Papyrus, 1 OF 2 by C.K Attner

The Art Of Surviving Dragons Chapter 1 by Jamie Perault

I have a weakness for breezy, sassy voices in epic fantasy. They’re a little paradoxical and quite a bit iconoclastic, and they have to be absolutely on point in order to work. But when they do, they’re a rollicking delight.

This chapter has potential. It’s got the wry, dry tone, and it has some nice plot and character twists. The style is distinctive; the protagonist defines himself clearly in the way he speaks and thinks.

This guy is a storyteller. I can see him kicked back in the tavern, telling his tale at his own pace and in his own time. His rhythms are spoken rhythms. He’s addressing an audience. He editorializes as if he’s answering questions or responding to listeners’ expressions or body language.

That’s some nice craft, and I think it can be even nicer with a round or two of revision. There’s a fine line between the storyteller telling his story at leisure, and the guy who takes forever to get to the point. On the one hand we can appreciate the layering of action and information. On the other, too many layers can keep the story from moving. It does need to move, especially in action sequences.

First I would suggest paring down the repetitions. They’re meant for effect; the ongoing double and treble and sometimes quadruple echo of words and phrases can create a rolling rhythm that enhances the story. But rhetorical devices like this are like spices or seasoning. A little goes a long way.

One repetition here and there can wake the reader or listener up and make them pay closer attention. Constant repetitions have the opposite effect. After a while they turn into a sort of white noise. The trick is to figure out just how much echo effect is enough, and prune the rest.

Pay attention too to the pacing of the action scenes. Watch for wordiness and digressions. Keep a close eye on what the characters are doing, and be careful of interrupting a heated fight or a desperate flight with passages of explanation or exposition. Fast action needs fast prose. Shorter sentences, fewer words. Tighter focus.

One thing that might tighten and strengthen the prose in general is to notice how many negative constructions show up throughout. Note how often the narrator uses didn’t and wasn’t, and how often he undercuts himself by saying he’s not sure or he doesn’t know. He’ll describe something, and then walk it back:

If I didn’t know he was a mad, murdering monster, I would have been tempted to sketch a picture. Not that I could actually draw all that well, but…

Or he’ll set up an image and develop it it and redevelop it and develop it some more:

In that moment it sounded… young. Not child-young, but lazy apprentice young, someone still growing, whose body didn’t understand why work needed to be done instead of sleep. Perhaps that was why my next strike missed. Was I thrown off balance by that unexpected voice, pulling up just a little short instead of following through?

He’s in the midst of a fight for his or the dragon’s life, and he stops to develop a metaphor, in part by telling us what it’s not. Then he takes time for a rhetorical question. Meanwhile the action is on hold and the audience is waiting for the next blow to fall. This can work nicely in small doses, but if it happens frequently through the narrative, it keeps the story from moving forward. In a tavern, that means the rotten tomatoes will start to fly.

Luckily this is written rather than spoken prose, and there’s plenty of time to revise before it meets its audience. Keeping it focused, keeping it tight, and reining in the rhetoric will make a strong story and its intriguingly quirky characters even stronger. I certainly want to know more about the dragon who happens to be a werehuman, and the dragon hunter with the distinctly checkered past.

–Judith Tarr

Take Off Your Shoes, Chapter 55 by Peter Mackay

Usually in selecting Editor’s Choices I try to go for opening scenes or chapters. That makes it a bit easier to understand what’s going on. Once in a while however I like to mix things up. Hence, this time, a final chapter.

From the author’s note I gather that the big picture is pretty well under control. Reviewers have weighed in on plot and characters and suggested useful changes. There seems to be somewhat less emphasis on the line by line, on the final polish.

I have a few thoughts on that. Polishing the prose will add that last bit of extra oomph, sharpen up the characters and heighten the emotional impact of the finale.

The first thing I would suggest is checking for “frequent fliers”—words and images that repeat throughout the chapter (and possibly through the rest of the novel. For example, note all the things that people do with their eyes, passing and sharing and exchanging looks and glances. Count the number of times characters nod or sigh, and how often they wave hands or arms. In what other ways can they express similar emotions or reactions?

