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1,084 Public Reviews Given
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Review Style
Unsentimental. I focus on the kinds of craft issues that will keep a writer from being taken seriously and prevent them from fully expressing their vision. For more information, see "Writing Hurts: Review Forum" 
I'm good at...
Analyzing the written word and determining where a piece is not accomplishing what it wants to accomplish.
Favorite Genres
Short stories and poetry are my forte. Novels, not so much. Usually I only need to read a chapter or two to determine if it's going to go off the rails. Sometimes I'll keep reading.
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I'll read anything.
Favorite Item Types
Anything.
Least Favorite Item Types
Pieces from authors who have never considered that writing is a craft, who nonetheless think they're great simply because they have penned the words, and who take offense when I don't agree.
I will not review...
Useful things don't always occur to me with a given piece. If I don't think I can offer insight into how the writer might become better at the task, I won't say anything.
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126
126
Review of Noble.  
Review by edgework
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Rated: 18+ | (3.5)
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You have a strong narrative style and you handle most of the elements in this story smoothly. I have some reservations regarding the story itself, or at least some of the crucial elements in it, but there is no question that it is well crafted and well written. If I had to make one major objection, it's that you seem to be a bit too self-indulgent with your style. I would say, overall, pull back a bit. There are several things that you've included that contribute nothing, and, in fact, get in the way.

First of all there is the wandering POV. It doesn't work and reads like the kind of clumsy error that you don't deserve to be saddled with. You go out of your way in the first five paragraphs to establish the narrative voice as a major factor, one that is commenting on and separate from the action. You address the audience directly, you contribute asides suggesting that the narration comes from a heightened perspective and is privy to knowledge that is denied the actual characters in the story. There is nothing wrong with such an approach, but if you go out of your way to raise such expectations, when your narrator's persona fades into the surface of the action it feels like you shifted directions without preparing us. It also just comes off as an affectation that is grafted on to the story proper. When you abandon the first-person altogether, we begin to suspect that you're not quite in control of your narrative voice. You even slip into James' head for a paragraph or two, something that is wholly unwarranted in a short story structure like this. It is possible, of course, but it's tricky to do it without calling attention to the device. You seem to have merely slipped up.

I would say that the section headings are another affectation that you can do without. A story like this depends on your ability to bring the reader inside the experience of the main character. When you keep flashing a bright neon sign that says "Writer At Work!" they always remain outside the experiences that are portrayed. Again, there is a valid use for such a device, but your story doesn't really assemble itself from separate bits and pieces. It works just fine as a simple straight-forward narrative. Why break the seamless surface, for no payoff?

I think you've handled a complex set of circumstances intelligently, without falling into stereotypes and cliches. Until the climactic moment when Noble allows himself to be beaten by his schoolmates, that is. I'll quote from your text:

He wasn't quite sure why he was doing this. Maybe to prove a point. Maybe to shock everyone into shutting the hell up.

Maybe. But then, maybe not. He's not sure, and neither are we. I'm not saying you chose an incorrect course of action for Nobel, only that you haven't found a way through the use of prose to establish it as a realistic act. I suspect you may have fallen prey to the insidious syndrome that afflicts even the most polished of writers from time to time: SCREENWRITER ENVY.

You've given us the movie version of the scene, not the prose fiction version. Movies get away with a lot of strange stuff simply by putting it on the screen. We see it, it's right there in front of us; clearly it's happening and unless you have an idiot like Will Farrell hamming it up with a jackass performance or something equally stupid, we'll believe it.

You don't have that luxury. We need to be able to follow Noble through the progression that led him to this extreme and somewhat bizarre decision. You haven't done that, and so we can't help wondering why he didn't opt for any of a dozen alternate courses of action that would have likewise maintained his dignity, avenged James and at the same time allowed us to cheer for him. We've followed him throughout this story and you've made him believable enough that we're willing to identify with him and his situation. We want him to win. For your climax to work, we need to understand this as a win, not a capitulation. Otherwise, all your fine work will be dissipated in our confusion as we scratch our heads and think, "Huh?" You want him to wear the dress, fine. Go for it. But you need to work a little harder to bring your reader along with him. You'll have a fine story if you fill in the gaps.
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127
Review by edgework
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Rated: E | (3.5)
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This poem is going to take a good bit of work to get it into the shape it deserves. I'm giving you a 3.5 but part of that is on the strength of a previous piece of yours that I reviewed, "---" , which I thought was nothing short of elegant. I know you're a good writer, and I know you have the chops to make this poem as good as it deserves to be. Interestingly enough, while that prior piece was prose, its sensibilities were far closer to the heart of poetry than is this piece. I'm not suggesting at all that you've just cut up prose into odd lines here. No, this is a true poem. It's just not as strong as it could, or should be, and it's weakness are precisely those areas where it's channeling prose in it's concept and execution.

Let's do a quick review, one that you probably don't need but which you might not be considering the full implications of as you come to a piece like this. You ready? Here goes:

Poetry is different from prose.

Sorry for belaboring the obvious, but if you deconstruct this poem, you'll see that you are doing a lot of prosey things that just suck the strength out of your language.

There are numerous analyses that attempt the define the precise differences between the two categories of writing; I opt for the simplest approach. Prose, whatever else it may attempt, exists in the service of an idea, narrative, argument, statement or description that is external to the writing itself. It is the goal of prose to provide the medium by which these external elements can be delivered to the reader with enough clarity that they understand what you are trying to say. In the case of objective journalism, that medium strives as much as possible for transparency, interfering with the content as little as possible. With ornate writers like Pynchon, Joyce or Faulkner, the language presents itself as a significant element in its own right, demanding our attention as much as the content it conveys. But still, the prose is subservient to its subject; it is the subject that justifies its existence.

So far I doubt I've stuck my neck out too much. But here's where it gets dicey. Poetry, by virtue of the fact that it enjoys it's own separate category, equal to and separate from prose, would then be all that other stuff that prose is not. In poetry, whether obscure post-modern structuralist oddities, or Elizabethan Sonnets, brings language itself to the fore, with subject serving as merely an excuse to let the language dance and shine. In some ways poetry is the most useless of forms, since it strives for no effect beyond its own existence. This isn't to say that poems can't be "about" something, only that poems that stand solely on their "message" probably are written by poets who haven't read much poetry. We don't remember poems because they espouse a particular argument or world view; it's not what they say, but how they say it. In poetry, subject is the playtoy of language.

So. The question is, have you done the hard work required to find language that stands on its own, apart from what you are trying to say? Is what you are trying to say the most important aspect of this piece? I'd say the answer is mixed. Consider your first and last stanzas:

There is a park,
where forgotten blackbirds hop up and down
frost covered branches.
The swing set creaks sadly,
waiting for the dark haired boy,
who shouted,
I’ll never
stop.


Winter,
where halves of once-were-couples
look with misty eyes at leaves shaded
half red, half green.
The empty swing set is playing games with itself
waiting for the dark haired boy
who flies higher and higher with each swing
shouting,
I'll never

stop.

So I reversed their sequence, and generally butchered your content. Don't worry, I'm not pretending that this is a suggested rewrite. But I would suggest that you rethink your approach to poetry by going through a similar exercise with every thing you write. I would suggest that these two stanzas, either modified or as originally written, might well be considered a complete poem. Do they make sense? Sort of. Do we know what's going on? Not really. Does that matter? Not in a poem. You're not writing a short story, you're not recreating history; you are create a structure of language, one that borrows freely from the world and from your own experience but which, if successful, will communicate to the reader on a level far beneath the rational, cause-and-effect ordering that prose narrative entails.

What is good about your stanzas is that you are wiling to allow them each to define a separate space and create their own context. And they're certainly visual enough. No fault there. But look at this stanza:

Water trickles in steady streams from the gutter,
painting equations on the window pane.
I watch the phone and hope it rings.

Nice visual images which you have unfortunately rendered in the most prosaic of language. There is no music, no rhythms that demand to be read one way and one way only, no crisp surprises, no sharp edges. You've used 22 words and haven't gotten your money's worth. THis is the language of narration and no matter what content might occupy it, the narrator stands as an immovable barrier between the reader and the actual experience.

Try to accomplish the same thing with 10 words. Don't just settle for telling us what you want us to know; do it with language that works hard, with words that stretch themselves. Cut away the prose narrative and seek out the essence of each stanza. Leave us with that and don't worry if we'll know what it "means." It's a poem. "Meaning" is something very different than if you were writing a short story.

I would actually suggest that you carry out that exercise through the entire poem. Cut out half the words. If you are faced with a choice between telling us everything you think we need to know, and leaving us with an image that captures some brief shard of experience, ditch the narrative every time. Find the language of immediacy that brings your reader inside the moment, that allows them to experience it, rather than simply analyze it.

If, as a result of recasting your lines with fewer words, you discover that they actually are saying something else than you intended, and that you are coming up with different images than what you had originally, so be it. Let the language go where it wants. Ashbury spoke of the process as being similar to riding a bicycle downhill, where the pedals move your feet instead of the other way around.

And if you're not sure of your choices, go back to basics: poetry is not prose. So figure out what prose would do, then do something altogether different.
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128
Review of Untitled  
Review by edgework
Rated: ASR | (3.0)
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You say about this piece: A short story about where I live.Not sure exactly where it's headed. Should be interesting.

Yes, it should be. All stories should be interesting. If they are to attract readers, that is. But there's no guarantee. I'd say the relevant data is your acknowledgement that you aren't sure where this is going. I' think you'd be better off viewing this as an exercise, the type of writing one turns out to keep the senses honed, the reflexes ready the machinery of your technique well oiled, so that if and when something occurs to you that might take the shape of a story, you'll be ready to pounce on it.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with exercises like this; they are how we learn what we sound like, how we discover the steps that are required to put one word after another and make them sound coherent. Yours do, by the way. You have an easy, breezy style that has a spoken feel to it, making it sound natural. Of course, while spoken words that pop off the top of your head usually manage to cover all the bases, they do so in a random fashion, lacking a structure that would give them direction and purpose. Direction and purpose is what is missing here, evidenced in the way that many of your elements could be rearranged in their sequence and lose nothing of the overall effect. So unless something totally new occurs to you in the course of working with this piece, and you abandon it in favor of that new direction, here are couple of things you might keep in mind as you sift through these words looking for the germ of a story.

First, you should recognize that you've have the beginning of more than one story here. I'm not talking about your own intentions, whatever they may be; I'm talking about the expectations that a reader will bring to the piece as a result of the focus you set up at the outset.

When you take this much time to describe a setting in the first paragraphs, your reader is going to justifiably expect that setting to play an important part in unfolding events. either in terms of its actual nature, or the characters' perceptions of it and the way that they are affected by it. Your emphasis on the idyllic town and the introduction of the locals vs. the tourists who don't really know the place is just begging to be developed into a story that reveals a darker, heretofore unsuspected, side of the town, perhaps involving outsiders who maybe know the place better than the locals. Or, if that is too mystery/adventure genre for you, then some kind of interaction with an outsider that, for whatever reason, changes your perception of the town.

