Critique #13 — Elaine Barlow
Kevin Andrew Murphy June 28th, 2006
He is The Artist. The worn down pencil frantically darts and scratches its way across the paper. Dark lines take shape and through the blur of his exhaustion he tries to make sense of them. The Hand makes another pass - its fingers grip the wood and push the lead with a hard swoop down and right. He blinks his eyes twice, hard - a figure …
In the house at the end of Lantis Road, a man is standing at the window watching the drops of rain run together, merge with each other, and tumble down the glass. His own face is a distorted reflection; warped by the liquid streaks.
… the montage breaks into a fresh piece and a new area of the paper is attacked by the pencil. Hard outlines now, sporadic spikes and distinct shapes. I see it now, he thinks wildly, Yes, I know this place …
The streetlights begin to come on while the man watches the rain gather in potholes and spill over into the street. He bows his head and closes his eyes as if to begin making a desperate prayer. There is only silence.
Elaine,
Openings like this are the reason why I often dislike the full omniscient. There’s too much telling, not enough showing or implying. You talk about the artist’s exhaustion, not about the sweat on his brow or how long it’s been since he’s eaten. You tell us that the figure in the house at the end of the road is bowing his head and closing his eyes, but then add “as if to begin making a desperate prayer” for those unable to connect the dots.
Other troubles are things like the frenzy of automatic writing being done with the artist as inkjet printer. Trouble is, I’ve seen this exact same motif done on television the past week and both times it had far more impact. Once was one of the previews for the upcoming superhero show Heroes where the watercolorist is freaked out by having painted the flaming bus-o’-doom from the morning’s paper two weeks earlier. The other was yesterday’s premier of Kyle XY where the vat-grown idiot savant Kyle grabs crayons and frantically pounds them on paper to make a dot-matrix photoreproduction of something he’s seen.
Anyway, perfectly valid SF trope, but far less successful here, both because of the lack of interest in the vision–a depressed man in a rainy house is hardly shirt-grabbing–and the relative dullness of the creation process. The Heroes watercolorist does his painting off-screen, but of a dramatic image. Kyle does an amusing picture (a snapshot of the couple making out in the tent who he first stumbled on) but the camera focus is on his desperate pounding with the crayons and his need to communicate.
Yes, I am comparing this to television, but the drama would be the same on the page with both scenes described. Because it isn’t in your scene here, I’m not really interested in reading the next paragraph.
Since I dont watch TV (I dont even have one) I can’t say I knew that the idea had already been done. Seems that can be said for a lot of ideas since writing has been around forever. I also don’t know how your television show turned out but if the connection between the artist and the subject is that obvious then it cant be that interesting to watch. Since its only the first 13 lines how can you be sure what the connection is or if it is that obvious? I’m not sure that it seems fair to compare the two. Can it not stand on its own or is it destined to be automatically pitched into the same bin that you recently threw your last meal of bad television? I know fairness isn’t an issue when it comes to opinion but it seems I’ve been typecast without even the option for there being more because you didn’t like the channel you were on. Thank you for your time though in reading it.
E, you‘ve not been typecast. I hope you can try to stop identifying your work with your self. It’s not easy, of course, and most new writers do make that equation. It will only cause a person pain and stop her from learning, however, if she gives into it.
Remember, too, the premise of this entire feature: an editor these days will only read the first 13 lines of a story before deciding to reject it or to read on. Readers are almost as bad — watch a bored person flip though a magazine, and you’ll see what I mean. The first lines are what you’ve got to make an impact and grab your reader.
The main things I watch on TV are baseball and WHAT NOT TO WEAR, neither of which applies to your story. That said, let’ s go back to your actual words. Overall, I’d say you were straining for pathos but getting distance instead. The lonely desperate man watching the rain fall is a passive figure, and the active one is a pencil. I don’t care about the pencil, worn down or not. The artist fades in and out, since he seems to be doing some kind of automatic drawing.
