The Unknown Ones, Chapter 1 by Peter Kelly

I love historical fantasy. Historical fantasy is my jam. Add Celts, and pointers toward Roman Britain—you’ve got me with some of my favorite things.

This chapter has a lot of potential. I can see a story taking shape. It hasn’t really gone anywhere yet, but it is moving. This may be a long book, as historical novels can turn out to be, but that’s fine, as long as the story stays in motion and the characters and their actions and reactions keep the reader turning the pages.

My main advice to a first-time writer would be to keep writing, and not worry about doing it “right.” Just get the story down and the characters blocked out. Let the words come in the way they want to come. Worry about revision after the draft is finished, when it will be time to go back and tidy up and sort out the various threads of the story.

That being said, since I’m here to offer a more general set of pointers as well as to address the chapter at hand, here are a few things I noticed as I read. I would say don’t worry about making the fixes now, and don’t let that worry get in the way of finishing the draft. Finishing is the most important thing. Just take what I say here and file it for the revision phase.

First, viewpoint. There’s no doubt about who is telling the story. We’re reminded in every sentence. We’re told Calgacus thinks, feels, suspects, knows, understands, ponders, and so on. I call these “viewpoint tags,” and while it can be helpful to sprinkle in a few to keep the reader apprised of the camera angle, a little (as with so much else in writing) goes a long way. Most of the tags don’t need to be there; the choice of words, the nature of the reactions, the feelings and opinions and biases that come through the narrative, will tell the reader all she needs to know about who Calgacus is and how he feels about what he’s seeing.

Another layer of viewpoint is a bigger one, and that’s whether this is the right character to tell this part of the story. All the important things that happen here are happening to someone else. Calgacus is pretty strictly an observer, and in that respect he’s less a protagonist than a plot device. He describes the ceremony and its participants, and delivers exposition about who the people are and what they’re doing and why.

This is particularly noticeable when he Explains Things to Bricriu, on the pretext that Bricriu is too much of a jock to have paid attention in history class. While the reader may need or want to know these things, having Calgacus explain them to his older brother shows just a little too much of the scaffolding underneath the structure of the story. We want to feel as if we’re inside the story, experiencing it with the characters. We end up wondering if Bricriu really has paid this little attention to one of the key elements of his religion, and if he has been that oblivious for so many years, whether he’d really bother to sit still when his brother starts godsplaining. Or would he just blow on past and leave Calgacus expounding to the air? And finally, would Bricriu really know that little about something that is so very important to his own future, let alone that of his tribe?

There’s also the question of why Calgacus isn’t the one who’s becoming a man this year. While I love the details and the exposition, as a reader I’m wondering when Calgacus will start protagging. Why is he the observer, and Bricriu the one who actually acts? If he has to be left out of the manhood ceremony for reasons that move the plot through to its eventual conclusion, what can he do here to show more of his active side? Is there something, some plot-piece, that he can be in charge of, that lets us see how he’ll be acting as he goes on?

Explaining and expositing don’t count. It should be something he does, some action he takes, or something he says that precipitates action—to which he then has to react.

Second, dialogue. The characters “quip” and joke around, and it seems they’re trying for some kid-level realism and comic relief in among the descriptions and the explanations. The problem with this in the draft is that the joking doesn’t move the story forward, and it clashes emotionally and stylistically with the ritual around it. I rather like Bricriu’s potty mouth, but the joshing and bickering slows down the narrative and keeps us from being able to really feel the power of what’s happening around it.

In revision, ask whether most of it really needs to be there. Some does help character, and we get a picture of an expanding cast of major and minor players, which is good. But again, a little goes a long way.

Third, names and naming. I’m a little confused about this, because some names are standard Celtic, such as Bricriu, but then there’s the Romanized Calgacus of the Epidii, and then there’s Martyn, whose name comes from another tradition altogether. Names have power, and in historical fantasy, that can be literal. Names make the magic. If the names aren’t consistent, and there isn’t a clear reason for that inconsistency, they undermine the worldbuilding.

Now mind you, I can give you a perfectly solid historical reason to have a character named Tiffany in your Viking historical, but that reason has to be clear and up front. If I’m writing in the viewpoint of a tweenaged boy in Britain, unless that boy is Roman or part Roman, he’s not going to give himself a Roman name. (Is he part Roman? Ione has a Greek flavor.) He’ll call himself something Celtic, and he’ll call his tribe by its Celtic name. Likewise his brother Martyn—what would the Celtic form of that be?

