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1,084 Public Reviews Given
1,107 Total Reviews Given
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.
Least Favorite Genres
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.
Public Reviews
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Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
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Not too shabby at all. You have an easy, breezy tone to your words and a strong confident voice to direct the narration. Everything moves without confusion and, truth is, it's fun to read. I notice one potentially crippling pattern in this opening segment however, and it's not the kind of thing you can solve by tweaking this line or that paragraph. It's a stylistic issue that goes to the heart of how you choose to convey your story to your reader, and I think the ending scene in this excerpt is a perfect metaphor for what you are doing wrong.

First of all, you have heavily weighted the content with your narrator's interior reflections, observations and recollections. The majority of these revolve around her mother and their somewhat complex relationship. This first section takes up 22 paragraphs, but only 7 of those paragraphs detail an actual interaction between the two of them, and that interaction is a bit sterile and stilted, hinting at the complexities, but, without the vast buttressing interior monologue to fill in the blanks, leaving us pretty much in the dark.

Keep in mind, as you decide how to balance expository narration with close up action and dialogue, a narrator talking about events is, for the reader, an experience of someone talking, regardless of the events under discussion. All such narration is timeless and spaceless, simply hovering like a color cast in a photo, a smokelike haze, a particular aroma: it adds necessary information, tone and color and aids the reader in knowing just how they are to interpret the events, but without actual events, the end result is nothing much happening.

Here, your narrator talks to us about events that, for her, were quite clearly problematic, difficult, fraught with tension and painful decisions: all the things that should be part of a good narrative arc. But none of that actually comes through, filtered as it is by that narrative voice. It's one thing to be told "I was upset." Quite another to be placed in the middle of an emotional scene, watching people turn red in the face, throw things against the wall, yell, storm out of the room and slam the door behind them. Those are things that activate the senses, that make us experience the moment instead of simply sitting on the sidelines, passively observing, thinking to ourselves, "Oh, I get it," when what you really want, as a writer, is for your story to get your readers.

It's the old adage: SHOW, DON'T TELL. I can see that you'll need to remind yourself of that, as you craft your scenes. The more actual events that can be placed in front of the reader, the more compelling your story will be. That's not to say that you have to abandon your interpretive prose narration; it's as crippling to try to tell a story simple with neutral action and dialogue, as though you were writing a movie script rather than a piece of prose fiction. Don't abandon your voice, but use it in the service of the actual story, rather than to simply tell us that a story exists, referring to it instead of allowing it to naturally play out.

I'm going to invoke a time-honored rule of romance novels here, which this may or may not prove to be, it's hard to say from this excerpt. What you have done is to literally leave her a passive observer in her first encounter with Connor. You've squandered your best opportunity to guide your reader in the direction you want, and to set the tone for all future developemnt, by not having them actually interact. Of course, in a run-of-the-mill romance novel, the heroine and the hero have to conflict in some way, usually through the most artificial of plot tricks and so their first meeting has to be antagonistic, but even so, so much more can be communicated through a natural interaction between characters than by simply describing their traits. If you want to prompt your reader to ask that all-important question "Gosh, I wonder what's gonna happen next?" put your character in a situation that absolutely requires a next. That compells her, and the reader, to make that next happen. String enough of those moments together, pretty soon you've got yourself a real story.
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Review by edgework
Rated: 18+ | (3.5)
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I think this warrants a 4.0 or a 4.5 for the quality of your writing, but maybe just a 3.0 considering the work yet to be done. So let's call it a 3.5. For all that, it may be publishable as is, certainly with some editing and restructuring, and with a bit of rethinking your approach to story structure, you could have something close to a masterpiece.

First the good stuff, about which there can be no argument.

Every sentence is strong. Nothing falls flat. Your language is vivid and your handling of the first-person present point of view exploits the resulting immediacy, keeping the reader in the center of the action, offering a rich feast for the senses.

Better yet, your sentences gather themselves into fully formed paragraphs, structures with a beginning, middle and end. Wow. Paragraphs with a third act. A rare treat. And you manage a balance between interior reflection and exterior description, allowing them to work together as a single unit, as in this quick passage:

The rickshaws wobble past me. The drivers all seem underfed and unhealthy. And all the passengers seem overfed and unhealthy. They’re such extremes. Some people die from over-eating. Others die from under-eating.

quickly followed by:

I don’t think I can ride a rickshaw. I can’t stand the thought of having someone else pulling me around. It isn’t even with a car. It’s with a bicycle. A cruel and burdensome weight to put on someone else’s leg muscles--I don’t think I’m twisted enough to utilize that mode of transportation. Even if it is cheap.

And even if it provides an income to someone.

It’s just not worth it. I’ll walk.

What's nice here is the feeling that everything is exactly enough to get the job done, and you seem to do it without breaking a sweat.

There is nothing I have to say about the sound of your words, the way they flow, your handling of time and place, dialogue or description. They are fully developed, and some of the things you are doing simply can't be taught: either you work them out yourself, through inspiration and ability, or they're not going to happen at all. You've clearly worked them out.

So. On to the difficult stuff. I want to talk about some things you might consider as you edit this piece, and some directions you might take to turn it into the piece it deserves to be.

I've read this three times to make sure that my own faulty perception wasn't obscuring crucial elements. Each time I found myself lulled by the words themselves, yet thinking, at some point, "Okay, great set-up. Great writing. Got it. Now let's cut to the chase." You never really do that. It's a story that's waiting for a reason to start, and eventually, it gets tired of waiting and everyone goes home.

What you've given us is really a journal, a "How I Spent My Summer Vacation," kind of essay, when the vacation did exactly what vacations are supposed to do: provide a respite from the tensions and conflicts that wait back in the real world. Hey, respites are great, as well as anything that eases the tensions, but stories need something with a bit more bite.

I'm assuming this is biographical; even if it isn't, the intention and effect seems to be "This is just how it happened." That's the problem. It sounds real. Too real. There are no stories in real life. Just one thing after another. Every once in a while something might blow up, someone might die unexpectedly, grandma might win the lottery, but really, the stuff of life is mostly this happened, then that happened, then these things happened...

It always takes the intervention of a mind to provide the stories, to envelope the raw material of life into a small block of movement that appears to have purpose, meaning and intent. When people say things like It was meant to happen, it was God's will, It all worked out for the best, He got what he deserved, It was karma, they're trying to wrap a veneer of purpose around those simple sequences of events that "just happen." As a writer, you have to create this artificial wrapping, and so far, you've just done a great job of feeding us the raw data. There is no sense of continuity because that has yet to be provided by you.

You do have the sketch of a narrative arc, of sorts:

Young girl returns to her country from school in America, wants a break, encounters enough of the local flavor to feel like a stranger, smokes some ganja, toys with a mystical experience, then goes back to the world she's come to think of as home.

Along the way you introduce a host of elements, any of which could provide actual plot points in the evolution of her story, if there was a story, but unfortunately they just appear, unconnected to anything beyond the surface content of their actions, probably for no other reason then "that's the way it happened," which is no reason at all.

But there's more. It's not enough to just perceive (or invent) a pattern in the events of life; if you want to be a good writer, you also have to make it interesting to the reader. Just because I think "It all worked out for the best" doesn't mean I've got a story that you want to read. And here we come to the real problem you face: your characters are basically good, decent people, involved with their lives, producing positive results, without a lot of complaint or difficulty beyond the difficulty we all face with the task of living. Great. I'm happy for them. Find people like that to hang out with. Marry them. Live next door to them. Emulate them at every opporunity. But never try to write a story about them, because there are no stories with such people. Why? Because they're pretty much content with things as they are. They like what's going on. They have no need to change.

But that need to change, for whatever infinite number of reasons, is precisely what constitutes an interesting story that will keep the reader turning the pages thinking, "Gosh, I wonder what's going to happen next." Of course, your reader will always wonder that, and so it's just good form to actually provide a next, and one after that and another after that to reward them for the time and effort they're spending reading your piece. If you insist on using people like this, then you have to step in and shake things up, bring in a flood, a robbery, a revolution, a plane crash, an alien invasion: something to show us how they react when their calm, still waters get stirred up.

Let's start with your main character, who, please keep in mind, is not you, or anyone you know: she's a fictional character who exists to tell a story and you owe her nothing other than to stick her in a situation that will catch our attention. She's kind of a non-interventionist, moving through her environment, observing and recording the sensory impressions that come along, but scarcely interacting with it. The truth is, she's not completely certain why she's there, but I guess she's willing to find a reason. For the most part, she's on a break from school and seems to welcome the suspended time, when nothing much is asked of her.

Now, back at school... hey now, lots of stuff going on back at school. Stories even. Complications. Problems. Actions to be taken. Decisions to be made. Decisions leading to actions. Actions forcing decisions. You know, all that plot stuff. And, by the end, she's back "home", and we assume that some stories are going to start up again. But in the time we actually get to spend with her, not much happens, and that seems to be how she wants it.

