Critique #172 — Sengei Tawn #2
Kevin Andrew Murphy September 5th, 2007
The flames hissed and sputtered as snowflakes drifted into the fire from out of darkened skies. The guard stamped his feet; his misty breath adding another layer of rime along the edge of the furred hood. He pulled the woolen neck gaiter higher over his nose, and then hugged his arms once more, watching the bright flames lick the branches.
Groaning, he winced and absentmindedly grabbed the wad at his crotch and then hesitated, his lips forming a loathing snarl.
“Chaad!” he finally swore, giving in and spinning away from the radiating warmth. He passed the anti-air gun collecting snowflakes on its tarp cover-the only other comfort sharing his night vigil. His steps crunched noisily through the snow crust as he approached the edge of the cliff; dozens of darkened tents arranged in military order behind him.
The vantage from the cliff’s edge set his teeth to chattering, yet he could not look away from the desolate vista. Snow-covered mountains drew a chaotic horizon in the distance, faintly luminescent, despite the starlight dampened by low-hanging clouds. The guard glanced down. The valley fell steeply into
dark obscurity-a 500-meter fall for the careless!
I’m afraid I don’t find this very engaging–too many unanswered questions, and a focal character who seems pretty unappealing. Not sure what the wad at the Guard’s crotch was or why it made him snarl, nor what that has to do with the view (or his compulsion to look at it–the view, that is). By the time I read the last paragraph nothing had happened: it’s cold, and there’s a view (and that wad at his crotch, whatever that’s about).
In terms of language, there are too many things going on in that last graph–it’s desolate, chaotic, faintly luminescent, with dampened starlight and low-hanging clouds. There are mountains and a valley and a 500-meter drop, but I still don’t know why this is going to matter to me.
Nitpickery: A construction I have always had problems with: The guard stamped his feet; his misty breath adding another layer of rime along the edge of the furred hood. Why not “The guard stamped his feet; his misty breath added another layer of rime along the edge of the furred hood.”
Also: whatever “Chaad!” is meant to convey, it just sounded like he was whining a man’s name to me, and I’m certain that wasn’t your intention.
Hi Chad,
I concur with Madeline’s comments.
The first paragraph seems to be about a guard standing by a fire in the cold, but you seem to have kept a fair bit of the ‘dead wood’. You mention the fire twice. I think once would be enough in the first paragraph, since it is a fairly inactive element in the story. Alot of the elements are about how cold it is, but I think you covered most of that in the first sentence or two. I think you could cut the first paragraph significantly and achieve the same image/situation.
AA gun = Anti-aircraft gun. Unless you are going to explain something I am unfamiliar with — I have never heard of an ‘anti-air gun’.
Why did the vantage point set his teeth chattering? Was it because it was exposed or because he sufferred agoraphobia/vertigo?
I understand you wanted to use the sentence to weld on a bit of description but you could have done it more cleanly.
Also I was unaware it was night until it was mentioned halfway through the piece. ‘Darkened skies’ made me think of dark clouds, possibly because it’s snowing. The addition of the fire didn’t make me assume it was night, either. Just how I read it, others may not concur.
Adam
Hello Sengei,
yeah, it’s not bad, but it doesn’t engage as well as it should (can?), I’m afraid. I’m still reading, but not fully engaged in the tale yet.
I think part of the problem for me is that it feels overly much like a setting of the setting, rather than an intro (if that makes sense?), there’s some hints about the overall world, and possible conflicts, and an intro of what I assume will be the protag.
The scene setting is actually fine, but what I don’t have yet, is a glimpse of what the idea/ conflict/ theme here is going to be. The raison d’etre of the story as it were.
Perhaps if you could weave your central idea in here with the descriptions?
Groaning, he winced and absentmindedly grabbed the wad at his crotch and then hesitated, his lips forming a loathing snarl
this one felt a bit disconnected to the rest; either if - 1) the presence of the wad; 2) its significane at his crotch; 3) why the loathing? (this is almost the most important to me, it got my attention immediately and then was left kind of dangling) - was explained straight after it was mentioned, or led up to in a preceding paragraph, it would have made more sense to me.
As it is, I’m afraid I don’t really see the connection to the rest of the text as yet. Having said that, I also found it the most intriguing element.
Hope my comments are of some help, thanks for the read.