I would work on the names as carefully as the rest of the details, many of which, as lovely as they are, somewhat front-load the narrative here; I’d cut them about about 75% and save them to be woven in later where they’ll be more directly relevant. The depth of the research is clear to see. Let the names show it, too.

Best of luck with this. It’s a very good start. I’ll be interested to see how it progresses.

–Judith Tarr

Downbound by Victoria Gregg

Beyond The Ether by Penelope Lee

“Beyond the Ether” caught my eye this month—and it was a hard choice between strong pieces!—with the wonderfully communicated, ambivalent, permeating emotion it packs into only a thousand words. This is a piece with an impact, and one of the rare workshop stories where the core relationship is a friendship—one that’s messy, complex, and full of hurt. So this month, I’d like to talk about symbolism and implication, and how they generate emotion.

One of the strategies that makes “Beyond the Ether” work for me is that it’s, on the prose level, a fairly straightforward read. The narrative voice is clear and conversational, with a simple structure and clean prose, and no tangents for explaining worldbuilding to distract from the unfolding situation. The story is a clear and easy read. The power that drives it is generated in the story’s symbols, and how the information on the page can be put together by readers to draw conclusions about what’s happening off the page—which is one of the most viable strategies for making very short fiction work. Flash fiction might be overall considered an art of implication: with so little space to work with, each sentence has to imply at least as much as it says in order to get a whole story on the page.

And “Beyond the Ether” starts that work immediately. It’s clear throughout the story that the tree stands in for more than one aspect of the situation: the protagonist, her friend, her friendship, the idea of freedom, of what’s outside. It establishes a solid visual anchor for readers before sliding into the story of this broken friendship and how it fits into the pieces of an obviously broken world, and does so in a way that’s vivid, vibrant, deep, and tactile. The idea of a tree leaning through a fence, straining its leaves outward—described in not just colour but twisted alteration, shelter and shade—is strongly kinetic, as is “I’ve got so many dreams. You used to put them into little marbles and ground them down to sand.” They’re metaphors that go directly to the hands, and embody the protagonist’s situation in a way that dodges cliché and spotlights, for readers, what clues we’re supposed to look for about how the world of the story and the Center work.

The worldbuilding in “Beyond the Ether” is interestingly done, for a story told so straightforwardly: true to an oppressive environment, the protagonist never outright expresses an opinion on the awfulness of Center life. She talks around it, leaves little facts like breadcrumbs, and we fill in the blanks as readers, characterizing her situation through the comparisons she makes or what’s left unsaid. There’s a dystopian world of horrors outside the walls of this situation, but it’s only looked at sideways, treated as part of the regular fabric of the protagonist’s world, and the way the hints add up is compelling—and still vague enough to let readers’ imaginations run.

The same technique is at work in talking about the story’s core: a mutiny and a messy, broken friendship. “Beyond the Ether” never actually says outright why the relationship between the protagonist and her friend happened in the first place, why it went bad, why it’s over—which is a core piece of information for emotionally engaging with the story. But the story gives readers that information incredibly clearly in the subtext, in little pieces. The entire contrast between why the protagonist chose Jack and a heterosexual romantic relationship and following the rules, keeping her head down, and escaping that way over the intense intimacy with her former friend, mutiny, and flight is implied by the collision between:

“It keeps us safe but it also can kill us. You used to say that a lot.”

—and—

“But I was hungry for you to give me that special treatment, to call me over from across the rec room to the little circle of cadets you’d created.”

—and—

“Jack says ideas don’t mean much if they never come to fruition and I think there’s a lot of truth in that. He helped me pass my flight exam. So he and I could be co-pilots”—that Jack’s brand of affection helped her be more and bigger to keep them together, instead of the friend’s steps to keep the protagonist small to keep them together; a concrete friendship instead of the idea of one. That’s an incredibly complex, difficult, and real set of dynamics rendered in the space of three lines, capped off by “If you were less stupid, you’d get out of here with me.”

That’s ultimately what I loved about this piece: how it manages to tackle the difference between love that elevates and love that crushes, in so little space, without the feeling of density: just by dropping the right puzzle pieces and the right clues to hold in one’s hand.