Even so, you could tighten the movement of your scenes somewhat. You might engineer a linear progression from her state at the opening where she's just kind of wandering around taking in the sights, then bring in a focus on her relationship to her grandfather, then focus on his friend and his story. And all the while let the energies gather toward the celebration when she encounters Shiva. As it is now written, it's unclear what actually takes place during that encounter, or what it means, but the scene is vivid enough that it might not matter, offering enough suggestion for the reader to provide their own embellishments. But you've diluted the force by bring it in too early, then going back to business as usual; after you go out to the garden bungalow (for reasons that don't make a lot of sense) then you bring in your grandfather's friend and we vamp around that for a while, then, it's back to the celebration again, for more of the same.

And that's the unfortunate effect this collection of snapshots has on us: it's all more of the same. Like life, first this happens, then that happens then these things... But you don't let it lead to anything, there's nothing really at stake so there are no conclusions to be drawn and no resolution to leave the reader feeling complete.

I'm going to suggest that in the future, and possibly with the rewrite of this piece, should you choose to undertake it, that you make a commitment to yourself that nothing will be introduced in a story that doesn't have a reason to be there. It's the old maxim: If you show a gun in Act One, it needs to be fired in Act Three, or the audience will feel like you've intentionally misdirected them. Conversely, any guns that are needed in Act Three better be introduced well before, or it will feel like you're just pulling rabbits out of a trick hat instead of doing the hard work of creating a believable narrative arc. What you have here are lots and lots of unfired guns littering your landscape.

You've given us rickshaw drivers, a suspicious shopkeeper, a disgruntled Imam (imagined, not actually present, but, still, he's introduced and we spend time on him) the garden bungalow and a temporary partner known only as "the girl" who appears unannounced and leaves just as quickly, plus the tattooing ritual in which she assists and the driver/butler who accompanies her to the celebration, and whose role then becomes highly ambiguous. But the biggest guns that remain unfired are the Grandfather and his friend. They're standing right in front of you with their rich, vibrant pasts and who knows what complicated presents, just waiting to have a story gather around them, something that might force your main character into a situation that requires her to undergo some kind of transformation. But no, all they do is have breakfast and go shopping and talk about the past, back when their stories took place.

Stories don't require a labyrinthine plot, just a sense that something is happening that has implications, that causes someone to have to question their assumptions, take unexpectd actions, make decisions... so something besides just go through their days the way they always do. That means you have to come up with characters who are confronted with something that breaks them out of their complacency. This might be an internal flaw, a character trait that gets them in a jam, it might be their attachment to someone else who is flawed and they get dragged along for an unwanted ride, or, as already mentioned, it might be an act of a capricious God tossing thunderbolts into the mix just because he can.

There are myriad possibilities for a story here, and it's tempting to toss off five or ten, just to show off. But it's not my story and your own vision will be far better served if you go back to the foundation you've created here and discover something that your characters want but don't have, or a situation from which they'd like to escape. Find out what the problem is, then trust them to figure out how to solve it. In the process, you'll have a killer story.
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Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.0)
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It's hard to say what this might turn into, although your set-up is intriguing. You hooked me with the first line and by the time I finished the opening narrative paragraphs, not only had you not lost me, you made me want to keep reading. So, for that alone, I have to say you're on the right track.

In my own portfolio I have a selection of story openings that seemed promising as well; in fact, some of my best writing. Yet, there they sit, unformed, undeveloped, unrealized, while lesser efforts make all the way the THE END. Writers everywhere have littered their shelves (and hard drives) with unfinished efforts.

All I can note here is that you have a facility with words, but that alone won't help you if you have no idea what makes a set-up turn into a complication, with either decisions leading to actions, or actions forced by decisions which lead to further complications... you know, all that plotting stuff. And even if you get that far, you'll run out of steam unless you come up with a third act. Gotta have a third act.

Not literally, of course, but there's nothing less satisfying than to read through a story or novel (or sit through a movie) that keeps your interest through a nice organic development, wondering to yourself, "Where are they going with this?" only to realize that the answer is "No where, special." Third acts are the payoff for the audience, they are how you make all that has come before count. Sometimes it's a plot twist, but more often it's just a natural follow through, a resolution that might not have been predictable, but which feels right.

Do you have that in you? Ya got me. It's certainly possible. I think it's fair to say that you won't have a lot of difficulty producing your scenes, once you figure out what they should contain. Your opening narrative was clean, clear and read well. You gave a feeling that the narrator was in control and, thus, we were more than willing to follow wherever we were lead.

However, narrative of that nature, meant to convey context, backstory and memories, is, necessarily, timeless. That's the problem with the past, all of it is right there, all at once. There's no time flow, not even when the narration is recounting past memories in a chronological manner. A narrator recounting their own experience is still, for the reader, an experience of someone talking, regardless of what they might be talking about.

As I said, your narration works, that's not a problem. But you need to pay a little more attention to those moments when you step out of that timeless exposition and explanatory text, into present action. Here's how you handle what is arguably the most profound moment in your narrator's life, up to this point:

This is the room my sister appears in one day. It is the first time I meet her.

And then it's right into ordinary dialogue. That's a rough segue, not quite whiplash inducing, but close. What's missing is all the subtle clues that would convey the significance of the moment. And so, it is my sad duty to inform you that you are afflicted with a serious malady, one that I've noticed in many writers, one that, to my knowledge, only I have diagnosed: you have Screenwriter Envy, and, in fact, you're about the fifth or sixth good writer I've encountered in the past month with the same problem.

Basically, you've gone from a strong block of narrative prose, into a movie script. Not completely, by the way, but except for some brief bits of action (plunking down in the armchair), and some adverbs that suggest a line that's missing the real verb you're still looking for, all we get is dialogue. A director loves that, of course; they hate it when a writer directs from the script. It's the director's job to choreograph the scene, to guide the camera's focus on the important elements, who will turn those lines of speech into a fully-formed environment with real people who provide us with expressions, body language, who function in an environment that will provide us with further clues.

Get it: you are not the camera. There is no camera. Only words, and what I feel here is that your words are settling for a pale imitation of a scene as it would unfold on the screen, rather than doing the real job of telling a story, which means, creating that fully realized context from words alone.

It's hard to say what's missing. Only that something is, that the narrative control present in the opening paragraphs has now withdrawn, leaving the characters on their own.

As I said, it's hard to make a determination based on such a brief excerpt. I may be reading too much into too little. In any event, I'd love to see where this goes.
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Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.0)
From the "Writing Hurts: Review Forum" 

This is a hit-and-run kind of poem: get in fast and close, do maximum damage and split before they know what hit 'em. A poem like this needs tightly focused language with something clear and sharp for the senses to be certain you make an impression. I like that you are trying to avoid the usual tired cliches with this kind of subject matter and I like the strong rhythms in your lines. You don't give us a lot of sentimental schmaltz (though the misspelled promises in the second line suggests a carelessness that you don't need to suggest.) Here's my complaint: a poem like this needs to be quick and deadly; you don't give yourself the luxury of a meditative contemplation. Unfortunately, I think your stylistic choices are undermining you and slowing you down.

For instance, while whatever "things" happening in a poem are seldom the point, or what will make it memorable (it's not a short story, after all), that something, anything, is happening will give a forward movement to the piece and keep things flowing. Here, you take care of the happening stuff in the first two lines:

...we dress-up...
And speak...

and that's it for the action. Everything else pivots around the rather abstract word promises, serving as an elaborate set of modifiers that examine and reexamine that word from different angles, but which offer nothing in the way of transforming energy. It's a description of an existing condition or state that continues on past the bounds of the poem with no indication that anything will shift.

While there may be eyes somewhere that sleep to forget, it doesn't happen here, since the entire phrase that sleep to forget serves as a modifier for those eyes. Likewise cold hands, also modified by a similar phrase that suggests a kind of action, in principle, but which offers none in the moment.

These things can't be tweaked; they must re-imagined, and it's not the content that's the problem, it's the linguistic structures themselves. Rethinking your images in the context of declarative sentences with a subject, verb and object will necessarily force you to grapple with not only what is taking place, but the implications and consequences that result. In a story this would take the form of plot points describing the changes that a character or characters undergo; in a poem there is no obligation to cause-and-effect logic, and so the transforming movement can wander freely through both inner and outer realities, as well as spaces that exist solely in the words themselves, with no analogues to other types of sensory experience. The important thing in a poem is always the language itself, and the language of action will always be more compelling, and more visual and concrete, than abstract description. We may not always be able to offer a clear answer to the question "What's it about?", but that sense of forward movement will leave us with a feeling that it was definitely "about" something, and it will offer a solid structure on which we might drape our own perceptions and experiences.
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Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.5)
The only thing this poem needs is editing. It's way longer than it needs to be. Just take out all the stuff you don't need to tell us, and let the real poem come into the light.

It's true in prose, but more so in poetry, that the writer is under no obligation to inform the reader about all the various elements that comprise the universe they've created. If all you choose to dole out are crumbs of information, quick images like a flash going off in the night, that can work just fine. All that's called for is that there actually does exist, somewhere, a continuous, complete universe, so that the glimpses we're given have an unspoken and undefined sense of continuity. We're willing to work with you to fill in the gaps you leave, which is a good thing, enrolling your reader into the process of letting the poem unfold, getting them inside the action.

