Critique #67 BN Balder
Katharine Kerr August 29th, 2006
The late summer night poked chilly fingers into her room, but she couldn’t
bring herself to close the window. Clouds like cotton balls soaked in ink
scudded past the smiling face of the moon, chasing each other giddily and
calling out to her. She yearned to run after them until she dropped. Without
stopping to think or put on a sweater, she jumped out of the window.
The sidewalks were empty and the traffic lights were flashing gray and
white. She met nobody in her frantic hurry to get away from the buildings
closing her in. Her feet ate tarmac and jumped over cars, the only sound she
made a faint rhythmic ticking. Was she wearing kitten heels?
With a joyous leap she crossed the hedge into the park and landed in the
middle of a carpet of scents so rich and diverse she forgot everything else.
Tantalizing smells of little and big people were everywhere, mixed in with
harsh chemical traces that made her sneeze. She roamed around, nosing each
trace and piece of scat, enjoying the pictures they made in her head. She
growled at a lamppost that was rusting from her competitors’ scent marks,
the odor of iron adulterated by the dribbles of degenerate cousins. She
sprayed all over it until every trace was obliterated.
BN, I’m sorry, but you are suffering from a serious case of rhetorical overload. Too many similes, cliches, too much pathetic fallacy, and on top of it all, it’s coy. Kitten heels, indeed!
Before you use an elaborate simile like those cotton balls dipped in ink, make sure it works. Dipping cotton balls in thin liquid will produce hard little clots of soaked cotton fiber, in no shape to chase anything giddily.
Oh yes, bewared awkward adverbs, too.
I agree that there are too many similes, etc. They are drawing my attention away from the story itself. Is the whole beginning from her point of view? If so, she is probably too involved with what is happening to her to describe things in this manner. (Although, I wouldn’t mind reading a story where someone transforms into a Cat-Poet). Also, since her mind seems to becoming more cat-like, I’m not sure she would think about why the lamppost is rusting.
In the beginning sequence it is not clear to me what she is feeling. Her descriptions of the clouds and moon lead me to think she is pretty happy when she leaps outside. But while running, she is frantic to get away from the buildings.
I would like to find out what is happening to her; is she turning into a cat in body as well as mind? Sounds like there is an interesting story here.
Yes, I agree on the overwritten comments.
I have a friend who writes beautiful looping descriptive narrative and my reaction to his work is that he buries the really poignant or evocative metaphore with a barrage of other less important contrast/comparisons.
Some authors/readers love the lavish layers of multiple meanings, so don’t discard any of it, but save it and space it out. If it gets in the way of the flow of the story or causes the reader to pause and re-read a section, you are working too hard.
This is a pathetic fallacy. I don’t mean, in the MTV sense, “Oooh, it’s pathetic!”. It’s a technical term for attributing life and feeling to an inanimate or abstract thing. They tend to come across as cutesy-poo, unless they are malicious (The night was her enemy, would be an example) in which case they are usually merely kind of lame.
This is a really old cliche’ and also cutesy.
It’s not jonly a question of too many figures of speech. In any piece of writing, you have to consider the over-all effect of the figures used.