The Pistoleer Chapter 2 by Shawn Farien

–Judith Tarr

The Editors’ Choices are chosen from the submissions from the previous month that show the most potential or otherwise earn the admiration of our Resident Editors. Submissions in four categories — science fiction chapters, fantasy chapters, horror, and short stories — receive a detailed review, meant to be educational for others as well as the author.This month’s reviews are written by Resident Editors Leah Bobet, Jeanne Cavelos, and Judith Tarr. The last four months of Editors’ Choices and their editorial reviews are archived on the workshop.

The Ambassador  by William Das

The Ambassador” caught my eye this month by offering a quieter, more nuanced take on the political divide dystopian: a close-in look at the impacts of a wider science-fictional future. While its worldbuilding illustrates and extrapolates a highly partisan American future, it doesn’t quite hang together yet when examined up close. So this month, I’d like to discuss the balance between internal science-fictional cohesion and allegory, and making a piece of fiction work as both.

“The Ambassador” quickly sets out a rich world that feels nonetheless personal, and takes pains to establish the individual strains Adam and Sandra are living under (though Liam is much less carefully drawn, and I think a few more details about his own motivations early on would balance out that sense of wobble in his character). The prose works very well here; it’s clean, engaging, and accessible, and drew me in with a sprinkling of solid details. It’s also capable of rising into the poetic to underscore an emotional or significant moment—the image of two ships slowly ripping each other apart is a powerful one, and keeping that metaphoric language in reserve so it could highlight the thematic climax of the piece was a smart, effective choice. There is no mistaking what the most important sentence of this story is.

There’s a lot of work being done in inference and implication, and the brand names, the ad content, the filtering of how the same news stories are reported by differently aligned outlets are all feeding back into the central thematic concern: political symbolism overtaking the personal, partisanship as identity, and a world organized around taking sides. The worldbuilding supports the theme and plot very well: no detail is wasted. “The Ambassador” is clear about what it’s addressing through allegory, stays on point, and doesn’t flatten its characters overmuch while doing it. This still feels like a story in and of itself.

It’s when I view the world of “The Ambassador” exclusively as a constructed science-fictional society—not as allegory—that it wrinkles and decoheres.

The major worldbuilding bobbles in “The Ambassador” for me starts around the question of loss of membership. While the parallel to health insurance networks and credit scores is visible, Sandra’s out-of-network dilemma doesn’t quite fit the worldbuilding already established here. Patriot Network Services—like Justice Network later on—seems to be a closed, binary-thinking ecology. I’m left wondering why they would even offer the counter-aligned options, but still warn people about consequences when they chose to use it instead of just applying them, gotcha!-style.

Systems are designed by people for a purpose, and the uneven application of consequences here leaves me unsure what behaviours the networks are trying to produce or reinforce, what emphasis they put on actual ideological purity, and how they deal with perceived traitors.

There’s also a significant gap between what people say in “The Ambassador” and what the actual organization of this world tells us. It’s ostensibly an entrenched cultural war, polarized enough to have separate towns and economies after riots forty years ago, but is somehow still one nation, with one president, and the people who hate those policies are leaving peaceably under that person?

That contradiction between rhetoric and action extends to characterization. Everyone in “The Ambassador”, barring Liam, is significantly more flexible than they let on, or than their society seems to want them to be. Sandra has a lot of grey areas and exceptions in her politics; she talks the talk, but she bought those Nike shoes. The staff at Betty’s Garden Centre seem reluctant, even as they turn Adam down, and ultimately they take that cash.

The disconnects reach down to the town names. Friedan and Schlafly are clear references to me and they communicate in terms of allegory, but they’re a little dated politically for what they’re representing here—would people whose schism was forty years ago, ostensibly in our present, have chosen those as their symbols? Why?

