This month OWW welcomes our new Fantasy Resident Editor, Amal El-Mohtar.

Amal El-Mohtar is an author, editor, and critic, a Locus Award winner for short fiction, a Nebula nominee, and a three time Rhysling Award winner. She edits Goblin Fruit, a quarterly journal of fantastical poetry, and is a contributor to NPR Books and the LA Times, and a member of Down and Safe: A Blake’s 7 podcast. We’re thrilled to have Amal join us at OWW.

“Nobody Walks” by Blaine Theriot

This is a smoothly written piece that is well-paced, well-structured and very readable; where I see the need for improvements is mostly at the level of voice, character and world-building.

I’ll start by answering the author’s immediate concerns:

Am I being over / under descriptive? The level of description is fine, but its use and direction could benefit from further scrutiny.

Does the dialogue flow? It does! Congratulations!

Do you care about the MC? That depends on if the main character is Leolen or Takari. I despised Leolen and really didn’t want to see him as any kind of hero, not even anti-, but thought he could make an interesting antagonist to a disillusioned or conflicted Takari.

Now to unpack that.

On the level of world-building, I’m always a bit annoyed to see obvious real-world analogues to fantasy ethnicities and cultures done to no purpose; in “Nobody Walks,” I winced at the evocation of Japan in the names (Takari, Mujakina – so far as I can tell these are words that approximate meanings in Japanese but aren’t actually names at all, any more than someone would be named “Extortion” or “Without Guile” in English) as well as in the “slanted eyes” remark that Leolan makes. Immediately I ask: what is the purpose of this analogue? What are you trying to achieve? Why are you trying to associate Dacian with Japanese in your reader’s eyes? Are you deliberately setting out to make Leolan reflect some dire racial politics for reasons of setting?

These are complicated questions with many potentially valid answers, and it’s entirely possible that there are indeed answers that will be developed in further chapters, but the material presented in this one gives me pause. I like that Leolen is set up first to be generously saving the day but then is revealed to be a ruthless butcher – but the text as written makes me uncertain about whether I’m supposed to see him as a villain or a successfully dangerous protagonist. I’m left with two potential readings:

•  That Takari is meant to be the protagonist, eventually, one who’ll be shocked and disillusioned by the massacre of legitimately angry farmers;
• That Leolen is meant to be the protagonist and that we as readers are meant to read his brutality as efficient, single-minded loyalty to his troupe, Empire or command.

If it’s the first scenario, we need a lot more of Takari’s voice and thoughts, and indeed I’d argue the scene would be far stronger, more nuanced and complex from his point of view; imagine experiencing the fear, the relief, then the horror from his perspective, instead of from Leolan’s coolly removed and entirely self-assured one. You’d have a good opportunity to really build up both characters in layers; as it is, your introduction of Leolan seems to promise some glimpse of the inside of his head, given his memory, but then you abandon it in order to have the ending be more surprising.

If it’s the second scenario, I urge you to question the whole project from the ground up, even if the world-building isn’t what interests you, because your answers will and should inform every character decision going forward.

Again, it comes down to what you are trying to accomplish. Where representations of imperialism and its attendant wars are concerned, I confess I take a lot of persuading if you’re trying to argue anything but Imperialism Is Bad (and trust me – all fiction is arguing something, consciously or not, whether it’s fast-paced adventure fiction or slow lyrical fantasy, whether it’s high-minded allegory or grimdark realism). There are many variations on this! Imperialism Is Bad, But People Try to Do Good; Imperialism is Bad, But [Some Alternative] Is Worse; Imperialism is Bad, Let’s Tear It Down. But to begin from the premise that Imperialism Is Kind of Okay Because Our Protagonist is Good at Being Bad is a shaky foundation for a story.

If you want to keep evocations of Japan in the story, I’d  recommend doing a lot of reading and thinking about why, and I’d also recommend these resources:

Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s Writing the Other: http://www.writingtheother.com/

G. O’Neill’s Japanese Names: https://t.co/sxaO75FRv1

If this seems like overkill for a fantasy story, just bear in mind how dislocating it would be for a reader fluent in Japanese to encounter these names and representations in a story, how jarring; it’s certainly often happened to me with Arabic, where I can see the shape of a language I speak twisted out of true because it looks pretty or scary to someone who doesn’t actually expect anyone who understands it to also read in English.