Good prose is words in the best order. Good poetry is the best words in the best order. That's all you need.

Indulge me here; I'm going to be obnoxious and play Ezra Pound to this poem:

I'd never had a blueprint,
in a life that seemed to wander;
and my soul circled endlessly
through corridors of books.
down rows and rows
of thousands of numbers
in a library,
where knowledge
was a letter on a floor in a room
and a syllabus was guidance
for the journey.

Had I anything to tell you,
in those lost days back in school -
I should have told you,
at the pond
in the field of Oklahoma,
I was too young ,
and hadn't a clue

doing wheelies,
dragging bumpers,
riding cardboard
over ice--

Even old memories have flavors,
Jelly touches the tongue.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I've butchered your baby. But every word is yours, exactly as you wrote it, so I can content myself with the notion that I'm not actually being a total pain in the ass by rewriting your stuff for you. Seriously, though, when you have images like these, who needs

But, I guess I REALLY should have said,
I was happy that you loved me,
and sad that our trouble
was such distraction
for your plans..

which is pure prose, and not all that interesting either. Don't be afraid to leave stuff out. Go for the essence of the experience, your reader will fill in the details with their own lives. And the minute that happens, they belong to you.
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Review of A Day Spent  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.5)
Even though I have a few reservations about this poem, I really like the language. I like that it is a real poem, striving for an effect that could not be attained with any form of prose. I like the steady musicality of the lines, the absence of soft, flabby rhythms. I like the cascade of images spilling one onto the next, none trying to hog the spotlight, all working effortlessly towards a larger result. Truth is, I like the poem.

So what reservations? It's the softness of your images. Not weak images, but images that come with all sharp edges already filed off so they go down easy. Consider the opening:

I painted the day with lillies
in a circular vase
drowned in swans
the fog could not swallow

By no means is this a set of cliches. That's not what I'm saying. But there is a kind of gauze over the lens, softening the focus, so that you remain perpetually in a meditative mode of contemplation. It's as if you don't want anything you're writing to disturb your frame of mind. And that's what I'm missing. I'd like you to shock me with an image. Tap into the emotional current flowing beneath this soft-focus exterior and bring up something a bit more raw, messy, smelly, even unpleasant. You're very much in control of yourself here, but poetry is the language of immediacy, of reflex and gut-clenching response. Right now, you're maintaining a safe distance from the content in your piece, safe enough to allow you to look back and and observe. Poetry is what happens when you release words from control and see what they do on their own, when you get down in the mud, close that distance and experience the moment, and let us experience it as well.

You might be a little horrified at what comes out, but you might also find it a pleasant surprise.
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Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.5)
From the Writing Hurts Review Forum

Great opening. I had no idea what was going on and it didn't bother me a bit. You kept things lively, interesting and visual. Backward Wilbur had me hooked. I wanted to know more and I had good reason to trust that you'd clue me in when the time was right.

You didn't quite deliver, unfortunately. You get high marks throughout because you write well. And I think you have a nice tight plot here. But you need to figure out a better way to let it unfold.

In its current form, all the really interesting stuff has long since happened, and is beyond the scope of your story and your characters to alter. We're in the mop-up phase now, but, in order to give the reader any hope of following along, there's a lot of backstory that needs to be introduced. And so, instead of action, we have two characters referring to past action. Not the same thing at all.

I'll give you props for the fight scene. No one could say that's not action. But I can't help wondering what happened to Backward Wilbur?

Here's what you need to do: write a few more scenes. Instead of tossing off quick, careless references to the really crucial stuff, you need to do what Wilbur apparently has been doing, and go back in time. Present the important stuff as present action in its own era. No question that you can write action, when there's actually something happening. Flashbacks aren't always a safe way to bring in backstory, but, for a time traveller, they're not only appropriate, they're kind of the point.

A character like Malcon is far too important to pop up the way he does, with no warning, introduction or context. You work hard to explain him, but, like I said, it's just two guys talking. Gotta get down in the dirt with your characters and show them in the process of experiencing the story, so the reader can experience it too.
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Review of Calling Me Home  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (2.5)
from the Writing Hurts Review Forum

Before offering my critique (and criticisms) of this poem, let me talk about what strikes me as encouraging; while you have some habits that I believe you will need to undo, if you with to write something memorable, you have some instincts that suggest a poetic sensibility that would make the effort to develop your craft worth your while.

First, and foremost, you're not overly concerned with telling me something, as in, shoving a message down my throat. Essays are good for that sort of thing, but a poem should be concerned more with its language than about whatever subject that language is conveying. In truth, your subject here is somewhat slight; there is no narrative flow, and while a few things could be said to happen, they are presented in a kind of timeless perception of the the moment, one that you hover around, coming at it from one direction, then another. So if I say you're more concerned with your language than with your subject, it is intended as a compliment, and it already places you a good deal farther along the developmental path than many who write (and, indeed, who publish) poetry.

You didn't rhyme. At least, not outright, with lots of moon/June cliches ending your lines for no reason other than some vaguely formed sense that poems need to rhyme. Rhyme is fine, if it serves the poem, but, like all artificial constructions (and poetry is the most artificial of all written forms), it needs to sound like it simply belongs there, that the words would have been spoken this way anyway and just happened to form into lines that rhyme.

The rhymes you've embedded in your poem are not so obvious; they are internal, and rhymes of assonance and consonance and so, while not calling attention to themselves, provide an internal consistency that operates totally apart from the surface content, giving much more force to that content. dreams/trees, darkness/caress, ears/eyes--none of these are literal rhyming pairs, but they sound right, they allow the words to rolls easily off the tongue.

Your meter is uneven. Don't get me wrong: I'm not offended by poems that adhere to a strict 4-beat line, as in da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM-de-de DUM, and some powerful verses have been written using that type of line, but it's nice to see variation, and you have provided that. I'm not certain that you were specifically thinking scansion when you wrote this, but it's strong nonetheless. If you're not sure what I mean about scansion, in the broadest sense, it's simply the way English arranges itself into a sequence of weak and strong beats. Well structured English will naturally contain a much higher ratio of strong to weak beats, and, will gather into metrical feet, small rhythmic units that create another underlying structure not directly concerned with content, but which enables it with a steady, relentless flow.

For the record, your first line scans into two trochees and a final strong beat, the second a trochee, an iamb and an anapest, and the third the same as the second with a trailing weak beat at the end. All three beat lines, but with enough variation that we don't feel like your stuck in a formula. In the second stanza you mix it up even more, your opening line an iamb, a trochee and an anapest, but the second line cut short at the second beat, giving to a four-beat third line.

The third stanza opens with the same three feet you've used previously, but again with a different sequence, leading with an anapest, then a trochee and a final iamb. The second line is the most complex, rhythmically, another four beat line with a spondee/pyrrhic combination that works perfectly with the content: this is the only line that actually contains an event that can be located in time and space, rather than internally perception, and the meter supports it nicely. And the final two beat line wraps things up with a fine, asymetrical balance, one that feels complete without feeling repetitious.

Whether the product of careful consideration, or simply a result of an instinctive sense of language, these are elements conspicuous by their absence in much poetry that is written here and elsewhere and they are why I believe you have good poems in your future.

Now for the elements that keep this from being one of them.

If there is one structural element that distinguishes poetry from prose, it is the line, and its attendant break. There is nothing like it in prose and it's effective use can create nuances of meaning and suggest alternative, even contradictory interpretations of the content. What never works is to simply take a block of prose and chop it up arbitrarily so that, on the page, it looks like a poem, but which, is still just prose. For all the reasons I've already mentioned, you are not writing prose, but neither are you taking advantage of the line break. Each of your lines is a complete element, self-contained, and while one flows to the next and they build on each other, they each convey a single element of perception and so, the repetition (and boredom) that you've so effortless avoided with your sound and rhythm now makes an unwanted appearance in the way your lines give us This... now this... and now this... and here's another... and now this one...

This is a much trickier thing to deconstruct, since it is so entwined with the content of the images themselves, and, for reasons that follow, it is not the kind of thing you can tweak. I wouldn't offer you alternative line breaks to consider here, because, due to the nature of your images, there really aren't any.

And so, finally, we come to the heart of the matter, which is your imagery. Here is where you let us down, and where lies your challenge if you want to produce something lasting. Before I start to gripe, let me offer one final compliment: you start with an image of moonlight as a welcoming presence, and end on a nice ambiguous note; a voice calling from the shadows, calling me home, could be interpreted a few different ways. The offered sanctuary could be simple, a respite from cares and tribulations, it could be something colder and more permanent, death and a release from this world. That you don't take your reader by the hand and force them into one or another interpretation, but rather let them all float around in the mist at once is a nice touch.

