Writing.Com General Discussion

normally, this kind of feedback is best done privately. My goal is not to embarrass you, merely give you clear advice based on best practices (aka advice from experts). Your mileage may vary and you are free to use/ignore what you find doesn't help you. :) I'd also like to caution that I have my engineer hat on, and I'm focused on problems/improvements to make, not what's good. So I don't tend to dole out praise on anything, when in that mode.

For my purposes, I just read up to when the character goes to complain to her mom. The beginning, which is crucial because that's got to sell the reader on the story and entice them to want to keep reading. So I'm looking at what you wrote, versus what might help do that better by fixing/removing things that detract.

Let's get to it to objective stuff first:
you have a lot of word repeats. Chill and Slave appear a lot. Consider some alternatives, or if we need those lines. Once we' know the POV is a Southern Belle on a plantation, it's obvious all the servants are black and slaves. You get that shorthand for free and don;t need to spell it out.

Trim extra text that restates the same thing, For example "overseer of the slaves" should be "overseer" as it is obvious that he over sees slaves. Which also gets rid of 1 more instance of "slave."

Now for the subjective, which means it's largely my opinion from my impression of the story. But still i'll try to be specific, so you can see what led me here.

Character voice is noisy and sometimes out of character. She says where we are " we are located" which is not how normal people talk, let alone somebody thinking to herself back then. There should be a smoother way to name drop where we are, like she looks out the window and sees a slave being whipped and is reminded that of course she's in Louisiana, not visiting her uncle in upstate New York... or some such. Or leave it out until it feels natural to come up. If the characters talk like southern plantation owners, and there's slaves, we'll get a decent idea of where and when we are.

Back to that noisy point. This girl went on and on about how the chill didn't matter to her, exactly like it did matter. She spends a lot of time comparing herself to others. She's telling us all of this, and you the writer aren't showing us how these people are when we meet them instead. Thus, you could trim/cut these down sliding us closer to the exciting parts, sooner.

The first exciting part is she sees her beloved being whipped on the grounds. Again, spending more time in her head about how she'd kill somebody, yet doing very little actual reacting. She could throw herself on the bed and cry, twist her pajamas and wring her hands watching it. Her reaction is kind of cold, and is a hint of the greater racism that gets shown when the maid shows up. What you're at risk, storytelling wise is I see her lusting after a prize bull (hey, it worked for Perseus's mom), not a person.

Here's where the racism really kicks in with this character, and not in a "grew up here and have to put up with it", but "drank the koolaid" kind of way. The maid comes in, revealing she'd been raped. Catherine hardly gives a care about a fellow woman being violated. She gives a platitude to calm the victim, and then mentally comments on how all it takes to sooth these people is a kind word. She straight up doesn't see them as fully functioning people. She doesn't respect them or justify to us/herself that Najeem is more better. She doesn't respect her love by witnessing his pain or reacting in any kind of way to help him. And she loves this person?

That is why I wanted your intended impression. Because you've got the ability to write sentences, but you might have set the scene wrong, by how you present Catherine. That's subjective, because it's my interpretation, and also, I don't know where you intend to go with this. Obviously, I didn't read more to find out. But that's my point about beginnings being so important. If a reader isn't intrigued, despises your character, shows a hint of maybe being better, but still has something to improve, then they won't read on.

I'm assuming you want us to like Catherine and want to find out if she saves Najeem, avoids marrying that other guy her Mom's about to put her in front of. But her callous behavior right away puts me off from that, and I'm less interested in reading a story from a bad person's perspective when I don't see a hint of possibility of redemption.

Now Neil Gaiman has advice that says to ignore feedback that specifically tells you what to change. For an experienced writer, I think he's right. But at the ground floor of learning to tell stories, the point of this discussion is to be specific and try some adjustments to see how they feel, for the point of learning different ways of doing a scene.

Consider cutting out the raped aspect (it's a red flag for editors to reject your story), or changing Catherine's reaction to be more sympathetic.

Swap out the comparisons to people in her life, and wait for those people to show up and behave the way she told us they are.

Make that cold morning be the first lines and symbolic in some way, of her heart warming as she saw Najeem suffer. Drop all that sighing and hit us with a whopper of a line about the cold, her heart's forbidden love. First sentence has to hook us and "A sigh left my mouth as I awoke from my deep slumber." tells me very little.

Give us a stronger reaction to Najeem. I'd argue that she'd stomp out to the yard in her robe and scold the overseer. Perhaps even having to adjust her words to cover her emotions, as "protecting the assets" Now we know where we are and have a sense of her conflict and what side of the argument she's on. She'll appear stronger willed and appeal morally to more readers.


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There you go. See what of that is useful. Might be Zen has ideas. Technically, I've given you specific changes that if you do it, your story will be different but lead to the same place. Better, hopefully, but that depends on a lot of things. If you try them, your word choices, style are still going to be in there, as applied to a given approach. I think some people resist changes or other ways of writing, for fear of losing that.

Good luck, and let me know if you do crank out a different draft (make a copy!) using these suggestions. Seeing how they compare would be educational, and might reveal an even better way to do it. That's writing :)