The Last Road, Ch. 1, by Helen Rena

A major subgenre of horror involves a protagonist with a psychological disorder and keeps the reader wondering whether the horror is real or only in the protagonist’s mind. This is one of my favorite types of horror, so I was very excited to read this. The opening chapter has many strengths. The situation, with Mara trying to convince her psychiatrist that she’s all better, is intellectually engaging and builds tension through the chapter. The chapter gracefully flips back and forth between present and past without ever confusing me. In those past segments, the interaction between young Mara and Haley is very believable, and I’m quite intrigued by the “king of little things.” The descriptions in the chapter are strong and evocative, such as “I frowned, feeling fear rising up my spine like a spark rushing up a fuse” and “his handwriting loopy and small, his letters like tiny rings that were strung together into chains.”

That said, I think there are several areas that could be improved. I have a hard time relating to and understanding the protagonist, and I feel a number of things are set up but then fail to provide strong payoffs. I’ll talk about the protagonist first. I feel Mara is being manipulated some by the author rather than doing what she would actually do. First chapters are very hard, and the author is often anxious to include certain information, which then requires characters do and say certain things. I feel that this chapter is more focused on getting out certain information about Mara and her past, and less focused on exploring how Mara would interact with this psychiatrist. Mara spends much of the chapter working to convince the psychiatrist that she’s healthy so she won’t be prescribed more anti-psychotic medication. But she seems to be living outside of any institution, so I think she could avoid taking any pill that is prescribed. Many people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other disorders refuse to take their medication or fake taking it. So I don’t understand (or really believe) that this is so important to Mara.

Through most of the chapter, Mara is thinking back to what happened with Haley. While I find the flashbacks very involving, I don’t believe Mara would remember all of this now. It feels forced by the author to get this exposition into the chapter. If she is sent into a flashback this easily, I think she would be remembering this incident multiple times each day. And if that’s the case, then we should see it through the rest of the novel, which would be quite repetitive. Also, her memories don’t seem like those of a mentally unstable person. They seem clear and believable. So the chapter undermines the idea that she has a psychological disorder. I think you could build more suspense by withholding this memory until later in this novel, until Mara reaches some major crisis that forces her to think back on this event she works very hard to avoid. And when she does remember, the memory could be more chaotic and less clear, so we can see how traumatic it was. This chapter could describe Mara struggling to hold back the memory, so we get only her false account to the psychiatrist and the name “the king of little things.” That would make me want to keep reading to find out what happened. The chapter could also intensify the conflict between Mara and the psychiatrist, having the psychiatrist try harder to get Mara to explain what she thinks happened, and Mara trying not to think about it. For example, the psychiatrist might bring out a ring, honey, and bread, which could alarm Mara. He could also show a picture of their old house and Haley.

Mara completely shifts her attitude toward anti-psychotics near the end of the chapter. I’m afraid I really got lost in those last seven paragraphs. When she thinks, “So who cared if I had to take these pills? Not me,” she seems to be confusing herself and Haley. Yet nothing else in the chapter suggests she confuses the two of them. So this new psychological symptom seems to come out of nowhere (meaning it seems like the author made her think this). Similarly, the thought about the boyfriend at the end seems to arise with no setup and to be forced.

I think part of the problem is that Mara seems pretty sane through most of the chapter. She has a goal she’s pursuing, and her flashbacks are clear and coherent. I don’t really believe she’s got mental problems, except for trauma over what happened, and then she suddenly has several very irrational thoughts near the end. So the chapter’s attempt to introduce a lot of exposition (background information) undermines the premise that Mara is mentally unstable.

