Critique #113 — Joy Hersey
Kevin Andrew Murphy February 5th, 2007
It was wet. The spring rain fell in torrents and I was caught in the middle of it. My cloak was drenched and I could feel the water seeping through my clothes to my skin. Pushing my way through the trees, there in the midst of a clearing stood the ruins of what was once a grand manor. The sky rumbled and growled and I dashed for shelter. Managing to make it safely under what was left of the second floor lightening then split the sky and the rain came down even harder. Nothing was making me go back out there again! Suddenly there came a sound from outside. It sounded like a great set of wings. I could not see anything through the haze and the wing beats got louder. I continued to peer out to the rain and suddenly there was a small purple dragon sitting in the courtyard. She stopped and blinked at me. The sight of that great and noble creature staring at me was awe-inspiring. The rain glistened on the light purple scales that shimmered in the dim light. Her dark eyes regarded me curiously then without so much as a by your leave the dragon marched into my shelter and plopped herself down beside the fire.
Where did the fire come from and who lit it? And why does the narrator claim the pre-existing fire as his/hers, since it was evidently lit and tended by some other squater, presumably the dragon?
Also, “lightning,” not “lightening.” Use your eyes, not just a spell check program. Such things are a mark of laziness and disrespect. If you don’t care about your manuscript, why should an editor?
Beyond that, how do you sex a dragon? Are only the females purple, or do they have long girly eyelashes like in Shrek or what? I found that more annoying than the “dragon groupie” vibe about the “awesome” dragon, since even those who don’t like them might not like them, though this is still a pretty small dragon if it can walk in through even the grand front door of a ruined manor house. One assumes a manor house door is something like a church door, so like ten, twelve feet wide, with each individual door half that, so your dragon can’t be much wider than ten feet since she “marches” rather than “squeezes” into the entrance which is still structurally sound enough to support a second floor.
These are individual nits, however. The basic scenario, though stock, is still engaging, and actually it’s nice to see someone taking shelter in ruins encountering a dragon rather than the more typical ghost. I’m intrigued enough by that to turn the page, but I still want the details cleaned up.
Also, the first line “It was wet” is rather unnecessary with what comes after.
Joy, you are using more words than you need to. Ironically, this is my problem, yet somehow I can see it when other people do it. For example, “The spring rain fell in torrents and I was caught in the middle of it.” You create that same image if you cut “in the middle of” and say, “…torrents, and I was caught in it.” The description you give after that certainly shows us that he/she wasn’t caught in the edge of it.
You are missing a lot of needed commas. I’d suggest reading the commas section of a grammar book, since this appears to be a problem for you.
Also, you could break your one paragraph into two paragraphs. More specifically, you can use paragraphing to increase suspense. For example:
You like to combine sentences with ‘and.’ Again, to build suspense, go ahead and use some more short sentences while building the suspense. Also, break some of the earlier combined sentences into shorter sentences, and it will make the reading flow more naturally.
Instead of telling us that the POV character finds the sight of the dragon awe-inspiring, perhaps you can show us. Did he/she feel his heart race faster as the wing sounds approached and then hold his breath at the sight of the dragon? Did his jaw drop instead? Showing us how the POV feels is more engaging than just telling us.
Opps, now THAT didn’t show up well. I meant:
Joy: I think you’ve got the germ of a good story here, but your prose is tripping you up a bit. Besides what’s been noted above, you’ve got a big grammar ouchie right close to the front:
Pushing my way through the trees, there in the midst of a clearing stood the ruins of what was once a grand manor.
A ruin (passive construction) cannot be pushing your way through the trees. I think you mean ‘I’ to be the subject, so you would say: Pushing my way through the trees, I saw in the midst of a clearing the ruins… but the problem then shifts to how the protagonist can be seeing this clearing while pushing her way through trees.
Then, you have a great set of wings, followed by a small purple dragon, which then becomes great and noble. Is the dragon “great” (which implies huge and awe-inspiring) or small?
These are all tiny things that can be fixed when the first hot fire of creation dies down a bit, and you rework the material sentence by sentence to best show the reader what you are seeing. Then you have a better chance of hooking us into wanting to know what’s going to happen next.
Joy, this is an intriguing situation. I would turn the page to see what you do with it.
I agree with the comments above about prose.
Here’s a for example of saying more than you need to (and I would go farther than Debbie):
You write:
It was wet. The spring rain fell in torrents and I was caught in the middle of it. My cloak was drenched and I could feel the water seeping through my clothes to my skin.
You could, for instance, cut “it was wet.”