But I have to tell you that moonlight is a dangerous image in the best of times. It's been used, for centuries. I'm not saying that there is nothing new in the image to surprise us, only that you haven't located or exploited it. The entire first stanza is simply a cliche use of moonlight. Sure, moonlight can do the obvious like gently embracing my dreams but isn't there another, darker, side to moonlight? The whole "dark night of the soul" thing which could offer a sharp contrast to the expected (and cliche) usage, and also buttress the ambiguity at the end.

But to manage that, you're going to have to come up with something for moonlight to do besides gently embracing anything. Something sharper, unexpected, a suggestion that moonlight might not just be a silvery web of protection and solace. But this is where a reviewer has to recognize the limits of a review. It's a simple thing to note elements that don't work, that fail to maximize the potential of a poem, but quite another to start offering alternatives, for those can only come from the poet whose vision this is, and they cannot be induced or grafted on. I won't undertake a line by line analysis because in general, all the lines have the same problem: they use indistinct images in predictable ways that neither surprise nor satisfy.

If you're going to get serious about this stuff, you're going to have to read poets who have, for whatever reason, produced work that has endured, that has transcended their own eras to become part of the broad body of English poetry. There are myriad examples, none of them necessarily the same. But unless you dive into this vast pool of poetry, and uncover for yourself the reason why those poets would probably not have used words like moonlight, gently embracing, wind whispers, breathy caress, or endearments, literally, with no irony or ulterior motive, then you will continue to rely on the same easy images that are too easy, that really serve as place holders in a poem that hasn't actually been written yet.

I would suggest that you study a random selection of works from a poet like William Carlos Williams. He pioneered the kind of flexible, almost conversational rhythm at which you seem so adept. But note, in these two short poems, how his images are utterly surprising, and how they actually create meanings that are skewed in different direction from the surface content. That is what poetry can do, and do it more effectively than prose, give us a multidimensional experience, rather than simply convey a message.

Dawn

Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings--
beating color up into it
at a far edge,--beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,--
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,--
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself--is lifted--
bit by bit above the edge
of things,--runs free at last
out into the open--!lumbering
glorified in full release upward--
songs cease.


The Cold Night

It is cold. The white moon
is up among her scattered stars--
like the bare thighs of
the Police Sergeant's wife--among
her five children . . .
No answer. Pale shadows lie upon
the frosted grass. One answer:
It is midnight, it is still
and it is cold . . . !
White thights of the sky! a
new answer out of the depths of
my male belly: In April . . .
In April I shall see again--In April!
the round and perfects thighs
of the Police Sergeant's wife
perfect still after many babies.
Oya!

Am I suggesting that you should write like Williams? Of course not. Aside from the fact that he's already done a pretty good job of it himself, I'd much prefer that you write like you. But I'd like to see you challenge yourself to come up with something original, something that captures my attention, something that makes me think, "Wow, language can do that."
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Review of Apology #12  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.5)
Many "love" poems aren't written with the intention of actually creating a poem. Rather, they are efforts to objectify some deep, hidden, usually painful emotion, and, as such, serve a no-doubt valuable function for both the writer and many who read them. But they seldom make any attempt to explore the inner structures of language, and certain offer nothing that surprises, that causes one to pause, do a double-take and think "Wow, I've never heard that before!" And so it's not fair to review them as poems. Such personal expressions of pain or joy should be left as they are.

While this "love" poem manages to avoid the usual "You broke my heart but I'm stronger now and I'm getting on with my life," kind of stuff, I wasn't certain that you would want it reviewed as a poem. So I visited your portfolio to see what else you've been working on. I'm glad I did, because you have some nice stuff there, most of it better than this one, though, as I said, this managed in some way to catch my attention and cause me to spend time on it, so it's not a loss by any means. But it's not as good as you want it to be.

I like that you're pushing real-world images into your own subjective context, letting sense impressions carry much of the load for you. I wish you'd do more of it. And I wish you'd not settle so easily for those constructions that pop into your thoughts with so little effort. For example, in your first four lines you give us ...closed tightly... burned brightly... and burned recently. Come on, that's just lazy. Even if it didn't sound so repetitious, you still wouldn't get away with it. Those adverbs are a clear indication that you haven't searched for the right noun. Maybe clamped for closed tightly, or how about scorched for burned brightly, or seared, perhaps. All those linguistic tributaries flowing into the river of English means there are a lot of descriptive words out there, and when you make an effort to find them, your poem becomes something more than simply an excuse to carry content. (I love the "careless cigarette", by the way).

And as for that content, it's slim, but that's okay, content isn't the point of a poem anyway, though when form and content compliment each other, it enhances both. You say Love is a funny thing / I always mean it until I say it and then you simply say the same thing again in the next line: I love you sounds so funny to me / so hard to take seriously. And neither really tells us anything. They are references to a moment without actually giving us an experience of the moment.

Interestingly enough, the last sentence contains the same information as well, but this time, you get it right. So much so that everything beginning with I wrote... could stand on its own and pack a much bigger punch for its brevity. It's never necessary (or possible) to convey the entirety of whatever universe your poem inhabits. What is necessary is that there is a one, and that it is consistent with itself, so that whatever fragments you choose from it to include in your poem, whatever glimpses we manage to catch, might not explain everything but they will give us the sense that such explanations are possible. When you leave so much out, as would be the case in the shortened version that I suggested, you open up the possibility for the reader to fill in the blanks with their own experience. This is a good thing, something you always want to happen.

I'm going to give this a 3.5 because I like your sensibility, and the fact that you're working to create unique work, and I like your portfolio.
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Review of Sculpture  
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
I'm giving this a 3.5, against my better judgment, because, in truth, it doesn't rate that high. However, there's a 5.0 inside this effort, and it's close enough to the surface that I'm going to give you credit for what you might have written, as opposed to simply judging what you have written. I'm not trying to be cute or clever; you're a good writer and you have a much better story here than you've produced thus far.

Here's the problem: your story consists of both present and past action. The problem with past action is that it has to either be fed to us second hand, as narrative, or, if it temporarily shifts into a present moment, allowing direct depiction of action and dialogue, then whatever is happening in the actual, real-time present, is put on hold. In your case, the story in the present never takes off, let alone go anywhere, and so the real interest, all the backstory leading up to the present, is delivered second-hand. The events being narrated are undeniably dramatic, but we are granted no actual experience of that drama. All we experience is the musings of narrated thought, not at all the same thing.

All stories, in some way, owe the reader a pay-off. After all, we're taking time out of our own lives to step into your created universe, and even if we do so with no preconceptions or demands, we want to feel that the trip has been worth it. Perhaps that means nothing more than a touch of excitement, anticipation, maybe an unexpected plot twist, some thwarted expectations... Better is to find ourselves confronted by a situation that might well be our own, in which case, the characters' problems become our own, and their need for a solution is one that we can personally identify with. But there is one universal requirement demanded of all authors: they have to make the reader wonder "What's going to happen next?" and persuade him to hang in long enough to find out.

You come close, but there's never any tension, simply a series of descriptions during which you spoonfeed us the important plot points that, given a different treatment, might have kept us on the edge of our seats. And, if you want to cast your story in this way, using a character who has no changes left in him because the defining crises have already occurred before the story begins, then you need to create suspense from a different direction, using your readers' assumptions to work against them, letting tentions evolve from their growing awareness of the true nature of your character. You've tried that here, but, again, the lack of any present action story-line gives us nothing to start from, that might serve as a contrast to our final awareness of the truth. We kind of know from the first paragraph that there's something weird about this guy, and... yep, we were right. We get it... but what you really want is for the story to get us. To slug us in the gut and leave us dazed.

One correction would be to have a current action plot line with its own tension, conflict, obsticals that gives a sense of forward movement, while feeding the backstory in at salient moments. Such a plot-line can serve as needed misdirection, keeping our atttention while the magician gets ready to pull the rabbit from his hat.

The other possibility is to completely recast the narrative, tell the story that is clearly the focus of your interest, but strip away the narrative filters and the second-hand distance between action and reader, and just tell the story. You have the elements at your disposal already, including the focus on clay and the sculpting process. You also have begun to explore the metaphoric implications in this activity. What you haven't done is tell us a story. There's a story here, but telling us about the story is not at all the same as simply telling us a compelling story and letting our imaginations do the heavy lifting.
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Review of Cliché  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.5)
First things first: poetry is not prose. The reason I mention this obvious truth is that I suspect you think this should make "sense" as in prose sense, as in you have a message, and you want your poem to convey that message in a clear manner so that everyone can read it and say, "Ah, I get it. Wow. What a message."

If your message is that important, then use the medium best suited for conveying messages: prose. The English variety is unparalleled in its ability to construct arguments, cite reasons, specify hierarchies of both subjective and objective elements and order both objects and thoughts in time and space.

Poetry, then, is all the other stuff. Kind of like what you've done here. My only question is why do you have a problem with what you've done here, or feel that it needs "fixing" or explaining? Poetry is what happens to language when it's cut loose from the dictates of linear logic and sense, when time gets to turn into Silly Putty and wormholes link anything to everything. Poetry is language finding it's own justification, rather than having to serve as a slave to the twin masters of message and meaning. Poetry is language saying "Hey, look what I can do!" all on its own.