These issues with the protagonist tie to the other area I mentioned, which is setups that don’t provide strong payoffs. The chapter places a lot of stress on Mara’s name tag, so much that I think she must have written her sister’s name on the tag. But all she’s done is include her middle initial. This is a let-down and fails to provide the payoff we anticipated. Her middle initial may become more important later, but the effect in this chapter is disappointing. The desire to avoid anti-psychotics is also set up as a major struggle, yet Mara drops it at the end, the chapter failing to provide a strong payoff. The chapter tries to end with a payoff to the whole story of the king of little things with the idea that Mara’s boyfriend will help her to save her sister, but that doesn’t seem strongly set up. All I know about the boyfriend is that she hasn’t told him about the king. So she just seems delusional here rather than planning something exciting. If we knew a few more things about the boyfriend, such as that he wears rings on every finger and that he does whatever Mara asks without questioning it, then we could be worried about him at the end of the chapter with the idea Mara might be planning to use her boyfriend as bait for the king.

I hope my comments are helpful. I admire your description, and I really enjoy the dynamic between Haley and Mara, and the story of what happened to Haley with the king.

–Jeanne Cavelos, editor, author, director of Odyssey

Subliminal Shrapnel CH 1 by Boz Flamagin

I’ve seen a bit of writing advice floating around social media lately, attributed to Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov:

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

Chekhov never actually wrote that. It’s a paraphrase of longer, more specific advice that Chekhov wrote in a letter to his brother, who also wanted to be a writer:

“In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.”

(For all the details and citations on the history of both quotations, if that sort of thing appeals to you, I enthusiastically recommend Quote Investigator, which is the source I used to track down these words: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/07/30/moon-glint/)

Honestly, this advice, in either its original or summary format, should be even more famous than Chekhov’s Gun.

Because it’s that much more important.

This is one of the simplest, most effective skills a writer can develop to improve their writing. Chekhov’s advice applies to every setting, not just nature.

A reader comes to a book like an eager kid in a swimsuit arriving at the pool.

The writer who uses too many mediating words, who relies on clichés and familiar images, who creates the experience at one remove from the reader, leaves that kid standing on the edge of the pool waiting for the lifeguard to blow the whistle.

The writer who practices and learns how to choose the right details bounces the kid off the diving board with a joyful whoop and cannonballs them into the icy water of the story.

That’s why we call it immersion.

And readers like to be immersed in their stories.

All of that is by way of introduction to this month’s Editor’s Choice submission, Chapter 1 of Subliminal Shrapnel by Boz Flamigan.

This chapter caught my eye because in spots it’s very close to being that kind of immersive. With a few small refinements, I believe the writer can make this a more compelling chapter. None of these are big changes, but are a series of small changes that I think could have a transformative effect.

Let’s look at the first sentence:

Velvet knelt, shivering on winter-chilled kitchen tiles, arms buried up to her elbows in potting soil.

If the writing makes the readers shiver, that’s more powerful than telling us that Velvet is shivering. I would suggest some small tweaks:

Velvet knelt, her bare knees on winter-chilled kitchen tiles and her arms elbow-deep in cold, damp potting soil.

Don’t pay too much attention to the exact words in my example – you can probably do better. But notice the effect. We’re not looking at Velvet shivering or seeing her arms buried any more. We’re experiencing it, just like she does.

The second sentence and the rest of the first paragraph wants us to know what woke Velvet and got her out of bed:

The nightmare that had chased her from bed rose again in a disjointed image: She hesitates before a door, breath caught on the dream-certainty that two men wait behind it. The door shouldn’t be blue, not that vivid, cheerful blue. The wrongness of the color makes her eyes ache. When she’s finally forced to draw a raspy breath, the chalky, solvent smell of new paint makes her cough. Her head smacks the cement steps, as if the cough propelled her through the door, and they drag her to the bottom.

The nightmare is great, full of vivid, visceral details. But the transition could be too. You ever notice that if tell yourself not to think about a clown with an axe, you immediately visualize a clown with an axe? The same principle works for characters.

She refused to think about the nightmare.

 

She hesitates before a door, breath caught on the dream-certainty that two men wait behind it. The door shouldn’t be blue, not that vivid, cheerful blue. The wrongness of the color makes her eyes ache. When she’s finally forced to draw a raspy breath, the chalky, solvent smell of new paint makes her cough. Her head smacks the cement steps, as if the cough propelled her through the door, and they drag her to the bottom.