I don't claim that either of these are great setups, only that you have to realize that your reader will be doing this same thing from the first word they encounter. They will do strive to assemble the elements you present to them into a coherent universe, and they will continue to do so until they begin to suspect that things you are tossing their way aren't really connected, or don't matter at all. This is what they will conclude when, after all their efforts to follow your opening leads, you turn around and say "Nope, it's not about the town at all. It's about me being forced to go to college. And not wanting to grow up."

If that's what the story is going to be about, it needs to be about that topic from the first word, and it needs to color everything that follows. It doesn't mean that you wouldn't include descriptions of the town anyway, perhaps even the very descriptions you now have. But if the story is about a reluctance to leave, and that is introduced at the outset, the town takes on a very different quality in the reader's mind than if it's simply introduced as the opening element.

Assume your reader knows nothing, and assume that they assume you know everything. If you are to avoid disappointing them, you have to present everything to them in exactly the right sequence, and the right way. Otherwise, they'll get lost, confused and they'll stop reading.

Another thing to consider: don't make the main character biographical. It's too easy to fall into the twin traps of 1) wanting to maintain historical and biographical fidelity, and 2) it's hard to give yourself warts, bad moods and negative character traits. About the first, unless your life is of sufficient interest that others will want to read about it, you owe historical fidelity absolutely nothing. It's a story. You're not here to write a biography, you're here to entertain a reader, at the least, maybe create art in the best case scenario. About the second, warts, bad moods and general nastiness yield things like fear, anger, greed, revenge, all of which do a great job of giving characters something to do with their time in your story besides just sit there and be who they are. Characters with a reason to do something, to shift their circumstances, who are seeking to attain something or seeking to avoid a result, who make mistakes and try to cope with the consequences are what you should be focusing on. If you want to make yourself the main character, then you're going to have to determine the narrative arc in this particular portion of your own life, and you're going to have to be brutally honest about yourself. That's a lot harder than it sounds.

I think you have a facility with words and know how to make them do what you want. Now, decide what you actually want them to do. i'd like to read it when you figure it out.
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129
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
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I'm giving this a conditional 3.5, because it should be a 4.0. The overall concept, and your presentation of it are really nice. There's one flaw. I think it's a big blooper, but it's so easily fixed, I can't imagine you'll leave it to stand out on an otherwise smooth surface like a wart.

From the start you are channeling "The Sixth Sense" in the way that you present one story to mask the true story, and you do it well. Timing in a situation like this is everything; you have to manage the information that your reader is privy to, making certain that everything falls into place at the right moment. Otherwise they'll go back over it after they see what's really going on to make certain you didn't cheat or take any unwarranted shortcuts. You don't. The facade remains firmly in place until you're ready to pull back the curtain. The reveal is successful in terms of content. It creates a coherent whole that brings the narrative to a satisfying conclusion.

But the way you choose to do it is the problem.

Up through the line where Rebecca whispers to Jim, "I already tried that, Jim. It didn't work," you are on solid ground. No false notes, either in the perceived narrative or the actual narrative yet to be revealed. But then, Teddy begins

“We had worked late that night. Remember, Jim? It was that homicide over in The Heights. So I was sleeping in. ...

And then follows a totally unrealistic passage where Teddy tells Jim the whole sequence of events, a sequence that Jim clearly must know almost as intimately as Teddy, given that Teddy still hasn't come back to work and Jim is still dropping by to talk to him. They're partners, right? Cops. They'd know everything there is to know about each other, at least as far as the job is concerned. Think about it. What's Jim supposed to say after Teddy's revelation? "Oh gosh, Teddy, I had no idea. No wonder you've been staying at home vegetating."

Obviously the reader needs to know this information. Your challenge is to convey it to them as naturally as you've managed the rest of the narrative, and forcing your characters to have a conversation where they remind each other of things that they clearly already know and have known since before we joined the action at the beginning of the story is the kind of technique you find in romance novels, but not in stories as well-conceived as this one. A realistic treatment would be to have Teddy simply brush off Jim's efforts, leaving his actions unexplained. That's how it would play out in the real world, and it would lock your readers' attention, making them want to know what's going on and how it's going to turn out.

Your problem is that Rebecca is your main character, the one whose perspective defines the reader's access to the action, which I assume is why you tried to outsource the heavy lifting and backstory to Teddy. No pass. You have to give us the relevant information through Rebecca, using her concern for her husband as the vehicle on which you piggyback the backstory. Wouldn't need much, probably not as much as you now have Teddy recalling. A phrase, maybe two; just enough for the reader to go "Oh... I get it..." And then Rebecca's concern, which is revealed as the true underlying motivation for the story would naturally lead her to what I would think would be an unexpected and surprising result: her physical contact with Teddy, and the soothing effects that it has. And there you have your Act III, short, to be sure, but it's a short story. But just long enough.

Still, it has a nice emotional conclusion without being syrupy. It's good writing.
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Review of Stubborn Hair  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: E | (2.5)
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I'm going to talk about scansion a bit in this review. While you have a sense of rhythm, your lines and stanzas are too loose to suggest the careful attention to syllable management that a knowledge of the ins and outs of scansion would facilitate. There are numerous sources available on the web and on this site that might get you up to speed. This article of mine, (warning: shameless plug imminent) "Poetic Feet and Meter"  isn't a bad place to start. It's short, gets to the point, isn't horrible to read and has the added advantage of actually being accurate.

The point is, a poem such as this one relies on its rhythm for a major part of its impact and appeal. As is always the case with poetry, regardless of the style or format, what you have to say isn't as important as how you say it. Poetry is always about language first and foremost, and the kind of things it can do besides simply convey a topic, subject or message. And when the topic is a little bizarre and surrealistic, as is the case here, a steady rhythm can keep the attention from wandering and provide the coherence and continuity that is needed.

By the way, I have no problem with bizarre and surreal; Dr. Seuss had Horton discover an entire civilization on a speck of dust after all. You should check out a copy of Horton Hears A Who in the children's section of your local bookstore, or the library. Theodore Seuss Geisel was a master versifier, turning out reams of stanzas that bent the language to his will with apparent ease. Whether intentional or not you are channeling the same type of verse and much of the difficulty can be found in your sloppy, inconsistent or weak rhythms.

Your rhythmic structure is simple, and basic: two lines with two metrical feet, followed by a line with three feet. Repeating these rhythms provides your stanza and the opening sets up our expectations:


I impart a tale,
Full of woe and wail,
Whose foundations lie right at is roots,
And though you may doubt,
For these seek us out,
I divulge that this story be true.

The problem is that many of your lines can only fit this format by forcing the words to read in ways that they would never be spoken. Here, for example:

“You see I speak true,
Oh mistrusting you!
Your fine food lies right here on the floor.”
Our man simply looked,
“It’s covered in mud!
That is it I shall take not one more!”

The second line, read naturally, scans into two feet only by forcing a weak beat onto the first syllable. But the sound and sense of the word is too strong for a weak beat and so we want to force the line into three feet. But there aren't enough syllables for that, and it's wrong in any case, and so the line simply stands out as not fitting.

Likewise the third line. You want it to scan as three anapests (da-da-DUM da-da-DUM da-da-DUM), but again, the sense of the words thwarts you. It's really a four foot line, as in

Your FINE / FOOD lies / RIGHT HERE / on the FLOOR.

And so we stumble. The potential for form and content to intertwine, each enhancing the other, is lost. Rather than a coherent whole, we have elements isolated in their own dimensions.

I could offer many more examples. Suffice it to say that you weave in and out of good scansion throughout the poem.

I would also suggest that this might be Exhibit A in the argument that "Less is More." It goes on for a long time. However, if the rhythmic issues get tightened, you might be able to sustain the kind of momentum that pulls the reader along. Lacking that, it's a long poem, one that ends by hitting us over the head with your theme. That's never a good idea. Themes are never meant to be spoken aloud. They all sound preachy and trite when exposed to the light of day. Themes work under the surface, behind the scenes, giving meaning to the things happening. Themes are not for the author to explain, they are for the reader to intuit. If you haven't provided the reader with enough raw material to allow them to come to the desired conclusions, you haven't done your job.
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131
Review of ---  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: E | (4.5)
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Sweet.

Strong prose and nice imagery that's never overdone. Plus, I like the songs you referenced.

As I was reading this I was thinking maybe this was really a prose poem and that you might want to pull back a few steps from the actual moments, bend them through more of a subjective prism that would allow you to expand the scope. Otherwise, it was just a nice bit of descriptive writing.

Then I got to Dad doing the dishes and everything fell together. Again, nothing overdone and all the more powerful for it.

I like it. I'm sure there's an editor out there trying to fill a decent magazine with decent writing who would would agree. I hope you're looking for him.
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Review of The Lake  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: E | (3.0)
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This is cast as a fable, although the time frame is a bit confused. The natives seem to be from a timeless perfect past, while the outsiders are clearly from today, most likely with BP logos on their shirts.

Here's the problem that arises whenever you enlist your writing in the service of a political position, argument or agenda; worthiness of the message aside, the writing always takes second place. It is the message that counts. But this is always about the writing first. Messages, such as they are, will either express themselves through the dynamics of a well-crafted story, or not, but you don't get extra points for being on the "right" side of history, however you think that is defined.

Here's a basic rule of characterization right out of the Writing—101 textbook: when half your characters are all good, and the other half are all bad, you've been lazy, and none of your characters are real. James Cameron might have paid a bit more attention to that rule when he came up with "Avatar' but he too had a message he fell in love with and felt its inherent rightness exempted him from the need to craft three dimensional characters. As have you.

You sense that this is true already, in the way you've considered the chief. There's an actual arc hidden away behind all the cookie cutter situations. He starts out being optimistic, thinking of the good of his people and wanting to embrace new ideas, and he ends up being greedy. We know he's greedy because you tell us so. How much better would it have been had you gotten out of the way, let the interaction between the chief, the shaman, perhaps one of the leading warriors, and the spokesman for the outsiders play itself out in real time, front and center, where we can see the characters working through the situation you've crafted for them, and letting the consequences of their actions define the themes you are concerned with. That's where themes do their best work, seeping into our consciousness as the actions unfold and the narrative works its way through its arc. When you take the reader by the hand and literally spell out your theme for them... well, all themes are simple, a little trite and banal when exposed to a literal explication. It's when you find unique characters in a unique situation, forced to make decisions, take actions, and deal with the implication and unexpected consequences of those actions that the true power of a theme is revealed, as a force field guiding and directing all the elements of the story and given them cohesion and focus.

Right now this story is strictly about your message. I make no judgement or comment about that message, understand, only to point out that writing that has as its first priority the propagation of a specific message is, well... propaganda. By definition it will appeal to those who already agree with you and be dismissed by those who don't. The power of art is that it can appeal to people who don't agree with it, thereby holding out the possibility of transformation.

