Critique #151 — Kimberley King #2
Kevin Andrew Murphy July 8th, 2007
“Filthy. Absolutely filthy! I leave for five minutes and what’s happened to my cave? Bats take over and there is guano everywhere!” Leathe was careful not to put any of her four giant feet in the droppings, but failed miserably.
“It’s everywhere! Filthy!” This had been her first migration and she was only gone for six months.
“Half a year and they invade like I’ve been dead for five. I’ll clear those little blood-suckers out.” She took a deep breath and released the chemicals in her mouth, that when combined ignite, and blew as hard as she could. Fire leaped from rock to rock and the squeals of dying bats made a smile appear on her satisfied face.
“There we go. And, I get a snack to welcome me home.”
Hi,
Shouldn’t this be ‘Kimberley King #3′?
The second line of dialog is repetitious, you’ve already said it’s filthy…you could say something different, and that that would a further level of interest, perhaps.
I would naturally structure it differently.
“Filthy. Absolutely filthy! I leave for five minutes and what’s happened to my cave? Bats take over and there is guano everywhere!†Leathe was careful not to put any of her four giant feet in the droppings, but failed miserably.
“It’s everywhere! Filthy!†This had been her first migration and she was only gone for six months.
“Half a year and they invade like I’ve been dead for five. I’ll clear those little blood-suckers out.â€
She took a deep breath and released the chemicals in her mouth, that when combined ignite, and blew as hard as she could. Fire leaped from rock to rock and the squeals of dying bats made a smile appear on her satisfied face.
“There we go. And, I get a snack to welcome me home.â€
Who is she talking to? If it’s to herself you may need to change some of it to thoughts.
….that when combined ignite….. telling, not showing.
I’d read on. This is better than your previous one!
Thanks Adam,
Yes she is talking to herself, I do it all the time when I get annoyed. Any mother does it when clearing up after their kids
I’m not sure whether to have it as thoughts or spoken aloud, but I like the aloud better.
How can I show that they ignite when combined? I can’t think of a way. I’m very unimaginative as you may have guessed.
Thanks again for the kind comments,
Kim
Do you need that detail? Does it slow the prose? If you can’t do it well — leave it out.
“Half a year and they invade like I’ve been dead for five. I’ll clear those little blood-suckers out.”
She took a deep breath and blew a jet of blue flame from rock to rock. The squeals of dying bats made a satisfied smile appear on her face.
Personally, I think you can drop it — I am not sure I care enough HOW she makes the flame.
Adam
Athough, retrospectively, can dragons smile? I also think the sentence re: smiling is too removed — i think the term is passive, but I am not sure.
Better:
She smiled with satisfaction at the squeals of the dying bats.
Feels more immediate.
Others may disagree….
Adam
I like it, but I’m a little confused. Is she gone five minutes or six months? “I leave for five minutes and what’s happened to my cave? Bats take over and there is guano everywhere!†Makes me think she was gone for five minutes and returned to find a sudden bat invasion.
“Half a year and they invade like I’ve been dead for five.” Makes me think they took six months to settle in.
Overall I loved the tone and I like the character. I agree, with Adam that we don’t really need to know about her body chemistry. She’s a dragon. She breathes fire. We move on.
I’m totally on board to keep reading. This is good stuff.
She keeps saying the same thing over and over. One comment about the state of the cave is sufficient, and then she can start toasting bats.
You don’t have to explain how the fire works. She wouldn’t be thinking about that anyway. It’s second nature to her.
“Failed miserably” is what’s known as a word package–an expression so common it borders on cliche. To keep your writing fresh, avoid word packages like the plague.
I’m going to partially disagree with Beth on one thing- I agree that in this case you might want to change it, but ‘failed miserably shouldn’tbe avoided at all costs. It’s one of many common-as-muck phrases that can be used quite effectively when you’re creating humour. Or, I think it can, anyway.
I digress.
‘She took a deep breath and released the chemicals in her mouth, that when combined ignite, and blew as hard as she could’ – I agree that you should get rid of the ‘that when combined ignite’, but I just wanted to point out that it’s pretty bad sentence structure. Firstly, that little bit should be ‘that ignite when combined’, not the other way round. Secondly, I’m not sure there’s any way you can effectively embed that into the sentence. Here’s my suggestion:
‘She took a deep breath, gathering together the volatile chemiclas stored in her mouth, and blew as hard as she could” (though ‘blew as hard as she could’ is another word package, which really SHOULD be avoided).
