Critique #140 — Kimberley King
Kevin Andrew Murphy June 26th, 2007
“With grief comes union; as our country and the Royal Family grieve for the loss of our Queen, together. When there has been so much love and happiness for someone, it is natural to be reluctant to close such a wonderful chapter in our lives. Moving forward is rarely accomplished without considerable grief and sadness, and while our sorrow is profound, we know the clouds will clear and the sun will shine on us again. In that warm, bright light, we will find ourselves facing a glorious future. A future with exciting challenges, and infinite possibilities in which the horizon will stretch out before us, framed in the heavenly glow of the sunrise of our tomorrow.”
The eulogy still echoed in the King’s mind. Queen Juliana had been dead for three years now, and he still faced problems trying to comfort his children.
She had given him three heirs to the throne of Tophate; Raphael, Thoreau and little Nicene. Raphael was nineteen when Juliana had died, Thoreau seventeen and Nicene was only twelve: it had been the hardest on her to lose her mother.
It started with a dream. One that pushed it’s way into the King’s subconscious mind. A dream of the Monarchy.
Hi,
I don’t like eulogies, it feels like a flashback. It also spends a lot of time saying very little.
She gave him three heirs? You mention four children…does that mean the girl can’t become queen? If her brothers die?
Its language is nice, but to be honest I am bored. Nothing has happened and there is no real hint of any direction the story may take.
Sorry but, no, I would not turn the page.
Adam
Hello Adam,
There are three children, Tophate is the country. So what do you suggest instead of the eulogy?
Kim
Hi Kim,
Apologies re: Tophate. I mis-read it.
It looks like Top hate or Top hat.
As far as what to do about the eulogy, well I don’t know the rest of the story so it’s difficult to suggest something. The king is obviously pondering on his lost love. But where is the king? You have not positioned your POV anywhere, except in his own thoughts.
Perhaps you should consider putting him somewhere, doing something — preferably something engaging — and he can briefly hint of his lost love. I don’t need the eulogy just the message — she’s gone, he misses her, she was the queen, she left behind three children.
What happens next in the story? Perhaps he could be hunting and reflect on how he no longer gets the same satisfaction from it….not since the queen died…blah, blah. Perhaps he could be doing something kingly ( then it would be obvious he was a king) and he could reflect on the empty space next to him…blah, blah. It would give it some context.
Its difficult to give you a context because you have given no details of the physical reality that the king is in.
I suppose it’s permissable to do this if your story is engaging in an other way, but the eulogy uses too much of your 13 lines for much more story to get in apart from the line at the end regarding ‘how it all started’. I wasn’t hooked by that line.
Others may differ in their opinions, but as a reader this is what I felt.
Adam
I think you’ve started in the wrong place. This is all backstory. The eulogy in particular is (sorry!) dead boring. Is the main problem the king faces in this story finding a way to comfort his children? Surely not. What is the main problem? That’s where you start.
Also, try to avoid opening a story with a character reflecting on something. Instead, open with a character doing something. You need character, setting, conflict. Not necessarily in that order, but the idea is to start with something concrete and intriguing.
The final paragraph seems like a sudden shift in focus. What does the “it” in the first sentence refer to? What started with a dream? Is this more backstory, or is this actual story?
You’ve got some punctuation issues there. You’re probably going to rewrite this anyway, but fwiw, a semi-colon joins two independent but related clauses. A colon is used to introduce a list or an idea. Put a colon, not a semi-colon, after “Tophate.” And while technically you could put a semi-colon after “twelve,” a period would be far better.
In the last paragraph “it’s” should be “its.”
It reads like your clearing your throat before starting the story. I’m going to bet that if you cut much of this amd introduced the information more organically as it became needed, you’ve got a good story there.
I love your prose. I thought the eulogy was a cheat because it was a flashback and I wasn’t oriented in the story to know that. I thought someone was speaking in the story present and the very next line would take place at the funeral, not years later.
Are the children’s names significant? Putting Nicene (of the Nicene creed) alongside Raphael (an archangel) suggests to me you intend them to be.
Don’t dreams come from the subconscious? I couldn’t understand this line.
I agree that the eulogy is boring and out of place. It would be fractionally more interesting if the scene was actually the queen’s funeral.
This is back story. None of it advances the plot or gives me a reason to read more. There is no action and no more character than a list of names.
As a slush reader, I wouldn’t even finish what’s here, let alone turn the page.
Seaboe
Hey Kimberley.
First, a note on your semi-colons: they’re both wrong, I’m afraid. ‘With grief comes union; as our country and the Royal Family grieve for the loss of our Queen, together’ - you’re got a clause, a semi colon, a subordinate clause, and a word. If it’s not a list, the thing after the semi-colon has to be able to stand on its own as if it were a separate sentence. Thus, you’d need to tack something like ‘we stand’ on the end of ‘together’ for it to make sense. You could just about get away with making it a comma and losing the ‘together’, but only just. As for your second one (’she had given him three heirs to the throne of Tophate; Raphael, Thoreau and little Nicene’), Beth S pretty much covered it: never use a semi-colon at the start of the list - it’s only used as a kind of ’super-comma’. See below:
[use a colon only] She packed the following: a brush, a towel, some sun-cream, food and a bottle of water.
