Critique #49: Kit Retterson
Kevin Andrew Murphy August 7th, 2006
Once upon a time.
That¹s how all fairy tales begin, isn¹t it?
But you know, somehow I¹d always imagined that my fairy tale would begin
with something grander, more eloquent than ³Once upon a time, there was a
fifty-something who was emptying the dishwasher.²
But that¹s where it began, this story of my once upon a time.
It was a day like so many other days that stack one upon another like forks
in a drawer, each hardly different from the next, compactly filling the time
of our lives with stuff too trivial to remember singly, but somehow together
were enough to serve a lifetime.
Just another Thursday  or perhaps it was a Monday < the day offered no
portent of doom, no claxon call to psychotic meltdown. No tsunami warning
had been issued by the Cosmological Weather Service.
An ordinary day, as I said  with glorious, smiling sunshine streaming in
and a soft breeze buffeting the blinds¹ cords on my kitchen windows,
carrying inside the sweet fragrance of lilies and lilacs.
Perhaps I was vulnerable at that very moment because I was engaged in the
banal in the safety of my cozy kitchen on a Technicolor Thursday.
I opened the cabinet drawer and looked down at the bouquet of silverware in
my hand.
And then it hit me.
Kit,
You had me caught and were reeling me in up until the simile of the stacking forks, which was very pretty apt and I liked very much but started to explain itself too much for my patience. And then the continuing non-metaphor with the blather about the lack of omens began to distract and grate, and then the alliteration of “lilies and lilacs” drew attention to itself, mostly because I pay very careful attention to the natural world and I asked myself “Do lilies and lilacs bloom in the same season?” and I concluded that, depending on the type, they can, but lillies are pretty close to the ground and you’d have to have an entire garden filled with the things to perfume a kitchen, whereas lilacs are big bushes and one near a window would be more than sufficient.
And then I lost interest.
My suggestion: Pare down the fork simile, shorten the lack of omens likewise, and cut straight to the remarkable thing that the reader is wanting. Oh, and weed out the lilies and leave just the lilacs. If you want, you can have them “nod” outside the window, which would imply a light breeze and also how heavy the blooms are.
Ha, ha, ha — “pare down the fork simile.” Very clever cutlery pun.
Thanks for the gift of feedback.
Oops! To be sure — the above post was posted with a smile.
I had the same reaction as Kevin–I loved stacking forks but got lost when it got belabored, I was thinking of T.S. Eliot’s short, sharp, evocative “I measured out my life in coffee spoons” which he does not explain, the reader sees it at once.
Also, “Then it hit me” has been so overused I am not sure I would have gone on, except I adored the line about the fifty-something so much. (Being one meself, and a veteran dishwasher-loader and unloader, sparse on adventure!)
Yes, “then it hit me” has been around for a long time and I debated not including that line in this blurb for that very reason.
For what it’s worth, the next line is:
“A great metaphysical tidal wave crashed over me, a thumping broadside to the port that toppled my mainmast and I started taking on water below the line. Water metaphors were suddenly apt, you see – afternoon tear-showers were threatening to commence as I sank to the floor.”
The rhythm of that simple sentence, with the “it” explained more elaborately in the next, felt right to me.
Although perhaps that next sentence is another labored metaphor. I’m not terribly comfortable with metaphors and belike I’m trying too hard …
And thanks for adoring the line — there are so few fairy tales (if any) for the Dishwashing Unloading Set — that’s why I wrote this one.
Oh, I do like that one. (Except I don’t think you need ‘It hit me” because it robs the next line, imo, which is so much better. Makes it seem reduntant. But that’s your call. I love the pooping ship metaphor!
Kit–
I agree with much of what’s said again, but (perhaps because it’s curmudgeonly Tuesday and I’m waiting for the coffee to brew) I want the whole thing pared down considerably. The excerpt seems curiously padded to me, both with imagery and extras phrases.
Me, I would delete “grander” and get rid of “But that’s where it began, this story of my once upon a time.”
In the same way,
there’s too much there. I adore the “No tsunami warning had been issued by the Cosmological Weather Service”, but if you keep that, perhaps you should get rid of “no portent of doom, no claxon call to psychotic meltdown.”
As it stands, I as the reader feel you don’t trust me to get your point. And that doesn’t help our relationship as co-creators of the reading experience.
I love the idea of a fairy tale for the Dishwasher Unloading set–you’re right, we’re underrepresented!
