never really reading at the age bracket I was supposed to. I can’t backfill that experience or learn it later, because I’ll never be a kid again. I can just try to work the problem for you and admit that answer’s going to be flawed.

But: What I’d like to offer up is modeling the process I used today to try to work that problem for you—and with that, talk about how we can learn to evaluate what works and what we can do as writers in an industry that can frequently drown in ideas about what a book should look like. What approaches can we take to writing advice and applying it when we don’t have good context?

The real question here: What do we do next when we don’t know something about our readership?

Find what the standard advice emphasizes. Fortunately or unfortunately, writing advice is never more than a Google search away; the problem we have is sorting it for relevance and credibility. The standard advice for writing middle-grade is plain, simple, digestible language that focuses on action over theory of mind or description. Active verbs over passive verbs, simple sentence structures, and literalism over metaphor.

In this case, if “The Talisman Plant” wanted to take that approach, there might be a balance to be struck between words that give the slightly historical flavour of a fairytale (“surmised”, “countenance”) and kids’ vocabularies; “went for a piss” might be rougher than a kid that age is used to from fairytales. There’s also something to look at in the sheer amount of information this story keeps in subtext and its accessibility to young audiences; that standard advice emphasizes being direct with your information and not assuming that younger readers will get your inferences.

I’d also extend that to suggesting a little less explanation and more action, especially with the fae’s early actions; kids are, for better or worse, used to a world where adults do arbitrary things without justifying themselves, and they’re used to not understanding things yet.

That’s one approach we can take with “The Talisman Plant”; take that advice as written and use it rigorously to get the story it’s telling within the storytelling conventions that advice describes.

But—there’s probably better work we can do on that front. It would mean not following that advice blindly, but using it as an idea of where to start asking questions.

Find the holes in the standard advice—but intelligently, not reactively. However—we might think—kids read fairy tales, and have for a very long time. It’s worth asking who a standard piece of writing advice is for: American eight-year-olds? British twelve-year-olds? From what background (they might well know about the police brutality, but not what a florin is). Who is this advice thinking of as the normative reader? What ideas does it hold about them—and this is especially important when writing for kids, because adults have all kinds of odd ideas about how kids think and act. The major obstacle, I’ve noticed, in working with young readers is adult projection; adults treat the question of “how childhood is” in an extremely politically loaded way, and that can get between writers and our younger audiences.

Middle-grade is technically 8-12, which is a huge spectrum of life experience, vocabulary, and mindset. It’s a huge spectrum of cultural attitudes toward childhood, regional education systems, ideas about reading, class privilege, and experiences with English. It covers very young children with dyslexia, the kids who have been already reading into the adult section, and everything in between.

I think ultimately, to navigate our question in that stack of complexity, we have to do the usual thing writers do with stories and decide who we are talking to. And then sort out what advice is useful for that choice from what isn’t as we move forward.

There’s a way of thinking about the story, in this context, which asks:

What are we assuming a nine-year-old reader already knows about stories? Do they have the concept of a gamekeeper or bailiff? Do they know what faeries are? Are we assuming too much? Are we assuming too little?
What are we assuming a nine-year-old reader already knows about the world as it is right now? Do they have the concept of police brutality (where does this nine-year-old live? They might well have this one down; they might have been sheltered from it or it might not be part of their experience).
And then: how do we then rewrite this one to fit with what that archetypical reader we made up does know?

Draw on any experience we might have—or can acquire—to get deeper. A third approach—a complementary one!—is to just try to get more information. And that’s always a good one, no matter what we decide to do next.

In trying to tackle this, I thought about my own bookselling experience and how I used to get around the problem of recommending books to kids and parents when I’d never been a middle-grade reader: finding out what else that particular reader liked, and ditching all ideas of what kids as a unit like. The first time I had to review a middle-grade book, I asked friends who had young children how they read and what they enjoyed. Is there a way to get more information about your particular archetypical reader?

Asking a bookseller or librarian what’s currently popular in their store beyond the usual series—with that reader we’re thinking of!—can be a good strategy. Talking to parents of readers who are themselves readers—and can deconstruct a book that way—can really help. Reading a dozen middle-grade books in a row aimed at that reader (they’re quite short!) and finding what they have in common is another.

These are ways to focus down a little more strongly, because we can ask finer-grained questions: what makes an MG book successful commercially? What makes one successful in terms of awards? How are those different? What do MG books that are written to uphold an idea of what kids are like do, and what do the books that want to argue kids are different do differently? What makes a MG book successful now versus ten years ago (whole new generation of kids!).

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What I’m outlining here is probably the longest and most complex answer to “Does the language work?” that’s ever been thrown across the proverbial desktop, but what it’s getting into is the foundations of building our own knowledge. It’s learning our industry—and our craft—with our own ears and eyes and fingers.

Ultimately, the problem with writing advice (this advice included!) is it means relying on authority to solve our writing conundrums—and authority is not really a thing in the very personal, very individual universe of what stories people like, why they like them, how children are, what a person knows or wants to know, and whether we’re communicating well with someone else. Authority has to generalize when it answers that question, so authority always misses.

When we start to build our own processes for finding things out about writing and stories, we start to have the information we need to make our own choices. Yeah, we’re going to miss too; but we’re going to miss things as a result of the decisions we’ve made—deliberately setting certain things aside—instead of the information we didn’t have, the person we believed, what they missed, what we didn’t know enough to ask about. Setting certain things aside and choosing others: it’s how we build a style, a voice of our own, and an aesthetic for our lifetime of writing.

So I hope this long detour into how to build a meaningful process to answer that question—how’s the language look?—is a useful one. Not just for answering that simple question, but for all the things that it’s possible to learn about writing and publishing on the way to the answer, and how that knowledge can shape your approach to writing in future.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

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

A Voice From The Moon Chapters 1 & 2 by Samuel Finn