Sometimes the phrasing is a bit odd, the words not quite as precise in their meaning as they might be:

She relaxed, tingling with relief.

She folded a hand against his cheek.

Martin’s head twitched.

Watch the idioms and the phrasing; be sure they’re on point. She glanced to would more likely be She glanced at, for example. Putting hands to her hips might read more smoothly as putting hands on her hips.

There’s a lot of stage business in general, a lot of actions surrounding passages of dialogue. Often it’s the same actions, characters doing the same things over and over, nodding, sighing, looking/glancing, smiling/grinning. Think about whether all of these actions are essential. Can some of them be dispensed with? Are they absolutely necessary? And if so, are they exactly the right actions?

Often too characters do two or three or more things in a row, piling action on action:

She took his hand in hers, kissed it, and gave him a hug. They held close and breathed in time with each other.

Unfar’ckt’s face tightened with a frown. He blinked, nodded, and looked at her.

In both of these passages, multiple emotionally fraught things happen. Putting them all together at once has the paradoxical effect of diminishing their effect. Try choosing the one that best conveys the feeling of the moment, and see if that actually heightens the emotion.

In short: paring and tightening the stage business, finding different ways for characters to act and react, and paying careful attention to choice of words and construction of idioms, will add that last bit of polish to the text, and make it that much stronger. Then the finale will pop even more than it does in this draft.

–Judith Tarr

Black Fire, Chapter 3 by Michael Keyton

First, one of my standard disclaimers. Line edits and word-by-word critiques are the last thing a writer should worry about, after all the other elements of the work are in place and it’s time to apply the final polish. Fix the big things first. Then, at the end, make sure all the words are in the right place and doing what they’re intended to do.

With that in mind, I have thoughts about the prose of this submission. Style and word choice are crucial in the horror genre; they create the mood and establish the ambience. This chapter has some lovely things going on in that department, but there’s still a bit of work to be done.

First of all, clarity. Every word and every sentence should be clear as to its meaning and intent. A reference can be obscure or a passage mysterious—sometimes the story needs that. But word for word and line for line, the reader should be able to parse the meaning. If they have to go back repeatedly and reread a passage, and still can’t quite get what the author is trying to say, they’ll lose their trust in the author’s ability to guide them through the story.

Here for example:

They looked at her in turn, and she recognised Perun . . . Dazhbog . . . Stribog, Hors and what she had been came back to her, and her mind finally broke.

The sentence starts with her recognizing a series of individuals, then swerves off in a different direction. The structure of the sentence points toward her recognizing what she had been, but what she had been is actually a different clause, a new train of thought: she’s remembering what she was, probably as a result of recognizing the four persons.

The prose does this fairly often. A sentence starts on one track and then switches to another. Generally the solution is as simple as adding a comma to mark off the separate clauses, or breaking up the clauses into separate sentences. Here, I’d say end the sentence with Hors and start a new one with What she had been.

Stringing together disconnected clauses with and weakens the effect of each clause, as well as confuses the meaning. Think carefully about what is going on in the sentence and the paragraph, and make sure the different parts of the sentence flow coherently from one to the next. Keep track of the whole as well as the parts.

Keep an eye on individual words, too. Make sure each word means exactly what it needs to mean in that particular context. This sentence starts off rather nicely:

And then they were there, subtle and eel-like, sinewy ribbons on fast moving currents, herding and directing, keeping her tight.

The image of the ribbons is vivid, but the final half-dozen words wander off the metaphorical track, until the last word pulls it up short. It’s not quite clear what tight wants to mean. Confinement? Tension? Tight in the street-talk sense, or in the literal sense, or the emotional one, or…?

Watch the emotional temperature, too. Make sure the word or phrase matches the intensity of the moment.

The sobbing started and wouldn’t be stopped.

The emotion here is strong, but the verbs are passive. The result is a sense of disconnection from the feelings that caused the outpouring of grief. It might be more effective to shift to active voice: The sobbing started and wouldn’t stop.

And then the response is perhaps too understated:

He sounded concerned.

Is concern enough? Is it strong enough, or specific enough? Does it convey all that it needs to convey?

