Critique #154 — Daniel Woods #3
Kevin Andrew Murphy July 9th, 2007
‘… You can sod right off if you think I’m going near that thing, Mike.’
Oh bloody hell.
‘But it’s your job, Tanya!’ I said, exasperated. ‘Just fucking look at it, woman – someone’s gotta do something.’
‘Very true,’ she replied, ‘and good sodding luck to the poor bastard. But I tell you now, it’s not going to be me.’
‘For fuck sake, Tan-’
‘Not. Me. Michael.’
And with that, she left. Flounced out of the room with a face like a slapped arse, she did. Dropped me right in it.
There was a worrying crunch, and I turned around to look at it again, all spines and improbable limbs. One of its mouths had gotten hold of a chair, God help us.
‘Now look here,’ I started.
It was fast, I’ll give it that. The chair hit me squarely on the nose, and I stumbled back into the office door, eyes watering and arms flailing.
‘Gnyaah!’ I cried, all bravery and defiance.
The mouth gnashed mischievously at me. It was laughing, the swine.
‘This is not fucking funny!’ I bellowed.
Aha, it’s up.
This is my first attempt at being overtly funny. My main concerns are that it a.) isn’t, and b.) won’t appeal to an American audience (due to all the briticisms).
Secondly, it’s very low on description - not much on the surroundings, etc. That’s deliberate, since the hook is the argument, but is it so sparse that it doesn’t work?
Thirdly, the language. I find that with swearing, you have to start as you mean to go on, but be careful not to overload the dialogue with profanity. Is it too much?
All comments welcome, hope you liked.
The details do seem too sparse and the profanity seems too much. The Briticisms are fine. I want to know what the huge thing in the room is and why anyone has to deal with it. I’d love to know what dealing with it entails.
I’m not a prude, but I wouldn’t read on because of the profanity. It’s too over the top for my taste.
That’s fair enough, thanks for your honesty :).
The profanity is maybe a little OTT for my taste (which is pretty conservative about such things), but OTOH, they are under stress. I’d read on because I did think it was funny. I love how you didn’t describe the creature right away. Ordinarily the lack of visual clues would bother me, but when you’re doing humor, different rules apply. You aim the camera at it at just the right moment.
One thing–I’m not sure why you began the first sentence with an ellipsis. That wold normally indicate that we’re missing the first part of a dialogue sentence, but in this case, the sentence was complete. Nothing seemed missing.
Hey Beth, glad you liked it :). I was indeed trying to show that they’re stressed with all the swearing, but I guess maybe I need to tone it down a little.
Regarding the ellipsis, I’ve always used them in speech to indicate a deliberate pause (usually an incredulous [as in this case] or sarcastic one) - I’ve never looked up how they’re actually supposed to be used, so apologies if I’m using it incorrectly :).
Hi Daniel,
I like it, but I feel you are cheating me, unnecessarily. If the POV can see this thing then I feel so should I — it’s the focus of the scene. To me, it feels as though you have avoided it because it may be complicated to describe!
I think the above would work if it was a darkened corner of the room, some reference to lack of light:
“Get a torch!”
This would give an acceptable reason for you lack of detail in the room and of the creature….the reveal could happen when light became available.
I would definitely read on, it’s amusing.
Profanity is not a problem for me, as long as it isn’t continuous.
Adam
You can start out with an ellipsis if you want to make it look like we’re coming in on the middle of a sentence. Like picking up a phone extension to eavesdrop and hearing “…and then he told me” or “…didn’t believe it either.” There, the ellipsis stands for the part of the sentence we didn’t hear.
When used at the end of a sentence, it means a trailing off. A verbal pause.
But for a pause to be felt by the reader, there has to be something before it. It doesn’t work as the first syllable of the first sentence.
If, however, you want to use it to show we’ve walked into the middle of something, you can do something like–
‘… and what’s more, you can sod right off if you think I’m going near that thing.’
To Adam - lol, glad you liked, though I didn’t mean to cheat you out of a description. This is really gonna make me sound lazy, but I wanted to force people to imagine their own version of the creature, first. It’s an accidental creature - a random assortment of teeth, limbs and various unpleasant things. Before I tie it down with actual specific details, I wanted people to have their own rough version of it that I could then clarify with my details. ‘Random’ is the point of this creature, which I wanted to emphasize. I, for example, imagined it as a ball of legs and protruding mouths about the size of a space-hopper, while Ivy envisioned a giant monstrosity dominating the room with its size (even though I never said it was big). Arguably, that really is just being lazy, but that’s what I was going for, anyway :).