Make this story about someone, and tell their story. Give them a goal, a quest or an imperative that they cannot avoid. Throw them into conflict with events surrounding them. GIve the an opponent. Make them work. And make yourself work, as well. It will be worth the effort.
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Review by edgework
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Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
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You've set some ambitious challenges for yourself in this story. You have a couple of compelling characters front and center and some cameo walk-ons that pop out of the background and grab our attention while they're on stage. What's missing for me is a clearly established point of view for the story itself, a force field that will organize and define the various thematic elements that are in orbit around each other. At the end I was left unsatisfied, not in the sense that the old vaudeville veteran meant when he said "Always leave 'em wanting more, kid." In this case, I just don't think you've done your job fully. You've given us the characters, and you've done a good job of setting them in motion (although nothing much actually happens); what you haven't done for the reader is answer the question "So what?" You've offered sketches of an answer, suggestions of what it might all amount to, but I think you'd fare much better if you came up with more of a narrative arc that would show us the implications of your themes, rather than simply having Hyacinth think about them.

Part of the problem is that you have more than a few issues that you're playing with, and there's an unfocused approach to the question "What's this story about?" You seem equally divided between the various oppositions you've set up: successful writers vs. those still aspiring to success; celebrity vs. true accomplishment; the experience of American blacks vs. the British black community. Beneath those themes is the question of the possibilities of political change, and the relevance of the American Civil Rights movement to present day conditions. What you seem to be doing is using the initial theme, the aspiring writers seeking insight and guidance from one already estalished, as the surface vehicle through which your other concerns can slip in and guide the story in its true direction. Nothing wrong with that approach, in theory; in practice, I think you have a rewrite or two ahead of you.

When you use one level of narrative as a conduit to project deeper levels into the story, you have to make it seamless. When the deeper themes begin to assert themselves, we need to be able to think, "Ah... yes. This what the story is about, and what it has always been about." In order for that to happen, you need to create a container large enough to hold all the elements from the first word. At the moment you seem to simply be juggling smaller containers as you go, focusing first on this, then that. While you may be getting the full range of your own concerns onto the page, for the reader the experience is of a piece that is internally inconsistent, lacking a single core movement from start to finish.

For instance, I would suggest that the issues relating to black culture, on both sides of the Atlantic, historical as well as current, are in fact what the story is about. That you come at this from an oblique angle rather than beating us over the head with didactic insistence is effective and makes for a stronger impact. To a lesser extent, the question of celebrity vs. actual accomplishment certainly figures in strongly. Betty is the focal point for both themes, yet by the end of the fifth paragraph we have nothing to prepare us for these concerns. As far as we're concerned, this story is solely about creativity, finding success as a writer, and having ones works critiqued. We don't even know for sure if Hyacinth is black or white. In story in which black identity is a major concern, keeping this bit of information from the reader serves only to confuse, with no dramatic payoff for the withheld information. Imagine trying to turn this into a film, and keeping the audience confused as to her ethnicity. Cameral angles from the waist down, close-up shots on her back, a specific avoidance of hands, face, possibly even hair... all of which would call dramatic attention to themselves as a device to keep us from knowing crucial information about the character, the kind of device that would need to justify itself as the narrative unfolds.

You aren't really creating a story here where racial ambiguity is a point you are trying to exploit. As we continue reading we are allowed to intuit the fact that this is a fairly conventional set-up: famous black writer with a civil rights pedigree lecturing in a predominantly black venue to a predominantly black audience. About predominantly black themes. So why not just show us who we are dealing with at the outset? If you leave your readers without crucial information, it needs to be for a purpose and it needs to pay off later in dramatic impact.

Betty is handled a little better, though the only clue you offer at the outset is the word "activist", which certainly does nothing to establish a thematic concern with the black cultural experience, but neither does it preclude such a concern. The bigger issue with Betty is that Hyacinth, on the evidence of her internal musings at the opening, seems unaware that the lecturer has a past. And that's what I mean by not setting us up for the real themes of the story. In paragraph six you get down to Betty's resume in some detail, but that's you the author talking to the reader, filling them in on crucial information. Hyacinth, in the preceding paragraph is thinking only of the generic issues of writing, talent and pathways to success. That's not how an aspiring black author would think as they prepare to encounter someone who they consider to be a legendary figure from the civil rights movement. Hyacinth's awareness should become the reader's awareness, freeing you of the need to step into the middle of the action with information as you've done in paragraph six. Hyacinth is not just there to hear a writer; she's there to hear this writer, for reasons that include but also go beyond mere creative writing aspirations. That's the fuller context of your story, and making it part of your story from the start allows you to seamlessly and effortlessly shift focus later on as we realize that Betty comes to the table with some serious problems... both as a writer and as a celebrity.

Which brings me to your start. Kill the first two paragraphs. Please. Don't rewrite them. Don't find a different way to work them into the narrative. They are pointless, accomplish nothing and totally waste the opportunity that you have in your opening to guide your reader's attention and direct their focus in the way you want. Come on... it's not a story about shopping, and public transportation has zero relevance, as does her invalid mother. Your readers will trust you, at the outset anyway, and so will attempt to fit everything you throw at them into a growing sense of what the story is about. If they discover halfway through that things they've been holding in their minds are irrelevant, they're going to get cranky and stop trusting you. And then they will stop reading. The two opening paragraphs are extreme examples of the same thing I said about the opening creative writing theme. That theme, while far more relevant than the shopping spree, still is not what the story is about. Prepare us for what the story is about, so that when you go there, we don't suffer whiplash.

A note about Hyacinth as a character: you've unquestionably given her an arc of sorts, in that she ends the story with a very different sense of who Betty is, and her importance. But what you haven't really done is make this Hyacinth's story. You have an admirable set-up just waiting for something to actually take place between Betty and Hyacinth. But nothing ever does. Hyacinth remains inside her thoughts and Betty is always seen from afar. That missing interaction is what keeps this from being a strong story. It is what would give Hyacinth an opportunity to take an action, make a decision, face a complication, overcome an obstacle... you know, all that plot stuff. We need more from her in the way of facing a situation and engineering her own path through the complications. It doesn't need to be much. But right now, she and Betty remain in their own bubbles, never coming into contact. They need to. And, of course, it is in the unfolding, development and resolution of plot concerns that your themes are able to express themselves, from behind the scenes where they belong.

You write well; your words sound good. But until you start paying more attention to the structures upon which you drape those words, they will fail to land with the force of which they are capable.
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Review by edgework
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Rated: E | (2.5)
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Judson Jerome, for many years the poetry editor of The Antioch Review and a quite elegant writer on the art and craft of poetry, once observed that if good prose consists of words in the best order, good poetry would be the best words in the best order.

As with anything so simplistic and all-encompassing this both misses by a mile and hits the target dead-center. Poetry is, first and foremost, about the words, how they intermingle, what they do linguistically apart from the meaning that they are intended to convey. You have an intuitive sense of this; no one's going to suggest that this poem is simply prose broken arbitrarily into lines. But as to whether or not they are the best words you could have chosen, I think not so much.

The first line, while tight and precise rhythmically, is lazy in its content. If one is wandering, there is a suggtestion of unfocused direction, an aimlessness in ones purpose. If one is on a quest, the opposite is suggested. Quests are focused and intentional. No one wakes up one morning, slaps themselves across the face and thinks, "Oh shucks! I've been searching for the Holy Grail for the past ten years!!! How the heck did that happen?"

So right off, while we might not consciously think you're lazy, or careless, neither do you avail yourself of the opportunity a first line offers to set the tone, direction and intention of the your poem, and face us in the right direction.

Much of the rest suffers from the same lack of precision, but the problem is more specific. You have totally ignored the expectations you set up in the first two lines as far as the rhythm that you will be following.

In these post-modern times it's safe to say the rules are dead. Except that's not exactly true. There are rules. Every poem has rules and from the first word they encounter, the reader is attempting to both discern the rules and also measure the extent to which you follow them, or, should you violate them, whether you do it well, or clumsily. The catch is, they're your rules. You get to make them up. That's the good news. The bad news is, you have to make them up. And then you have to follow them. The extent to which you establish a consistent set of rules for your poem, and follow them, is the degree to which the poem will present a coherent, internally consistent experience for the reader.

The rules entail balancing the relationships between subject, content, structure, form, and whatever real-world analogues contributed to the content. Some poems use their subjects like silly putty, running them through a gauntlet of linguistic transformations so that it's difficult to say exactly what the poem is "about." If the language is well considered, though, the poem will succeed on its own terms, not based on how well it captures some element external to it. In your case, the relationship between the content of your poem and events in the external world is very close; you are talking about things that actually happen, and we are to interpret them as such, not as metaphors or allegories, or some other such stuffy literary term.

But not entirely. There are linguistic structures suggested that can only exist in the poem. The real world doesn't rhyme, after all. There's no rule that says your poem must rhyme either, but if you go the the trouble of setting up a rhyme scheme in your first stanza, it's not very productive to abandon it halfway through, for no reason. You sense this, and, of course, you don't abandon it.

However, your first two lines are fairly strict in their meter. Both scan effortlessly into four metrical feet:

My mind's / been wan / der-ing out / on a quest.
my way / ward thoughts / have so / di - gressed

So effective is a concise rhythm that it can make up for deficiencies in content. Despite my comments on your first line, the rhythm carries the day and we move though it without much of a stumble.

Ah, but then we hit line three, and stumble we do.

There is a way to read this line that shoehorns all those syllables into a four-foot scansion, but it sounds stupid and doesn't work. A natural reading of the line gives us six feet.

Spring - ing / up - on / my mind / ma - ny / a fan / ci - ful thought.

It's not wrong in itself, understand. It just thwarts our expectations for the no other reason than that you didn't realize you'd established expectations in the first place. Never good. Thwarting expectations is a fine technique when under your control and done for dramatic or poetic effect. Here... not.

Okay, we think, maybe this is the form being established. Two lines of four beats, followed by a line of six, followed by... whaddaya know, two more lines of four beats. Okay. We can live with that. Structures and forms, after all, exist to be laughed at, for the poet to show that they won't be bound by any restrictions, that they can make their poem do whatever they want, regardless of the dictates of the form.

Then we hit stanza two, and things get really muddied. The first line fits. The second, alas, collapses into pure prose. Eleven syllables and only three strong beats in a truly natural reading of the words; four if you fudge. It's hard to interpret the third line's scansion; it's rhythmic but not in a way that fits what you need here.

The rest of the poem confirms what we've begun to suspect. You are loosely thinking in terms of four-foot lines. Emphasis on loosely. You need to get tight. The kind of poem you are writing depends on those structural aspects for its strength and for its effect. When we spend all our effort trying to force lines to fit the scansion for which they were intended, and failing, we loose our connection with the language and the poem.