Starting with “The spring rain fell in torrents.” tells us that it was wet.
You could, for instance, go on to cut “and I was caught in the middle of it” because the next sentence shows us that the narrator is out in the rain.
You could even add the first phrase from the next sentence, and end up with something like this, which is all your prose:
“The spring rain fell in torrents. My cloak was drenched, and I could feel the water seeping through my clothes to my skin as I pushed through the trees.”
Yes. I’m pretty sure that “Pushing my way through the trees, there in the midst of a clearing stood the ruins of what was once a grand manor.” is called a dangling modifier. You do it again here:
“Managing to make it safely under what was left of the second floor lightening then split the sky and the rain came down even harder.”
In this sentence, the lightning managed to make it safely under what was left of the second floor. And, as someone else pointed out, you spelled “lightning” wrong.
I like the scenario you come up with, but dangling modifiers are a pet peeve of mine and those two sentences alone might keep me from going on. Fix up the grammar stuff, though, and I’d keep reading.
Hmm, I don’t know if this is intentional, but I imagined your dragon as being really small. Like, maybe as big as two grown men or something. You might want to focus a little more on your description of the dragon or the dragon’s movements to convey the exact size you’re going after.
- My apologies about the fire part. In the original run there was a fire built before the arrival of the dragon and in my overzealousness to have my work critiqued I must have forgotten to remove it.
- The “lightening” error was my fault. I honestly thought that was how it was spelled.
- The original email I sent this in had two paragraphs.
- The “It was wet.” phrase was part of the fact that yes I am wordy.
- And the part of the dragon being female. I just thought “She” sounded better than “It.”
- There was no front door. I seem to have pictured “ruins” differently than others.
My thanks for the input. And I am sorry if I offended anybody.
Joy, you’re doing fine. Keep working!
Yes! It would do you good to read the part of a grammar book dealing with dangling modifiers, though. Simple grammar stuff like that is very easily fixed.
The dangling modifiers are a bad habit of mine. I just went back and read through some of my other stories and I see that those are just as bad. I do intend to post a rewrite. I’m just reworking it as was suggested to try and get past the fact that I write the way I talk: not always in complete sentences. Not good. Also I personally like a lot of description so my stories are not economical with words. I didn’t realize my grammer was so terrible. Thanks for the help. I really do appreciate it.
(ed. note: Joy submitted a rewrite, but since this post is still current, I’m simply adding it below so folk can comment in this posting)
Rewrite:
              The spring rain fell in torrents. My cloak was drenched and I could feel the water seeping through my clothes to my skin. Pushing my way through the trees, I came upon a clearing. There stood what was once a grand manor now fallen into an advanced state of decay. The sky rumbled and I dashed for shelter. I managed to make it safely under what was left of the second floor when lightning split the sky and the rain came down even harder.
Nothing was making me go back out there again! Over the pounding of the rain I heard something else. It sounded like wings but belonging to something much larger than a bird. I could not see anything through the haze and the wing beats became louder. I continued to peer out through the rain and suddenly a small dragon landed in the courtyard. I could feel my heart skip a few beats. The sight of those wondrous creatures, large or small, always filled me with awe. This particular one was light purple in color and about the size of a pair of draft horses. It stopped and blinked at me. The rain glistened on scales that shimmered in the dim light. Those dark eyes regarded me curiously as it marched into my shelter and laid down, curling its tail around its body.
Joy,
The rewrite is much improved, though could stand a use of a pen to redline through redundant word choice. For example, “purple in color” could be clipped down to simply “purple.” I know a few extra words here and there can help with mood and flow, but some of this is getting in the way of getting to the story.
The narrator also seems rather unafraid of the possiblity of being eaten by the dragon, which I question, but then again, as I’ve noted earlier, I have a bit of an allergy to the “magical wondrous creature” view of dragons unless it’s followed by “that might eat me.”
This is better but could be better still with a few more tweaks.
Kevin already pointed out that you could cut “purple in color” to “purple.”
Commas are our friends if used in the correct places. Your main problem is joined sentences. If you have two sentences joined by an “and,” then you need to put a comma before the “and.”
You use a lot of joined sentences. You might wish to break some of these joined sentences down into singles, especially after your POV hears the wing beats and you want to increase the tension of the story.
This is an awkward sentence. You are also talking about the dragon’s wing size before the POV can see the wings. Perhaps “It sounded like wings but much louder than for a bird.”?
You can drop the “I could feel.” “My heart skipped a few beats” is sufficient.