Hey Sengei.
There are a lot of things here that need clearing up, but I will say that I’d read on just because I liked the mood of the piece - I enjoyed reading it, even if I wasn’t 100% sure what was going on. It’s bit like poetry in that respect :p.
Anyway, everyone else has pretty much covered what I noticed, but here’s what I had:
‘the bright flames lick the branches’ - branches implies that they’re still whole, like he’s burning a fallen tree or something. There’s nothing wrong with just ‘firewood’ or ‘kindling’, etc.
The crotch-wad: … what? He makes a ‘loathing snarl’ when he feels it, so does that mean there’s something there that he hates / wishes wasn’t? It doesn’t really convey ‘pain’ to me, if that’s what you were after. Incidentally, I didn’t like the way ‘forming a loathing snarl’ sounds - I think it’s the repeated ings (though there’s just something about ‘loathing snarl’ I don’t seem to like either).
“Chaad!â€? does indeed sound like he’s just whining a man’s name. Did you ever see the show Farscape? They had a made-up swear word too - ‘frell’. Admittedly it’s obviously just a derivative of ‘fuck’, but can you see how ‘oh frell’ carries more punch than ‘oh Chaad’? And how do you even say ‘chaad’, anyway? Is it a long and drawn-out ‘Chad’, or is it ‘Ch-ah-d’ (rhymes with ‘facade’)?
I hadn’t noticed ‘anti-air gun’, but Adam’s right about it.
The two semi-colons - these, as far as I know, are simply incorrect - semi-colons, when not used in lists, join two often related but otherwise independent sentences [e.g. 'Snow makes my skin itch; I don't like winter]. Hence, ‘his misty breath adding another layer’ needs to be ‘added another layer’, and ‘dozens of darkened tents arranged…’ needs to either be ‘were arranged’, or to end with something else ['dozens of darkened tents arranged in military order behind him made for ominous presences in the gloom' or something].
‘The vantage from the cliff’s edge set his teeth to chattering’ - a ‘vantage’ is a place, specifically one that gives you an advantage of some kind. It’d be the same as saying ‘the hill set his teeth to chattering’. The COLD did, but odds are the place didn’t. I suppose you could say the place made him afraid, and the fear made his teeth chatter, but I’m not getting a sense of fear here.
* * *
As the others have said, there’s no real sense of conflict in this opening. Now, as has been said on here many times, truly good prose will carry itself - you don’t have to open with a bang to get a reader’s attention. Personally, I’d read on simply because I liked reading it, and I think tidying up your prose could really make this opening work (without needing to resort to something dramatic). You will, of course, eventually have to introduce a conflict and tell a story, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to start with it.
Hope this helped :).
Thanks very much for the suggestions! All very helpful.
Geesh, 13 lines is really hard to fit in interesting description, hint of the story, explanations, etc. Looks like I have a major rewrite to accomplish! Slashing ahead. These lines are a prelude to some action, and just setting up the scene. The guard is not my main character. I wanted to see how this tact would play out to you all. But there are so many problems, that tact is not even the focus of discussion. Argh! So. I will go back and rewrite and post here again and see how it reads. Give me a day. Thanks all, very much.
Hi Sengei,
Sorry I called you Chad! I am grateful I didn’t call ‘Chaad’ because apparently that is a swear word in some cultures.
Adam
What everyone else said. Overladen with description; no conflict. No real sense of a story beginning.
Try opening with the main character. Get us into his or her head. Show him or her faced with an apparently unsolvable dilemma. That’s always a good place to start.
Beth, Thanks for your comments. I really want to start this story with an unimportant character and with a quiet before the storm.
Another challenge: How does one swear in an alien language? After all, I DID say “he swore.� My aliens see soft words as irritating…thus…’chaad!’ instead of ch..it! or f..ck! Notice the harder sounding endings of OUR swear words. Are readers ethnocentric? Ah. So they are. What to do? What to do?
I’ve decided on omniscient POV. And actually, I am not in the mind of my protagonist until next scene! Maybe am making this harder than needs to be. I don’t want to be in the guard’s mind. I just want to show what’s going on before my protagonist shows up. So, here is a revision, which probably has a whole other host of problems.
The flames hissed and sputtered as snowflakes drifted into the fire from out of the black night. The guard winced, his breath adding rime to the edge of his furred hood. Swearing, he reluctantly spun away, his steps crunching noisily in the snow towards the cliff edge.