Thinking through each word and phrase, the structure of each sentence, the effect of each image and rhetorical flourish, can seem like a lot of work. But with practice it becomes easier. It’s all about clarity, about focus, about making sure the different pieces of the prose fit together into a strong and coherent whole.

–Judith Tarr

Automata Part I of II by Joseph Ahn

The moody worldbuilding in “Automata” caught my attention this month: a muted, constantly shapeshifting story set in a postapocalyptic world trembling like a soap bubble, painted against stark, striking imagery: twisted metal against soft orange skies. However, the author’s concern about its length dovetailed with my own about its wandering, constantly-shifting plot, and so this month I’d like to talk about pacing and deciding which of a world’s many strands is the story.

There’s a lot to play with, narratively, in “Automata”: Barda and Vela’s relationship, the mystery of the automata, the broken oscillator, the missing people, the crisis of leadership in the commune. All of these questions have enough proverbial meat on them to potentially make the central plotline of a story in this world—or at least half of one.

However, since the author’s notes ask about condensing wordcount here, that profusion of questions and potential conflicts is also the first place I go when considering that issue: how are those questions interacting with each other, and is there a way to make them interact that would compress this from 10,000 words to something more manageable?

The conflicts or challenges in “Automata” string together consecutively: plots tagging in and out instead of subplots supporting or weaving through a main question or thoroughline. There’s a great deal done to set up the problem with the oscillator, which only proves to be a setup for the problem of the leadership and then the automaton murder, which only proves to be a setup for the quest to find Panu, which only sets up the problem of the dreaming queen. It’s all neatly causal—things aren’t just necessarily happening in a string but are leading into each other with a solid logic—but it takes a while for “Automata” to get where it’s actually going (Barda’s parents and being happy with where he is, with Vela) and the questions at the beginning don’t necessarily have a relationship with the questions at the end. To this reader, it feels as if they’ve (tidily) drifted toward a conclusion, rather than deliberately resolved a question that was at least implied in the first pages.

The second half almost morphs genre, into cosmic horror/grimdark from the dreamy postapocalyptic SF, and while there’s nothing wrong with being flexible, I find myself wanting at least the seeds of that world sown in the first half, so that when it shows up, it feels like a satisfying payoff, not a surprising sharp turn—so they’re in relationship.

I think there’s a way to bring everything here into alignment—and that having a story in this space isn’t atypical of early or middle drafts, where we figure out all possible universes of the story before deciding which one we want to use. The major question I’d suggest asking: What is the action of the story? What does it want to specifically explore, discuss, illuminate? It’s when we figure out what we do want to say that we can start arranging the rest to support it, reflect it, embroider it—or just see what doesn’t run in the same direction and file that for another piece.

There is some material that, I think, could probably be condensed or outright stripped out: Vela and Barda’s journey underground diverts into more standard tropes about subways, sewers, and the Fall of the World Before, which stands out strongly against the more specific, unique-feeling worldbuilding of the first half. I know the author’s notes mention this is an older story, and there was little way to tell which tropes would age in that time, but trimming with an eye to what the rest of the subgenre assumes as true—what you can just imply now and let readers do the rest—would definitely save wordcount.

Likewise, there’s a good strategy in asking what “Automata” might look like if the same questions were layered instead of tackled consecutively, one after the other. How can those conflicts inform each other and weave through each other, instead of happening one after the other? Can the questions of Barda and Vela’s relationship, of Barda’s restlessness, happen within the action of the rest of the story instead of before or after it?

There’s benefits to rethinking the pacing and structure here that’ll communicate into the line-by-line level. There’s a somewhat abrupt jump from that dreamlike narrative pace into the trapped automaton’s death scene at present—it’s something that can, I think, be sorted out by folding a little more action into Barda’s ruminating earlier, and a little more reflection into that encounter.

Likewise, the hesitancy Barda has about his own emotions early on—”Something about their endless hunt inspires a strange feeling within my heart – like pity, perhaps. Maybe it is nothing more than sadness” and “It feels somehow eerie and out of place, though I cannot explain why.”—feels as if it doesn’t quite serve a strong purpose at present, but those can be accessible sites in the story to start off clues about his restless loneliness—and present the problem being home with Vela would solve.