Consider these phrases:
– the adverb contributes nothing. The strong verbs convey the pencil’s frenzy.
– this adverb doesn’t make up for the lack of a strong verb.
Which of the two do you think is better?
I don’t understand wha tyou mean by “breaks into a fresh piece”. And is the pencil creating a “montage” or just dashing off images? There is a difference. “The paper is attacked by the pencil” is a passive construction — these leach energy out of a story.
You don’t need the “own” here. “is a distorted . . . warped” Reflections are by nature passive, and this one here contributes to the distanced feel of the piece. That semi-colon should be a comma, as well. Yes, pro editors do notice such details. It’s part of their jobs.
You need to find some way to make your reader care about the figures presented.
Katharine everything you have said is very helpful. Comparisons to what is happening on television or how my writing is like television doesnt help me to understand anything really useful to correcting any mistakes or advancing. I’m still unsure of how to create such complicated emotions in such a short piece of writing - you say things like “make the reader care” and it just confuses me. I know that a lot can be communicated in very little but how little?
The paper being attacked b the pencil was my way of suggesting that it is out of the control of the artist itself that his hand and the objects in it are beyond his control and have minds of their own as far as creating something with purpose that he has no understanding of. Its a violent action I suppose, how it is being drawn and therefore himself and even the paper become “victims” of third party entities. I tried explaining it even further once and boiled it down to a sentence that I thought might sum it up. It seems to have made it more confusing - or less effective.
I was always taught that semi colons could be “as if” in certain areas depending on context. I guess that was definately wrong information.
What you have explained tells me a lot but I guess I am at a loss. Words that paint a picture for me if I was reading them seem to have the opposite effect on others when I use them. I wonder why that is. Am I reading things wrong? Or do the words have less meaning than I am giving them when I read them? I will have to figure that out.
I thank you also for your time and really helpful information.
E–
I’m sorry if you felt I was comparing you to television, but as you mentioned, there’s not much original anyway. That’s why we talk about things like devices, tropes and motifs.
Television, film, opera, dance, prose fiction, narrative verse–the form is immaterial, at least when talking about folk motifs and literary devices. Automatic writing is one of these.
As Katharine said, the point of the 13 line critiques is to write something that will grab an editor and entice a reader to read further.
Automatic writing/drawing is a subset of scrying, the old formal word for getting visions of the past, present or future. A gypsy’s crystal ball, a wicked queen’s magic mirror, an entranced artist’s scribbling charcoal–all different means to the same end. The end–the vision–needs to be of interest to the reader. It doesn’t have to be flaming-bus-dramatic, but it does have to engage the reader’s emotions in some fashion. One of my favorites with this is vision held in the paperweight in John Bellair’s The Face in the Frost–simply a deserted crossroads with snow blowing and a lone stone marker. This was engaging because of the mystery and the starkness of the image.
Getting back to your lines, the reader sympathy you want isn’t coming in because of various reasons. Having a passive vision is one trouble, but wouldn’t be enough by itself. If you consider Bellair’s mysterious marker stone, what made it intriguing is that no one knew where the place was–whereas here you give us a street address. Moreover, the man who closes his eyes and bows his head, you automatically intimate this is prayer, rather than leave the reader to guess, but more than that, let the Artist try to guess. He’s just drawn a picture of a man with his eyes closed and his head bowed. Is he praying? Tired? Is he in pain?
What I’d suggest is switching this whole scene to third person limited omniscient, focusing on the artist. Let him draw his images and then react to them. Let us see his expressions and reactions, rather than just telling us about his emotions. In this fashion, you’ll get a lot more character sympathy for the artist and you’ll have the reader also be far more intrigued about the man in the vision.
I think I see where Kevin is coming from: the detachment of the anthropomorphized pencil, the descriptions of what it is doing (and ‘feeling’), the unexplained images, are all cinematic, but there is no sign of any character moving that pencil. At the very beginning of a story, a busy pencil just doesn’t draw me the way a person would.