A few more technical observations: I think you could very usefully cut the opening paragraph out of this story. It muddles the perspective by beginning with dialogue, as if someone present is speaking it, only to pull away from that, indicate the speaker is actually remembered speech, and introduce Leolan in a very different light immediately afterwards: first we see Leolan as a boy, then as someone who stumbles, after which he is suddenly someone who is coolly in command at all times. The way it’s presented just seems like a contradiction, not like Leolan himself contains contradictions.

A little later,  there’s this passage:

 The headman was yelling right back in Dacian but it wasn’t hard to pick up the gist. I’ll stick you bastard, I’ll kill you fucker or something to that effect. The two men bellowing in different languages might have been funny under different circumstances.

This seems to imply that Leolan can’t really understand Dacian, but shortly thereafter he’s offering to speak it with fluency. I’d suggest making it clear either way.

To recap: this is a genuinely engaging piece that demonstrates strong command of pace and dialogue, knows how to raise and lower tension very effectively, and was enjoyable to read. I think there’s a lot to work with in terms of asking the right questions of your project and world-building, but also that those questions and their answers will be in service of richer characters and settings.

 

“Matched Set” by Aimee Ogden

“Matched Set” caught my eye this month for how efficiently it’s layered. In just 1500 words, it tells a complete story with a significant thematic and emotional punch—without ever feeling rushed, irregularly paced, or awkward. So this month, I’d like to talk about small stories, layering, and how to pack the most into every sentence without slowing the reader down.

While “Matched Set” isn’t spinning out an especially new idea—there’s a whole body of work on bad relationships and their power dynamics out there—the strength here is the smooth execution, where each element of the story boosts and supports the others and most of what’s said is said in the readers’ conclusions, not explicitly on the page.

There’s an art to getting the most said in the smallest space possible—the art that makes poetry work. When we write stories that fit more on the inside of a sentence than the space it takes up on a page, there’s one major tool we use: tapping into the buttons readers already have installed. While it means knowing your audience well, we all carry around cultural presumptions, set ideas, and assumptions about How Things Work. In linguistics, there’s a term for this concept: scripts. And working with those scripts can evoke a whole idea in just a few words.

What “Matched Set” does so well—and how it fits so much story in such a little space—is effectively work to not just evoke cultural scripts about men, women, and relationships, but undermine them instantly. It shows up in places large and small: Evelyn’s refusal of a mixed cocktail in favour of a beer, the way she rattles off baseball stats and is good at math and it impresses him, because he doesn’t expect it. The explicit statement that she doesn’t care if she chips a nail. Evelyn only outright says, once, that she’s Not Like Other Girls™ but these little moments—and his reaction to them—add up, like silt, to not only advance the plot and flesh out her character, but to say basically everything about the story’s thematic message and build a tangible atmosphere.

“Matched Set” spends a lot of its small space actively evoking stereotypical scripts about What Women Are Like at the same time that it completely undermines them. And then, with Evelyn’s slow cornering into her tie-pin self, completely undermines that—takes the notion that by being One of the Guys her story would end differently, and sets that notion on fire.

The effect of having the story so often set up your assumptions and then twist them is subtly and pervasively unsettling. Reading “Matched Set” feels menacing and tense, and that driving emotion is underscored by how obvious it is how this affair is going to end, and how much Evelyn stays still because she doesn’t want that to be true.

That tension’s further ramped up by the nice touch of leaving the man unnamed. He’s undefinable and thus powerful; he’s the man, the centre of the story, but simultaneously, “Matched Set” does its dislocation trick again by pulling the centre of the story back to Evelyn and the other discarded women, making them the real people in this narrative. They are named, and he is just “the man”; he’s an accessory just as he’s worked so hard to make them his accessories. The tug-of-war embodied in just the naming conventions supports the overall off-kilter feeling in this piece, and contributes to the tight feeling of a relationship that’s war.

Finally, there is a tension to knowing exactly which terrible end something is heading for, and watching it fall, and fall, and fall; it’s the driving emotion of a lot of horror fiction. “Matched Set” exploits that feeling amazingly well, and paired with the constant, slight destabilizing of readerly assumptions being tweaked and corrected, it jumps past being another story about bad relationships into something intensely effective, that makes its point and gets out of there before belabouring that point.

There is one point which could potentially be trouble for readers or editors: ultimately, “Matched Set” is at its core what the Strange Horizons editorial team used to refer to as a Bad Man Learns Better story.