The author’s notes asked about the ending, and whether it feels complete enough, and I’m uncertain it does. While there’s a sense of completion there, I’m not sure the ending as it’s currently written brings the emotional arc to a close, or opens it up for a new implied, off-the-page direction. I think some of that problem’s in the sentence level: By the time we reach “Forget me”, we’re textually far from the idea that it’s what she’s hoping for—just in terms of literal page-distance—and so the sentence reads closer to a stand-alone imperative. It muddies the tone a touch with a despair and self-destruction that hadn’t been in evidence before, and that might be a source for any confusion generated by the ending.

However, the other potential problem is that I’m not sure just the act of forgetting would bring this relationship to a close, or bring the protagonist in line with a new direction. The problem, to be quite literal, is still open-ended. It doesn’t feel like an ending to me, because it hasn’t ended.

If I have a suggestion for a more satisfying ending, it might be to approach that problem from the thematic level. “Beyond the Ether” isn’t a plot-driven piece: it’s a study of a relationship, and the study of a resolution—a decision already made, if made conflicted and in grief and maybe not with 100% resolution. What moves within it, the driving narrative force, is the protagonist’s progress from grief to something different; something more. I’d suggest that getting a stronger sense of where she is going emotionally and crafting an ending line that points to that goal would be a good starting point for finding the right closing lines for “Beyond the Ether”. Which door she is opening, or which door she’s closing—but on the level of the emotional decision, rather than her choice to go into space with Jack.

It’s a small but significant piece of work, and I think that’ll really bring “Beyond the Ether” into focus—and take it from affecting to outright powerful.

Best of luck!

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

Eyes Of Glass, Chapter One by Scott Christian

–Judith Tarr

West Of California, Chapter 8 by Steve Brady

This is an intriguing chapter. With the help of the synopsis, it comes through pretty well for a cold read; there’s enough background information to get a sense of who the characters are and what the larger story is about.

The narrative voice is distinctive, with a wry sense of humor. As I read, I can actually hear a couple of my college friends talking in that same tone, telling a long, rambling tale in between hits of controlled substances. It very much has that vibe.

What I’d like to suggest in the next round of revisions is further work on the structure of the story. There is so much going on, so many things happening over so many years. Much of it we do need to know in order to understand what’s happening in the story-present, and there is a clear attempt to break up the passages of summary and synopsis with bits of dialogue and character interaction.

That’s a good start. As a reader I’d like more air in the story-room—by which I mean, slowing down for the dramatized scenes, giving them more space, with less synopsis in between. Do we need the blow-by-blow of Laura and Andy’s life and travels, or can we move faster from major event to major event? Can the dramatized scenes fold in more backstory as characters talk and interact, and dispense with at least some of the summaries?

One way to write backstory like this is to tell it in a series of flashbacks with characters acting and interacting. For example in the Tucson sequence, rather than summarizing what Laura did and with whom over those years, the story might be told in a handful of scenes. The seeds of those scenes are already there: Laura’s meeting with Brad in the midst of her empty life of smoking and painting, and how and when she introduces him to Andy; a vignette of Brad caring for Andy while Laura takes the leap into signing up for courses, in which we see how they all feel about it, and maybe we get to feel Laura’s sense of freedom with maybe a stab of guilt; the rave and the party (which might be combined for further narrative economy); the day Laura finds out Brad is leaving.

The last scene is partly written, but it needs more. More emotional complications. More resistance from Brad. More friction—because friction is how things move in this universe, including stories.

Transitions between scenes don’t need to be written out as such (“Two years went this way,” for example). It’s quite acceptable to jump from scene to scene with a bit that establishes where and when it stands in relation to the last one—Brad might say to Laura, “I’ve been spinning my wheels for two years. I’m bored. I want out. I’m going to New York.” And then Laura reacts, and maybe Andy does something in reaction to that. Maybe there’s an argument. When it’s over, Brad has been backed into a corner—and how does he feel about that? Trapped? Pissed? Resigned? A combination of all three? And then on to the next important event, which in this case would be a scene set in New York.

None of these scenes needs to be long or elaborate. The word count may not be a whole lot more than is already there in the summary. It’s the difference between passive voice and active, between a story summed up from a distance and one that’s happening right in front of the reader.

Exposition definitely has its place, and so does synopsis, but what brings a story to life is characters acting, moving, talking, living–sometimes in messy ways, with complicated feelings. Then the reader gets to experience that life with them.

–Judith Tarr