The result for me is an oddly soft dystopia: one where the strings are quite visible and you get enough warnings to not have to really worry; where people had riots, tore apart families and societies, and live apart, but somehow now are reserved enough to apply all kinds of moral brakes. Where there’s an entire other system for working around the rules and the consequences are never quite brutal, just expensive and embarrassing.

While it takes enough brutality out of the situation to make “The Ambassador” feel like safer, warmer reading, once the allegory is stripped away, it also makes this world feel like it could be more strongly thought through.

So what I’d suggest for polishing “The Ambassador” up is looking at everything in it with that streak of literalism: if this was saying nothing at all about the present day and was just this other world, these people’s conflicts and choices, would each element of the story make sense and flow into the next? Would a world with these rules and habits function as a world? This can be tricky adjustment, making one set of actions work on two different levels, the literal and the allegorical. But it’s the kind of work that makes a politically allegorical story feel not just like advertising, but like story: satisfying, heartfelt, thoughtful.

My second major suggestion would be to provide a little more support through the middle of “The Ambassador” for the subthread with Adam’s father. It’s supposed to be the closing image—the closing choice—of “The Ambassador”: Adam makes a choice about reaching out. However, I’m not feeling that decision is supported by the rest of the piece: I don’t see, in this draft, why the altercation between Liam and Sandra is enough to make him choose against his father—what it has to do with his father and that strained relationship. I’m fairly certain this thought is lurking in the subtext right now: I think there’s room to strengthen the impact of that ending, though, by making the connections a little clearer, and Adam’s thoughts about his father more consistently present.

Best of luck!

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

That Look In Her Eyes by Jim Racanelli

I start reading with mild interest.  Most of us have probably read stories or seen movies in which the spirit of someone who has died calls a living loved one on the phone.  So when James receives a call from his dead father, I’m thinking it’s somewhat familiar territory, though handled nicely.  I grow more interested when James calls his sister but instead reaches his brother-in-law, Bobby, who seems to expect the call.  I fall in love with this story at the line, “You were driving home last March,” when I realize James, too, is a spirit calling a loved one.  The plot twist is delightful.  I feel excited anticipation about what is to come (hoping for yet another plot twist–could Bobby also be a ghost?) and really enjoy the absurdity when James tries to prove he can’t be a ghost by arguing, “a ghost can’t pick up the phone and call another ghost.  That doesn’t even make sense.”

The story also does a nice job of using text from the first part of the story to create subtext later in the story.  After James talks to his dead father, he worries about the possibility that his father might show up at the house.  Later, when James talks to Bobby, and James decides he should go over to Bobby’s house, Bobby does everything he can to deter James from going over.  We recognize the parallels to the first situation and are able to deduce what is in Bobby’s mind.  That works very nicely.

While I really enjoy all that, some areas of the story don’t work as well as they might.

The story doesn’t seem unified.  For me, the first part of the story, in which James talks to his dead father, shows us that the father is a relentless complainer and is still stuck in that behavior after death.  We also see that James is relentless–relentlessly angry, I think, though that could be shown more clearly–and has trouble taking responsibility and apologizing.  The theme seems to be that people are stuck with their personalities and behaviors and have a hard time escaping those.  This doesn’t quite seem to fit with James, who had such a heated argument with his father that his father had a heart attack and died.  Yet the James we see in the story seems able to stay fairly calm when on the phone with his father now.  James does not seem stuck in his behaviors.  When talking to Bobby, he doesn’t seem angry.  So I don’t get a consistent sense of his personality; another way of saying it is that he seems to have changed since his father was alive.

The climax centers around the placing of blame, as James remembers being in the car accident with his wife, Jo, and Jo giving him an accusatory look as she dies.  James doesn’t actually seem to be to blame.  A drunk driver T-boned their car.  Jo seems trapped in blaming James, unable to get past that moment and rescind the blame.  This is very believable territory for me.  Years ago, my husband made me aware that I tended to blame him for everything, and once I realized that I did, indeed, do that, I was horrified and I stopped.  Spouses and family members can definitely fall into the blame game, and that game can last a lifetime–or perhaps, even longer.  So that section rings very true to me, yet it doesn’t seem to strongly connect to the rest of the story.