Evelyn’s internalized a lot of misogyny: She’s certain the other women her unnamed partner wears were inadequate, confusing the pendant’s attempt to protect her with possessiveness or competition. She cracks jokes about other women’s weight, certain it’ll prove she’s one of the cool ones. While “Matched Set” evokes a very real personality type—the woman who considers herself Not Like Other Girls—the plot of the story is functionally an illustration of how that person’s ideas are wrong and she is promptly sorry.

I think the ending spikes that somewhat—Evelyn is still a fighter, and she’s learning the subtle ways in which the women who are his jewelry fight back. The dominant emotion isn’t a narrative smugness; it’s rage. But generally, regardless of how well-built a machine this piece is, it’s still a machine whose purpose is something that is sometimes hard to place with magazines or readers. There isn’t really anything I’d suggest to change. “Matched Set” does its job well. It’s just a job that might take a few tries to complete in the submissions pile.

Overall, an extremely strong example of how building a piece on the littlest things can produce a story that’s highly effective.

Best of luck!

–Leah Bobet

Author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (October 2015)

“Donnie” by Angraecus Daniels

Is the relationship between a singer and his audience symbiotic? And can that relationship survive when the singer is now only a ghost? This is the very interesting idea behind “Donnie.” I become very involved in the story with the explanation of this relationship and the science behind it. The idea feels fresh and different, and the relationship between ghost and audience poses a difficult challenge for the first-person protagonist. The plot has some nice escalation when the audience breaks into the stadium to be with Donnie.
I think there are several ways the story could be strengthened, mainly involving character and plot. The protagonist seems inconsistent to me, and I have a hard time understanding him and caring about him. Apparently, before the story began, he was so upset about the relationship between Donnie and his fans that he shot and killed Donnie, the one violent act of his life. This confuses me for several reasons. First, the protagonist seems to be a spellcaster of some kind, focused on magic. Why would he kill someone using a gun? More than that, the protagonist I see within the story seems not to care much about Donnie at all. When asked to stop Ghost Donnie from calling out to his followers from the stadium, the protagonist says it’s not his problem. He seems to have no desire to stop Ghost Donnie for half the story. If he was upset enough about the living Donnie to kill him, why isn’t he equally if not more upset about what Ghost Donnie is doing? I think he killed Donnie in the first place to free the fans trapped in this relationship with him. Doesn’t he care about the fans now?

If I imagine myself in the protagonist’s place, and I’d killed Donnie to stop this destructive relationship, then I’d be really angry at myself and upset that Donnie had come back as a ghost and was causing an even worse problem. I’d be begging for a chance to go to the stadium and destroy Ghost Donnie, especially if I knew spells that might banish a ghost. So I feel a major disconnect between the backstory and the present character.

I also find it difficult to care about the protagonist. One key reason we care about a character is that we see him struggling to achieve a goal. When he doesn’t have a clear goal for quite a while, that makes me not care about him. Once he does take on the goal of stopping Ghost Donnie, he doesn’t seem to struggle that much or to be terribly invested in the outcome. For me, he seems fairly detached. He seems to be most upset at the stadium owner for making money from concerts, which is not the focus of the conflict or the story. I also have a hard time making sense of this, because stadiums are built and events are held in response to demand, and as you explain, it’s human nature to form these sorts of relationships. Even without the stadium, Donnie could sing and others could become his fans. So the protagonist seems concerned about something that’s unrelated to the conflict and something that doesn’t concern me, which puts me at a distance from him.

The fact that the protagonist has no clear goal for the first half of the story has important repercussions on the plot. The protagonist’s goal drives the plot, and if the protagonist doesn’t have one, then the story tends to meander and lack focus. That’s what happens for the first half of the story, up until the protagonist says, “Get me a bag of rock salt and an internet connection.” If, instead, the protagonist is struggling from the opening of the story to be taken to the stadium so he can attempt to destroy Ghost Donnie, I would be much more involved in the story and would care more about the protagonist. He could have many obstacles to overcome–maybe the stadium has hired someone else to banish Ghost Donnie; maybe the prison officials won’t allow him to leave. Maybe he tries to destroy Donnie remotely and fails. Finally he convinces them, but maybe one of the guards who accompanies him is a fan of Donnie’s and very angry at what the protagonist did. That could provide more problems and conflict later.