I suggest rethinking each line in terms of its meter. In some cases you can drop a word, or a syllable. in others you will need to rethink the purpose of the line and the images and perhaps come up with a different way of saying what you want to say. That's often the result of addressing a sloppy meter. You find that in order to achieve the necessary precision, you have to look for sharper images that do more, with less. The old adage "A picture is worth a thousand words," may be a cliche, but in poetry, a concrete image will definitely save you from wasting syllables.
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Review by edgework
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Rated: 18+ | (3.0)
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This tale has at its core the kind of guaranteed emotional trigger that can cloud judgment and cause everything else to be viewed in the glare of the harsh events being chronicled. Nonetheless, some issues suggest themselves.

FIrst, the opening and closing paragraphs, which serve as a framing structure for the story proper. The structure adds nothing to the story and, in fact, dilutes its effect, since we read the entire thing holding on to the possibility that all this is backstory, or supplemental material to events in the present that will somehow complete the material from the past. This never happens. The present action material is largely irrelevant and simply places a narrative buffer between the reader and the story proper, which, I note, is not conveyed as backstory at all, but, rather as simply the story. This is as it should be. It's not backstory. It is the story and should be left alone to do what it is there to do.

I found the time frame unconvincing. You place this in 1969, and if it actually happened then, and you were there, there's not much for me to say, other than to point out that stories aren't history, and the event didn't seem to be the type of thing that one could so easily get away with in 1969, even in Mississippi. By that time, Black Panthers were all over the south registering voters, media awareness had been fine-tuned through seven years of covering the unfolding civil rights saga, the FBI had actually become vigorous in its focus on the KKK, and while racism still flourishes, in and out of the south, by 1969, it had ceased to enjoy the easy comfort of open expression that previous decades had allowed. The high-water mark of such open racism came during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964 when Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman were murdered for their civil rights work. After that, lights shined a bit more brightly in dark corners all over the south; perhaps not brightly enough, but times changed rapidly in the 60s, which, according to your bio block, you certainly recall. Even placing this in 1966 would ring a bit truer, certainly 1963, at the dawn of the struggle. As I said, it may have happened just this way, but that's a thing for history texts. For a story, it doesn't feel correct. If it did happen in 1969, there would have been repercussions. I don't doubt that there would have been pillars of the community who shared the judge's beliefs, but it would have been difficult to gloss over the whole event as if it never took place, a conclusion we're forced to intuit in the way you've portrayed it now.

Emotionally wrenching events aside, I note that your two primary characters are both cast in situations where they are powerless to affect their fate. The thing that makes a story compelling is a character who involves us in their particular odyssey as they confront the issues facing them, struggle to solve problems, engage foes in combat and, basically, try to win, however the particular dynamics of the story defines winning. What is needed is a story-judgement on the events. If a character fails, it still needs to have counted for something as far as the story is concerned. All we're given here is despair and futility as a fait accompli, without comment. It's not enough to say "But that's how it happened." Like I said, you're not writing history and you owe nothing to historical accuracy in the crafting of a compelling plot and engaging character arcs. Your only responsibility is to the reader. Gotta think of the reader, out there somewhere; theirs is the only judgment that counts.

My last point is a hornet's nest waiting to be kicked, and I'm not really in the mood to kick it: much. It's an open question whether or not women can write honest, believable male characters and men can write honest, believable female characters. Certainly fine-tuned powers of observation will suffice in the creation of believable behavior in ones characters, regardless of gender. But whether one believes that internal psychological and emotional drives and instincts can be intuited through mere observation depends in some part on whether one believes there to be fundamental differences in attitude, perspective, life priorities and behavior that are gender-based, or merely socialized effects of ingrained biases. This is certainly not the place for an examination of the topic in all its multifaceted complexity; suffice it to say that I did not find your main characters particularly believable. Not wrong, understand, just too idealized, missing echoes and overtones that would have made them much more realistic portrayals of young men trying to find their way in a turbulent time.
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Review of Wayne  
Review by edgework
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Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
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Let's cut to the chase, shall we?

Here's your first sentence:

As he does every morning, Wayne Jarvis wakes up when his ex-girlfriend’s black cat stirs on his chest and begins wailing that breakfast is long overdue.

Here's a possible rewrite:

Once again Wayne Jarvis wakes up with his ex-girlfriend’s black cat sitting on his chest wailing for breakfast.

I submit to you that, while you might quibble over the exclusion of this element or that element, the second version trips much more easily off the tongue, puts us much more directly in the midst of the action by paring away the narrative buffer between text and reader, and does so with eight fewer words. According to the "Writin' Real Good" manual, these are all noteworthy improvements.

You have to make a choice regarding your priorities: is it reader appreciation you seek, or indulging yourself and listening to the sound of your own narration?

Personally, I think you're far too in love with your own voice and figure that more is better. Don't get me wrong, it's a strong voice and you're a good writer, but I'd say you could probably carve excess flab out of each one of your sentence, as I've done, retain the core and deliver a much greater impact for the reader. Your guy's mourning the loss of a relationship, okay? But the way you're presenting him, he's hopelessly lost in his head, intellectualizing everything until it's smothered in a blanket of interpretive explanation that chokes the life out of whatever events lie at the center. No wonder she left him.

Enough for style. You'll agree or not but there's no point in me going through each sentence only to say the same thing, which I would.

Let's move on to structure. Once again I think you are stumbling over your overwhelming narrative voice that keeps everything in a hammerlock, refusing to allow any of your characters, or the events which concern them, to break out on their own. You insist on mediating the entire affair for the reader, and at times, it's necessary for the author to step in and collapse a sequence of events into a narrative paraphrasing. Other times, you want him to step out of the way and let the characters take center stage and show us what's going on. You never let them do this.

There's a reason for this: they have nothing to do. You have no story in the present, even though you narrate in present tense. Your entire piece is an internal reflection on an amorphous past where nothing happens, since it's already happened, and time has no flow, since the past is with us all at once, all of it at the same time. Some of it could be remedied, as with this passage:

All of his fellow policemen are frustrated middle-aged men who like to think that Wayne is out in the world doing all the f***ing for them. ‘Hey blondie!’ one of them will call and then laugh uproariously when Wayne walks in (ten minutes late as usual).

This is cast as a generalized example of a type of activity, a description of a condition, the type of thing that tends to happen. What we want is what is happening now, this moment, in the present, and we want to know what happened just before, that lead to this moment, and what happens right after, that flows out of this moment. What we want is a plot of some sort, to go along with the internal characterization, the kind of thing that Lawrence Block has described as "One damn thing after another." The only thing you let Wayne do is dwell on the past, which you gamely try to channel into the present with a detailed flashback, but by then it's too late. We don't know when or where we are. That's the trouble when all your narrative takes place in the past. There is no when. It's all foggy memory.

You're close to a real story here. What's needed is an actual arc in the present, something that takes your character from Point A, deposits him at Point B after putting him through some form of transforming process. That transforming process is called "The Story" and it's what keeps the reader wondering "Gosh, I wonder what's going to happen next?" Giving your character concerns, problems, decisions and actions in the present will release some of the burden of the past, which can then take its proper place as guiding force, informing attitudes and actions rather than trying to substitute for them.

To make your backstory relevant, something needs to intrude into the present, much like the cat in the first sentence. Some vestige of Mary's character and who she is and what type of relationship Wayne thought they had together needs to be the thing that creates whatever is happening to him in the present. But without something actually happening in the present, we won't really care.
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Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
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Great idea at the center of this story. However, you're going to have to carve away the irrelevant material (or find a way to make it relevant), the bad dialogue and all the back story and create dramatic tension out of the present action.

What we have now is two people talking about things they mostly already know, simply to feed information to the reader. It never works, and it doesn't work here. People don't talk like that. And the back story, while all about explosions and stretches in third-world prisons and death and destruction, is powerless to channel that energy into the present. It's just two people talking. The fact that they're talking about nifty stuff just makes us wonder why you didn't make that stuff your story instead.

It's a question of scope. Right now you're trying to shoehorn a novel's worth of narrative into a short story sack and you can't do justice to either the material or the story format. That's a shame, because if you'd settle for the story that's right in front of you—a man murdering a former lover for the sake of God and Country—and grant us access to the myriad conflicts within as he goes about his business, you'd have us right where you want us.

But that means you'll have to find a different structure to present the elements of the tale. Consider little Mandy. Right now, she appears, does her dance and then she's gone with no effect on the proceedings at all. Yet, I can imagine her being significant, internally to Buck, and thematically to the story. I can also see her in a movie scene as our mysterious main character interacts with this image of innocence while the somber overtones and undertones and echoes ripple through the surface action. Movies get to do that sort of thing with editing, music, timing, lighting, camera angles and cuts and all the other bits of cinematic language that you as a writer of prose have no access to. You have to use the unique elements of prose to embed the texture.

Here's an example, a small thing, but I think it's actually crucial, particularly if it's repeated over and over in the course of a story. In the third paragraph we have this:

"Hi, Mister," a blonde, curly-headed little girl's cherry-cheeked face peaked over the back of the black plastic booth surprising him.

In a movie, we might well hear the sound of her voice, while the camera is focused elsewhere, a close-up of his pack of cigarettes perhaps. But unlike this paragraph, we would already know much more about the voice, including the fact that it belongs to a little girl. We'd also know something about her personality (cheery, exuberant, optimistic, as opposed to dour, depressed and fearful, for example). By the time the camera actually brought her curly hair and cheery cheeks into the frame, we have been well prepared for the meeting.

None of that happens in your paragraph. We hear a disembodied voice that has no context at all. That you quickly provide the supplemental information in the next sentence doesn't change the fact that for a moment, however brief, your reader has no idea what is going on, and the writing, rather than serving as a seamless conduit into the universe you've imagined, instead gets in the way, calls attention to itself and breaks the mood. Sometimes writing calls attention to itself through a breathtaking image or tour-de-force description of this or that, but usually it's because it's not really doing its job. This is an example of the latter case. It's actually a particular flaw that I call Screenwriter Envy and it pops up a lot. We see our story unfolding on the movie screen in our mind and let our imagined camera and microphone transcribe the events. It provides the actual sequence as they unfold, both internally and externally, but in prose that's not always the way you want to present things, particularly when it leaves out all the texture that gives us the real material that you're concerned with. In this case, that would be the abrupt intrusion of a naive innocent standing in stark contrast to the grim work Buck has ahead of him. Something as simple as inverting the order in which you present the information in that sentence would go a long way to keeping us in the moment.

Another place where the language calls attention to itself, to the detriment of the content, is in the opening sentence. Quoted internal thoughts are always awkward, particularly in a third-person restricted narrative. We're on safe ground assuming that you're not going to meander from one character to the next in the same scene, so we'll know who internal perceptions belong to. They can be effortlessly woven into the narrative itself eliminating the need to stick a first-person sentence into third-person text.

Poppa Gino's: the perfect location for his mission today.

This strikes me as accomplishing the task with a lot less intrusiveness.

As for the rest of it, do we really need all the details of the backstory? No, not if something compelling is happening in the present. We'll wait to find out where they all came from if we're busy wondering what's going to happen next. We'll even forego certainty about who they are, settling for hints and suggestions. But we need something in the present to occupy our focus.