So what I like about your poem is that it breaks out of a prose structure, it allows meaning to rise from the words rather than lashing the words to a preordained meaning. That is the power of linguistic structures: two elements can be linked simply by flowing grammatically one to the next, leaving the connections to be intuited by the reader.

What I don't like is that you haven't taken it far enough. While the overall structure defies prose logic, the lines stubbornly insist on sounding like prose, all falling into neat little sentences (arbitrary breaks don't make a poetic line. These are still sentences). And so you aren't letting the language go nearly as far as it might.

I'd go through each line and strip out every single word that is expendable. You might begin by removing the words "My" and "is" from the first line... and "But", "is" and "as" from the second, that sort of thing. But quickly you'll start to see that it's not just removing that is called for, it's rewriting. And so the second line might morph into

my heart, an empty wallet

which suddenly rises up with some starch in its spine, with three solid metrical feet to support it, compared to the dead prose rhythms of your original.

But then, you might realize that the crisp image in that line needs to be duplicated in lines like

Answers are a thing of the past

which has nothing visual, tactile, experiential or interesting about it, along with being an empty cliche, the kind of line that serves only as a place holder for the real line you haven't written yet. (Beware those simple constructions that pop so easily into your head and that sound profound. They have no content. Maybe they once did, but they've been popping easily into writers' minds for centuries and they have nothing left to offer you, as a writer, or me, as a reader).

Do you need to wrap it up into a nice tidy package at the end? I wouldn't think so. Again, poetry isn't a representation of the world, like prose; poetry is an attempt to capture the world, both our apprehension of it and our internal experience of it, in the moment, as it happens. It's an ongoing process, a work in progress. Capture what you can as it passes by.
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Review by edgework
Rated: E | (5.0)
Even if your words hadn't resonated on a deep level with me, I would have had to give you this rating simply on the strength of the eloquence and purpose you bring to your task. It's a painfully accurate examination of the inner perspective of one who answers the call.

It's considered unsophisticated to attribute developments in history to conspiratorial methods. Nonetheless, had someone or some group looked at our nation fifty years ago and wondered what inner strengths allowed us to emerge from the war victorious, and wished to undermine those strengths, they could have chosen no better path than to turn those three words—Duty, Honor, Courage—into a source of ridicule and elitist patronization. Don't know if it's by intention or other means, but the sad truth is that is precisely what has happened. We've lost our clear connection to the value of those words, and, along with it, we've lost our ability to respect the warrior and to appreciate the sacrifice that he makes on a daily basis.

We need to rediscover this connection, and pieces such as yours can be a powerful tool. Thomas Paine wrote "These are the times that try mens' souls," and may well have galvanized a people to revolution. I defy anyone to read your piece and retain a jaded cynicism that resists the force of your words and the simple, though uncomfortable, truth at their core.

Keep the faith, and the fight. It's a worthy cause you've chosen.
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Review of Autumn Storms  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (4.5)
This is really nice. If I was reviewing this for some stuffy, pretentious literary journal, I'd probably head it with a title like "The Importance of Every Little Thing," because that's what you've chronicled here: all the various moments and bits of sensory input apprehended in a simple act of awareness, consciousness without analysis or interpretation. It's the kind of thing that might sound boring were it to be paraphrased, or merely described. But you've performed a neat trick of allowing us to gain access to the experiences themselves as they unfold, virtually from within the narrative mind, and so we too feel the weight of undifferentiated moments and the aimless lack of focus that underlies them; we also feel the loss of relationship, almost painfully so, without you ever needed to mention how lonely you feel, or how depressed, or needing, actually, to explain anything.

Fiction? Just barely. It certainly satisfies the requirement of providing some form of narrative arc, though one that doesn't involve the narrator, who seems frozen in an unending series of present moments, none more or less distinguished than any others. It is, instead, the reader's arc, a slowly gathering awareness as the original hypnotic cadences of sentence after sentence steadily coalesce into a clearer picture of this moment. But I'm not sure that it's useful to seek categories for writing like this. Whether prose poem or poetic prose, the designations say nothing about it's true worth. What it does is use structure, form and content as malleable elements that come together into a whole that satisfies both as an experience of language and a revelation of some inner consciousness, something that takes language beyond a mere medium of transmission and gives it weight and substance in and of itself. Who can ask more of a piece of writing than that?
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Review by edgework
Rated: E | (4.0)
Please allow me to sing this poem's praises before I address its shortcomings; what is praiseworthy clearly outweighs any difficiencies, and I want those comments to be received in the context of my admiration for this poet's ability.

If anyone wants to kid themselves that it's easy writing rhymed iambic pentameter, they have only to read this poem and then spend a few minutes trying to imagine how they might match it. It won't take much longer than that to realize that the trick isn't in the rhythm, or the rhyme. It's in the ability to hide those bits of cleverness; to make the language sound natural, to make it flow with a real-world cadence, as if it's just a coincidence that the lines all scan perfectly into five metrical feet and fall into interesting rhymes. That's the place where craft edges into art, and in this piece we see it happening throughout.

By the time we've finished reading the first stanza, we are not only convinced that we're in the hands of a writer who genuinely knows their craft, but the content slips in between the lines and captures our attention: we want to know what's going to happen. I've often commented, in other reviews on this site, that subject is the least important reason for writing a poem, that it is the language itself that is the star. But I've never suggested that poems cannot, or should not be "about" something, only that the subject in and of itself is insufficient justification for a poem's existence. However, in a case such as this, where language is so expertly handled, the subject finds it's proper place, as one element among many, all combining to create a whole that exceeds the individual parts comprising it.

In almost all cases the end rhymes manage not to shine a spotlight on themselves, feeling like they have a purpose other than to simply fill a slot in a rhyme scheme. Partly this is due to the enjambment; there's a nice mix of lines that complete a thought with the end word, and lines that carry the thought across the break, allowing the rhyming word to slip in unnoticed. And these are not moon/June, love/dove rhymes either; performed/conformed, stale/fail don't immediatley pop into one's thoughts as obvious rhyming words, and for that reason they keep things interesting. Okay, tears is paired with years, but even that manages to avoid feeling like a cliche.

I might suggest a shot at blank verse. You rhyme well enough, but sometimes rhyming becomes a crutch, a way of settling for lines that don't quite say what you want, but dazzle with the superficial effortlessness of the rhyme to the point that you, and we, let it slide. But it is in blank verse that we find the potential for linguistic perfection. It worked well enough for Shakespeare, after all.

And that leads me to my primary complaint. I think you've sold yourself, and your poem, short, for, after all, what it really adds up to is little more than a trick. A clever trick, to be sure, and an entertaining one. But an effect that really falls outside of poetry. It's a short-story trick, an O'Henry ending that is unfashionable enough among serious fiction writers; as a poet you should ask more of yourself, and allow your poems to do more.

This is my problem with letting the poem rest on its subject; it's all too tempting to think that the message (or, in this case, the story) is more imporant than the language that conveys it. But the degree to which you believe this is the degree to which your poems will fail to reach their true potential.

Poetry, if for no other reason than the fact that it is a category of writing all its own, is separate and distinct from prose, and it needs to measure itself on its own terms. Prose, particularly the English variety, is unsurpassed for all manner of narratives, descriptions, arguments, chronologies, comparisons and contrasts... all the elements of prose combine to insure that it will provide an effortless and somewhat transparent medium to carry the meaning, subject, story or other purpose for which it exists.

But consider the elements of poetry: lines, stanzas, metrical feet, scansion, assonance, consonance, alliteration, metaphor, simile, and myriad forms too numerous to list: none of these is concerned with subject, topic, story or any other prosaic concerns. They are about the structure, sound and shape of the language. In the line break alone we have an element that exists no where in prose, and is utterly uaffected by sentences, clauses, phrases, paragraphs, or cause and effect logic. It is the line that makes poetry distinct, and which allows it to break free of the very things that give prose it's worth. It's not too much of a stretch to say that while poems can certainly be "about" something, it probably shouldn't be whatever occupies it's subject.

In your poem, what it is about is precisely what happens on the surface of the content. That surface is an almost frictionless medium, elegantly crafted, but instead of setting us up for the "Oh... I get it," reaction that is unavoidable, you could allow this situation to provide a jumping off point for other realms, other content, other concerns, possibly a meditation on the frailty of life itself. Sure, that sounds trite, but all the great themes sound trite when simply spoken, literally, with no buttressing art. It's the job of the poet to recast the timeless themes, making them fresh so that we are able to encountter them again and again and not grow tired.

Where should you take this poem, if you were to take it somewhere else? Ya got me. It's not my poem. But I'd bet you could work it out. I'd love to see it when you do.
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Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.5)
The following note, with which you preface your poem, is a good entry point for my review, for it exemplifies the major flaw in your thinking and in your approach to this poem.

Note: If you don't understand this or you aren't South African please refrain from leaving condescending comments. However if you do understand this or are South African, your comments are appreciated.

