Critique #8: Mary Kay Kare
Kevin Andrew Murphy June 24th, 2006
January in Seattle. Cold, grey, damp; the sun isn’t even a bright spot behind the clouds and hasn’t been for days. The interior of Victrola Coffee Shop is too dark to read anything not displayed on a lighted screen. Miranda sits in the darkest corner staring at her lighted screen – which doesn’t have much on it. “Yup,� she thinks, “staring at a blank page until drops of blood form on my brow. Criminy what a poseur! Maybe I wouldn’t sell my soul for light or warmth or inspiration but I’d sure as hell mortgage it. Heavily.�
The south door of the coffee shop slams open and a remarkable woman steps into the dank dimness. She is tall, broad shouldered, heavy bodied, with long snaky black hair. The violent swirling reds and yellows in her dress play beautifully with the dark liquid eyes and warm brown skin. Water trickles down her face and disappears. She looks terribly out of place in a gloomy Seattle coffee shop in mid-winter.
Mary Kay,
Nice to see you here. Now on to the critique.
First, show don’t tell. Second, imply don’t show.
Telling us it’s Seattle in January is acceptable shorthand, however, if not terribly original, but if you do that, you don’t have to go to all the bother of describing the gloom. Beyond that, while the description of the computers is nice, the repeat of “lighted screen” is awkward. After that, we’re into the story of a writer, which is rarely done well and a touch narcissistic even when you pull it off.
The “remarkable” woman who comes in in the next paragraph does sound a bit out of place, but not enough to interest me. Even if she’s the devil here to witness Miranda’s impious oath, which is the only possible SF element I can find here.
My suggestion is to go from the full omniscient you have here to the limited omniscient, because if you go with the full, it’s just dirty pool that the omniscient voice isn’t coming out and saying she’s the devil. Also, play around with the writer’s tricks. Let’s see some of Miranda’s frustrated writing. And what if she’s doing a writer’s exercise called “What would you sell your soul for?”
Heh. She’s not the devil. She’s Pele. The assignment was to write about a displaced god and I couldn’t think of anything more displaced than Pele in Seattle.
But your points are good ones and echo what Eileen said to me about another story I’m working on. Is there a good text/explication of POV for the nascent writer? I’m not sure I fully understand the subtleties and ramifications of the various permutations.
MKK
Mary Kay,
There is probably a good text somewhere, but damned if I’ve ever seen it. Viewpoint and viewpoint shifts were some of the arcana I learned through writer’s workshops years ago and have had to explain down the way. So I suppose I’ll just have to write that Ur text here:
First person: You write a first person story and everything is in the viewpoint of your narrator. Everything your narrator says is taken with a large grain of salt as his/her opinion. It’s all written “I did this, I did that” and while not the easiest point of view to pull off, is certainly not the hardest and is pretty much immune to viewpoint shifts.
Second person: Rarely used except for horoscopes, travelogues and the occasional “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. The whole “You are a Leo and are contemplating murder and pie, not necessarily in that order” sort of voice.
Third person limited omniscient: The usual viewpoint for most novels these days. The story is set in third person, focusing solely one one character and what he or she thinks and observes. It’s very much like first person in focus.
Third person serial limited omniscient: This is like first person limited omnscient except that the viewpoint changes from character to character, usually at scene or chapter breaks, so one chapter is told from Bob’s viewpoint, the next from Sue’s and so forth.
Third person full omniscient: The narrator sees all, knows all, and tells a fair bit. Not everything, but enough to make the story entertaining. Something like “Miranda was working on her laptop when Pele, the Polynesian Goddess of Fire, walked into the coffee shop. Thankfully she was not made of magma at the moment, but had incarnated as a statuesque woman in a flame-colored gown more appropriate to the Oscars than a rainy day in Seattle.” In more old fashioned versions of full omniscient, the narrator occasionally becomes a character in and of himself, even if one not appearing in the story. A good example of this would be Daniel Handler’s “Lemony Snickett,” the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Viewpoint Shifts are a flaw in the third person limited omniscient style where we are all into a particular character’s viewpoint when suddenly we get some tidbit of information from someone else’s viewpoint, be it another character or cosmic narrator. The most common viewpoint shifts are sensory details. Things like “Susan eyed a delicious cake” which are problematic because how does Susan know the cake is delicious if she’s not eating it? It can be “appetizing,” “attractive,” “delicious-looking,” or even “sinful” but if we’re in her viewpoint, the only time the writer gets to say something is delicious is if the viewpoint character is currently eating or has recently eaten it. Some of the worst viewpoint shifts are what is known as “author intrusion,” which usually happen when an author is writing about a character with completely different beliefs and values from his/her own and starts having his own perceptions color his character’s thoughts, or worse, puts in editorial comments about the character.
Thanks Kevin. I’m going to save that for future reference and more study.
MKK
Mary Kay: a couple days ago in my journal we were talking about Voice–and POV–which may or may not help. Also I do have a splendid essay about POV on my archive that I found a couple years ago, if you like I can copy it to an e-mail and send it to you.
My reaction is: try not to begin with the weather. The first line is always more effective as a hook, not a neutral painting of setting. My eye wanted to skim until I saw ‘Miranda”–character! Interest!
Now, it’s not the same if a character is reacting to the weather, especially in this context: Pele in gloomy Seatle.
Sherwood, is that essay (about POV) something that could be posted on deep genre for others to use?
I nipped it off the Internet ages ago, and do not know whom to attribute it. I fear a copyright violation.
What I will do, though, fo r purposes of discussion, is post a quote from a thread on POV and OMNI that we had on my newsgroup on SFF Net a few years ago. Since it was a public post, I’m going to assume it’s okay to post it here, with attritutions to the two in that portion of the conversation: