Brought Near To Beast by Gregor Hartmann

My interest was piqued by “Brought Near to Beast” this month because of its smooth take on a set of classic centre-of-genre tropes—near-alien overclasses, dinosaurs, a researcher protagonist—one which brings a seeping political consciousness into play. However, the connections between those ideas felt, to this reader, frequently a little jerky; they didn’t always add up. So this month, I’d like to talk about continuity—how the elements of our stories connect—and what we communicate with the absences in our narratives.

“Brought Near to Beast” is a fun read: reasonably light and quick, well-focused, and with enough sense of a wider world and wider issues to feel substantial. Its clear, tidy prose foregrounds the story well, and sparks here and there with a few bright, vivid metaphors—I liked “short sullen grass” especially. The question of Suu’s real motives builds a legitimately frightening threat to combat and a sense of the overall stakes involved, and alongside Peng’s slow realization of what he might be enabling, it’s compelling enough to drive the piece.

What I’d suggest for “Brought Near to Beast”, though, is largely about connections: giving some stronger thought to how the various ideas in this story interact with and feed one another—or where they don’t.

The major issue I had with the piece was the rather short half-life of its ideas: a motivation—like the potential culling of Sapiens on the horizon—appears to drive the action of one particular scene, but after that? It near-disappears into another motivation, and isn’t picked back up. Even with Peng’s me-first attitude, there isn’t a flicker of that consideration in play when the assassination attempt goes down, and those disconnections dent the realism of Peng’s psychology and the world in general.

Likewise, the question of Peng’s relationship with the mammoths doesn’t surface between the first page and the last, and by then, it feels rather tangential. What readers have been told is important here, told is the driving issue for Peng and Bataar, has moved sufficiently by the last paragraphs that I’m unsure the ending—while basically heartwarming—still actually addresses the problem the story has set. Peng’s final choice—to stay with Bataar and build a better rapport with the herd—feels abrupt and, given how strongly his ambitions for a different, networked life have been built up just paragraphs before, somewhat counterintuitive.

That sense of disconnect shows up in the characterization as well. Peng’s ineffectual tendencies and little jealousies don’t always mesh with his claimed ambitions: he wants to cozy up to a ChoRen for professional advancement, but all he knows about his networking targets seems to come from TV shows and propaganda—and he’s ignoring a lot of the social cues Suu and the other ChoRen are throwing his way instead of using them. It’s pretty plain he’s not going to achieve his goal, even if he takes credit for saving Suu; Suu uses people as props. He has not conducted himself like someone who would care enough to issue Peng the kind of reward he’s fishing for.

In short, what I’m noticing here are absences: missing reactions, missing connections, and missing facts which, through the holes they leave, reshape the narrative in ways I’m not sure are precisely intended.

What we put on the page or imply conveys information to readers, but our absences convey information too. Readers infer deliberation out of what’s not happened, not mentioned, and how it juxtaposes with what was and has. Here, those collisions are conveying that Peng is a bad scientist, without potentially meaning to say that thing; they’re conveying that he’s somewhat sociopathic, given the casualness with which he takes learning that Bataar’s a murderer (I mean, doesn’t everyone who kills someone think they deserved it on some level?) and his absolute lack of regard for every other Sap in the world. Peng is missing his society—family, friends, associates, people to care about who aren’t Bataar—but readers fill in that he would have one, and by disregarding it, by throwing it under the bus, Peng’s simply an incredibly ethically and emotionally broken person, insecure and a bit of a fool.

There are a few strategies for finding what conclusions the absences in our narratives are feeding—for making sure the signal we’re conveying is as clean as possible. This is one of the places where critiques are possibly one’s first line of defense; there’s not much substitute for seeing how a character’s reading to other sets of eyes. But to help ensure the blanks we leave are pointing the ways we want them, it’s worthwhile to read a drafted piece with attention to just one character arc: make notes on everything that’s said about that person and deliberately reconstruct the footprint they’re leaving.

From the other side, if we can establish a cohesive idea of what each character wants and how each line they speak, silence they extend, or action they take links back to that core idea, we can clear the noise or contradiction out of that character’s expression.

This is careful and somewhat grinding work, but it’s worthwhile to make sure we’re communicating signal, not noise. That importance struck me while wondering why Suu and the other ChoRen’s dialogue is so choppy. The overclock explanation comes a bit late, and from a linguistic standpoint—dependent on how the SophX implants are supposed to work—either he’s going to think in complete sentences anyway, or in a more abstract form that wouldn’t necessitate dropping particles in his audible speech. Particle drop is a syntactic translation question or a marker of linguistic play, not one of resource management.

The impression I was left with was that Suu’s speech patterns have ended up quite close to the stereotype of an Asian person speaking broken English, in a story where Chinese sociopolitical concepts are centred, where the characters are Asian and Mongolian—and the protagonist is insecure, social-climbing, bootlicking, and jealous.

A picture is eventually painted. A conclusion’s being led to by those narrative facts.

We’ve talked a lot in previous months about making sure your choices are choices, not accidents, and that’s a reference that’s going to be inevitably read as an authorial choice on how to depict others. Just as Peng’s shortcuts are communicating—and it’s up to us as writers to know what’s being communicated—the characterization choices in “Brought Near to Beast” are too, and I’d suggest they’re worth reexamining.

Best of luck with the piece!

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

Poison Wind-Chapter 1 by J. Kyle Kelsey

–Judith Tarr

The 10,000 Year Civil War by Christopher Halk

–Judith Tarr

Tomorrow’s Place by Jim McDougall

I like the concept of this story. Magical artifacts are always fun, and when they come from mysterious junk shops, that’s even better. I also appreciate the punch line. “Dead right,” indeed.

I have a couple of suggestions for the next round of revisions.

First, the character arc could be smoother and more consistent. The story opens with Lucy as the skeptic, bored and out of sorts and referring to the contents of the shop as “garbage.” It’s Jack who’s the believer.

After this beginning, the reader expects Lucy to keep on being a hard sell. But as soon as Jack buys the radio, suddenly she’s fine with listening to it. We need to see how she gets to this point. For example, when she agrees with Jack, she might be less willing; she may say “Sure,” but without enthusiasm. She’s just saying it to maintain family harmony.

There’s another abrupt shift once Jack turns the radio on. She immediately realizes what it’s doing, and suddenly she’s wildly enthusiastic about it. Now it’s Jack who’s the skeptic, and he’s both rude and insulting—until the station starts playing the disaster at the factory. Then he’s the believer again, so much so that he insists on physically investigating; and now it’s Lucy who’s the skeptic again, so much so that she stomps off and leaves him to it.

In revision I’d suggest some careful rethinking of the characters’ reactions and their interactions. Make sure the shifts from skeptic to believer and vice versa progress logically. Make it a little clearer in the beginning that in spite of Lucy’s tiredness and her lack of patience with Jack’s fascination with old junk, she’s the imaginative one.

Maybe he makes it clear that he’s just looking for a cheap radio, and she makes a joke about “If it’s that old, it must be magic.” Then when she’s proved right, Jack’s nastiness makes more sense. Jack doesn’t like to be wrong.

Likewise, when Jack shifts toward acceptance of the truth, give it a little more space. Show how he comes around to it. Does he think to apologize to Lucy for doubting her? If he doesn’t, would Lucy call him on it? Or does she stay on the moral high ground?

None of this needs to take up a lot of story space. The right line or two in the right place will do it.

The other suggestion I would make is to rethink the structure of the ending. The shift of scene from Lucy abandoning Jack to Lucy dreaming about the factory’s collapse is confusing on two fronts. First, it’s not clear that it’s a dream, until we’re told in so many words.

Second, would Lucy really do that? She’s the one who believes wholeheartedly in the radio’s predictive powers. If it’s broadcasting a disaster, does it make sense for her to go away and leave Jack? If she really is that pissed off at his general assholery, wouldn’t she get all or partway home and then turn back because he might be in danger? Would she leave him like that, ignore his absence, and go calmly to sleep, considering what the radio predicted?

Much of the dream sequence would work if she were stomping along in a temper rather than lying in bed asleep. She could hallucinate the walls falling, and hear Jack’s voice—then turn and run back, praying she isn’t too late.

That would close the gap of several hours between her dumping Jack and her waking up from the dream. Where is Jack during those hours? Why didn’t he just make the call and then come home? Would he stay around the factory if he knows it’s going to come down?

There’s also the question of how long the interval is between the radio’s prediction and the event it predicts. The baseball game happens 24 hours later. The factory seems to collapse much sooner. Is there any particular logic in play here? If so, how do Jack and Lucy figure it out?

One final note: Think about the emotional temperature of the ending. Make sure it’s high enough. “It was time to look for Jack” needs to be stronger, more urgent, less passive. Let us feel the tension. Lucy’s “flash of cold understanding and hot grief” is lovely—that’s what we want to feel in the whole scene. Then the punch line truly is a blow to our emotional center.

–Judith Tarr

Snake Head by C.K. Attner

“Snake Head” drew me in this month with its examination of violence and what makes strength in an eerie, evocative, brutal little world. It draws a swift, sympathetic picture through implication, but doesn’t quite resolve in the final paragraphs—and the author’s notes aren’t sure about where to take the story next. So this month, I’d like to discuss building our capacity to figure out why a piece isn’t quite landing right: one way to diagnose which direction to move with a draft where it’s unclear what isn’t working.

The standout feature of “Snake Head” is definitely the atmosphere: Huey’s narrative arc isn’t precisely a new one, but the tiny universe he’s trying to escape drips and molders and curls around the edges, bolstered by the persistent use of physical, bodily metaphors: water that “smells like armpit”, the sun biting down. The snakeskin peeling like sunburn is palpable in my fingertips. “Muscles cocked” is just up to the line of potentially overdone, but in context, it really works: a body like a weapon. The effect is that the entire seaside world of “Snake Head” feels like a human body: humid and vulnerable, breakable down to parts, a site for hurt.

That reinforces the slow accretion of details and incidents that build up to the choice Huey makes—and fails. There’s a sense in which the quiet of this story both underscores and balances out, at the same time, its brutality. Taken together, Able’s winced-away-from sexual coercion, Uncle Pete’s violent wolverine stories, and parents who keep having children just because slaves are too much trouble—because slaves fight back—paint a horrifying picture. But the way that information is dripped out even over a rather short piece, the emotional quiet with which Huey conveys it, help keep that brutality from being a full-on slap into readers’ faces (or at least, it did for this reader).

There’s a concern in the author’s notes about present tense, but for me, that choice also works well. Tense and person choices are fundamentally, when we break them down, about whether the basic effects and associations readers have with that tense work with or against the kind of story we’re trying to tell. One of the big pluses of present tense can be a sense of immediacy and vividness; “Snake Head” capitalizes on that feeling with its imagery, its slightly shocky emotional tone, and centering around a question of ethical choice—what will Huey do in this moment? That means the present tense is working with the other elements of the story, not against them: what it brings to the table resonates with, backs up, and strengthens what other aspects of craft are trying to create.

The key here is how these elements reinforce each other: the metaphor set in agreement with the emotional tone and thematics, the narrative style in agreement with the core question about ethics and kindness and power, the tense agreeing with the tone. All those points of craft, every choice that was made about them, are pulling as a team toward specific goals.

Where “Snake Head” isn’t firing on all cylinders yet, I think—and this is the diagnostic!—is where elements aren’t pulling with that team, or are pulling away from it, diverting focus.

There’s a small confusion as to the supernatural element—or lack thereof—in “Snake Head”: if there’s a power in Fayt’s gaze or if he’s functionally just the first basically kind person Hugh’s ever met, and Hugh’s desperation to know why all the violence of his family doesn’t seem to touch this man is less about the supernatural than emotional strength and different systems of power. I think it’s not precisely a weakness to have that slightly unclear, but it’s enough of a small confusion to help create a split in the story’s focus.

That split grows into an open question of what “Snake Head” is centred on: whether it’s the idea of the snake head—something that can still poison even dead, a relic of violence, violence’s reach—or the image of the gaze, of the idea of being seen, the eye. Those ideas aren’t exactly in competition, but they’re the elements that I think aren’t yet working in tandem in the ways the present tense does with the imagery and thematics. They fork instead, and as I reader, I’m not sure which one is the one to put weight on, to make the central image in my head.

That’s why the last lines fall flat for me. It ends on the eye, but I’m not sure “Snake Head” was built on the eye. I’m told, as a reader, this was the way to go, which makes me wonder if the early symbol—prompted by the title!—was the wrong thing to centre.

I think it’s thoroughly repairable, and probably without too much rewriting: the only thing that needs doing is to find a way to make the central image of “Snake Head” pull together with all the other elements of craft—unify it, and unify the story with it. It’s possible to not choose one or the other, but both, here: there’s already the ghost of a link between the snake heads—”lizard eyes”—and the silver-gold eyes of the Geemoh people, and that might work too, because it finds a way to get both those elements back on the team.

But largely this is a question of decision-making: sifting through what the early draft has to find what the finished draft wants to say, and how. It’s the diagnostic process—asking people for eyes, yes, but also charting which bundles of ideas go in the same direction—that can help identify that message, and the ways to get it out that are already building themselves within the story.

Best of luck with the piece!

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