Let’s look at some other parts of the story in which the issue of the placement of blame arises.  James knows he’s at least partially responsible for his father’s death, though this doesn’t seem to weigh on him and he never apologizes.  Since the father doesn’t know he’s dead, he doesn’t blame James.  So the issue is touched on but not really explored.

One more situation involving transgression and blame involves Fran, James’s sister, who blames herself for the deaths of James and Jo, and Bobby, who believes he is actually the one to blame for their deaths.  Since Fran and Bobby aren’t central to the story, these aren’t adding much.  And blaming oneself is different from blaming someone else.

I think you could adjust these elements of transgression and blame to focus them around a single theme and unify the story.  If Jo blames James, perhaps James blames his father.  In the story, James implies the father is to blame for the breakup of their family, though it doesn’t seem to bother him.  Maybe it does bother him.  Maybe his mother is unhappy and alone, or died unhappy and alone.  Or maybe James blames his father for making James into a stubborn, relentless person.  In this sort of situation, perhaps the person who is being blamed can’t find rest after death, knowing someone is condemning him, and the person placing the blame also can’t find rest, feeling unsatisfied.  The person feeling blamed makes the phone call, searching for forgiveness, though he may not realize it.  In that case, maybe Fran blames James, so James keeps trying to call Fran but gets Bobby instead.  And when James goes upstairs to wake Jo, perhaps he finds Jo calling the wife of the drunk driver, who blames Jo for her husband’s death.  Or perhaps Jo is calling James’s father, who blames her for stopping James from becoming a lawyer.

I think with some changes like this, the story’s exploration of the horrific web of blame that can swallow up a family can be more focused and unified, and can carry more emotion and power.

Another area I’d like to discuss is James’s reaction when Bobby tells him that he died in a car accident.  For me, James’s reaction rings false.  He doesn’t seem to react to many things Bobby says; the first-person perspective fades away from the story, leaving us primarily with dialogue.  When Bobby tells James that James was in an accident, James seems to ignore that information.  If he was tuning Bobby out, I might understand that, but later he reacts to what Bobby says, replying, “Sounds like it should have been in my eulogy.”  Why would James say this when he thinks he’s alive?  He certainly wouldn’t use that tense.  He might say, “Sounds like it should be in my eulogy,” though even that response wouldn’t make sense to me.  A page later, James suggests that Bobby was having a bad dream when he called.  That reaction comes far too late, if that’s how James is explaining this to himself.  Later still, James has a deep insight into Bobby’s feelings, thinking “it’s like he’s at the bottom of a deep pit,” etc.  James has seemed oblivious to much of what Bobby has said, and now he seems deeply involved in the conversation.  It feels like James’s reactions are being controlled by the author, not that this is how James would really react.  That section undermined the character for me.

Finally, the opening section, up until James calls Bobby, seems a bit talky, which is a common problem with first person.  I think you could cut that down about 10% and tighten the story.

I hope these comments are helpful.  I enjoy the story and the themes you explore.

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

The action in this chapter moves along briskly. It’s clear what’s happening, and the line of the plot is straightforward, even with the flashback to the conversation with Sincerity. As a reader I have a solid picture of the protagonist—what he looks like, how he thinks, as well as who he is.

That’s all good work, and bodes well for the structure of the novel as a whole. It starts off with a literal bang and moves on from there.

What I would like to do for this Editor’s Choice is talk about the prose. I tend to advise authors not to worry about the word-by-word or the line-by-line while they’re still putting up the scaffolding of the plot. The important thing is to get the scenes blocked out and the characters moving within them.

How they do that is entirely up to the author’s individual process. Every writer has their own way of getting into the project. Some sketch sparingly and fill in later. Others throw it all in, try different ways of saying things, pile on the details as they come, then when it’s time to revise, go in with the pruning shears and cut away the undergrowth to show the structure of the story.

