Critique #28: Anni M–
Kevin Andrew Murphy July 8th, 2006
It was a dark and stormy night.
Alright, I know you’re not supposed to start a story with that particular phrase, but my dad always taught me that in a tricky situation, the truth always is the easiest way out. (Not that I’m in the habit of sticking to things my dad told me, but since he was a man that lived by the rule “do as I say and not as I do”, I figure telling the truth still is more or less rebellious.) So:
It was a dark and stormy night. The wind made the snow come twirling in an almost horizontal direction, sending it inside your clothes and leaving icy water melting against your body. That morning was even worse, and since the snow made it impossible for my dad to take the car (because, surprise surprise, the garage was snowed in), he decided to walk the three kilometers to work. If you hade ever been outside in a snowstorm, you know that taking a walk in one is just about the stupidest thing you can do. Take one step forward, fly three steps backwards. But my dad had never missed a single day of work, and he wasn’t planning on starting now. He kept walking, with his head down against the wind, and his hat pressed far down over his ears, determined to get to work in time, no matter what.
The “what” that kept him from work that day was me. About half the way to work, my dad stumbled over a dark blue baby car seat that was standing alone right in the middle of the road.
Anni,
I’m going to start with a small gripe: Something we’re starting to see with the 13-line Critiques is samples where there’s a cliffhanger on precisely line thirteen. Yes, you want the reader to turn the page, and this certainly makes me interested–foundling babies in perilous situations are always good for that–but what came before seems padded to get the heart-clenching line on precisely line thirteen.
Anyway, other things. Yes, we have established that the reader will want to turn the page, but before that… Well, the riffing on the “It was a dark and stormy night” doesn’t do much for me, and I question your father not simply shoveling the driveway out to get the car out if he doesn’t have a snow plow service.
However, the worst thing in all this, which will kill it for an editor, is the laziness of not using a spellchecker. There’s no good excuse for poor proofreading and bad punctuation, but there’s even less for leaving in typographical errors that even the poorest spellcheck program will catch. You have “habe” in place of “have” right there in the middle of your sample. Also, commas generally go inside quotation marks unless there is an express reason not to.
I also wonder why your father was stumbling down the middle of the road rather than the sidewalks, unless of course the road was plowed, but this begs the question of why wasn’t the road to your house plowed? Maybe rather than having the garage snowed shut, the road to your house isn’t plowed but the main road is.
There’s nothing fantasy or SF in this introduction, by the way, but of course you know that.
Anni, you have a nice voice here, but as Kevin pointed out, there are so many spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes, an editor is not going to take the story seriously because he or she will assume that you do not take the rudiments of your craft seriously.
Think about it this way. Would you trust a surgeon to operate on you, no matter how innovative his reputation promises him to be, if he comes to the operating room with a kid’s doctor kit?
So, the second line, the very first word, is misspelled. It is all right. You are mixing it up with already. Many people do, but writers ought to know how to spell it correctly. Next, it’s people who and things that. So it’s incorrect to say “He is a man that….” unless he’s a thing, not a person. And so on, as Kevin points out.
Actually, a small difference with Sherwood in regards to “alright” versus “all right.” I don’t have a problem with “alright” when used for an idiomatic synonym for “okay.” James Joyce and Langston Hughes both used it, and it follows the older constructions of “already” and “altogether.” That said, Strunk & White still has it listed as a deadly sin, and a whole lot of editors agree.
Actually, the main reason I favor “alright” as a single word in certain instances is a matter of clarity. If you contrast “They were all right on the way to the play” with “They were alright on the way to the play,” the second is clear in its meaning, with “alright” meaning “in an acceptable state of well-being” whereas the former construction might mean that or might mean “collectively directly.”
However, set alongside all the other clear errors in this piece, “alright” will be read as an error as well, rather than an arguable point or simply “nonstandard usage” as it’s currently listed in the dictionary.
Thanks, Kevin–I hadn’t known that about all right/alright. (My texts all give it as an error; though as you point out, it should make sense what with altogether, already, etc. . . . but then English, she does not always make ze sense!)
My big stumble with that second paragraph, beyond everything already said, is that I wasn’t sure it was the story-narrator speaking or the writer making a really big mistake by breaking into the story to explain something to the editor. The story-narrator’s voice isn’t strong enough to carry it.
You also do not need “it was a dark etc.”
This makes the point quite well that it’s stormy. A simple “That night, the wind . . . ” etc would do. Like Kevin, I suspect padding.
Thank you all for your comments!
The comments about padding made me think about when I first wrote this - and yes, it was padding, to help me get started with the story. I forgot that while I continued writing the story. I’ll change all that, so that the story has a better flow. I’ll also avoid talking directly to the reader until the narrator is more established! =)
As for the poor editing - unfortunately, it’s not the editing; it’s my knowledge (or rather, lack of knowledge) about the English language that destroys things. Thank you for pointing it out to me, it made me remember that I’m not as fluent as I’d like to think I am… I’ll stick to my first language when I’m writing from now on.
Thank you all for taking time to critique this! =)
//Anni M
Anni, if you want help with idiomatic English, this blog com is a good place to ask. Simply tell people that at the beginning of your post, and then everyone can help you with the idioms and weirdnesses for which English is renowned.
It really is a difficult language to learn, not as bad as Hopi or Georgian, maybe, but very hard. ::-)