Thank you all for the comments. Some of my suspicions have been confirmed. I thought the fork thing was a bit weighty and it’s been tined back. The references to impending doom have been deleted because it’s not really doom that befalls our heroine. I thought the “Cosmological Weather Service” thing was nice, too, but it had to go because a single portent made the thing too choppy.
At the risk of appearing stubborn, I don’t think I’m a pared-down kind of writer.
I’m bewilderd by the notion that a reader might take my (or any author’s) style as a personal insult of his intelligence. I grok that it might not be a reader’s taste, but I don’t see how a reader can construe it to mean that I don’t trust him to understand the point.
In fact, it hurts my feelings to think that a reader would think me so condescending. (sniff!)
I believe (although I could be sadly mistaken and/or simply poorly executing it) that part of an author’s duty is to create an aura for the reader. My “extra” words and phrases are there to convey the cadence of verbal storytelling. This is a fairy tale and I imagine it told out loud.
Dickens could have begun “A Tale of Two Cities” with “The times were the same as our own.” That phrase tells the reader everything he needs to know.
Are readers’ intelligences insulted because he actually wrote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” (Note — that’s Dickens’ punctuation — one long sentence.)
To be sure, I think some readers are turned off by Dickens’ eloquence, but I don’t see how it can be construed as a violation of some reader/author pact.
[Caveat -- I _know_ I'm not Charles Dickens. I know that I haven't even been published (yet?) -- and perhaps I might never be if I persist in the opinion that Strunk and White ought to be strung up and whipped.]
I know that I’m new to this site — and you-all don’t know me — so please know that:
1) I hear what you’re saying and value the kind and helpful feedback,
2) I respect each of your points of view,
3) I hope that it’s okay to respectfully disagree from time to time, and 4) I fervently hope you won’t boot me off for being verbose.
(smile)
(That’s a “don’t beat me” smile.)
Kit,
The difference, I think, is that Dickens started with the grandeloquent then went to the merely eloquent peppered with the occasional bit of prosaic. Here, you start with the traditional, then go to conversational, then prosaic, then poetic but belabored, and then more and so forth.
Similes and metaphors should be kept on a theme, at least for a scene, and you shouldn’t have more than one of a different sort to a page. The forks are good. The weather service and Tsunami are fun, but starting a different thread. The swamped ship? It gets too much to me.
Dickens can get away with his grandiloquence because everything he says can be boiled down to the one phrase he doesn’t say (because he doesn’t have to) which is “It was a season of extremes and highly contradictory things.”
You can have a whole panoply of metaphors and similes if they’re unified by a single thread. Likely something about omens, because you can have all sorts of omens, and it makes a good portmaneau to shove everything into.
However, what Madeleine was getting at that I don’t think you’re quite getting, regarding trusting your readers, is that readers like to be able to connect some of the dots themselves. It makes them happier, feel more clever, and that’s why you don’t need to spell everything out. Simply “I measured out my life with coffee spoons” says it all without Elliot going “which means in small increments on a daily basis at regular times, without thinking about it or even realizing that it was going away.” You see the difference?
Let the days stack up like forks and end that simile there. Similarly with the others, and let the omens be unified by atleast all being omens. And then let’s get to the funky stuff, because that’s what the reader wants.
Kit–
Since my last two books have been written in a sort of faux Austen voice, I’m totally with the “creating an aura” thing; I think the writer’s voice is at least as important in creating a sense of place and time as are concrete physical details. Nor did I mean to say that you were condescending to the reader (don’t sniff!) What I meant was that if you make the point with one metaphor, adding more of them simply keeps me from getting to the story. And I want to get to the story.
For the record, I can’t read Dickens without remembering that he was paid by the word; if I’d been his editor I’d have pruned some (though not the opening to Tale of Two Cities–more like some of the bathetic subplots). And I don’t think that Strunk and White are Gods; I don’t always think they’re right. My first criterion is: is something getting in the way of my involvement with the story? When it does, I’m going to tell you, because I believe your goal is to reach me with your story.
Kevin,
There are two separate issues here: 1) the subject of my poor prose, and 2) the notion that the style of one’s writing is some indicator of the author’s opinion of prospective readers’ abilities.
So, please — I do get the observations that you and others have made regarding Point Number One. I know what you’re talking about. I do understand it. (I’m a newbie, not an idiot.) I didn’t think the thing read right for me — thus, I posted it for the (gratefully accepted) help — and you’ve stated it correctly — the tone varied too much and there were too many metaphors. I thought as much; you-all confirmed it for me. ‘Nuf said.