The problem with the setting you've chosen is that there really isn't anything for them to do but talk, and sip cocktails. It's inherently static. How about an afternoon tryst between old lovers? They would know they're there for other business, of course, but the reader won't, and part of the arc you provide would be the reader's own discovery of the growing implications of the activity, and it's seriousness. A casual mention of scars and evidence of past brutal treatment will accomplish far more than having them simply mention Iraqi prisons, talking about bombs and spelling everything out for the reader. Besides, all those things are past. They really aren't part of the present story.

Your challenge is to make their interaction realistic, without making it real. Real interactions, even between double agents, are usually pretty boring. You have to let the reader believe they're reading one story, while allowing the real story to slip in between the lines. You do this in the way that you highlight the cigarette pack, but you need to be doing this sort of thing with everything they say to each other. It's misdirection, really, and you're thinking in these terms, but what you are using to misdirect us doesn't work. You need an actual story in the present moment.

The ending is really an example of "phoning it in," (literally). Again you miss a chance to keep the reader wondering "What's going to happen next?" He should follow her. We've already seen him select the cigarette. We suspect dire consequences, but we still don't know for sure. It won't be until he watches her collapse on the street that he, and we, have the certainty that the story has been building towards. It will pack a much bigger punch that way.
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Review of The Believer  
Review by edgework
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Rated: 13+ | (2.0)
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You say you've hit a wall writing this. I'm not sure that's how I would characterize your problem. I'd say that you've accomplished what you set out to do here, which is to talk about some of the themes embodied in the story you intend to write. My suggestion at this point is to now actually write that story.

The proper place for the type of material you've presented here is out of sight, tucked away in the background, never calling attention to itself save for the ways in which it provides a force field driving your characters through their various transformations. Themes are not stories and, sadly, no matter how profound or weighty, they all sound banal and trite when actually spoken aloud, forced to stand on their own. "Love is good. War is bad. You reap what you sow. Don't take any wooden nickles." Themes are simple, by nature and that's how they come across when they try to carry the responsibilities properly assigned to plot, characterization and the unfolding dynamic when the two mingle.

You've suggested that some things have actually happened to your unnamed character, that he's gone out in the world and performed acts of research, questioning strangers as to their beliefs, and that he's drawn certain conclusions from this activity. Okay. We'll take your word for it because what's the point in arguing? You say it's what happened, fine. But do we care? Of course not. We don't know your character, other than through his self-involved monologue that never actually defines anything concrete, other than the TV. Alas, that is merely a momentary prop, having no bearing on any of the action because there is no action. Only thought. Thoughts about the theme.

A person trying to discern meaning in an uncaring world, and coming away disillusioned might well make a compelling character. It all depends on what you actually give him to do. And, once deciding on things for him to do, you really need to let us in on the action, showing your character as he goes about his business rather than just recalling that "something, sometime" took place. It would also help if something personal were at stake, so that he might need to take a risk in order to resolve his quandary. That's the way you involve your reader and get them thinking that magic phrase "Gosh, I wonder wha's gonna happen next?" In which case, they will most certainly keep reading to find out. That, of course, is the only hard and fixed requirement you have as a writer, to compel your reader to keep turning the pages. Otherwise you are merely playing solitaire in the dark with a deck of blank cards.
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Review by edgework
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Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
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Ah, those demons from the dim past, lurking in the shadows of consciousness, waiting for any opportunity to sabotage our efforts in the present. The twig bent at an early age really does determines the way we grow and reach maturity. It is so fused to our sense of self that we scarcely are aware of the ways in which we've been influenced.

That's the situation that this story gathers around and I must say I found the early childhood incident to be subtle, believable and a bit of kick in the gut, emotionally. Well portrayed.

In fact, you handle a lot of craft elements well. Your lines sound good, for the most part. You move from external description to internal reflection without calling attention to the narrator, your images are easily visualized if, perhaps, a little overbaked, as if you're trying too hard to sound "writerly." Best of all, you are working with a genuine narrative arc here; you're thinking in terms of story and how a character's transformation creates the movement that tells us one has taken place. So you're on the right track

So now I'm going to complain, which is my job, after all. My first reaction when I read this was "There's no story here, just a situation," said situation being the demons I mentioned at the beginning of this review. Situations are not stories, they are the fertile ground in which the seeds of a story take root. Rather than allow a real story to grow out of your situation, you mostly have your characters talk to each other about the situation itself.

I changed my mind on subsequent readings, having to grudgingly acknowledge the clear arc you've provided. My feeling now is that you're not really dealing with a short story at all. In terms of scope, your material is begging for a much longer format, maybe not a full blown novel, but certainly something that allows for more development than the piece you have here. Jasmine moves through several distinct stages, but you never really let us inside any of them, giving everything a "touch-and-go" treatment that tells us things have taken place, but which doesn't actually offer the emotional experience that will allow us to empathize with her and share in what she's going through. Having your characters talk about "the problem" is no substitute for showing us a character with a problem behaving in ways that are consistent with that problem and allowing us to discover the reality in which she exists. Actually, the problem here is "the problem," itself. You've done a good job of presenting the underlying incident that affects her later in life, but you're not handling the implications of it in such a way that we believe it's really a problem for Jasmine in the present.

A childhood incident such as you describe will either serve as an indicator of a generalized condition—the lack of motherly nurturing evidenced here suggesting a childhood devoid of motherly love—in which case, it would not be that one incident that would stand out, but rather the overall pattern of neglect. Or, it could stand alone, an anomaly nested away in the subconscious causing unsuspected damage to the adult as the unresolved child keeps seeking completion. In either case, the incident itself would be the kind of thing that drives people into therapy as they seek to uncover hidden time bombs and bring them into the light of objective awareness where they can be assimilated.

This where you falter. Jasmine has way too much objective awareness of the situation for it to be capable of doing hidden damage. And since there seems to be no suggestion that she suffered from a general pattern of emotional abuse, we're left with this one moment that she's totally aware of (as are her friends, it seems). Basically, she's just stuck. I don't deny that people get stuck on stuff like this all the time, and that some of them derive a perverse satisfaction out of their intellectual awareness of what has them so stuck, but it doesn't really work here as the major roadblock in Jasmine's life. When she talks to Aurelia about it, it comes across as if she was complaining "Oh, gosh, I went off my diet last night."

Which brings me back to my earlier suspicion that you're not really working with a short story here. In order for you to make this real for the reader, you'll need to take a bit more time letting us get inside Jasmine's head. This isn't a plot driven story. The relevant arc is the shift in Jasmine's life and world view, and we get very little of that. You're going to need to craft believable moments in Jasmine's present with sufficient dimension that we believe them, care about her and want to see how things turn out. That process is your job as the writer; it can't be outsourced to phone conversations between your characters assuring the reader that all this is so very, very important. You have to make it important. That's the only way you're going to get over the hurdle of a seemingly trite problem. All problems are big to the person experiencing them. You need to show us Jasmine in the midst of grappling with a problem and discovering for herself the nature of what's got her blocked.

Stories that use the creative process itself as the primary action can be tricky. There are two groups of people who will read this story: people who write, and people who don't. The first group will have experienced their own struggles with writer's block and will be decidedly unsympathetic as a result. "Been there, done that, get a grip," is probably the reflexive response you can expect. People who don't write and who don't understand writer's block will be likewise unsympathetic for the opposite reason. Their reaction will be "Come on, if you want to write, just do it," as though everything could be distilled down to a Nike commercial. If you're going to use the process of writing, you will, again, need to take more time to make it something we experience. Amadeus was able to reveal Mozart's mind in the act of creation in ways that made us think "Wow, that's really interesting," but it is because Mozart was a fascinating character himself, with a story running parallel to his creative endeavors that hinged on his ability to create. I don't suggest that you provide Jasmine with a genre-type plot to occupy her time and keep the reader's interest, but you need to provide us with a lot more of Jasmine if we're going to care about her.

Right now you seem uncertain whether its a character study you're working with, or a plotted narrative. Either way, for the purposes of a short story, the entire last third is really a different story altogether and feels grafted on. It's like you realized "Uh-oh, getting close to the end. Gotta get a plot going." You don't need it. Neither do we. All we need is Jasmine, the three-dimensional version, the one we can get to know, empathize with, and cheer for.

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Review by edgework
Rated: 18+ | (2.5)
I'm not sure what to think of this. You call it Chapter One and so I can accept that we're mostly going to encounter the beginnings of threads. Still a chapter, like a scene and even a paragraph, needs to have a purpose of its own, apart from the larger context to which it contributes, and I'd say you've done something along these lines. The narrative definitely has a beginning, middle and an end, and we have a set up for what comes next. So you are thinking correctly in terms of structure.

There's something out of whack with your narrative voice, however. While you're touching all the bases, it feels like you aren't actually connecting with the elements you are describing. You may be visualizing the action and interactions between characters, but you're not making the events believable.

Take your opening line:

I remember the day I met my darling husband, Lucifer Webster, on a beautiful morning in April 1863 just like it was yesterday.

Admittedly, we don't know what's coming, but you're already in trouble with your character named Lucifer. With a name like that, if he's not The Devil, you've committed yourself to some serious misdirection and thwarting of expectations. If he is, then you've already made your main character hopelessly naive. Either that, or your use of the word "darling" is just out of place and doesn't capture the essence of what your character is really trying to say.

When she encounters the tree, she seems to be taken by surprise that it exists at all, even though it's in her own backyard. Does that make sense? You tell us that she can't take her eyes off "the climbing red roses," and so neither can we. Unfortunately, they just appear and then are never mentioned again, and so we file away another element that doesn't add up to anything.

Then she sees the door. In the tree. I don't know about you, but where I come from, this would be cause for some serious reflection, surprise and puzzlement. Not your main character, though. She simply notices it, mentioning its presence as one would note a lawn ornament, and then opens it, whereupon she finds that she's not in Kansas any more. Clearly she never was in Kansas, or anywhere else that we'd find familiar, but by the time you get around to letting us know she's from the Faerie Realm, it's just about too late.

Truth is, a good argument can be made for the way you are handling this. I often state that it's not necessary to tell the reader everything about the background of the story, or even anything, as long as there is something going on in the present action that will keep them interested. But we need to know that the world in which we find ourselves is different that what we expect. At least we need to know that you know. Your character doesn't, of course, but she not expected to. The narrative voice, however, which is the perspective of both the main character and the story itself, needs to be aware of the distinction between what the reader expects, and where you've actually dropped them. I don't get that sense of awareness. The fantastic elements are presented on a flat surface, almost with no comment. I like the bit about the colors of the world through the door striking her as strange, only to find that the are our normal colors, leaving us to imagine the "dizzy array of colors" that she is used to. But it's not really used. It's just another element that appears without connection to anything else.

By the time Cydia and Lucifer are engaged in conversation, we're starting to orient ourselves, wondering if perhaps we should go back and reread the opening paragraphs to see if they make more sense now that we're armed with this crucial knowledge. But then you throw in a sex scene and so of course we keep reading because that's what sex scenes require.