Then as soon as the protagonist arrives at the stadium he can struggle to use his skills to banish Ghost Donnie. In addition to pursuing this goal sooner, he could also struggle more. When magic is used to solve a problem, the author runs the risk of making the solution seem convenient. That’s what happens here. I don’t know why the magic would succeed or fail at banishing Donnie; I don’t know what key requirements need to be satisfied or how this challenges the protagonist. Right now, he seems to try several things and then Donnie creates a vortex that ends up sucking him into oblivion. That seems pretty convenient. If I knew that the protagonist was struggling to create a vortex from the beginning to suck Donnie into oblivion, then I could feel satisfied when this happens at the end. Instead, it seems to come out of nowhere. So you could set up that the solution is a vortex. Then, in the midst of the protagonist’s struggle to create this, I think the plot also needs a turn when the protagonist takes a radically new approach to achieving this goal. This will create a third act to your two-act story, which will make the plot more surprising and emotional. He could try all of his techniques and fail. Then he could realize Donnie is too powerful for the protagonist to create the vortex. He needs Donnie himself to create the vortex. How? By letting the fans into the stadium, so Donnie will try to suck them in by creating a vortex. Then the protagonist could fight off the police and the owner to open the doors and let the fans in. And Donnie could create the vortex to suck in the fans and unintentionally destroy himself.

Another possibility for a third act would be for the fans to break in, break the circle, free Donnie, and Donnie could form a huge vortex to suck them in. Then the protagonist would really have to struggle to stop Donnie and save the fans.

Suspense is another aspect of the plot that could be strengthened, by establishing dangers in advance. For almost the entire story, I don’t know what’s at stake besides the stadium owner’s ability to book more events into this venue. If I knew early on that Donnie wanted to suck all the fans into him and take them all into the afterlife, that would be something I could feel suspense about. But I don’t know that danger exists until a few paragraphs before the end. Also, if I knew that breaking the circle would free Donnie, I could worry about that, particularly if there was some threat, such as a fan loose in the stadium, or a guard who loves Donnie. But I don’t know that’s a danger until Gardner has already blocked the threat from breaking the circle. Establishing threats earlier could make the story much more involving.

I hope my comments are helpful. You’ve set up a fascinating, fresh situation that illuminates the whole fan/celebrity dynamic in a new way.

Jeanne Cavelos–editor, author, director of Odyssey

THE FALL CHAPTER 2 by Seona Churchward

Much writing advice focuses on crafting elegant and purposeful sentences. An equal amount of attention is given to the structure of scenes, stories, and novels. But one tool that is the most overlooked is also the most important.

Paragraphing.

The paragraph is the basic unit of storytelling.

Paragraphing controls the pace of a narrative and can make it move faster or slower, without changing a single word. Paragraphing can hide information and reveal it. Paragraphing can ease the work of the reader or challenge them to pay more attention.

But paragraphing isn’t just important for the impact it has on readers. Paragraphing is a tool that can help writers too. Changing the paragraphing of a scene can show a writer where we’re missing story beats and character reactions. It can reveal places where we’re repeating ourselves and can make cuts.

And the thing about paragraphing is this: there isn’t a prescriptive way to do it, a single right or wrong way. A good writer develops an awareness of how paragraphs affect the story and then plays with the paragraphs to get the effect they want.

Different paragraphing can even take a good story and make it great. Chapter 2 of THE FALL, this month’s editor’s choice, is an example of good writing that I think could be made stronger just by working with the paragraphs.

For an example, let’s look at the very first paragraph. It begins with Kiah and ends with her. Presented as one block paragraph, it creates a very still and heavy moment, focused on Kiah, and gives us a strong sense of how much the story’s main problem is weighing on her.

Kiah sat down opposite her father’s still form. His head remained bowed over the reader and made no move to acknowledge her presence. She wanted nothing more than to knock the monitor from his hand. Desperate for him to react, she blurted out the words. “Jai’s family will run out within two days.” His brow creased, though he kept his eyes on his work. Determined not to let him avoid the topic, she grabbed his hand. “We can’t let them die. We’ve got to share.” When he didn’t answer, she squeezed his fingers tight. “Please.” Despair creased her father’s forehead then and she held her breath.

But if we look closely, the paragraph contains three distinct pieces of dialogue broken up by several actions and reactions. Breaking up the paragraph to emphasize those things will give it a different effect.

Kiah sat down opposite her father’s still form. His head remained bowed over the reader and made no move to acknowledge her presence. She wanted nothing more than to knock the monitor from his hand. Desperate for him to react, she blurted out the words. “Jai’s family will run out within two days.”

 

His brow creased, though he kept his eyes on his work.

 

Determined not to let him avoid the topic, she grabbed his hand. “We can’t let them die. We’ve got to share.”

 

When he didn’t answer, she squeezed his fingers tight.