Ditto Ivy’s comments about time.
erm… ok, my suggestion version [with good spelling and no extra apostrophes! woo]:
‘She took a deep breath, gathering together the volatile chemicals stored in her mouth, and blew as hard as she could (though ‘blew as hard as she could’ is another word package, which really SHOULD be avoided).
Also, would I read on? Not sure. I too am intrigued but confused.
Oh dear god.
‘my suggestion version TWO‘
I think I’ll go back to bed before I somehow injure myself.
First, you have a lot of grammar problems. I’d highly recommend at least looking up correct usage of commas in a grammar book (found in a local library if not your home).
Second, beyond problems already pointed out:
You first state that Leathe didn’t put her feet in the dropping, but then you change that to she did do so. Also, would a dragon think of her feet as giant feet?
How about something like:
Hi Kimberly,
This is such an improvement! Keep working.
These two sentences violate your POV:
She wouldn’t be thinking about her own feet being giant (unless she’s a dragon with a body complex!) and she can’t see the smile on her own face.
And although
is not technically a POV violation, is jarred me out of the story like one. Instead you could work it into your dialogue: “My mother never warned me about this when she was telling me what my first migration would be like” or some such, since you already have her talking out loud.
I liked it. A dragon that talks to herself. Kept me intriqued.
Thank you all for your comments, but I am very confused as to where my grammatical errors are. I would be grateful if someone could point them out, nicely if possible, so I can edit the rest of my writing. Thanks, I’m glad the majority of you are warming up to me.
Kim xx
I just gave it a careful read and I didn’t see much in the way of grammatical errors. Just a couple places, really.
Here, the verb tense is iffy in the second half of the sentence–
Should be:
This had been her first migration and she’d only been gone for six months.
It’s still a bit awkward, so you might try something like:
She’d just finished her first migration and had only been gone for six months.
That’s another unwieldy sentence; it needs more commas to properly set off all the nested clauses, and “that” should be “which”–
She took a deep breath and released the chemicals in her mouth, which, when combined, ignited, and blew as hard as she could.
– but what it really needs is to be rewritten. It’s got too much going on and I think we’ve already mentioned that the explanation about the chemicals isn’t necessary.
According to The Little, Brown Handbook and the Elements of Style (and also how I was taught grammar in school and how my mother, a grammar queen, was taught it in school):
Main Rule Violated, Debbie paraphrase: If two complete sentences are combined with an “and,” then put a comma after the word before the “and.”
Example of correct comma use: “I ran along the road, and Ben ran with me.”
Example when comma not used: “I ran along the road and sang my favorite song out loud.”
So:
Beth S. already pointed out the other things that I noticed.
The thing is, in dialogue, punctuation takes on a role similar to musical notation. You can have comma splices and run-ons and sentences with dangly bits…it’s all a matter of how you want it to sound when spoken. For instance–
Chances are, if the character is in full rant, she’s not pausing after “five minutes.” Similarly, semi-colons represent a more significant pause than a comma, so strings of independent clauses can be casually spliced together if that represents the meter of the speech.
Thank you both for pointing it out for me. I’ll take a closer look at the story.
Beth S., grammar is about clear communication, not music. Commas and semi-colons don’t represent “length of pauses” but “separation of thoughts.” A reader might pause briefly after a comma because they are gathering themselves for the next thought, but a comma is not a musical notation for “pause here before continue.”
Editors repeatedly say that correct use of grammar is important in a story and is a main reason for their rejection of submitted stories. That’s the only reason I bother to point it out.
Debbie,
Yes, I do agree. But when writing dialogue, the rules can be bent as long as clarity and ease of reading don’t suffer. Because writing dialogue is about reproducing the sound of speech*; it’s a place where punctuation becomes a tool not merely to set off phrases to help the eye, but also to indicate pauses (or lack thereof), and to regulate the meter. The writer needs to bring the ear into play.