Faintly luminescent mountains drew a chaotic horizon in the distance, despite the starlight dampened by low-hanging clouds as the guard wrestled his zipper open and sighed, a stream of steaming urine drilling miniature canyons at his feet. “Ahh!� he groaned in relief while glancing down into the canyon below. He stepped back nervously and threw a glance behind him, where dozens of tents arranged in military order lay quiescent. The guard shoved his privates back into his pants and turned back to his post, his footfalls fading into the distance.
Just below the cliff edge, a dozen bodies flattened tightly against a wall of ice-encrusted rock.
I think the second version is better than the first (removing the distracting wad in the guard’s crotch is a huge help). However, I also think that some of the description in paragraph two can go. Do we need to know there are dozens of tents? Do we need to know they’re militarily neat? Does the description of the horizon add anything?
Seaboe
That’s an improvement. It contains a hook now, in that last line.
I wonder if you could get some sort of hook into the first line as well.
I still think the tension is diluted from too much description sandwiched in. And this is coming from someone who likes description and writes a fair amount of it herself. But the thing is, it needs paring down here. “Faintly luminescent mountains drew a chaotic horizon in the distance” is wonderful and I’d keep that, but “despite the starlight dampened by low-hanging clouds” is wordy and completely unnecessary besides, since we already know it’s cloudy (after all, it’s snowing). And it causes the reader to imagine starlight, then have to mentally erase it from the image you’re painting.
Also, this is the kind of opening that works great in a movie, but books aren’t movies; the written story has different requirements. One of those is reader involvement, and this impersonal, omniscient approach is death to that. For this reader, anyway.
Thanks all, so much! This really helps. It’s a place to try daring things and see if they pass or not and why. I’m learning a lot from this exercise!
Beth, it’s so hard to cut the visual, but I see what you are saying. I left that description of the mountains in to see what you all would say. You are right about it being too wordy. Is all much tighter now. Cheers all!
Well, like I said, I think the mountain description can stay. It’s the the following line about the starlight that isn’t there that can safely be cut.
I also think the part about the tents being arranged in military order is a good detail to keep, because it says something about the nature of the camp.
Hi Sengei,
I quite liked it — particularly with the refinements. Were I in charge of page-turning though, there are a few nitpicking things that I might have held against you. Most things have been covered by the others, but…
When reading, it can be slightly confusing (if you’re dumb like me, and I’d imagine some people are) to read what I’ve bold-ed. I think it’s better when using dashes (forget the proper name) to separate thoughts, to do a double dash, which the computer automatically turns into a — … It’s easier to read, and doesn’t give the editor a headache! That’s the last thing you want!
Leave a gap between the words and do a — basically, is my advice
Re-reading your 13-liner, I realised that my other nitpick was me mis-reading! Good work. Hope I’ve helped a little and haven’t been too annoying.
~Chris
Hi Chris,
The single dash was actually a computer translation problem when I sent it in; it was supposed to be an “em” dash (the long dash). I was using it in that sentence to see if it was a problem or not. I often include bold things in my 13-lines just to see the response (am trying to learn). I used to type for a professor who loved em dashes, to the point of using them in every other sentence! So, I am particularly gun shy of them. Yet, they work so well, sometimes. Would love to know more about their use, if anyone has thoughts. Thanks, Chris. Look forward to reading some of your work!
Yeah, I know someone who used to use them to excess, too, but they’re good when used right.
I have quite a few … not problems, as such, but … I find I’m unsure of how to use certain grammar techniques, sometimes.
There are, of course, quite a few things on the Internet to help, but I’ve found (to my surprise) the thing that’s helped the most has been a podcast called “Grammar Girl’s Guide to Grammar” — in which she covers just about everything in a small weekly chunk, and listeners can send in queries, etc.
Some of them are no-brainers, but most are things that you’d be surprised how many people (myself included) get wrong on a day-to-day process. “Grammar Myths” are covered, too — for example, it is actually OK to split infinitives (”to boldly go”, is now allowed, rather than just “to go”) … although she does mention that so many people still think it’s wrong, that you probably shouldn’t use it anyway!
I’m not one for pimping things, but it is actually a good 5 mins well spent
Best,