To Beth - thanks for the notes on the ellipsis. I did want to open with some immediate dialogue (so I’ll probably use your example, if that’s ok - it works just as well), but I thought about losing the ellipsis and having something like this instead:
She gave me an incredulous look [or 'She stared at me' / 'She gawped at me' / 'She gave me a long, hard look', etc - something like that].
‘You can sod right off if you think I’m going near that thing, Mike.’
Better / worse?
Daniel,
I take your point re: the creature and the randomness, but don’t you then fall into the problem of the reader having to readjust their ideas when you ‘tell’ them that actually it’s about the size of a spider, but looks more like a dog with a head on both ends and a couple of extra limbs (I know ‘cos I was there!)?
I am not really suggesting you are lazy, but I did wonder if you wished to avoid a long description in your 13 valuable lines!
Is this creature like a glamour-like (e.g. what you fear) or something that keeps changing shape? To be honest I didn’t really get yourr direction of wanting the reader to create their own mental image of something that should be specific. It’s not a Norman castle, or something we can all imagine in our own way.
‘Now look here,’ I started.
Not the above is wrong, but it may be more effective to use:
‘Now look here –,’ I started.
If you can rephrase to cut a word in two you may not even need the speech tag.
‘Now, look here, you blo–’
Then the chair hits without any speech tag to slow it.
It’s still really good, Daniel — I am just picking!
Adam
Daniel,
Sure, you could do that. Of the three options, I prefer ‘She gawped at me.’ It’s in voice and much more vivid than ’stared.’
I’d use her name instead of the pronoun, though.
Adam,
That’s true. I guess I need to lay down a few more details (a ‘template’, if you like). The creature isn’t a glamour or anything, and doesn’t change shape - it used to be a person, and is the result of a bodged spell. I just wanted to give the impression that nobody really knows what it is. If it were a three-headed dog, everyone would be able to point and say ‘look, it’s a three-headed dog’. The effect I’m going for is ‘well, it’s… erm… well, it’s got some, er, legs, and a mouth… two mouths… and, er…’ Nevertheless, you’re right, without a template, I would eventually have to tell people that they’re ‘imagining it wrong’, which is just bad description on my part.
Also, I did think about going ‘Now wait just a m-’, but I’d already done it with ‘For fuck sake Tan-’, so I wanted to avoid doing the same thing twice.
And please, pick away - every problem uncovered is something that I can then fix :).
To Beth, thanks for the advice :).
I like it…I actually think it’s a strength that you don’t immediately describe the creature in its entirety. Letting slip a detail or two at a time (it has spines…its mouth is big enough to grab and toss a chair…it laughs…) is more suspenseful and funny. I imagine it going on with more scattered crumbs of detail (”…its purple tentacles writhed towards me…its six foot tongue slurped my face…) and so on, so we gradually build up the grotesque image in our heads.
Daniel, don’t ever describe your monster. Let us be the blind men discovering an elephant for the first time.
To Miriam - glad you liked, and yep, ’scattered crumbs of detail’ is what I’m trying for. That way, there’s still a lot of wiggle room for people to create their own creature, but all the important things are covered (like the fact that it has a mouth, for example).
To Brendan - love the analogy, lol, and point taken :).
Daniel,
I shall bow to public opinion. After all that’s what it’s all about.
You may keep your multi-mouthed, improbably limbed whoodjamaflip ;).
Adam
Haha, thanks Adam.
I like it. I actually had something similar in mind to what you say you actually have. I imagined a green (don’t know why green) blob with a few legs, maybe a few eyes dotted around and a few mouths too. Just a heap of organs and limbs, which works well for me. In all honesty though being vague is best anyway because we all think of different things. Get ten people in a room and give them the same description of something they haven’t seen before and ask them to draw it. Guaranteed every one would be different and completely different to what you originally had. It’s the way the human mind works. Many times a fellow writer has described something and I’ve thought of another thing, then they’d show me how they thought it’d look (they drew it) and it was the total opposite of what I imagined. That could/could not be related to how they put it across in the story.
Anyway.. I diverse. Keep the descriptions as they are.
Yes it is funny, no the swearing wasn’t too much for me, and yes I would read on. The reason I liked this so much was due to the sparse-ness (if that’s a word) of the descriptions. Only half way through do I learn that they’re in an office. But I loved it. The dialogue takes presedence (sp?) so use it to your advantage.
All in all I’m very impressed with this and would love to read it all. If you’ve finished writing it send it to me on: blue_girl173@hotmail.com
Hey Kim, thanks for reading :). I’ve already e-mailed you, but I always reply to peoples’ comments on here, so I thought it only fair :p. I’ve been on holiday, so there is, I’m afraid, nothing new on this to show you, but I’ll e-mail you as soon as it’s done.
Glad you liked it,
Daniel :).