That’s what I see happening here. It’s a classic example of “kitchen-sink” drafting. There’s nothing wrong with it at all—as I like to say, “There is no wrong way to write a draft.” When it comes time for the line edits however, I have a few suggestions.

1. Overspecificity

One characteristic of kitchen-sink drafting is that the author puts everything in. They’re blocking out the scene in all aspects and from all angles. That means, for example, specifying what each hand is doing when a character moves. In his left hand he carried…, and in his right hand he carried… The question to ask in revision is, Does the reader need to know these exact details at this exact point? Is it impossible to understand what’s going on unless we know these particular facts? Are these facts relevant right here and now, or do they actually distract the reader from what’s happening? How much detail is just right, and how much is too much?

2. Word and phrase echoes

Another aspect of this type of process is a tendency to repeat the same words and phrases, as we can see in the excerpt above. Repetition is an effective rhetorical device, but it’s one of those things that needs a deft hand and sparing application. A little, in short, goes a long way.

In revision, see what happens when you trim down the repetitive phrases. Cut all but a few, and vary as many of the others as possible. Find different ways to say what needs to be said.

3. Wordiness

When writing draft, the goal is to get the words on the page. Sometimes that takes a bit of maneuvering, of talking around the subject until the meaning takes the shape the author is aiming for. Revision can tighten up the phrasing and make the meaning clearer. Here for example:

And most of all, he had Sincerity’s word that it was impossible for him to fail, no matter the trembling gun, no matter his aching back, no matter biting insects or sneeze-inducing pollen. Even if a mosquito were to take a whack at his neck at just the moment he fired, Sincerity would say that it’s all part of the plan. Baked in, like setting a watch 15 minutes ahead of an appointment he’d never be late for. She’d say there was no way he could ruin his moment to save the world. Every variable, calculated out to the nanosecond, was baked in good as a chocolate chip cookie.

There are some interesting images here, but these five sentences all say the same thing in five slightly different ways. Try condensing this passage into a single sentence. Think about the one or two details that are absolutely necessary here, that convey all the rest, and let those carry the narrative forward.

4. Transitions, flashbacks, and the passage of time

Movement within and between scenes can get challenging at times. When we’re telling each other stories, we often gravitate toward set phrases. And then, and so, or as we see in this chapter, that was when.

Here as elsewhere, variety is the spice of narrative, and the author’s job is to find different ways to say the same thing. It’s important to be clear that time is passing. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, sometimes the best way to do it is not to do it at all. Just move straight from one timeline to the next.

Flashbacks are a different kind of challenge. On the one hand, we need to make sure the reader is clear that the timeline has shifted. On the other, we don’t want to overstate the case.

Hence the use of the pluperfect to distinguish regular narrative past tense (she said) from the more distant past of the flashback (she had said). I tend to go minimalist here. Establish that this part of the scene is a flashback, but then shift to regular past tense. One “had” and then just go on with “said.” That does mean a clear transition back to the regular narrative, some phrase or construction that establishes the shift, but I think it’s less intrusive than a series of verbs marked off with “had.”

5. Viewpoint tagging

This happens a lot in draft. The author frequently reminds the reader (who at that point is basically themself) that THERE IS VIEWPOINT HERE, by the use of reminder words: thought, wondered, saw, and a favorite here, realized. There is often a fair amount of rhetorical questioning, too, as the author blocks the scene through the character’s internal monologue.

When it’s time to revise, it’s time to prune the excess, and think about whether and how often the reader will need to be reminded that they’re experiencing the story through the eyes and mind of a particular character. If the author does it right, they’ll only need to tag once or twice, then trust the reader to stay with the character until the scene or the viewpoint changes. It’s all about trust: the author trusting themself to tell the story clearly and effectively, then trusting the reader to follow where the author leads.

–Judith Tarr