Critique #12 — Fahim Farook
Kevin Andrew Murphy June 27th, 2006
“Yo, CrackerJack!”
“Hey, SpeedDemon! Been a long time. What’s up?”
“Nothing much, dude. Just checking to see if you’ve got a spell to record finger-pass entries.”
Jack snorted. “Been there, tried it!”
“So you got a spell?”
“Nope! Nothing that works with finger-pass entries. Keep me posted if you come up with something, will ya?”
“Sure thing dude. Ciao!”
“Adios!”
Duh-Li, SpeedDemon to his many acquaintances on the astralNet, made a pass in the air with his hand, cutting off the audience with Jack.
Fahim,
Though the astral plane/web interface hasn’t yet been overdone from what I’ve seen, this read more like a chat room done solely via text, rather than some advanced graphical user interface that would let people play at being wizards while doing keystrokes as mystic gestures. Or alternately, wizardry advanced to the point of being technical geekery.
The lack of any description outside the dialogue is part of the problem, but the main problem is that there’s no tension here. What we have are two people chatting about not much of anything, and not very amusingly either. They could be mermaids or antipopes for all the difference it makes, which is none, because there are no stakes here. Nothing depends on this conversation, and consequently, it’s dull.
Also, naming your main character “Duh-Li” is going to make people snicker, even if it is a real name. It’s not as bad as “Phuc Mi,” a student I once had in class (I am not making this up), or the President’s actual nepphew, Pierce Bush, but it’s still pretty bad.
The conversation goes on much too long for something banal that doesn’t develop the characters. I suspect that your actual story starts somewhere farther in, well beyond the 13 lines you’ve posted here.
“pass with his hand, cutting off the audience” The combination of hand and and cutting here produces an unfortunate ambiguity for a moment in the reader’s mind. Is he cutting something off of the audience?
The dialog sounds good — you have a good ear there — but it has no tension, nothing pulling the character(s) forward despite the apparent desire of the POV. This is one effect of talking heads. In contrast, the line of narrative at the end is so flat (and clogged with extraneous description) it clunks in contrast. Given the apparent genre and intended tone, I’d expect the narration to be tight — short, direct sentences. Think of the best noir writers.
Like Kit, I suspect this story starts too early, but without seeing what comes next that’s a tentative conclusion — it may be that you haven’t given us enough information to see this is the moment Things Changed.
—L.