I think I’d like these 13 lines better if I’d had an introductory graph or two establishing who the Artist is, and what the problem is. (And what the image means.)
E, compare “the pencil attacks the paper” to “the paper is attacked by the pencil.” The first is active, the second is passive. The first is more interesting, as well, because the thing that’s acting, the pencil, is active!
This is what makes writing short stories so difficult. Every word has to count for two or three things at once. Making people care about the characters takes a lot of work, but the basic method is to present a solid-seeming illusion of a real person. Readers are primed to empathize with a real-seeming character if one’s presented to them.
Your character, the artist, is barely there at all. We don’t know where he is, what he looks like, how he’s reacting to this pencil with a life of its own. We do know he’s exhausted and “thinking wildly”. My impulse is to tell him, “put the pencil down and go to bed,” which actions would not make a very interesting story. You don’t need a full description of the character, mind, to give us a way in — something like “The artist hunches over his drawing board and blinks hard in the glare of his gooseneck lamp. With one hand he pushes his sweaty hair out of his eyes. In the other, the pencil . . . ”
That sort of thing.
Kit
As I mentioned in my first response to Kevin’s comments … it’s hard to tell what is happening in the first 13 lines because nothing is really being explained. The Artist actually has not drawn the man who is at the window at all. But they are connected by a similar event which is what the Artist is drawing. He is very much a victim of his Hand which makes him a reluctant seer in this modern age. He’s spends most of his time trying to draw connections between events that seem to be random. The connections, much like what he is drawing and the man at the window, are NOT that obvious. There would be no story if it was.
The story does not start out with those lines definately. And I guess I should mention that the story is more of an epic style. Many characters who seem unrelated are drawn together because of a commonality that they discover. However, its not that obvious of a connection and in fact is barely revealed until the end like a classic mystery style. There are hints and clues but the story takes you on their individual paths until the end. Again, its hard to show what the 13 lines are about out of context.
There is a very specific reason for that. He is meaningless when in this state of being controlled by the outside forces. His life is not one of Artistry. He’s a kid forced into something that has taken over his life. That’s why he has no name but a title. Many of the other “players” in the book have titles designated a more ancient role that they have to fill. His individuality becomes very insignificant when up against a “universal role” that he is forced to fill. It doesnt matter who he is at that moment, what matters is what he does. His name only becomes important in the “real world” outside of the nightmare he’s trapped in. The real world being his friends and family that don’t know what he goes through in the dark some nights. To the universe that controls him or the entity or whatever … he is just a tool - an artist.
Again, everyone has had incredibly helpful responses and I really appreciate the time you all have put into this. I just think that a detached set of 13 lines from a longer piece is going to be a bit confusing because the story doesn’t get started right there. I understand that an editor is only going to read but so much and if 13 lines is all it takes then that definately forces one to write differently. If, as a reader, I only read the first page of a book and judged the whole story that way and made assumptions about what was going to happen I wouldn’t get very far nor would anything seem remotely interesting to me. But I’m a reader and not an editor or a writer so I guess its very different perspectives there. The idea for a reader is to “find out” or be “drawn in” to something. I guess it is different from the other end. A lot of books sound like or feel like something I have read before and rarely do they turn out that way by the end. Sometimes, but not always.
I’ve been told I’d do better writing screenplays perhaps that is where I should direct my efforts?
Thank you again everyone.
Perhaps, but screenplays–unless you are emulating Luis Bunuel–definitely require you to orient your audience even sooner. The 13 lines, turned as is into screenplay form will seem even more disjointed. Unless you want to write an art film, you really need an establishing shot–quick or longer for credits–leading immediately to some character to follow to the next character link, if you don’t want to begin with the character whose actions begin to drive the story.
But for an exercise, you might go ahead and recast these lines into screenplay format, which, judging roughly, would be just about a minute in, depending on how you are handling the montage of images, and compare that to how much information is given you a minute in on your favorite movies.