First, allow me to acknowledge the seriousness of your topic and to acknowledge also that, as one who is not a South African, I do not and have access to the intensity of memories that you bring to the table. However, having read your piece, I can claim access to a small portion of that experience. That I don't have more is preciesely where your poem lets me down.

There is perhaps no finer medium than English language poetry for capturing the essence of a moment, or the sweep of an entire historical context. The multiplicity of linguistic traditions that have contributed to the language makes it almost impossible to not find the perfect set of words to create any effect imaginable. All it takes is the right image and a willingness to ruthlessly edit out the weak lines that simply take up space, as though they were waiting for the real lines to hurry up and be written and take their place. You have examples of both.

The danger with political poetry, or with any "message" poetry, is that one can become so attached to the presentation of the message that it's easy to forget that poetry is first and foremost about language. It's not just words in the best order, but the best words in the best order. And, let us not forget, poetry is not prose. And so it is neither restricted nor hindered by the elements that prose must address: clarity, a clean, linear progression of thought, an ability to explain and describe, and to create heirarchies of order, both temporal and emotional.

This isn't to say that poems can't do any of those things, only that they are free to do more, and to do it with less. Shortcuts that wouldn't work in prose are almost essential in poetry. For instance, you have a wonderful opening image in your poem:

There is blood on my hands,
But it is not mine.

Reading those lines, which capture such a potent image, I might not have any idea what's going on, or what might be in store, but I'm certainly ready to find out. You've hooked me.

Unfortunately, those aren't the lines you used to open your poem. Instead, you start out with a bland, abstract descriptive line:

I am horrified.

You have to allow images to do the tasks they're meant to accomplish. The image of blood on one's hands, that "isn't mine" conveys horror so much more effectively on its own. We see the horror through your eyes. You've short circuited our logical thought processes, our need to analyze, to step back and wonder "Gosh, why's he horrified?", instead plunging our own hands in the blood, making your experience, our experience.

As long as you're telling us things, we're observers and analysts, and in that mode, we will not be effected by your poem, however much we might empathize with the content. The extent to which you can repeat the effect of those two lines, you will be a successful poet.

In line after line, you are translating a raw, bitter, painful memory into a bland proseaic descriptive substitute. Don't call them "persecutors," show us an image of persecution. Don't refer second-hand to "The forced Removals," show us families shattered by political agendas. But, more than that, rip open your own heart and let it bleed onto the page. Because if you want to write a poem that is capable of capturing the scope of this topic, you're going to have to go through the pain, so that you can force us to go through it with you. Poety can do that.
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Review of The Meeting  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.0)
You offer two versions of the same 55-word story, and you wish to know which is preferable.

Okay, I'll be the spoiler here; they both fail for the same reason. Forced to choose, I'd select the first version as the winner, since its language is far more direct. The ornamentation of the second seems an effort to lend weight to a narrative that should, by rights, stand on its own, unaided. More on that narrative in a moment.

The opening sentences tell us what's coming; the second version simply does it with a more complicated structure which is unwarranted. I'd suggest shifting the tense of the first version's opener to match the rest of the paragraph—

They drove several hundred miles to reach the cemetery.

I realize that the form you chose implies action that has already transpired, a sort of catch-up process to lead in to the current action, which we are joining in progress, and there's nothing wrong with it as written. But you've only got 5 sentences total. The power of this type of micro- or flash-fiction is in it's impact and directness. Juggling multiple time-frames is a bit of an indulgence that you probably don't have time to do justice to. But either way, it's far superior to the 2nd version's opening, which kicks things off with a weak clause and then follows with a maudlin cliché. Juxtaposing spatial miles and traveling "into the past" is the kind of thing that pops into your head easily and fools you into thinking it's profound. Just assume that anything that pops so effortlessly into your head has been popping into writers' heads for generations beyond counting and has no life left with which to suprise, entertain or interest us.

You continue the trend with sentence two. Version one gives us stones and a family plot beneath the sycamore. Telling us that they walked solemnly might be redundant, for how else would one be expected to walk in such a setting? Were they boisterously tripping over each other, then you would expect it to be pointed out. Perhaps there's a better verb than walking, one that would convey the solemnity of the occasion with no need for an adverb. But in any event, there are three solid nouns, unadorned, as is proper, given that they are sufficiently imagistic on their own. Version two continues the needless indulgence: we've lost the sense of motion, of the two of them wandering between the headstones, to which sun-dappled adds nothing useful; and you've lost one of your nouns, sycamore, demoting it to a flabbly adjective instead.

Sentence three: more of the same. Version two contains filler, which, in such a short piece, sticks out like a wart.

But the real problem has nothing to do with word choice. You've set an interesting challenge for yourself. 55 words gives you scarcely enough time to accomplish the most spartan of goals. Yet, we, the readers, aren't about to cut you any slack. If we're going to carve some time out of our day and give it to your writing, we want a real story, one that does the most important thing any story can do: leave us feeling that the effort was worth it. Given the necessary brevity, you don't have the luxury of innovative plot structures, or of deeply intuitive characterizations, or of elegant descriptive passages. You have to slug us in the gut, virtually from the start.

Your idea is fine. But what you want to do... scratch that; what you have to do is leave us, at the end, with a "Oh Wow!" reaction. Right now, all you manage is a "Oh... I get it." kind of response, and it's not good enough. I won't suggest any rewrites. For one thing, it's not my story; for another, the possibilities are endless. I will suggest an area that you might wish to explore further: thwarting the reader's expectations. That's a useful approach with short fiction. There are any number of ways to accomplish this, beginning with a title that suggests one thing, but which, as the ending is revealed, shows itself to mean something different. You might be reaching for something like this with your title, but, as it stands, it's pretty much a literal meaning with no echos or overtones.

Likewise, the content itself doesn't work hard enough. Iif we are to read deeper implications beneath the surface action, we must grant you the benefit of the doubt. More than is actually justified. A difficult past relationship is suggested; likewise, a sense of present triumph. But if this is a life that exemplifies extremes of emotion and effort, one small moment of which we are granted access to, such is suggested so subtly as to not really register. On the other hand, if all is as it really appears, that this is an ordinary life, with an ordinary trajectory, why are you writing about it? We don't need ordinary lives in our fiction. We have ordinary lives of our own. Fiction is that place where we turn to encounter the unexpected, the abnormal, the peaks and troughs that our own lives don't usually offer us. Fiction is the answer to all those "What if..." questions that daily life avoids: "What if a flying saucer actually landed? What if you struck up a conversation with that stranger in the elevator? What if you won the lottery? What if you found love after having given it up as a hopeless quest?" Stuff like that.

I think, actually, that your character is positioned to offer us one of those glimpses into an emotional peak, an extreme moment, a paradigm shift in perception, a grand triumph. And, scant though they may be, 55 words are sufficient to give her the moment she's due. But you're going to have to make all of them, each one of those 55 words, work much harder than they are now. You're going to have to find a way to pack into them an entire life, both that which has gone before, and that which might be waiting ahead. And you're going to have to make us care. You're going to have to make us feel her triumph on such a personal level, that her triumph becomes our own measure of hope and optimism.

Then you'll have a killer of a story, however short it is.
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Review by edgework
Rated: E | (4.5)
This poem shouldn't work, but it does. The reason I say it shouldn't work is that there are no images, usually the mark of a truncated vision and language that insists on telling us what to think rather than showing us the conditions necessary for us to draw the proper conclusions on our own.

The reason I say it does work is that the language manages to carve out a unique space for itself, demanding that we judge it on its own terms rather than any preconceived notions we might bring to the reading. And, most importantly, it is interesting; unconventional without being intentionally obscure, difficult but internally consistent. We might not logically intuit all the links and connections that reach beyond the bounds of the poem, but we sense that they are there, that this is a fragment carves out of a coherent universe, and that we might find it rewarding to attain access to that universe.

Abstract free verse probably reached its greatest expression in the poems John Ashbury turned out in the 70s and early 80s (but, unfortunately, not the 90s or beyond). This recalls those pieces, language that exists for its own sake, possibly carrying a message, possibly suggesting meaning, but standing primarily on it's own sounds and structures, language that takes pleasure in simply saying "Hey! Look what I can do!"

Nice piece.
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Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
I can't offer you a point-by-point assessment of this story and say "Fix these problems and it'll work great!" There's nothing really wrong with any of your points: you have a facility with words, your dialogue, while a little stilted in places, is believable, and time seems to flow in a real-world sort of fashion. It's not that there's anything wrong with any of your points, it's that you haven't selected the actual points of your story, and so, while that story is hinted at, referenced and alluded to, all we get are the aftermath scenes, having to settle for assurances that there really was a story there. I'd like you to go back to these characters' lives, think through the bona fide narrative arc that you've envisioned for them, and stretch yourself sufficiently to tell the story that is hidden behind what is essentially a summary, an abstract for a piece yet to be written.

