Hello! First of all I’d just like to let you know that I’m not a professional editor, agent, publisher, or anyone with any official authority in the literary world. I, like you, am just a writer, offering my personal and impartial and possibly pretentious advice. So you are allowed to take anything I say and either accept it or dismiss it as absolute rubbish, and I won’t be offended either way.
Now. You asked what was wrong with your story, because apparently Glimmertrain Magazine wasn’t such a fan of it. I don’t think there’s anything…wrong with it. It’s good. I spotted a few random copyedits that I can go into more detail with if you like but I don’t think that they’re the problem. In fact I don’t think you have any one big problem. In a way I wish I could pick out something that was wrong with it, some crucial flaw that you could zip right in and fix and BAM you’d have a masterpiece, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s that simple. Your story’s good. It’s just not outstanding.
First of all, you need to avoid cliches. Not that there’s anything in your story that I would call an outright cliche, in the most technical sense. But there are phrases throughout that I would say have been used before, in various contexts—phrases that anyone, really, can write. You’re not just anyone, so you don’t need to settle for these. Examples: “bright full moon;” “thick, shaggy beard;” “long and unkempt hair.” These are just in the first few paragraphs. What makes hair “unkempt”? Describe it. What exactly does a “bright full moon” look like? Everyone talks about the bright full moon, maybe not in exactly-precisely-entirely those words, but in phrases very similar. Don’t you see the same image if someone just says “moon”? So maybe my real advice on this note is, avoid an overload of adjectives. If you really see a bright full moon, if that’s a distinctive image you want to give your audience, then specify. Describe the ivory face of it, explain how it glows like steam on the corner of the roof above. Etc., etc. As an audience member I can tell you I didn’t really see a distinctive image of the bright full moon while reading that passage—or at least not an image any more distinctive than if you just said “the moon.”
One thing I think you need more of is action. Until that last crucial moment when he starts off for home, there is very little of it. Your protagonist sits and drinks; he thinks; he remembers; but then he sits and drinks some more. Finally he breaks a bottle and gets up and starts walking home. I know it’s hardly fair to reduce your story to something as simple as this—I feel a little sacrilegious doing it, to be honest—but the fact remains that until the last few lines, nothing really happens. I don’t want to say that it’s impossible to write a good story with very little action, because a few people have, in my opinion, pulled it off. But it’s incredibly difficult.
Maybe you deliberately didn’t put much action throughout the story, kept your protagonist in a stagnant state, in order to provide a contrast in those final lines. If this is the case, it can be considered an experiment, and a good one at that, but one that in the end didn’t—at least according to Glimmertrain Magazine—quite work out. Don’t get me wrong, the contrast was great. But it’s a big risk to leave your audience floating around in your protagonist’s head for so long, waiting, waiting, and then at the very end to hit them with the action. Because there’s an unfortunate chance that they won’t stick around throughout the waiting period, the build, and that they won’t make it to the end. And that would be a pity, because those final lines really got me, more than anything else in the story.
You obviously have potential. (I probably wouldn’t be rambling on so long if you didn’t.) You have a strong idea of characterization. I love some of your lines; things like, “It weighed like a concrete elephant on his soul,” feel like pure poetry in prose, in a good way. A great way. And the segment, “They were wrong. They were dead wrong,” very nearly gave me goose bumps. When the action finally came about I really felt it, felt the drive, felt the passion. That means that it’s a waste for it to be held off until the very end, because you can really do action. You can really do feeling.
Your protagonist can be in a stagnant state without being physically stagnant. You just have to figure out how.
Of course I realize that the edits I’m giving you aren’t just a matter of tweaking a word here or there. (I realize that if you eliminate the adjectives in the part about the moon, it becomes an awkward and kind of redundant sentence.) Here’s what I recommend, whether you resubmit to Glimmertrain or not, whether you even continue with this story or not. If you decide to continue to tweak “Simon’s Home” to its full perfection, I—and again I remind you, I’m no professional—would recommend a full dissection, starting at the beginning. Some chunks may be salvaged but it’s not going to be a simple matter of changing a few words; I think you need to dig straight to the core, which is a difficult and, depending on how attached you are to your story in its current state, often very painful task. If you decide to toss this endeavor and start fresh with something else—which would be a pity, but is sometimes the easier alternative—then I think you’ll have great potential and hopefully greater success wherever else you roam too.
Regardless, keep writing and good luck! |
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