It's not bad as sex scenes go; a bit pornographic, but that alone isn't cause to indict its inclusion in the chapter. The reason we indict it is because there has been no preparation. We start off with a kind of Mother Goose environment, and all at once we're dealing with Larry Flynt.

And throughout it all, we have a main character who appears to accept whatever comes to her through her senses without question or analysis of any kind. And so we have nothing to bound off of. We can't agree or disagree with her because she doesn't seem to actually have a perspective. She reacts from moment to moment, but she brings no specific world view to the table and so we have no way of interpreting her.

The most important thing we're missing is a sense of what she wants. What are her goals? What are the circumstances that get in her way. Is there something from which she's trying to escape? Any of these would give some meaning to her actions (and, not incidently, give you something to focus on as you try to come up with things for her to think, do and say).

You might also reflect on the differences between pornographic and erotic writing. They are not mutually exclusive, but neither does the presence of one imply the presence of the other. The main difference for me is that graphic pornography is far more interesting to contemplate than to actually experience, whereas good erotic writing generates the contemplation as you experience it. Your sex scene is certainly graphic and pornographic. It is not, however, erotic. It's like Supreme Court Justice Potter White said: "I may not know how to define it, but I know it when I see it."
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Review of Inanimate Demons  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: ASR | (3.5)
Sig for reviews

Interesting idea. I think your narrative approach is diluting it's potential effect, however.

With all those drip, drip, drips and tick, tick, ticks and beep, beep, beeps, you are working on an experiential depiction of the process of encroaching madness. What you want to do is to capture that state for the reader, put them inside a mind going mad. You can't do that when there's so much narrative—sane, logical, clear narrative, no less—acting as a buffer between the reader and the experience.

I'd suggest putting it in present tense. Past tense, coupled with the narrative voice, suggests that the whole thing is being recalled from a later point, one that permits an objective perspective. We don't want objective. We want madness. Not a description of madness, but the thing itself. Let the language reflect the tattered state of your character's mind. Let it break down, as his own ability to understand what is happening likewise breaks down.

That's what will make something like this memorable—language that does the unexpected, that takes risks, that breaks out of the box. Otherwise, all we have is a rather pedestrian description of what we're told is an extreme moment, but we'll have to take your word for it.
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Review by edgework
In affiliation with Let's Publish!  
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
Reviewed for "Let's Publish!" .

You call this a prose poem. That's tricky. On the sliding scale that links poetry and prose, prose poems have no fixed address. At some point prose leaves the realm of transparent form that characterizes objective journalism and begins to adorn itself with elements that call attention to not just the topic and subject that the language conveys, but to the language itself, and we pause and think "Wow, that was a nice image." Because of such adornments we gain a deeper appreciation of the topic or the subject, and the "meaning," of the words, such as it is, gains multiple dimensions of interpretation. But however elaborate, decorative or complex, the purpose of the words remains prosaic: that is, there is a point to be made, an argument to be rebutted or a narrative to unfold, something external to the words themselves.

At some point further along the scale, the form of the language begins to assert primacy, demanding more of our attention than the subject, until finally, we reach a place where poems are turning subject and meaning into silly putty, twisting and toying with them while the poem goes about its true business, which is letting language dance and perform and do all manner of acrobatics that are possible when it becomes unfettered from the need to create cause and effect connections to an external topic.

And somewhere in there we have poems that use the structures of prose, and prose that looks and feels like poetry. Which brings me to this piece. The writing, as is your style, is both vivid and visual, musical in its rhythms and seamless in its narrative flow. But I'm not sure that it's a poem, prose or otherwise, The reason is that despite the fact that pieces of the picture are missing, they remain conspicuous by their absence and we know that whatever it is that is going on here, the "aboutness" of the piece, exists in those missing links. An incomplete subject is still a subject and it is still the point of the words you've written. Everything points to that unattainable conclusion and so the language has not managed to evolve beyond its prose DNA. Don't misunderstand me: it's good prose, even poetic prose. But were it to be located on that sliding scale, we would find it somewhere in the same region where we find other writers whose prose rises well above the simple journalistic requirements of telling us what happened.

What would make this a poem? Hard to say since the possibilities are infinite. But whatever the direction, it would turn our focus away from the plot questions of "Gosh, who's coming back, anyway?" and toward a landscape that is possibly pure linguistics, elements that might borrow from the imagery you've already provided but which take us in other directions according to logic that prose cannot mimic. And when it reaches it's conclusion, we won't be any more concerned with who's coming back than you seem to be, because we will have been given an experience, not of narrative story telling, but of language doing a linguistic dance, and subject be damned.

I like the writing, but I think you need to let this piece commit itself. Either tell us the story, or let it go wholly subjective and leave logic behind; follow the impressions, sensations and images wherever they lead and don't be cute and coy with a story that's not quite a story. Either way, it would be a good bit of writing.
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Review by edgework
Rated: ASR | (3.0)
Reviewed for "Invalid Item" 

There's a good story in here, but you're just skirting the edges of it. Mostly the problem is structural; you've referred to the conflict and transformation of your main character, but you haven't actually given us access to the events themselves. Keep in mind: two characters discussing a dramatic event is still, for the reader, two guys talking. Try as you might, you can't channel the drama and tension of the original incident into a second-hand narration of that incident.

More on that in a minute. But first a few other points. I think your opening would be dramatically enhanced if you swap your first two paragraphs. The trick of beginning the story at some point after the beginning of the action proper is a good one, if it drops the reader into the middle of action, then rewinds the narrative to catch the reader up on the backstory. On the surface, this is what you do, starting at a tense moment as they watch the dear that is about to be shot. But you break the tension for the second paragraph recap and gain nothing in doing so, other than to break the tension. The second paragraph is too wordy, for one thing; we can assume that the father has been training David for a long time and in a real exchange would not need to be so descriptive and informative in the things he says. Characters don't know that there are readers out there needing to be informed of important details. They don't want the job of having to burden their conversation with stuff that is already known between them, just to get information onto the page. Your job as an author is to let that information slip in between the lines, unnoticed by your characters, and to also recognize what to leave out, trusting the reader to fill in the blanks for themselves.

I admit it's a personal preference; yours might be different. But I think the perfect opening line is a distillation of your second paragraph: "We're not trophy hunters, son. We take what we need and that's all."

That line alone crystallizes everything we need to know about the father and his philosophy. We intuit that a man who thinks like that is not careless or thoughtless. We know that he takes his craft seriously, and that he takes just as seriously his obligation to pass his knowledge down to his son. By that opening, you frree up a lot of unnecessary wordiness and explanatory discourse that follows. This is good because you will need the space to add the actual story that you are now just referring to.

This sentence:

"“You really proved yourself this year, Dave. The way you sat patiently for hours waiting for that doe, the way you knew, instinctively, that she’d be coming out of that thick brush any minute and hushed. You’ve worked really hard this year.”

is the story you are simply referring to. Hidden inside that affirmation is the entire process of David proving himself to a demanding father who will not tolerate slipshod technique in such a life and death situation. By picking up the action after all the actual story part is over, you let yourself off the hook with a TV solution (that's when there's not enough money in the budget to stage the actual scenes, so they just have a couple of characters talk about what happened, after the fact, so they can get the important information to the audience), but you deny the reader of the experience of David proving himself. Without that, we have nothing in which to involve ourselves. We take the father's word for it, but we don't really care, because we're just observers. You want your readers to be participants, and that means creating the crucial moments on the page, allowing them to unfold in such a way that we want to know what's going to happen next. Without that bit of curiosity, you won't keep your reader reading, which is, afterall, your primary obligation as a writer.

You close with a scene involving a knife. Showing David mishandling a knife in some way and facing his father's stern rebuke. Thats what will let us know that David has moved from Point A to Point B. The distance between them is the story you need to tell.
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Review of Mr. Tibbs  
Review by edgework
Rated: ASR | (3.5)
Reviewed for "Let's Publish!" 

You asked for some comments regarding the structure of your piece. You would ask that, wouldn't you? The story presents some interesting issues and I've had to do some thinking to make sure I knew what I wanted to say.

As always, you come up with strong characters who stand apart from each other. Dialogue is good and you manage to characterize through their interactions, always a plus.

The way you've presented the story so far, it seems that you could go two different ways with it. At the moment, you seem to be toying with both directions, without fully committing yourself to either. I would normally say that you have a strong protagonist, Larry, around whom that action gathers itself, and who definitely takes action himself when he summons help for the sick woman he finds in the alley with him. And you would seem to have a good candidate for a main character in Jenna who is ripe for some kind of transformation as a result of her interaction with Larry and the impact that he has on her.

Except that you are clearly telling this story from both their perspectives, switching back and forth, which forces you to take a different approach. You really have two separate stories, each of which needs to come to the table with characters who each have their own goals, obstacles, conflicts and desired resolutions, even before they start to bump up against each other. Think of two separate vines each crawling up the same fence post. The problem is that while Larry's story is fairly well-formed, Jenna doesn't have much going on, nor does she have much impact on events. A parallel structure like this requires that both Larry and Jenna fill the roles of main character and protagonist in their separate narratives. That means that Jenna not only needs to want something (always a good place to kick off a change character) but she has to have a story of her own, an agenda that is in some way complicated by the introduction of Larry into her life. There's no question that she presents a complication in his life even though you don't really let it develop. But Jenna, and her arc, are still unformed.

The dual POV can tricky in a short story. Right now you only have one point at which Larry and Jenna interact. You get away with the dual POV because you're not straining it overly much in that one bit of contact. However, were you to fill out the narrative and have their separate tales truly interweave and influence each other, you will most likely find that jumping from one mind to the other, in the midst of, say, an actual conversation, becomes clumsy and counterproductive. I realize that Larry doesn't seem to be the talkative type, but you will still have to cope with the artificial nature of keeping a dynamic situation moving along naturally when you need to present both perspectives. That sort of structure works in novels, of course, because you have room to move from character to character, and time to let each arc develop on its own. It's difficult in a short story, simply because you don't experience individual interactions ping-ponging back and forth, and you're unable to present the two perspectives simultaneously. But I'll leave that to you to work out. It's certainly not a story killer, just a challenge.

The real problem is finding something for Jenna to do besides look out the window and want to help. She has to have a purpose and an agenda and it needs to come from the circumstances of her own life. That's what will make her believable, and what will give her believable reactions when she and Larry get in each others' way.

They really need to get in each others' way. That's what makes for development, and what will kick your story into a third act. Right now the third act, such as it is, has nothing to do with Jenna. A well-structured story would take the separate concerns of each character and allow them to play out in a joint context. An example using the elements you've already come up with would have Larry feel so concerned for the woman in the blankets that he relents and actually makes tries to make contact with Jenna, seeking her help. His lack of communication skills presents a good opportunity for the kind of complication that rises naturally out of a set up that's already been established. And if Jenna's first attempt to reach out to Larry turned out badly, much more so than having him simply run away—maybe he got angry when he misinterpreted her efforts, and she found herself in fear for her safety—you would now have double the complications fed by the energies from both narrative arcs. And you would have a nice juicy scene to write as they try to figure out what's going on with the other one. In fact, a situation like this just might support a series of quick shots bouncing back and forth between each person. I don't want to try to tell you want to write, only suggest the kind of development that will take full advantage of the set up you've presented.