You need to ask yourself what makes fiction worth reading, worth the investment of time and energy that it takes for your readers to enter a strange universe, find their way around, get to know the inhabitants and become involved in their lives. I would suggest that, regardless of the infinite number of reasons that might be posited, all in some way involve a desire to experience an aspect of life that is not available in our own existence. We want to know how it feels to chase a killer, or be one; to fall in love with a lunatic, or a genius (or both at the same time); to face the loss of fortune, to strive for the ultimate prize and succeed, or fail... These are things that don't usually happen to us in daily life. Fiction is about those "What ifs," those extreme situations that we probably won't face, but which cause us to wonder "How would I react to this?"

You've come up with two of those things that don't usually happen to people: getting a shot at the Olympics as a world-reknowned gymnist, or losing a loved one far too soon to cancer. And you've entwined these two elements so that one directly impacts the other. That's why I say there's a story hidden in here somewhere; you've come up with the basic ingredients of a smash-bang plot. All you need to do now is figure out how to tell the story.

At their simplest, plots are about movement. They all come down to a chase, and your main character will either be running away from something, or trying to attain something. There has to be that seed of instability and dissatisfaction, or else there's no reason to seek change, and nothing will happen. And, of course, it can't just be a process of getting off one's butt and going out and doing what needs to be done, because then there wouldn't be a story either. It has to be difficult. It has to involve some form of triumphing over obstacles, overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.

You understand what I'm talking about, because you've built these elements into the context of the world you've created. But you've settled for shortcuts when what is called for is a careful telling of, well... your story. You are going to have to be braver than this. Lawrence Block has opined that plots are just "one damned thing after another." You need to portray more of those "things" and the sequence of their unfolding. You're going to have to discover how to write scenes such as the one where her husband actually tells her that he's dying, and you're going to have to allow the scene to unwind for us as it might actually happen, so that the experience of your characters becomes our experience as well. You're going to have to not only create a painful situation, but you're going to have to feel the pain; otherwise, we won't feel it and it we'll have no more access to the experience than we do now being told about the situation after it's already happened.

Your second scene shows the same timidity when it comes to confronting the peak moment. We want to see her on the bars, not just find out that she's already won the gold. Don't invite us to the show, then, when we get there tell us "Oops, you missed it. But it was a heck of a show, believe me!" But we want more than to just watch her; we want access to the turmoil within, the conflicting emotions that she is feeling, as she feels them. We want to see how hard it has been for her to overcome her loss, not by proxy, not vicariously, but as she's in the midst of discovering for herself how it's going to happen. And we want to be there with her as she finds that spark that makes the impossible, possible. That's what makes memorable fiction, or memorable writing of any sort. And that's why so few are really able to pull it off. It's not cheap or easy. It's a risk, it's your own peak moment, reaching for the words that will encapsulate a worldview with all its joy and pain, and maybe pulling it off, and maybe not. But if you don't make that effort, you'll end up with a story that doesn't have a whole lot happening in the moment, but that has one heck of a backstory.
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Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.0)
You ask "Should I keep working on this, or trashcan it?" First of all, never ask that question. Truth is, no one cares. Not really. If you do finish it, you will most likely find ample support among the reading community here and that will no doubt be a valuable thing. But whether or not you should finish it is the kind of question that has no answer. It's hard to imagine any work of fiction that SHOULD be written. The real question is, "Do you want to write it? Do you have the committment and vision and passion to finish it?" If so, you don't need to ask strangers for guidance. Follow your vision. If not, I certainly can't provide it. Not for your story. I have enough on my plate trying to sustain the vision for my own works. So, let's assume that you really do have the passion and vision to tackle the issues presented by your unfinished story.

Actually, it's not that it's unfinished so much as that it's insufficiently focused. And I think you need to grapple with the mysteries of plotting and discover some of the things that make a plot grab a reader and scream at them "YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, DON'T YOU!!!??"

From your blurb on the Review Request page, it sounds like this is pretty much autobiographical. And it sounds like a potentially traumatic situation found a rather unexpected and pleasant resolution. Don't get me wrong; I think this is a good thing... for you. We always like it when our lives take unexpected turns and they reveal themselves to be advantagous in unforeseen ways. I'm glad your unease didn't turn into serious despair, and perhaps melancholy depression. Truly, I wish you well and hope the new endeavor works out. And if, as your daughter suggests, this exercise has been primarily cathartic, then perhaps it has served its purpose.

But if your goal is to write a story, one that will capture a reader's attention and hold it till the last page, and leave them wanting more, you're going to need to add, at the very least, some serious problems. It's great when our lives bypass the deepest ruts in the road, but a good story thrives on them, and on the painful accidents that result when our characters blunder headlong into them with no clue.

You've offered several quite lively candidates for one of those ruts, but you back away almost at once, each time, and let things sort of be okay. Don't do that. You owe the actual events from the real world that inspired your story absolutely nothing. In fact, the excuse "But that the way it really happened," is about as lame a defense of a story line as I can imagine, because in the real world, not much really happens. A few things happen, and sometimes they scare us, or worry us, but most of the time, we go through our days doing pretty much the same old thing.

Stories are about those moments when life slaps us in the face, when it drops a piano on our heads, when it opens a dark closet and unleashes a boogeyman out of our deepest nightmares to chase us through the pages. Stories are things we read to experience those extremes that usually don't happen to us, where we're thrown in the midst of a situation that forces us to wonder, "Gosh, how would I react to this?"

At their most basic, plots are about somebody running from something, or somebody chasing something. The variations are infinite, but there has to be a condition of instability that forces movement, confrontation and, ultimately, change. You've provided this, of course, with the loss of your character's job. But you go awfully easy on her. You give her a mother that's kind of annoying, but we all know that they really love each other. There's a husband who is supportive. And there are plants to be planted, and we'ere not really too sure exactly what the problem is going to finally show itself to be, when—

WHOA!!!! Whiplash!!! Suddenly we're reading about frogs. I have nothing against frogs, and I don't even have a problem with the purpose they serve in your story. But there's been no foundation built up for the primary role they play, and there's really not much of a connection with your character's life, other than a convenient prop set in her path to keep things happy.

Consider, instead, a character who loathes frogs. Perhaps she fell into a pond as a child and found herself covered with hundreds of slimey green frogs all croaking at once, a sound that has haunted her dreams ever since (kind of like Bruce Wayne falling into the cave of bats in Batman Begins). Now there's some opposition. And, wouldn't you know, the town goes and betrays her by adopting the cursed creature as it's mascot. Everywhere she turns she haunted by a deep primal fear...

Okay, it's a little melodramatic and hoakey, but if she turns to the frogs as a solution to the dead end her life has suddenly taken and is forced to overcome some kind of primal resistance to them...well, you've got the irritating piece of sand that a pearl of a story might form around.

So, maybe the frogs aren't really the thing you want to feature center stage. How about Mom. Or Hubby? Both are just aching to be used to make things difficult for your lead character (who, I emphasize, is not you). And let's not forget the most obvious candidate for the role of antagonist, the incompetent Daffie. As it currently stands, your real story is all locked up in the two or three sentences you devote to the relationship with her that leads to the opening condition. It's never a good idea for your backstory to be more exciting and tense than the actual present-action story.

The essence of a page-turner is inevitability. A generating condition needs to be sufficiently unstable that some form of action is required. (Otherwise, nothing happens). And a conflict has to be present to give the character something to struggle against. And there probably needs to be some kind of confrontation that, again, has a feeling of inevitability to it, a confrontation with demons either internal or external, so that when the resolution appears, we have a feeling that it's been earned, both by your character and by your reader. When things work out as seemingly easy as they do for your character, we think, "Well, shucks, I wish my life worked out that smoothly," and we might be envious, but we have to wonder why we invested the effort and energy to stick with it, for so little payoff.
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Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (4.0)
I think this is a strong essay, though there are structural elements that you could improve that would focus your meaning more precisely. The major portion of the piece is well crafted, but I think your opening paragraph is missing an opportunity to draw your reader in and and set up the issues that follow.

For instance, in the opening sentence you lead with the reference to small towns and public opinion. I would suggest that neither is really what the essay is about, and in the short amount of space you have available to you, you can't afford to misdirect your reader's attention at all, for any reason.

Your opening phrase is already there; unfortunately, it doesn't open your essay. But consider When I became pregnant at fourteen.... Bingo! You set the situation with no ambiguity, and, I guarantee, you have your reader's attention. Your follow-up phrase is also important, but weakly structured: ...I was told what everyone thought. is passive voice. Much stronger: ...everyone offered an opinion... or ...everyone felt obligated to give me advice. Something along those lines. Together, the two phrases set up the initial conflict and lead smoothly to the next sentence.

I'm suggesting you drop the small town stuff altogether, but if you feel it's imporant, slip it in at the beginning of the second sentence: In my small town, two main opinions prevailed.... Now you come to those two options, and your sentence seems to be trying to do too much. I would suggest simplifying: ...either have an abortion, or keep the baby. Then, in another sentence, discuss the justifications offered for each option. What you have now seems weak. I think there are better arguments for each approach, or, at least, better ways to phrase the justifications you have given.

The next sentence is crucial and needs to be the final sentence in the paragraph. I'm not quite sure what your point is with the final sentence that now exists, but it seems expendable.

