I think this warrants a 4.0 or a 4.5 for the quality of your writing, but maybe just a 3.0 considering the work yet to be done. So let's call it a 3.5. For all that, it may be publishable as is, certainly with some editing and restructuring, and with a bit of rethinking your approach to story structure, you could have something close to a masterpiece.
First the good stuff, about which there can be no argument.
Every sentence is strong. Nothing falls flat. Your language is vivid and your handling of the first-person present point of view exploits the resulting immediacy, keeping the reader in the center of the action, offering a rich feast for the senses.
Better yet, your sentences gather themselves into fully formed paragraphs, structures with a beginning, middle and end. Wow. Paragraphs with a third act. A rare treat. And you manage a balance between interior reflection and exterior description, allowing them to work together as a single unit, as in this quick passage:
The rickshaws wobble past me. The drivers all seem underfed and unhealthy. And all the passengers seem overfed and unhealthy. They’re such extremes. Some people die from over-eating. Others die from under-eating.
quickly followed by:
I don’t think I can ride a rickshaw. I can’t stand the thought of having someone else pulling me around. It isn’t even with a car. It’s with a bicycle. A cruel and burdensome weight to put on someone else’s leg muscles--I don’t think I’m twisted enough to utilize that mode of transportation. Even if it is cheap.
And even if it provides an income to someone.
It’s just not worth it. I’ll walk.
What's nice here is the feeling that everything is exactly enough to get the job done, and you seem to do it without breaking a sweat.
There is nothing I have to say about the sound of your words, the way they flow, your handling of time and place, dialogue or description. They are fully developed, and some of the things you are doing simply can't be taught: either you work them out yourself, through inspiration and ability, or they're not going to happen at all. You've clearly worked them out.
So. On to the difficult stuff. I want to talk about some things you might consider as you edit this piece, and some directions you might take to turn it into the piece it deserves to be.
I've read this three times to make sure that my own faulty perception wasn't obscuring crucial elements. Each time I found myself lulled by the words themselves, yet thinking, at some point, "Okay, great set-up. Great writing. Got it. Now let's cut to the chase." You never really do that. It's a story that's waiting for a reason to start, and eventually, it gets tired of waiting and everyone goes home.
What you've given us is really a journal, a "How I Spent My Summer Vacation," kind of essay, when the vacation did exactly what vacations are supposed to do: provide a respite from the tensions and conflicts that wait back in the real world. Hey, respites are great, as well as anything that eases the tensions, but stories need something with a bit more bite.
I'm assuming this is biographical; even if it isn't, the intention and effect seems to be "This is just how it happened." That's the problem. It sounds real. Too real. There are no stories in real life. Just one thing after another. Every once in a while something might blow up, someone might die unexpectedly, grandma might win the lottery, but really, the stuff of life is mostly this happened, then that happened, then these things happened...
It always takes the intervention of a mind to provide the stories, to envelope the raw material of life into a small block of movement that appears to have purpose, meaning and intent. When people say things like It was meant to happen, it was God's will, It all worked out for the best, He got what he deserved, It was karma, they're trying to wrap a veneer of purpose around those simple sequences of events that "just happen." As a writer, you have to create this artificial wrapping, and so far, you've just done a great job of feeding us the raw data. There is no sense of continuity because that has yet to be provided by you.
You do have the sketch of a narrative arc, of sorts:
Young girl returns to her country from school in America, wants a break, encounters enough of the local flavor to feel like a stranger, smokes some ganja, toys with a mystical experience, then goes back to the world she's come to think of as home.
Along the way you introduce a host of elements, any of which could provide actual plot points in the evolution of her story, if there was a story, but unfortunately they just appear, unconnected to anything beyond the surface content of their actions, probably for no other reason then "that's the way it happened," which is no reason at all.
But there's more. It's not enough to just perceive (or invent) a pattern in the events of life; if you want to be a good writer, you also have to make it interesting to the reader. Just because I think "It all worked out for the best" doesn't mean I've got a story that you want to read. And here we come to the real problem you face: your characters are basically good, decent people, involved with their lives, producing positive results, without a lot of complaint or difficulty beyond the difficulty we all face with the task of living. Great. I'm happy for them. Find people like that to hang out with. Marry them. Live next door to them. Emulate them at every opporunity. But never try to write a story about them, because there are no stories with such people. Why? Because they're pretty much content with things as they are. They like what's going on. They have no need to change.