E–
While I believe you when you say what the artist is drawing is not the man in the house, that is what the implication is. A great deal of writing, as with drawing, is dealing with negative space. The artist’s drawing is one negative space–we haven’t seen what the image is, or what it means. Looking for meaning, the next image we’re presented with is the man in the lonely house. The reader attempts to fit the puzzle piece in there, and since we’ve been presented with no other information that tells us it doesn’t fit, we assume it does.
If you want to change the implication, the easiest plan is to simply swap the scenes. Start with the man in the lonely house, then cut to the artist, then back to the man, then to the artist.
Another thing you could do is work on the sonics of the piece. Something like “Rain pelted the panes, sliding down the windows like silent tears.” It gives not just the images, but the sounds in the sound of the words. It’s an old poets trick, but it really helps with setting the mood.
The main question I have is, however, why are these the first scenes we see? From the sound of what you’re saying is happening with your story, there’s a good deal of synchronicity and mystery. Why these two scenelets and not some others?
Snapping back and forth between two different yet similar scenes is also something that comes from the world of cinema. It’s called match-cutting. You’re going from one solitary male figure to another solitary male figure, and while you don’t have a television, I’m certain it’s something you’ve seen on film and internalized. There are some parallels in the worlds of prose and poetry, but what makes this read more like a screenplay than prose fiction is that you’re missing the details that cinema cannot reproduce: the kinesthetic, the olfactory, the gustatory. All you’ve given us are the visual and a hint of the auditory, the hallmarks of film.
Do the artist’s fingers hurt from holding the pencil so tightly? Is his mouth parched from staying at the task so long though he won’t break the spell to get a drink of water? (A thing all writers will have experienced.) Does the man in the house smell the scent of rain from an open window, or merely from the damp of having brought a wet coat or umbrella indoors?
Some writers make a point of including all five senses in each page. I’m not necessarily that meticulous myself, but stories will read very flat if all you describe is the visual. Moreover, readers will pay attention to different things, and if you have a reader who is sound or touch oriented, your visual story will be completely dead to them.
Kevin is exactly right. When two images or pieces of information are juxtaposed, the reader’s mind will connect them. Or the viewer’s mind.
Now, about the “rest of the story” — are these 13 lines the opening for a short story? If so, they fail on their own. What happens later can’t justify them. IF this is the opening of a novel, however, you have a much wider canvas to play with. Some novel readers will indeed be drawn forward by a desire to see “how this all works out”. The ideas as you describe them in your last post are pretty abstract, however. Impersonal forces of the Universe need persons to make them interesting.
As for screenplays, I hope you’ll pay close attention to what Sherwood says.
Elaine, have you ever drawn or painted? What you describe is not what I have experienced in forty years as a recreational painter. To call someone’s drawing ‘a scribble ‘ is actually insulting. It indicates a tightly held instrument and a cramped style, whereas a loose searching drawing, whether of a real or imaginary motif, would be called ‘a gesture.’ My point is that drawing is an act of focused concentration. In particular, I don’t know any artist who is surprised to discover they have drawn a figure. It’s generally the result of a focused effort.
What you describe sounds like the automatic drawings done in occult groups of the 1890’s. That is actually not a bad setting for a story, but it’s hard to tell what period this narrative is set in. H.
Now I’ve insulted someone?
I explained what the situation with this character is … He is not a willing participant of what is happening. He is not an artist by trade. He is a victim of a forced act. He is surprised by what is drawn everytime because he is not in control. I’m not trying to insult anyone. Every night more or less this person is “used” as a tool to create something well beyond his own means and desires. This is not an attempt to insult artistry. To someone who is NOT an artist, who is NOT in control of what is happening, and who is NOT happy about what is happening to them against their will … a seemingly bunch of random lines could easily be considered a ’scribble.’
