Critique #109 — Rhiannon Rose
Kevin Andrew Murphy January 28th, 2007
The first thing I noticed was the road and the horizon and how the dark road just sort of went on and on until it took a sharp left curve at some shiny building down the way. The second thing I noticed was that I’d noticed this; and then my engine, rumbling, all set and good to go. Idling, even.
If the engine went off, did I go off? Hey, the sky, the sky was wide and kind of a purple color, you know, and shiny with clouds like a chrome finish misted over with patches of bubbly fog. Could I fall off? The road was just as wide, but darker; concrete and asphalt double-striped yellow like the back of a snake, corralled into a line by the paler concrete of the sidewalk and the red no-parking paint.
Is this Siobhagn? Because if it isn’t (or someone similar), then I am totally lost.
I have to admit that this left me totally confused. I couldn’t get an anchor point on what was going on. I read it through slowly two more times in an attempt to figure it out. The only thing that seemed to fit all the clues is that the viewpoint character is a car and that this is the first time the car has ever been started (thus, all the questions about its existence). The question, then, is why are we on a road instead of a car lot or something.
Rhiannon,
The trouble here isn’t the individual lines so much as the fact that you’ve stacked up various evocative lines rather haphazardly. If the person is disoriented and just realizing it, I as reader don’t want them waxing poetic about snakeline roads unless there’s some strong sense of urgency pulling me along through the stream-of-consciousness.
That’s the trouble with stream-of-consciousness–it can be interesting and evocative if done just so, but if not, runs the risk of just sounding like stoned waffle. I was with you for the first paragraph, but you lost me by the second since the image didn’t sharpen up and start to tell us a story. A stoned person driving on a road somewhere doesn’t interest me enough to turn the page.
Okay! Thank you all. I got ahead of myself, though - I think I need critique on the whole story before I can fix the first lines, because I’m no longer sure the story can go anywhere interesting.
Gyp - nope, it’s not.
Oh! Then I really had no idea what was happening. Sorry.