But that need to change, for whatever infinite number of reasons, is precisely what constitutes an interesting story that will keep the reader turning the pages thinking, "Gosh, I wonder what's going to happen next." Of course, your reader will always wonder that, and so it's just good form to actually provide a next, and one after that and another after that to reward them for the time and effort they're spending reading your piece. If you insist on using people like this, then you have to step in and shake things up, bring in a flood, a robbery, a revolution, a plane crash, an alien invasion: something to show us how they react when their calm, still waters get stirred up.
Let's start with your main character, who, please keep in mind, is not you, or anyone you know: she's a fictional character who exists to tell a story and you owe her nothing other than to stick her in a situation that will catch our attention. She's kind of a non-interventionist, moving through her environment, observing and recording the sensory impressions that come along, but scarcely interacting with it. The truth is, she's not completely certain why she's there, but I guess she's willing to find a reason. For the most part, she's on a break from school and seems to welcome the suspended time, when nothing much is asked of her.
Now, back at school... hey now, lots of stuff going on back at school. Stories even. Complications. Problems. Actions to be taken. Decisions to be made. Decisions leading to actions. Actions forcing decisions. You know, all that plot stuff. And, by the end, she's back "home", and we assume that some stories are going to start up again. But in the time we actually get to spend with her, not much happens, and that seems to be how she wants it.
Even so, you could tighten the movement of your scenes somewhat. You might engineer a linear progression from her state at the opening where she's just kind of wandering around taking in the sights, then bring in a focus on her relationship to her grandfather, then focus on his friend and his story. And all the while let the energies gather toward the celebration when she encounters Shiva. As it is now written, it's unclear what actually takes place during that encounter, or what it means, but the scene is vivid enough that it might not matter, offering enough suggestion for the reader to provide their own embellishments. But you've diluted the force by bring it in too early, then going back to business as usual; after you go out to the garden bungalow (for reasons that don't make a lot of sense) then you bring in your grandfather's friend and we vamp around that for a while, then, it's back to the celebration again, for more of the same.
And that's the unfortunate effect this collection of snapshots has on us: it's all more of the same. Like life, first this happens, then that happens then these things... But you don't let it lead to anything, there's nothing really at stake so there are no conclusions to be drawn and no resolution to leave the reader feeling complete.
I'm going to suggest that in the future, and possibly with the rewrite of this piece, should you choose to undertake it, that you make a commitment to yourself that nothing will be introduced in a story that doesn't have a reason to be there. It's the old maxim: If you show a gun in Act One, it needs to be fired in Act Three, or the audience will feel like you've intentionally misdirected them. Conversely, any guns that are needed in Act Three better be introduced well before, or it will feel like you're just pulling rabbits out of a trick hat instead of doing the hard work of creating a believable narrative arc. What you have here are lots and lots of unfired guns littering your landscape.
You've given us rickshaw drivers, a suspicious shopkeeper, a disgruntled Imam (imagined, not actually present, but, still, he's introduced and we spend time on him) the garden bungalow and a temporary partner known only as "the girl" who appears unannounced and leaves just as quickly, plus the tattooing ritual in which she assists and the driver/butler who accompanies her to the celebration, and whose role then becomes highly ambiguous. But the biggest guns that remain unfired are the Grandfather and his friend. They're standing right in front of you with their rich, vibrant pasts and who knows what complicated presents, just waiting to have a story gather around them, something that might force your main character into a situation that requires her to undergo some kind of transformation. But no, all they do is have breakfast and go shopping and talk about the past, back when their stories took place.
Stories don't require a labyrinthine plot, just a sense that something is happening that has implications, that causes someone to have to question their assumptions, take unexpectd actions, make decisions... so something besides just go through their days the way they always do. That means you have to come up with characters who are confronted with something that breaks them out of their complacency. This might be an internal flaw, a character trait that gets them in a jam, it might be their attachment to someone else who is flawed and they get dragged along for an unwanted ride, or, as already mentioned, it might be an act of a capricious God tossing thunderbolts into the mix just because he can.
There are myriad possibilities for a story here, and it's tempting to toss off five or ten, just to show off. But it's not my story and your own vision will be far better served if you go back to the foundation you've created here and discover something that your characters want but don't have, or a situation from which they'd like to escape. Find out what the problem is, then trust them to figure out how to solve it. In the process, you'll have a killer story. |
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