And actually … as a web designer I do a lot of creative work and to be honest with you when I sit down in front of a blank document in Photoshop with nothing but the clients company image in my mind, I am often pleasantly surprised at what kinds of representative designs I come up with. I have a focused effort to create … but I do not always have a clear design in my mind when I begin. Sometimes all I know is that the client likes the color blue and that they sell cheese and from that it is up to my imagination. I do not always get what I expect. Nor do I always know what will come of what I begin.
I am really at a loss here.
Katharine: These lines do not begin the story at all. They are just a piece actually from quite a ways in. The guidelines didnt say anything about from when the lines could come. I just picked 13 lines that could stand as 13 lines. Everything else was snippets of floating dialog. My story doesnt have a defined beginning yet. I am still in the beginning stages. Mostly what I am writing are scenes in which I get a feel for how a character talks or reacts. Like putting them in a mini one act to get a feel for their “voice”. I think a lot of what has been said is valid but is based on having no information about anything that comes before or after 13 random lines of information. I guess they would “fail on their own” … but they are not on their own. They are part of a whole.
Perhaps that is part of the point of a mystery … to do the opposite of what the reader expects. To not stay within defined boundaries. If people’s minds are so predictable that two ideas next to each other develop meaning then it’s easy to alter the meaning and give them something else to consider. The two images are together to give an impression of a connection but the connection is not what the reader expects and in fact is much more interesting. The book is a lot about the threads that tie people together that seem coincidental or random but are not. And the connection between the artist and the man at the window are not that clear and arent suppose to be. If you think they are connected it will only further demonstrate the point later on that not everything is that obvious and sometimes there is more beneath the surface. That is part of what the artist needs to figure out about each image that his hand draws.
Somethings are incomprehensible and incomplete. The life of the victimized “artist” is similar. It doesnt have anymore meaning to him at that moment than it does to the reader.
You explained it in one of your comments, not in your story. E, what you are seeing in this piece is simply not reaching the reader in the first 13 lines. Not all of it can reach the reader right away, but you have to make the opening interesting enough for the reader to want to figure it out. That’s the point of this 13-line exercise. All the explanations of what you do later, what you want to do, or thought you were doing will not help the reader get beyond the opening.
I’m sorry that all this criticism has upset you. I think it would be more productive for you to put this enery into revising your work.
Contrary to how my responses sound. I’m not upset at all. Confused certainly, but not upset. Since these lines arent the opening to anything there is my confusion as to why it is assumed that they are and subsequently interpreted in a specific way. Most of the information that has been presented has been helpful in giving me some direction and ideas about how to write better and I appreciately greatly all tha time and effort that everyone has put in.
Oh! A lot os clearer now! Elaine, I do believe the context here is that people but up the first 13 lines of a story or novel, that is the opening. So if you chose something from the middle, and all the characters and context have been established before, of course everyone is totally confused and not connecting.
How about trying your opening? All the previous comments, while many offer good advice for general writing, were geared toward an opening, and thus couldn’t be the least helpful for you, but on the contrary, frustrating. You’d get a more meaningful response on an opening.
As Sherwood suggests I will submit the first lines I wrote of my story. I think its about 13 but I don’t know. I’ve always felt that these lines were the beginning somehow but I cannot say that I have a distinct beginning yet. But I will submit what first came to mind and from where everything else sprang. I hope this will be a better submission than the last. I thank everyone for their time and understanding and especially their patience.
Elaine
Thank you, Sherwood.
However, I’d prefer that people not post the opening of novels, but only of short pieces. The opening of a novel would require more than 13 lines.
E, did you ever read the guidelines for this feature?
Ooop sorry–I did read the guidelines but my sieve brain managed not to process “only short pieces.”
Sherwood, not to worry. I very much appreciate your taking the time to critique here — I know how busy you are, and your comments are invaluable.
I’ve put up a general comment to everyone who wants to post their 13 lines, though, to Read the F-ing Guidelines FIRST. It will save time and energy for everyone if posters follow them.
I’ve also added a line to the main page of this feature. The link to the guidelines now appears a second time, closer to the top of the page.