I think there's a good story here. I don't think you've found it yet, but I don't doubt that you will.
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Review of The Camp Out  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: 13+ | (4.5)
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Yikes! You said this was a revision! I don't think so. You've come up with an entirely new story, and while you were at it, you traded in Leave It To Beaver for and exchanged it for Tales From The Crypt. You got the better end of the bargain, believe me.

When I reviewed this the first time I suggested some revisions that were intended to make the story you'd written feel a little more internally consistent, and also allow it to capitalize on the set-up you'd provided. What you've done, instead, is to revisit that set-up, turn your characters loose and let them go where the story wants to take them. I began reading thinking I knew where I was heading. I didn't. The surprise was most welcome.

I don't have a lot more to say, other than well-done. There are plenty of magazines that love this sort of writing. One of them is waiting for you to submit it. Get to it.
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Review of Alison's Find  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with Let's Publish!  
Rated: ASR | (4.5)
Reviewed for "Let's Publish!" 

I can think of dozens of things you could do with this. But they would all be different stories. Meanwhile, the one you have is just fine as it is. Entertaining, clever but not too cute, and the way you prepared us for the climax with Tim, a casual aside that was humorous in passing, then returning to be the crucial pivot on which the plot turned, was masterful.

Submit it.
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Review of Edge of Reality  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
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There's good news and there's bad news here. The good news is you've got a real story cooking, and when you stop taking shortcuts and get down to the business of letting it unfold, you do a decent job. The bad news is you've given us tons of stuff we don't need to know, and the stuff we do need to know has been compressed into three or four sentences that obliterate all the action that would make this a compelling read.

You have all the materials at hand to get the job done. Now you have to do the work of an author— arrange them in the best order; decide what to compress, what to portray in close-up detail. You have to decide how to make this a dramatic process of transformation for your main character in order that we might actually have something with which to become involved. You have to make us care. Face it, cheating husbands and vengeful wives are all around us. The situation isn't new. You have to make it new but making your characters three-dimensional and giving them thoughhts, words and deeds that show us a familiar situation in a way that makes us think , "This is real. These are people I want to know more about."

Let's start with basics, then move on to the details. Short stories, by definition, are excerpts carved out of some larger context. The larger context is important but only in as much as it defines the attitudes and perspectives of the characters and gives the things they think, do and say an inner cohesion. It's the excerpt that counts, and it has to stand on its own. It's important for you to know the backstory, the larger context, because that's how you get to know your characters and make them believable; it's much less important for us to know it. If you give us believable characters, we'll accept them without knowing everything about them, or anything in particular about them. What counts is the story at hand. Backstory needs to be fed in as sparingly as you can get away with. Keep in mind that every time you as author pause to tell us backstory, or your characters pause to reflect on something that has already happened just to make sure the reader is up to speed, nothing is happening in the present. So break that flow only when you absolutely have to, and find a way to slip in the relevant material at appropriate points, places where the action naturally has a pause, so that the time flow remains consistent.

What this means is that your first 16 paragraphs or so have nothing whatsoever to do with this story. Truth is, we don't care about all that stuff. We'll follow along for a while because we trust you and trust that you're not going to put anything in front of us that doesn't impact on the story at hand, but once we begin to suspect that you haven't provided the structure that the story requires, that you're just throwing everything at us, none of it will stand out in importance. Particularly since you've chosen the artificial trick of starting the story after the beginning and then backtracking. This can be a good technique when you want to grab the reader's attention. But you want to save some of the actual story for the present action. You've started your story after everything has taken place. So there is no story in the present, other than your main character lying on a stretcher and watching the gurney being wheeled out of her house. That's it for action in the present. Everything else, the entire story, is relegated to backstory. Major flaw, because no one really takes backstory seriously; we know it's just bits of business that need to be dealt with so the present action can make sense and the real story can get moving again. When there's no story, the backstory has no purpose and remains forever removed from the kind of immediacy that allows us to crawl inside the universe you've created and experience it, rather than simply contemplate it.

For my money, the story begins when she starts trying to get pregnant. This is a natural starting point for her arc, which will take her from hope and optimism to shock, denial, horror and tragedy. You might have some references to Cliff's former behavior but only to let us know that for Leah, this is a new beginning.

For it to be meaningful for the reader, we need to actually make the journey with her. That means that instead of a passage like this one:

In the last three months leading up to this night it was an argument they repeated almost daily. As days turned to weeks they quit trying to get pregnant because they quit sleeping together at all. Cliff and Amy, who had always had an oddly uncomfortable, confrontational relationship began to argue quietly, but in depth. Leah turned inward, becoming quieter, more withdrawn...

you actually unlock all the scenes that you've carelessly referred to in passing and show them as they happen. The developmnet section of your story is hidden away in those generalized summaries of what transpires. You need so show us the argument, and show how it affects Leah. You need to show them as they stop sleeping together, and let us experience the significance of this as Leah experiences it. Don't tell us they begin to argue quietly, but in depth (whatever the heck that means)—show us what an argument like that looks like.

Keep in mind all the while that your job is not to simply tell us what is happening around Leah and to Leah, nor what she is doing about it. Your job is to keep the reader turning the pages. So you need to cast each plot point as some form of difficulty for Leah to deal with, and each one needs to come at her with greater intensity than the one before. That's how you reel your reader in and keep them wondering what's going to happen next. If they stop wondering that, they'll stop reading.

The relationship between Cliff and Amy is, of course the primary conflict and the major obstacle facing Leah. You have planted the seeds of this situation early on, mentioning that when Amy came to live with them, Cliff changed his cheating ways, but you need to integrate this into the tapestry of their relationship, show the growing doubt, the warning signs, the red flags. Give Leah a real-world response to the idea of her sister stealing her husband away from her in their own home: casual dismissal changing to nagging doubt, transitioning into shocked disbelief and denial, finally moving to grim acceptance. The timeline for this process is crucial. Spill the beans too soon, you have no climax. Wait too long, you have no third act.

Like I said at the beginning, all the elements are here. You now need to discover the difference beween simply letting us know what they are, and using narrative technique to craft a process of transition—development, climax and resolution—that will keep the reader engaged.
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Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: 18+ | (4.0)
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You say you've revised this poem. I beg to differ. This is hardly a revision. It is, in fact, an entirely different poem, complete with an utterly different set of rules that it conforms to. It's also a far superior poem. However, as you are doing something totally new, a host of new issues suggests itself.

Keep in mind that some of this stuff is going to get really picky, which is what you need to do as your poem approaches a state of completion. The difference between a poem that is 95% "there", and one that does its job completely is a long span indeed. However, as you leave the realm of rookie blunders, any commentary will also pull away from objective critique and approach aspects of personal preference, and my preferences aren't necessarily yours. I can make a good argument for mine; that's why I'm here. Part of your evolution as a poet is to likewise make a good argument for your own, and if you can't, figure out why not. That said, a few things nonetheless come to mind.

Visually it's strong, but more important, it's interesting. Lot's of rich words jostling up against each other. Be careful of obvious redundancies like "a cacophony of noise"; cacophony is, by definition, noise. Likewise, "Lost in a maze of dead-end emotion"; if you're in a maze, you're probably lost. As for the "dead-end" emotions, I'd bet there's something else you rather say but haven't yet thought of it. Keep looking. HINT: don't settle for literal description. There's nothing wrong with making sense, but it's certainly not required, and in any event, sense in a poem is something very different from prosaic, logical cause-and-effect sense. You don't always want your images to form a direct link to the desired effect, in the same way that you don't really want your poem to be "about" what it appears to be about. You will engage the reader more forcefully if you creep up on the effect or come at it sideways.

Another thing to look at is your line breaks. RIght now there is a one-to-one correspondence between the specific elements of your poem and the lines in which they appear, one line for each. Setting up a counterpoint between line breaks and content can make for a more interesting read, and choosing your breaks carefully can engineer shades of meaning into your lines that the surface content of the words does not suggest. Consider the first line:

Asleep behind the wheel

It's sharp and crisp, and nicely imagistic. Nonetheless, it's a line of description referring to some state, condition or situation outside of itself, which necessarily calls into being a narrator who is doing the describing. This isn't wrong, but it does place a buffer between the reader and the experience itself. Rethinking the wording, as well as the line breaks, you might come up with something like this for the first stanza:

behind
the wheel,
sleeping through
noise—this numb
maze, solace
sought in vain.

That's a quick shot off the top of my head, but one thing it does is bring the reader closer to the experience itself, placing them in the midst of the event as it unfolds, allowing them to make your experience their experience as well. Another thing it does is run elements over line breaks, a process that pulls the reader forward as they attempt to resolve the counterpoint between rhythm and sense. And by ruthlessly edting out any expendable elements and tightening up the ones that remain, you sacrifice a bit of prose sense, but what you gain in immediacy more than makes up for it. Sure, it's a judgement call whether or not "numb maze," captures the essence of "maze of dead-end emotions," but something along those lines would give the reader something to do in the way of providing interpretation themselves, instead of having it spelled out for them.

Note stanza four. Again, lots of images and no flabby abstractions. However, keep in mind that for something to happen, for things to unfold over time, it takes a verb, and the two you have in four lines are "gives," and "is". Neither are particularly dynamic. When your verbs aren't working hard enough, your images just sort of hang around, being what they are, but not doing much. There's no rule that says these particular elements need to be doing anything, but in general, language that pushes forward through time and space will allow for more natural transitions between elements and offer a framework on which the reader can drape their interpretations.

I think you're moving in a great direction with this. Keep at it.
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Review of Twinkle  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: ASR | (2.5)
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You asked for an in-depth critique of the first three chapters of your novel.

I read the three chapters; well, I skimmed the third to see if it confirmed my suspicions. It did. More on that in a moment. I think your idea is good; but, then, all ideas are potentially good. It all comes down to the telling. In my estimation, you have to reconsider some of the elements you're juggling, and you're going to have to force yourself through a learning curve to discover the difference between simply telling us what happens and bringing narrative technique into the equation.

First, the structural stuff. You don't have four protagonists unless you have four separate stories. I don't see that happening and would advise against it if you did. You have one protagonist and he is Sean. You have an antagonist in the person of his father. You have an objective story line that involves the cult they are battling each other for control.

Zoe is your main character. She is the point of access to everything that happens, the person with whom the reader will identify. She has her own storyline, apart from the objective story line. That doesn't mean she has nothing to do with it. Far from it. But she is the anchor of your subjective storyline which involves the challenges, conflicts and desires in her own life, and which are complicated by her collision with the objective story. Her realtionship with Sean is the intersection between the two story lines, and it is this co-mingling that allows them to influence each other.