[use semi-colons as well] She packed the following: a brush, since her hair always frizzed in the sun; some sun cream, for obvious reasons; a towel to lie on - she didn’t actually like sand very much, and had no intention of lying on it;… etc
Ditto Beth S on ‘twelve’ - you could technically put a semi-colon after ‘Nicene was only twelve’, but a hyphen works better (’Nicene was only twelve - it had been…’).
Secondly, the sunshine thing. If you’re from the UK, you may remember David Cameron’s first speech as party leader - more specifically, the ‘let sunshine win the day’ comment, and the collective groan let out by the entire country. For me, at least, you
achieved exactly the same result with your ‘we know the clouds will clear and the sun will shine on us again’ thing, and worse you made it into an extended metaphor and carried it on until the bitter end. Sunshine metaphors are twee and cliché: avoid them.
On the brighter side, I didn’t think that starting with a eulogy was too bad, even as a flashback. The problem, sunshine issues aside, is that the forgivable sin of starting with a flashback was compounded by the far greater one of infodumping.
Lastly, a few things on your final line. Firstly, be very careful when using the word ’subconscious’ - it’s popular misnomer for the word ‘unconscious’; the sub and the unconscious are two different ideas (the former being an idea from Pierre Janet’s work, the latter being a Freudian term). A small point, but a point nonetheless. Secondly, something about this line is awkward. Until now, we’ve been wading through flashbacks and infodumps, and suddenly we’re yanked over into a storyline. It’s like there’s a paragraph missing somewhere or something, and I was a little taken aback.
Would I turn the page? Honestly, I’m not sure I would.
Hope this helped :).
Thank you for all your comments. The semi-colon issue, I’ve shortened the sentences and things and forgot the semi-colons. Sorry, they shall be edited. I am curious though, why is starting the story with a flashback a bad thing? I’ve read a few others comments for other stories who have started with flashbacks and the responses are the same.
The plotline I’m not going to explain, as you’ve said it should be the first 13 lines that grip the reader and mine obviously do not. I do have one or two ideas of how to alter the beginning.
Thank you again for being so… honest.
Kim
Starting with a flashback is bad because it has no forward momentum. Flashbacks as a whole have a tendency to stop a story. That’s not always a terrible thing. If something major happens to a character, she might need a little time to process and the reader needs a breather too. That’s when a flashback works fine. When you’re coming out of the gate you have no momentum, no driving force at all and you need to build some. Also, you want to avoid info dumps if possible.
Raphael knocked softly on the door before entering. “A word, father?”
Works better than:
Raphael was the king’s son.
or
The king was Raphael’s father.
Because it gives us the same information while still moving the story forward.
Kim,
For me, it’s the fact that you have given me nothing to really care about. The queen died three years ago. But what is happening now? So far? Nothing.
Do I care about what is going to happen next? Well, since nothing has happened — no, I don’t.
As I said, your language is nice, it’s just that you haven’t shown me anything apart from backstory.
You are possibly referring to my story about the guy and the lion which started with a flashback — it did move into some actual story later, though! My new creed is to start with relevant action.
Adam
You need to get the reader involved in the “now” of the story before stopping the action to insert a “way back then” moment. This is especially true of short stories. And speaking for myself, I don’t like to get invested in a flashback, because what happened then is already done and over with.
It’s the same thing if you open with a dream. If we don’t know it’s a dream, then we feel tricked when it turns out not to be the real story. If we do know it’s a dream, then we resist involvement, because after all, it’s just a dream.
You’ve got me curious now, though. Who’s the main character of this story and what’s the main conflict?
Kim,
Unfortunately, I just had a long involved critique which DeepGenre thought it would be amusing to eat. Damn the internet gremlins.
I’ll nutshell it however:
You’ve gotten a lot of good critiques so far. What I wanted to add is that it isn’t so much that this is a flashback, or that flashbacks are bad–they can be quite good done right–but that this opening should be a story about grief, not monarchy.
The king has lost the love of his life or at very least the mother of his children and someone he’s grown fond of or at least come to depend on, and here’s this priest waffling on with this awful boilerplate eulogy while the king is there having to not only be monarch and grieving husband, but also for the first time be a single parent.
What if Princess Nicene doesn’t go with the script, starts crying or screaming or anything a twelve-year-old girl who’s just lost her mom might reasonably do? What if the king is used to having his wife getting her to mind, and when he reflexively looks for her to deal with the unruly princess, that’s when the full crushing weight of his loss finally hits him and he suddenly has to be a single father?
There’s a lot of raw human emotion you can go with here and we’re not getting it. If I were the king, I’d privately be wanting to push the bishop out the window, or maybe I’d be more horrified because the bishop is a dear old family councilor and it’s obvious the man is now having Alzheimers, especially if he flashbacks to some eulogy he did twenty years before.
The power of a story isn’t in what goes according to plan. It’s in what goes wrong, even little foreseeable disasters that simply have to be dealt with as they occur.
Anyway, this all could be a very engaging opening with a rewrite, but as it stands now, it’s losing everyone for various reasons.