I always struggle with the opening — it’s my version of stage fright — too much pressure on the opening and I choke.
I get that the opening didn’t work. Honestly, seriously, I do. I even grok why.
Mea culpa.
Point Number Two. I think the notion that a writer — because of style or mere ineptitude — is somehow purposely insulting or violating some kind of reader-writer convenant — I find that a bewildering notion and I’m not inclined to agree with it (not that I couldn’t be persuaded).
For what it’s worth — the forks simile went on - NOT because I thought it needed explaining but because I couldn’t resist the “serve up a lifetime” play on words. Mea culpa. I enjoy word play. But it is gone now — all that offensive verbiage — breft of life, it rests in peace. It’s rung down the curtain and gone to join the Choir Invisible. It is a deceased and deleted metaphor.
As I mentioned — the other metaphors are also GONE — leaving only the tidal-wave, water/tears metaphor.
Oh — did I mention that I deleted the other metaphors so that now there’s only one?
I do hope Madeleine will forgive me if I have been entirely stupid in understanding her point (as you suggest I’m being). She mentioned “curiously padded” prose — that I’d said things too many times. She didn’t say that she objected to me being too clear (i.e., connecting the dots for her). She wrote that she thought that the repetition left her with the feeling that I didn’t trust her to get an obvious point. I was expressing bewilderment and respectful disagreement over the reader-author covenant suggested.
[Did you notice how I repeated myself many times, because this time I don't trust you to get the point that I took your sound advice (see prior postings) and already (yesterday) deleted the forks metaphor, doom references and tsunami warning? Oh -- are you using repetition with me because you don't trust me to get your original point? Oh -- now I get Madeleine's point!!!]
(He he he — Sorry, Google me and you get pointed to Wikipedia’s “smart-ass” entry. Please know that I intend this jovially.)
I chose “A Tale of Two Cities” to illustrate my point about repetition for effect and tone. Dickens _wasn’t_ saying that 1775 was a time of ‘extremes and contradictions’ — just the opposite.
He was making the point that 1775 was not really any better or worse than 1858. He was satirizing the tendency people have to use superlative terms whatever they are describing. He could have been a lot clearer in his satire, but he chose to use simple superlatives in repetition because that’s the effect he wanted. It wasn’t about getting away with grandiloquence because it all boiled down to the thing he didn’t say — and it had nothing to do with the idea that his readers might not get his point. He was using repetition for satire. (Careful, the word is “grandiloquence” with an “i.”)
I’m (whether it works or not is another matter) trying to use repetition for cadence.
Again, I get it that my opening didn’t work, and I’m thankful for the feedback. (Some things bear repeating.)
My (new) opening is more worthy of the sweet story that follows because of the thoughtful (and repetitious) comments I’ve received.
Thanks for clarifying, Madeleine. I hit the send on my last post before I saw your thang.
I was reacting, I think, to you suggestion that I remove — “That’s where it began, my once upon a time.” I liked that there for rhythm. Since it wasn’t a metaphor, I assumed you were responding to the repetition.
So, sorry I misunderstood your point.
Dickens was paid by the week, not the word. His “books” were published as penny serials. I have three “bound from parts” Dickens novels — the only true “first edition Dickens” are bindings of collections of the penny leaflets. He wrote to fill a certain length that was expected for each installment — readers expected to receive so much story for their penny. So, you’re right — he definitely would be pruned were he writing real novels today — but he wrote filler, not to pad his pay, but to pad the week’s episode.
Don’t throw out the word play completely! I hope you try working on some of them first. Lilian Jackson Braun has a mystery series which incorporates a lot of word play. Example: “The Cat Who Tailed a Thief.” There could be some techniques to pick up there.
The fairy tale sentence at the first actually turned me off reading. Also, look at the sentences starting with the word “But”. I would suggest tightening this and getting to the point, not be so wordy. You have:
“But you know, somehow I¹d always imagined that my fairy tale would begin
with something grander, more eloquent than ³Once upon a time, there was a
fifty-something who was emptying the dishwasher.²
But that¹s where it began, this story of my once upon a time.”
I’d put something like “Somehow, I’d always imagined…” eliminating the first “but” so the second one would be OK.
“It was a day like so many other days that stack …” Each paragraph is about one sentence, which doesn’t interest me, tho starting a story with shorter pars is good. I don’t like “It was a day” because that is overdone and telling us each sentence about “day” is repetitive (sp). I like the part about “so many other days stack…” Good metaphor. Watch the wordiness and tighten and you’ll have a much smoother read.