To recap: you want your initial paragraph to clearly set out the parameter of your discussion and you do not want to deviate from that set-up. You certainly don't want to set up false expectations in your reader, suggesting that you are writing about one thing, then shifting gears in the middle. Regardless of how well you present your argument, or portray the situation in question, such a shift will dilute the effect drastically.

And, in fact, the rest of the essay is quite good. My only question is regarding the word Painfully at the opening to paragraph three. I'm not sure the pain came at this point, particularly when you so clearly experience pain later on (believably described, by the way). Perhaps another reaction is more appropriate here: awkwardness, uncertainty, reluctance...

I think this will be a first-rate essay, if you avoid the mistakes in the opening paragraph.
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Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (5.0)
A poem like this might present a bit of a challenge for one who feels that poems should be "about" something. Were one to structure a prose essay in a similar fashion, the annoyance might be justified; we want our prose to "make sense," to adhere to the linear forms that seems natural to sentences with subjects, verbs and objects: actions which imply antecedents as well as consequences.

But one of the most essential aspects of poetry is that is, precisely, not prose, and owes no obligation to the restrictions that prose assumes. Poetry can go anywhere, and it can do so in a decidedly non-linear fashion. This tends to muddy the relationship between content and subject, which is, for my money, a good thing. I don't read poems to learn "about" things. There's prose aplenty to satisfy that need. Poems are, first and foremost, about language, and about pushing language into spaces where it might not ordinarily go were it shackled to the need to clarify a subject. Poetry gets to dance around the edges of a thing, to imply, hint, suggest, paint, or not. At it's most extreme, the language of poetry makes no pretense to subject at all, yet, somehow, through the power of linguistic structures themselves (analogs, afterall, of our own thought processes) meaning still bubbles to the surface.

While this poem does not seek those extremes—It doesn't mind that we more or less know what it's about—it still leaves things a little ambibuous, which is our problem. It's too busy with other priorities, like making sure there isn't a flabby line from beginning to end; like providing a wealth of crisp visual images that convey so much on their surface and suggest so much more.

This is not the language of narration; the "I" is no detached observer, filtering a separate experience for us to receive second-hand. This is the language of immediacy and the "i" in the poem might well be ourselves, the experience our own, and the words the product of our own nameless sensations, gurgling up from the subconscious depths, captured in that instant when they first cloak themselves with words, when thought invents language and language provides the means for thought to happen, each creating the other.

Nice stuff.
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Review of The Wooded Way  
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
You say I've heard the ending is confusing. Tell me what's confusing about it.

I'd disagree. By the time you get to the ending, it seems you've started to settle into an idea of what the whole thing is supposed to be about. It's all the stuff that comes before that's confusing.

Unless I miss the point, it seems that the essence of the story can be summarized thusly: Dominic, emotionally crippled by the loss of his brother, wanders paths and regions that once served as the landscape for their childhood fantasy life and discovers that he's left his reality behind and entered into a parallel universe that might be his childhood fantasies come to life. Is this about the size of it?

There are a couple of different categories of problems here, but I think they can both be addressed by rethinking your sense of a (i)timeline. Let's be elementary here: stories are about things that happen, either to a character, or initiated by a character. They are essentially unstable situations threatening to collapse, and we catch the action, as it were, in the process of things coming apart. Consider the alternative: a stable situation where everyone is content and not particularly motivated to seek to change the conditions in which they find themselves. Perhaps an enviable state for our own lives, but boring as a story, both to read, and (even worse) to write.

So at the outset, I'd suggest you think of your story in terms of what is driving Dominic. You've give a hazy, gauzy context of depression and despair regarding the loss of his brother, but we're not really sure what's going on. It's not that it's unbelievable, more that we just don't know enough to form an opinion.

The opening three paragraphs seem to be trying to set the stage, and we get the imagery of the woods, the setting of a fantasy life... we're introduced to Dominic at the age of 17 and automatically begin to make certain assumptions based on this information. And to form expectations, both of Dominic, and of the story in which we are investing our time.

Oops. Guess what? He's not really 17 at all. He's all grown up, and now he's standing beside the grave and it's five years since his brother died of some very specific causes and now we're not sure what our time frame is, nor the fictional universe in which we find ourselves. Is it going to be a book about death, medicine, or young kids, or a grown up kid who can't shake his memories?

It would appear to be the latter, though if that's the case, it needs to be presented at the outset, unambiguously. A short story only has a limited amount of space to make its point and you can't afford to spend three paragraphs sending false signals with no real focus to draw the reader in.

Then you have this line:

He was DAMNED if he was going to face them. which is the kind of authorial intrustion disguised as interior monologue that simply tells the reader that you haven't done your job as a writer, which is to let us see a fully formed universe, with three dimensional character moving about in believable ways, which will allow us to make our own determination regarding their psychological and emotional states.

In truth, there's nothing wrong with the idea behind this. What's missing in the execution is a seamless link between events in the past and events in the present. The problems are twofold: the events in the past are not really formed; they exist as indistinct conclusions as part of Dominic's internal flow of impressions and recollections. In the present, there's not much happening either. A walk in the woods, seemingly one of many (every weekend, we're told), only this time, things go differently. Why? What's different about his weekend? The road appears that has not been there before, and it takes him to new regions. But we don't really know why, nor why it's important and significant at this point in his life. You cast hints and suggestions all along the way, but I never get the feeling that you really know the answers yourself. Until you do, your world will be incomplete and confusing, and we'll be wondering not only why your character is behaving as he is, but why we should care.
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Review of Natalia  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (2.5)
You say:

The idea for this character just jumped into my mind. It's a very rough draft, but I'm hoping to have more with this character eventually... just not sure what!

Okay. That being the case, you might think about 1) what is the story, or stories, that you have suggested here, and 2) how will you go about telling them.

In its current form, you've managed to join up with your character pretty much after all the stories have ended. Perhaps there's a new one about to begin, but we don't really have any indication of that. Don't get me wrong: I'm happy that she finally feels like she's "home," that she's finished rebuilding her life, that she's got a nice cat and a trendy couch and that her clothes match on this peaceful day when snow's falling outside in a picture postcard vista... but COM'ON, how about a car chase? Or something to make me wonder what's going to happen next?

As it is, What's going to happen next is probably that she'll fix herself a cup of tea, and maybe write a letter or two... she's probably the type who meditates, so, yeah, she'll meditate a little, maybe do some chanting. Somebody wake me up when a stranger comes through the door with a gun in his hand (Raymond Chandler's one-size fits all quick-fix for a plot that was lagging. You can figure out why he's there later on, but it sure gets things moving).

What's interesting is all the stuff that you whiz right past with breathless inattention. All those STORIES. All those conflicts, crises, decisions that needed to be faced, implications that had to be weighed and measured. There's a real life there, somewhere, and a real story to keep the reader engaged. Because there are, or were, problems. Gotta have problems. People who have arrived at their destination might be subjects of envy, even emulation, but they make lousy characters because the chase is the thing. Once they're across the finish line, it's game over. We want OUR lives to be peaceful and tranquil, but we want our stories to be about pain, misery, avarice, revenge, desperation, fear, rage... all those neat things that make plots so much fun to write. And read.

The day of the epic, lifelong novel is pretty much over. What you need to do is figure out if she's really worth writing about, and then find a narrative arc in the midst of all this biographical debris and tell THAT story. Figure out what she's running from, or towards, what's in her way and what she does to prevail. Don't just toss off the 25-words-or-less summation. TELL the story. You might sum up The Wizard of Oz with the phrase "There's no place like home," but it sort of leaves a lot out. Same here.
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Review of Bradbury Park  
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (5.0)
Ya got my attention! Nice diffused language, pushing beyond narrative. Or perhaps catching the process of thought on its way to becoming narrative.

A demon shines his massive flashlight; it is all there is.

Excellent image and word choice.

A fine read.
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Review of Salvation Army  
Review by edgework
Rated: 18+ | (3.5)
You get a 4.5 for set up, and for the sound of your language. It's nice and spare, you don't leave us wondering who's saying what to whom, or when one thing occurs in relation to something else. By definition this already places you in a small minority of those who call themselves writers (which does not include a great many who have actually published stuff).

But as you know, the reject bin is stuffed to overflowing with great set-ups that failed to follow through with a compelling development. You've set up a contrast between your two main characters, but you don't have an infinite amount of time in a short story to get the job done. I would think that by this point, at least the faint outlines of a genuine conflict would begin to show themselves. So far they seem slick, sure of themselves, a little too sure, of course, so they're going to have to get themselves into some kind of jam.

And then you'll want a third act. In this case, it would consist of actually getting out of the jam that appears to be dire, perhaps even hopeless, by the end of the second act. I realize you don't actually have "Acts" in a short story, but then again, sure you do. The third act is the thing that arises organically out of the development, gives things a little twist and drives the plot through to the end—the weak nerd finds the courage to take on the bully; the hero finds a way to win back the girl; that sort of thing. Nothing disappoints more than a story that has a great development, and then doesn't bother to capitalize on it.

I'll be interested in seeing where you take this.
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