This is nothing more than the classic structure of all good stories, novels or movies, that work. If you think of any stories that stuck in your mind, there is an elegant simplicity about them. A main character we identify with, a protagonist we root and cheer for, a serious conflict for the main character and a complicating situation that forms the larger story and makes things difficult (and interesting). Sometimes the main character and the protagonist are one and the same. Not here.

You have all the elements ready to be used. You just need to use them correctly. If you try to balance your story between four different people, your story will be about none of them, and don't fool yourself that you can make it about an idea. Stories aren't about ideas, and the ones that try to be are called propaganda. Stories are about things happening; things happening to people we are interested in becoming involved with. We don't even have to like them, but we have to want to know what's going to happen next, and whatever happens next needs to have flowed organically from what just happened and flow just as organically to the thing after that, whatever it might be. That's the elegant simplicity. An unbroken chain of events and people causing them, responding to them and interacting because of them.

You also have another important element in the character of Sophie, which is The Buddy. Every main character needs a buddy. It's not artificial or a cliche because everybody everywhere needs a buddy, even if it's a cat or a goldfish. Buddies not only relieve you of the need to put all of your main character's impression into internal monologues (during which nothing happens), but they also are a useful resource when plot points are called for.

You also have another crucial character in the Uncle, who would be {i]The Mentor. Sometimes the mentor is also an Obstacle Character who is not the same thing as an antagonist is in relation to the protagonist. The obstacle character is the person who stands in the way and forces the main character to reevaluate her assumptions, who questions her motives and who plays devils advocate. In Star wars, Obi Wan Kenobi was Luke Skywalker's mentor and obstacle character.

When you assign your characters their proper roles, you'll have a much less cluttered path before you. When you realize that Zoe's story is a separate arc from Sean's, that they serve two totally different functions in your story, you'll be much more focused in how they interact and influence each other's arcs.



Here's the difference between telling us what happens, and using narrative technique. You have an interesting situation brewing, which I know because I asked for your summary. However, I'm at the end of chapter three and there's no sign of it. You've performed some utilitarian functions—established some backstory, introduced the important characters, but whatever the issues are that will form your story are so far no where in evidence. Meanwhile, in Chapter Two you refer to the fact that Uncle Sunday isn't one of the insiders in town, but all you do is refer to it. That's not how you hook the reader and make them think that if they put your book down, they're going to be missing the time of their life.

Truth is, you need to dump the first chapter entirely. It exists for no other reason than to tell us that Zoe's parents were killed unexpectedly and she went to live with her Uncle in Maine. Anything else, if you find you really cant live without it, like the stuff about the philosophy/theology dichotomy, can be slipped in between the lines as you work through the opening passages—in between the important events that you will be telling us about instead.

The first sentence of Chapter Two is a natural opening line. Then follow that with a few sentence condensing everything else in chapter two, until you get to the stuff you are now condensing that needs to be opened up and turned into the scene proper.

Something like this:

The tears were hardest for Uncle Sunday to handle. There wasn't anything I could do about them, however. It was still too soon after my parents deaths and I hadn't accepted that cold reality. I was grateful to have a relative who cared enough to let me come live with him, and I suppose Crucible Point was a pleasant enough town, but at that point in my life, I didn't want to live anywhere.

Or some such. That pretty much takes care of everything from Chapter One that the reader needs to know at this point; it also kicks things off at a gallop; it will make the reader want to at least move on to paragraph two, whereupon you most definitely will not want to smother him, as you do now, with abstract reflections on the nature of men, life in general and lots of mundane activities like wiring cable and internet, and Uncle Sunday's utility service. You want to establish the situation. You want to define the energy field out of which your entire story will evolve. That means, down towards the end of Chapter Two, when you get to passages like this,'

It was a fairly even town. Creepily even. The make up of denizens of Crucible point was divided into three main groups, each with a third of the population. There were the fishermen and their families, the Townies and their families, and the "Flash," who were the ultra-rich elite that didn't really live in the city full time but kept it as their main address.

and later on, the three sections where you tell us that the three groups didn't like her uncle, you will close your eyes and imagine Zoe and Sunday interacting with various towns folk, interactions that will show the situations that you now just refer to. Situations in which people do and say things that strike Zoe as off-kilter, not right. Situations that alert her (and the reader, gotta think of the reader) to the fact that there is more going on than first meets the eye. And then you will write those scenes, action and dialogue, so the reader can see the tale unfolding before them instead of simply tossing them off in quick asides, like you do now. Those odd interactions are the proper beginning of the situation that will concern the rest of your novel. You have to know what to condense, what to focus on.

In the course of these interactions (two or three is all you really need to set the scene and let us know what's happening), you will actually want to merge Chapter Two and Chapter Three. Right now, Chapter Three exists solely to let Zoe meet a couple of friendly faces. You need to integrate that into the overall process of her mapping out the territory in her own mind. Make it a natural part of her orientation process, and, while you're at it, begin introducing the actual conflict. It's the core of your story, after all. Right now it's no where in sight. Maybe in the real world she could go three or four months in a new town before she starts to get a sense that things aren't right; you don't have four months. You've got maybe a half hour, which is how long it will take your reader to decide nothing's happening and turn their attention to the TV schedule.

Every single thing you tell us has to count towards that central narrative. It's fine to take your time letting the reader get to know your characters, but you need to be working double time all the while, planting clues, making sure that when you begin revealing the deeper dimensions of your story it sounds like a natural progression, not something grafted on because it was time to get a plot going.

So now after all this surgery, you have a rich first chapter that introduces the four major characters, establishes some of the conflict and sets the stage for whatever comes next. You have to do that with every chapter and everything you tell us has to be used. Don't waste time on things that don't impact on the story. If Zoe has to stop and ponder or wander off into some abstract reflection on some topic or other, make sure it's a topic that's relevant to the situation and that she comes out of it with something to show for it in the form of insight, satisfaction, resolution.... something to let us know that the story is chugging along just as it should.

You write good dialogue and overall your prose has a nice crisp sound and it moves along at a good clip. You don't get bogged down in time flow issues; things are always clear. You just need to be more judicious in deciding what it is that you are going to put in front of your reader.
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Review of Turning  
Review by edgework
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Rated: 18+ | (2.5)
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I've discovered two types of serious narrative flaws in the course of reviewing stories here on WDC, and they are exact mirror reflections of each other, perfectly opposite in terms of what they produce and what they avoid.

One problem—I've dubbed it the Stand Aside, I'll Fix This! Syndrom—can be demonstrated by this simple exchange:

"But then, you never really were all that smart, were you?" purred Veronica, claws scarcely concealed.

How dare she talk like that in front of the others! Who did she think she was? Darby was so mad, she could spit.

"That's just your opinion," she said, seething inwardly.

Here we have a writer who doesn't trust the characters they've created, blundering into the scene with all manner of interpretive narration, telling the reader what they're supposed to be thinking and understanding. Of course, had Darby been given a response that would have been appropriate for someone so mad she could just spit, the effect would be telegraphed much more forcefully, and in a way that the reader could involve themselves with. It would also open up a dynamic character exchange where (Gasp!) something might actually happen in the real-time space, instead of just taking place inside Darby's head.

You exhibit the other problem, which I've dubbed Screenwriter Envy. That's pretty much what you've written— a screenplay, but one that lacks a cameraman to show us what's happening, along with the myriad visual clues of body language and facial expressions that make up the language of cinema; without a sound editor to carefully control what we hear, telling us what is important and what is background noise; without a film editor to craft the sequence of visual cues, forcing us to see the scene in a way that delivers the maximum impact; and without a director to provide the oversight and guiding hand to lash everything into a single, coherent statement. All you've really done is stick a camera and a microphone in the middle of the proceedings and then transcribed the resulting data.

The langage of cinema is not the language of prose and you need to create all the supporting context that gives life, shape and meaning to the data presented through prose techniques. If the first example I gave shows a writer who can't get out of the way, your story exemplifies a writer who doesn't want to get involved. The result is a story with an impact that has remained largely in your own mind, since you've attended to none of the narrative tasks that tell us exactly what's going on and what we need to know.

It's the difference in what I call Phenomenological Narration and Interpretive Narration. The former presents data as it comes through to the senses, the latter wraps up the data in a neat little package with labels attached. Both are crucial to a clear narrative line. The trick is knowing when to use each one. Clearly the first example needed to rely more on a close-up portrayal of the events (assuming those events were imagined in a way that demonstrated precisely what was going on), whereas in your case, simply telling us what is going on isn't enough. It's one thing to leave ambiguous spaces in a story, opportunities for the reader to fill in the blanks with their own experience and make connections for themselves; it's quite another to ask the reader to do your work for you and put sense into a structure that is essentially neutral.

It might not require a lot of modification either. One thing you need to do is stop wasting your opening. In a short story you don't have time to put in anything that is superfluous. This is doubly so in the opening, your only chance to aim the reader's perceptions in the direction you want, telegraph the problem and alert them to the conflicts. It's also a way to tell them how to approach the story. Is this a tragedy? A drama. A farce? You establish the tone, and if you neglect that task, we have no markers to guide us on our journey.

In all your talk about beer, and the weather report (which really has no impact on the story at all—steamy windows happen on clear nights as well), you bury this passage:

"Still think a night with the ex is a good idea?”
Ben shrugged and turned the radio down.

This, in the middle of a fairly long passage that simply marks time and goes nowhere. And the reason it goes nowhere is you're not doing anything to guide us, to let us know what we need to be focusing on. Compare:

It was probably a dumb idea to spend an evening with his ex and her current boyfriend, but Ben was prepared. The six-pack at his feet would provide all the emotional support he needed.

That boyfriend, who also happened to be his own best friend, now turned onto the long driveway, a path Ben had taken all too often. Lights winked through the trees from the otherwise invisible mansion.

I don't suggest you write like that; I do suggest you write something like that. Give us context. That way, when Mike kisses Sarah, the tension is ratcheted up a knotch instead of us wasting time trying to put the pieces together. And the bland conversation that follows will have an undercurrent of tension that is totally lacking now. Who knows, you might even decide to stick an couple more narrative flourishes in at strategic points along the way just to keep things on course, and also give us some access to Ben's inner thoughts. Don't make the mistake of characterizing through interior monologue, of course, which is always just an example of the first problem I mentioned. But neither should you make the mistake of trying to narrate through conversation, which just results in characters saying things they wouldn't really say, for no other reason than to keep the reader in the loop. You have to know when to give us hard sense data, and when to give us interpretation.

That interpretation is what's called the author's perspective, and if it doesn't infuse the story from top to bottom, it'll just be what you've given us now: a bunch of people sitting around talking, and some stuff happening. Like real life. Real life is a bore. Stories don't usually happen in real life. And the things that do happen in real life are mostly random events. Stories are what real life would look like if real life had direction, purpose and everything counted. The difference is you.
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