 

“Please.”

 

Despair creased her father’s forehead then and she held her breath.

Nothing has been changed except the paragraph breaks. But this version emphasizes the back-and-forth between Kiah and her father. It reads faster and feels like it’s building toward the moment where she pleads.

Now look what happens when we combine this last sentence with the first one in the next paragraph to create new paragraphing.

“Please.”

 

Despair creased her father’s forehead then and she held her breath. He looked up and laid a hand over hers. “We can’t help them Kiah.”

The series of long-to-short paragraphs ending with the one word, “Please,” emphasized Kiah’s desperation and her pleading. Following that with a paragraph that includes both Kiah’s tension (“she held her breath”) and her father’s gentle (“laid a hand over hers”) but firm response (“We can’t help”) creates a sense of finality about his “No” that makes it more effecting.

Breaking up a paragraph this way will change how fast the story reads and what we focus on. Two different writers will break up the paragraph that starts this chapter differently, and both of them can be the right way. It’s all about what you want to emphasize in the story and how you want to emphasize it.

Some editors and writing teachers I know treat it as a hard-and-fast rule that there should be a new paragraph every time a new person speaks. This makes sense in certain kinds of thrillers and page-turners, when you want a fast pace matched with constant clarity. But there are occasions where it makes sense to have two characters speak in the same paragraph: if they’re talking over one another, if one of them is finishing the other’s thoughts, or if the paragraph as a whole contains a single block of information or a single effect that the writer wants the reader to focus on.

Let’s consider the second paragraph of this chapter, as an example of one where two characters speak.

He looked up and laid a hand over hers. “We can’t help them Kiah.” Stunned, Kiah swayed on her feet. She grabbed onto the table in an effort to steady herself. “What do you mean?” The sound of her voice was shrill to her ears. “They’ll die if we don’t do something.”

The characters aren’t talking over each other – there’s clearly a pause while Kiah reacts to her father’s statement. They aren’t finishing each other’s thoughts – their opinions are in direct opposition to one another. So the final word – Kiah’s – is strongest. If we take one thing away from this paragraph, it’s Kiah’s reaction. Just like the first paragraph of the chapter, the father’s presence is de-emphasized.

When we break the paragraph up for different speakers, it changes the whole effect.

He looked up and laid a hand over hers. “We can’t help them Kiah.”

 

Stunned, Kiah swayed on her feet. She grabbed onto the table in an effort to steady herself. “What do you mean?” The sound of her voice was shrill to her ears. “They’ll die if we don’t do something.”

Now there’s uncertainty. The father’s calm “no” is opposed by Kiah’s desperate plea. A simple paragraph break creates tension that can drive the story forward – if that’s how you want to drive the story.

Both of these are examples of ways paragraphing can help a reader take something different away from a scene. But there are also cases where playing with the paragraphing can reveal something that’s missing. Any time I find a paragraph that contains three or more separate pieces of dialogue from the same person, interspersed with actions, I look for missing reactions.

Here’s a good example, with five pieces of dialogue broken up by five separate actions:

Kiah yanked her hand from his grip. “No,” she hissed, stepping backwards. “You’re got it all wrong.” She pointed in toward the sector where Jai’s family lived. “They’ll be the ones choking to death, if we don’t share.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re willing to let them die, while you still have a choice to do something about it.” She took a step backwards, away from him. “You always talked as if you were so different from the rest of that bigoted council, and I believed it.” She shook her head. “But you’re not. You’re just the same as they are.”

Let’s break this paragraph up and see what we have:

Kiah yanked her hand from his grip.

 

“No,” she hissed, stepping backwards. “You’re got it all wrong.”

 

She pointed in toward the sector where Jai’s family lived. “They’ll be the ones choking to death, if we don’t share.”

 

She shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re willing to let them die, while you still have a choice to do something about it.”

 

She took a step backwards, away from him. “You always talked as if you were so different from the rest of that bigoted council, and I believed it.”

 

She shook her head. “But you’re not. You’re just the same as they are.”

Two things jump out at me when we do this. First, we’re missing her father’s reactions. She’s clearly moving in response to him but we don’t see him at all. Let’s fill in those blanks:

Kiah yanked her hand from his grip.

[Father reacts.]

“No,” she hissed, stepping backwards. “You’re got it all wrong.”

[Father reacts.]

She pointed in toward the sector where Jai’s family lived. “They’ll be the ones choking to death, if we don’t share.”

[Father reacts.]

She shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re willing to let them die, while you still have a choice to do something about it.”

[Father reacts.]

She took a step backwards, away from him. “You always talked as if you were so different from the rest of that bigoted council, and I believed it.”

[Father reacts.]

She shook her head. “But you’re not. You’re just the same as they are.”

There’s clearly a missed opportunity here to develop their relationship and build toward the dramatic moment where Kiah decides to make a break from her parents. But because we only have half the story here, we don’t see that happen on the page.

My strong sense is that developing the scene with Kiah’s father at the beginning of the chapter, and placing them in separate paragraphs to emphasize their opposition, followed by drawing more attention to Kiah’s relationship with her father here, and her increasing distance from him, has the chance to give more emotional power to the final line of the chapter: “You’ve a little of your father in you, if I’m not mistaken.” The more these paragraphs isolate them and push them apart, the impact we get from that final line.

The second thing I notice when we break up the paragraph this way are the repetitions – she steps backwards twice and shakes her head twice. That indicates to me that there is duplication that may not be advancing the story. Perhaps a set of three reactions here instead of five would build more effectively to the dramatic moment.

Here’s a very similar paragraph from near the end of the chapter that does the same thing. As an exercise – for anyone reading this and not just the author – I would suggest breaking it up to see what it reveals:

The man stared at the ground. “Two days ago we were ordered to organize the last of the endalium supplies to be delivered,” his monotone voice droned on, “Only Peers and Cardinals were to be supplied. The lower classes were to be cut off completely, except for a few key personnel. I operated the planning protocol from the house. Jaia and my son Ranus were among those who accompanied the deliveries. Toward the end of the day, some in the lesser classes realized what was happening.” He paused. “They waited till the shipment was as on the outskirts of the Peer neighbourhood before they hit it…” His voice cracked. “Neither of them survived.” He was silent for a moment. “Nothing like that has ever happened before. Nobody expected rebellion, but I should have known. I should have realized.” He was shaking. “There’s never been a situation as dire as this. Of course people would break the rules and risk their own lives for a chance to survive.” He put his head in his hands. “I should have been there to help them.”

I want to end this review by making one more observation about paragraphing and how they can effect pacing and reader focus.

A series of really long paragraphs followed by a short one will lull the reader and then draw the reader’s eye. A sequence of short, sharp paragraphs followed by a longer one will signal to the quick-paced reader to slow down and pay more attention. A series of one word paragraphs can bring the reader to a full stop.

There’s a scene later in this chapter, where I felt paragraphing was used very effectively to create some of these effects.

With one hand holding her bag securely behind her, she crouched down and peered under the sleep pod, relieved to see the box of canisters actually there. This whole endeavor had been based on an educated guess. Very conscious of the presence of her parents sleeping in the pod above, she slid onto her stomach and edged toward the box tucked in at the head of the pod. The sound of her clothes sliding across the floor, made her cringe. As she crept forwards, a bead of sweat trailed into her eye, the salt making her blink. The thought of failure terrified her.

 

If her parents caught her, they would watch her like jailors. Jai and his family would die.

 

She was half way under the pod when a snort made her freeze. Wide-eyed she looked upwards, waiting.

 

The snoring stopped.

 

Kiah held her breath. This had to work.

 

Tonight.

 

A delay could lead to disaster. She tried not to picture what might happen to Jai.
Kiah focused and inched forward on elbows and stomach, her eyes on the box. She didn’t stop until her nose was almost touching the metal of the container.

Here in a 7-paragraph sequence, we have 1 longer paragraph, 1 medium length paragraph, 2 short paragraphs, 2 very short paragraphs, and 1 single-word paragraph. This kind of variation keeps a story interesting and creates different foci and effects – here the single word “Tonight” in the middle of the action creates a sense of urgency, which is developed in the next paragraph. On the whole, I found this sequence to be effective and it gives me the sense that the writer has a sense of paragraphing that can be developed and improved with practice.

There’s much more to be said about effective paragraphing, and the ways it can be used to create strong narratives. Perhaps I’ll return to this topic in future reviews.

For the meantime, I thought this was an interesting chapter with a strong emotional arc – Kiah’s break from her father to “you’re like your father” – and meaningful actions that develop the characters and move the plot forward. With some different paragraphing choices, and filling in some of the gaps that would reveal, I think this chapter can be even stronger.

Good luck with your revisions and with the rest of the book.

Best wishes,

C.C. Finlay
Editor, FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
sfsite.com/fsf/