This is structural work—basically, editing work—but I think the positive is that the material needed to make “Automata” hum is already here. It’s a question of rearranging, layering, pruning, and shaping it to go in the direction the author would like, and form a story that says, asks, resolves what’s most satisfying.

Best of luck!

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

The Falcon Arrives, Chapter 1 by Adrian Cross

There’s some good story-stuff here, and some interesting pointers to where it’s all going. I have a sense of the world, what level of technology it’s reached: armor and spears, but factories and pharmaceuticals. Or are the drugs made with magic? I’m sure the story will answer that as it unfolds. It seems to be a raffish sort of swords-and-sorcery underworld, with deep poverty and a good amount of brutality. I want to read more in order to get a wider picture of the world and its people.

In this Editor’s Choice I’d like to talk about language, but first, a disclaimer. There is no wrong way to write a draft. When a story is finding its way through the writer’s mind and screen, what matters most is not the specific words they use, but getting the story blocked out in whatever way works best for the writer’s process. The time to worry about finer points of language and line editing is much later. Build the framework first, get the walls and floor and ceiling in place, then concentrate on the decor and the colors.

When the revision gets to that point, I would suggest focusing closely on language and choice of words, especially figurative language. The language of the draft aims to be vivid and striking and memorable, with unusual metaphors and strong sensory and emotional images. When it succeeds, it gives us a clear and immediate sense of what it’s like to live in this world. We can feel and hear and smell and taste the action as it happens.

Right now, it’s a bit over the top. Images pile up and tumble over one another. The opening sentence pays homage to the great trope, “It was a dark and stormy night,” with striking imagery, but it loses control of itself toward the end:

The storm whipped the city with barbed nets of rain and wind, and occasionally lashes of lightning that shred the sky like the spine of a captured street rat.

Whips and nets don’t quite mesh, though there’s a raw power in the barbs. The rat’s spine seems to come out of nowhere after the image of lashing and shredding. How does a spine connect with whips and nets?

I think here, less is more. Pick a concept—whips, for example—and keep the imagery focused on that. Think about what would wrap up the image in the most effective way. It might be as simple as ending the sentence with lashed the sky, and saving the rat’s spine for another scene.

Another tendency in the draft is that words don’t quite mean what they want to mean. The rain moaned, for example: usually it’s the wind that does that. Think about what rain sounds like, what sounds it can make. Can it moan? What mechanism would make it possible? Think too about how a reader will react, whether the image will throw them out of the story while they try to figure out what it means or how it works.

Clarity of meaning is important to keep the reader in the story. In the same paragraph in which the rain moans, there’s this:

The smell of the vats was heavy, unpleasant, but comfortingly familiar. It kept people away without reason.

I’m not sure what “without reason” means. The vats smell bad, though Jay finds the stink comforting. How does that translate into keeping people away for no reason? People who don’t have the comfort of familiarity would have reason to avoid the area, because it’s unpleasant. The apparent contradiction made me stop reading, and I lost track of the story while I tried to figure it out. In revision, rethinking or rephrasing would make the meaning clearer and keep the story flowing onward without interruption.

Watch in general for contradictions and confusions. Even as Jay focuses on finding medicine for Kalp, right after he remembers the sight of the sick person and his desperate sister, he says, I had no family, no friends. What are Kalp and his sister, then? Why is he trying so hard and at such personal cost to save Kalp?

Be careful too about how characters react and interact. Think about the balance between action and reaction, provocation and response. For example when the guard materializes out of the storm, we feel the power and terror of his presence. But after he’s interrogated Jay, he shrugs and leaves. We’ve been set up for a conflict that dissipates before it really gets started.

Another line or two, a sharper conflict, maybe a scowl or a warning from the guard, might give the encounter a bit more weight while still letting Jay off. Maybe tone down or delete the garbage-hat, too. It’s a strong provocation, but the guard’s reaction is disproportionately mild. It promises but it doesn’t quite deliver.

At this stage of the draft, I would recommend focusing on the story and the characters, and making sure the overall structure is solid. Once that’s where it needs to be, then go word by word and line by line. That will bring it all together, and the story will be stronger

–Judith Tarr

The Black-Leopard Numen by Rita de Heer

— Judith Tarr