I found the change in verb tense in this one sentence a bit jarring. Perhaps “Nothing could make me got out there again!” or something like that would be better?
Keep at it. This is getting better.
What I particularly see in this new version is how strongly the forward motion of the action now moves. Each sentence leads directly to the next, so I always know where I (the reader) am going. I think there is significant improvement between this and the previous version. Good show!
(I agree with Kevin and Debbie’s comments about language, and you’ll continue to tweak this, but I think now you can really go through the rest of the story with that so called fine tooth comb and then see how much it has improved.)
The narrator not being immediately afraid of the dragon is a quirk of the character which I explain later in the story. First comes the awe/curiousity then the realization/fear sets in.
The “purple in colour” is the overly descriptive nature again. Will work on that.
I find I join alot of sentences with “and” because I’m having a little trouble avoiding too many “I” statements. The very first version of this had every other sentence beginning with “I”. Any suggestions on getting around that would be greatly appreciated. I’ll also be getting to the library soon to get a grammer and punctuation book.
Thank you for the help.
Joy,
You did a nice job of avoiding too much “I” construction, and personally I’m not that upset by compound/complex sentences, using a lot of them myself.
The way to avoid to much “I” or even the third-person alternation of “he” and “proper name” is to simply get to the dialogue. If there isn’t anyone else to talk to, this is why there are so many characters who talk to god, their pet/familiar, or alternately the audience/reader (old fashioned, but a personal favorite). Asides about whatnot can help to gloss over “and then I saw a bush and a tree and a couple more bushes and…” all the assorted minutia that actually happen but aren’t as entertaining to read about.
Joy, I apologize: I don’t think I explained my suggestion as well as I could. There is nothing wrong with using compound sentences. However, paragraphs tend to read a little better if you vary the length of sentences so that some are long and some are short. You can also use the sentence length to help build tension or the opposite. I suggested shortening some of the sentences because this section of the story sounds like it’s supposed to be more tense and faster-paced, with a bad storm and a dragon landing. Your compound sentences can very easily be made shorter by dropping the ‘and’ and placing a period there instead. Below is an example of what I mean.
[Note: I don't think you overused "I" at the beginning of the sentences, but I did a few "beginning with 'I'" cuts in this sample since you asked about that. I also did not correct the other things that were talked about in earlier posts.]
“I managed to make it safely under what was left of the second floor when lightning split the sky and the rain came down even harder. Nothing was making me go back out there again! Over the pounding of the rain, I heard something else. It sounded like wings but belonging to something much larger than a bird. I could not see anything through the haze. The wing beats became louder. … Suddenly, a small dragon landed in the courtyard. … My heart skip a few beats. The sight of those wondrous creatures, large or small, always filled me with awe.”
I hope I was able to make my explanation more helpful this time. Good luck.
Hello, Joy, One thing in your work I was thinking about commenting on was the lack of variation in sentence structure. Then I read your statement, “I find I join alot [sic] of sentences with “and†because I’m having a little trouble avoiding too many “I†statements. The very first version of this had every other sentence beginning with “Iâ€. Any suggestions on getting around that would be greatly appreciated.â€
I think I can help you with that.
One characteristic of this brief sample of your writing is that much that could be directly described is filtered through the narrator’s perceptions – and that’s one big reason there are so many I’s in it.
What I’m going to do here is not meant to re-write your story. It’s meant to give you some examples from your text that will shine a light on getting rid of an overabundance of I’s and at the same time allow the reader to experience the sensory details in the story first-hand.
You write, “My cloak was drenched and I could feel the water seeping through my clothes to my skin.â€
Another way to say this is, “My cloak was drenched, Cold water seeped through my clothes to my skin.†(This way, we can feel it, too.)
You write, “The sky rumbled and I dashed for shelterâ€
Another choice could be, “The rumbling of thunder sent me dashing for shelter.†(This way, it’s a sequence of cause and effect.)
You write, “I could not see anything through the haze and the wing beats became louder.â€
You could say, “Through the haze obscuring everything beyond the ruined wall, I could hear the approach of mighty wings.†(This shifts the focus from the narrator and what she’s looking at and hearing, to what is actually happening. Showing, not telling.)
A couple of other things. One, do be aware that hearts skipping beats is a very tired cliché. And two, “Nothing was making me go back out there again!†stopped me every time I read your sample. It sounds out of key with the rest, it doesn’t add anything to what’s going on, and the exclamation point, which should be used most judiciously, calls way too much attention to itself.
I do think this is an intriguing beginning. I’m curious as to what will happen next. Best luck with it.