It puts us right there in the scene. We can feel Velvet’s agency and also the power of things beyond her control. The writer doesn’t have to tell us that a disjointed image rose if they make the image rise for us.

Skim down a few paragraphs:

Fortunately, the grumble of the approaching metro train wouldn’t wake her loftmates. Nor would the bluish light from cars flickering into the loft’s windows. The train skimmed into view, a quarter floor down, half a broad avenue away. Exhausted workers slumped against handholds, bundled in coats in the barely heated cars.

Notice how vivid and immediate the last two sentences are. A couple small tweaks makes the whole paragraph just as strong:

The metro train rumbled as it approached. Bluish light from cars flickered through the loft’s windows. Her roommates kept sleeping as the train skimmed into view, a quarter floor down, half a broad avenue away. Exhausted workers slumped against handholds, bundled in coats in the barely heated cars.

In fact, so much of this chapter has that mix of telling detail with, well, just telling. There’s a place for telling – for summary – but there are also missed opportunities to keep us immersed in the experience of the scene. Like here:

Velvet plunked the tea bag in the mug. Relishing the heat radiating from the ceramic to her palms, despite it being too hot for comfort. She sipped and burnt her tongue.

The first and third sentences drop us right into Velvet’s experience. But the one in the middle pulls us out, and gives it to us second hand, when an easy edit could fix that. Or here is another key moment in the chapter, a turning point:

The nightmare cut through her nostalgia, like vulture beaks rending her physical world, as if reality had no more solidity than dream. Through the rents, the nightmare rushed at her. Two uniformed men grabbed handfuls of leather to hold her down. She’d worn that jacket in her nightmare, and with a whimper, knew she’d never wear it again.

 

She ripped the jacket off and hurled it across the room.

That first paragraph would be more effective if we experienced the PTSD flashback happen, triggered by a sensory memory like scent, if we heard the whimper, felt the frantic attempt to get out of the jacket, and then saw it hurled across the room.

This chapter is all about Velvet’s internal memories and struggle. There’s no external conflict, no external action, no external big idea, driving this chapter. It’s a risk starting a book this way. The only thing that we have to grab us and pull us into the story is the immediacy of Velvet’s experience. There are a lot of great details here already – the cactus, the train, the leather coat. Make the rest of the details vivid and tactile, invoking all the senses. Put us into the experience as it happens and we’ll keep reading.

Good luck with this chapter and the rest of the book.

Best wishes,

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

“A Brief History of Alien Invasions” by Paul Marino

“A Brief History of Alien Invasions” caught my interest this month because of how effectively it exploits a simple-looking structure to tell much more story—and communicate much more context—than strictly appears on the page. What looks like just a narration of how tropes have changed in stories about aliens blooms into a nicely subtle story about fear, illness, courage, and a phone call being avoided. However, from the author’s notes, “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” isn’t quite connecting with its potential audience, and this month, I’d like to explore both what makes this sort of oblique narrative style work—and where it might jump that last gap to connecting with readers.

The major misconception about pieces like “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” is that they’re stories that run on tone: a distanced, serious intonation on a slightly random topic or situation that creates, somehow, a profound narrative. What actually tends to make a highly abstract story work is its very lack of randomness—its structural strengths—which “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” has in spades. The piece is essentially a puzzlebox, the kind of narrative that grabs the parts of our brains that evolved for pattern-matching, and uses readers’ instinct to take that puzzle apart to lead us to uncovering a piece of story.

What makes “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” very much catch my interest is that it’s a box with not just one, but two puzzles: the game of calling out which movie or TV series is being described in each vignette, and then the slow uncovering of the story’s actual plot, the protagonist’s grapple with an impending diagnosis, found through matching the tropes and mood of those shows and the hints left in how they’re chosen and discussed.