For instance, suppose someone says:
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
Spoken aloud with that punctuation, it sounds measured and formal. The sound of the first sentence descends to a complete stop before the second begins its ascension. That’s fine if that’s the way the character talks. But suppose the writer wants to convey something a little more natural-sounding.
“I don’t know — what do you think?”
The pause between sentences is still there, but now it’s a moment of suspension, rather than a complete stop. The sound doesn’t descend after the first clause, but rather holds the note briefly before beginning the second. In musical notation, it would be written with an arc joining two phrases to show that the note is held. And when I say it out loud, it sounds different from the first example.
You could also write that with a semi-colon instead of a dash, but a semi-colon looks formal, even if the effect is the same. I personally try to avoid them when writing dialogue.
Now suppose you want to get really casual:
“I don’t know, what do you think?”
The pause offered by the comma is barely felt. It’s almost a run-on, because it’s really there more for the eye than the ear. And while it’s not strictly grammatical, it represents the way most people talk.
(*writing dialogue is actually about making an artificial reproduction of speech, because if we wrote dialogue the way people really talk, it would be very tedious to read with all the “ahs” and “ums” and lost trains of thoughts. So we write something that mimics real speech, but is much more focused and precise.)
I’m with Beth. In some cases an author will throw away the rules of grammar to get a certain effect in dialog.
“If you touch her, you. Will. Die.” There is a cold, measured tone to that, which wouldn’t be if it were punctuated properly.
From “House Call” by Christopher Evans, collected in Heaven Sent by Daw Publishing:
“You’re a little drunk for that, don’t you think? Oops. Now look what I’ve done. Ash on your stair carpet.”
Clearly the last is a sentence fragment, but it’s dialog, so it works.
I’d agree that Ivy’s two examples are okay for occasional use in dialogue. I’ll even accept “I don’t know, what do you think?” as an occasional way to show two sentences slurred together. The key here is occasional use. First, if you frequently use improper dialogue grammar, then you lose its “special” effect…just like using italics too frequently in dialogue. Second, you may know your grammar, but if you never–or rarely–use it correctly, then the editor and readers will assume that you are making mistakes rather than trying to show them a musical score for dialogue.
You will note that I didn’t call Kimberly on her sentence fragment in the above dialogue. I’d even accept the line “Bats take over and there is guano everywhere!” without a comma. But since the commas are incorrect in most of the sentences, whether they are dialogue or not, I’m guessing that Kim just didn’t know those grammar rules for commas.
Speech patterns should be individual to the character. If you have a character who consistently talks in a run-on way, or uses bad grammar or cliches, or speaks Valley Girl, or talks in monosyllabic grunts — well, that’s what you write for that character.
Like all writers, I have some areas of strength in writing — things that come to me naturally, without having to practice much — but personally, dialogue is something I have to work at. Back when I first started writing, all my characters sounded like me talking. [g] Once this was pointed out to me, I started paying very close attention to good dialogue, in movies and in books, and in the latter, how it was written down. And one thing I noticed was that often grammar and sometimes punctuation are left by the wayside. Really good dialogue writers do this instinctively, by ear; me, it’s something I’m having to teach myself. But I feel sure editors are (or should be) well aware that good dialogue often appears to break the rules. And if grammar and punctuation are correct in the narrative, then they’d have no reason to think the writer was making mistakes in the dialogue. IMO.
whoops, looks like I indirectly set off a grammar debate!
Kim for correct grammar usage you can go to The Elements of Style by Strunk and White as well as the other sources Debbie mentioned. I think there are other discussions on this blog about grammar as well that you can look at. Also look at Steering the Craft by Ursula Le Guin, she has a chapter on punctuation with writing exercises.
I’m with Ivy and Beth S here. Know the rules of grammar, inside out and upside down, and then break them on purpose, knowingly and for a reason. Writers are artists and words and grammar are our tools. Manipulate them to provide power to your prose. Doesn’t have to just be dialogue though. Read the authors you love and see how many of them use sentence fragments for example, or leave out the comma between two complete sentences that Debbie loves. We’re not writing essays here, we’re writing stories.
Read Blindness by Saramago (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature). There is no punctuation at all! He did it for a reason (although gets me what it was, I hated the book). The point is, he knew the rules and then he broke them.