It’s a highly effectual way to give readers that feeling of discovery—one which will be familiar to anyone who’s worked in game design and ever written a tutorial. Setting up the guessing-game of “Which movie?” primes readers’ brains to the fact that yes, this is a puzzle—and there’s something else to guess at, so it’s important to be looking. It provides the crucial element of a puzzle—a clue—upfront, leading with “The aliens came to escape their own problems” and telling readers, right in the first sentence, what this story is about and what to look for. That narrative Rosetta Stone is reinforced by the later clue, right on the page, that the aliens are metaphors: it’s a chance to shift one’s reading if the puzzle has left a reader behind.

In short, we’re shown what kind of story this is so we can find our way to the emotional payoff, and it’s a highly effectual emotional payoff, largely because of the way the puzzles interact to bolster the thematic level of the story. We’ve talked in previous months about tapping into the preexisting wiring that symbols and ideas have for our readership, and how effective hijacking or remixing an existing set of readerly assumptions can be. “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” works something its readers are guaranteed to recognize: The idea of science fiction as escapist—the place people go to get away from their problems—drifting inevitably back to social problems and anxieties in the way both the genre and the protagonist have.

It’s an almost inadvertent, brilliant little effect: A protagonist who’s telling us a wild story to try to escape the fear of diagnosis that’s plaguing them, but can’t help but get dragged back to those thoughts again and again and again. Who inevitably finds them self back in the story about that phone call.

The result is rawly emotional: Because the fear seeps up from between the cracks left for it in “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” the piece feels absolutely unpolished and visceral and real, and even more so because readers get to find it ourselves.

So there’s a great deal of smart, effectual structure work here, but it’s not quite connecting with readers so far. Why not? I’d diagnose two major issues: One with the story, and one with potential reader expectations.

No matter what we do as writers, the factor we definitely can’t control is our readers and the ideas they bring to the table. I will say that one of the pitfalls of a workshop environment is that we as writers, conscious of reading to evaluate or fix a story—and bluntly, sometimes a little too conscious of the perceived social hierarchy of a workshop—can frequently be much too quick to chalk an effect up to ignorance or incompetence, rather than digging in to find what a colleague is trying to achieve and help them achieve it better. I will quite frankly state that I found some of the existing critiques on this piece—the ones that contributed to the author’s note and its upsettingly defeated tone—to be quite dismissive, and dismissal is not very conducive to helping either the author or the critiquer learn more craft. We’re not here to dismiss each other. We’re here to learn, and while “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” is a great example of structural work, its author’s note and some of its existing reviews are a great example of why condescending to our colleagues is not just useless, but damaging and small. I’d ask everyone to take that example to heart, and remember what we’re here for: learning and community.

While that’s not a controllable issue, it does one useful thing: Points out where readers are straying off the proverbial garden path, and where a writer might put a fence or a helpful signpost to keep them going forward.

For my part, I’d suggest that there are definitely places “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” could be tightened to make it more narratively effective and separate the clues from their settings. While I know it’s one of the things I always say, this kind of story is probably most effective when it’s lean: get in, do the work, and get back out, leaving enough setting and mood work to keep the story feeling rounded out, but not enough words to send readers down false trails or confuse them as to what the focus of the story is. Even at 1,000 words, there’s narrative drift here, especially near the end of the piece before resolving for a frankly killer last line.

I’d suggest a pass through the piece for focus, thinking of the trope-puzzle material through the lens of the plot itself. Which pieces of the trope conversation contribute to the plot clues? Which of them are pieces of the puzzle? See what the rough percentage is—plot clues to fluff—and adjust that a little in the direction of the plot clues. A tighter focus will help readers pick up and keep the trail.

As well, the metaphors in “A Brief History of Alien Invasions” do complicate at a certain point—once we hit the superheroes, I’m not sure where the connections go anymore. I’d suggest keeping an eye out for complication and/or drift between the layers of the story, and minimizing it as necessary. This might be a multi-draft operation: finding a balance between information and subtlety.

Either way, there’s something profoundly moving and structurally intelligent at the heart of “A Brief History of Alien Invasions”, and while it’s still a few drafts away from finished, it’s worth pursuing.

Best of luck!

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