Critique #83 Michael Greenhut Revision 2
Katharine Kerr September 16th, 2006
   The open wound on Gideon’s lower stomach bled warmth along his cool
fingers. He pulled up his hand and studied the blood under the sleepy
orange candlelight of the abandoned storehouse. He sat against the
wall, sweating and shivering, as if all the fevers from his boyhood
had vengefully returned at the same moment.
  Shit. Not yet. He couldn’t bleed all over the place, not with small
children around him who slept lighter than raccoons.
  Mom and Ashley would have to wait for him a bit longer. Soon, he
would get his ass out of this rotting world and walk with them on the
white shores of Halamel, but not just yet.
  Gideon licked his hand clean. The brackish blood bit through his
palate, like the salt from the Halamel Ocean that greeted him from
behind closed eyes.  Too gods-damned soon.
  He felt the wound a second time. Dry.
  He waited. Still dry. Once more, the cut seemed frozen in time at
the moment of injury, two years ago.
Hey Michael.
I’ve gotta say, I prefer the other version. Yes it had its problems, but it still had an atmosphere about it. With this version… I dunno, it’s almost overdone where you’ve tried to deal with the problems of the first draft.
Take the first line, for example - though you’ve addressed the original problem (i.e. the drop of blood not seeming that important), there’s just something awkward about this version. ‘lower stomach’ seems like an odd thing to say - is a stomach generally big enough to warrant an ‘upper’ and a ‘lower’? either way, it’s unnecessary and breaks up the sentence. Same with ‘open wound’ - if it’s bleeding then we know it’s open; the word ‘open’ is also unneeded and feels awkward. Finally, something about ‘bled warmth’ is annoying me, and I can’t figure out what it is - that’s probably just personal preference.
Both versions of your opening line have their good points, so I suggest trying to merge them together. Here’s my [probably naff] example: ‘Gideon felt the wound on his stomach; a drop of warm blood trickled along his finger’.
Anyway, there’s a lot of the same thing throughout this version, so be wary of wordiness.
The second thing I noticed was ‘if all the fevers from his boyhood had vengefully returned at the same moment’, and I think I’ve just figured out why it was bothering me. Aside from using the word ‘boyhood’ (which always sounds very trite to me) and the use of ‘vengefully’ (again unnecessary, and it’s like hitting a speed bump or something when you read the sentence and run into a dirty great word like ‘vengefully’ halfway through), your tone isn’t consistent. You go from being terribly polite and benign with ‘boyhood fevers’ in one sentence to shit and bleeding in the next.
Also, lose the ‘lighter than raccoons’.
I must admit, I miss the prayer. Though it could’ve done with some revision in the punctuation dept., I always liked your last lines ‘Do not feel bereaved. The river H’autran is thin and my legs are long. When I close my eyes, I see you’. However, back to this version. ‘gods-damned soon’ sounds out of place to me - I think it’s to do with the varying tone of the writing, again. Cut out part or all of ‘He waited. Still dry.’ - checking the wound twice is enough for suspense; checking it three is stretching it a little.
Last bit of grammar - ‘the cut seemed frozen in time at
the moment of injury, two years ago’ doesn’t quite work. I must admit, I can’t put my finger on why not - all I can do is suggest having something like ‘the cut seemed frozen in time, unchanged from the moment of injury two years ago’. That doesn’t quite work either, but I’m fairly sure it’s the ‘at the moment of injury’ bit that’s throwing me.
Anyways, the point is that your two versions have different pros and cons to them - if you take all the good stuff from both, you’ll have a really good opening (in my opinion).
Hope this helps :).
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for your comments. The tone problem might be because I’ve never used vulgarity in my stories or written from the pov of a vulgar character before this one, so hopefully I can smooth that out.
I’d like to see other opinions on this revised opening.
No probs, just trying to help :). Ah, fair enough - the tone’s not bad for your first try, it just doesn’t quite work in places.
Oh, one thing - I just read Carol Berg’s interview at Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and it occured to me that me giving revision examples makes it sound like I’m trying to rewrite your work / ‘transform it into my own’. Please don’t think I am (god knows my examples aren’t perfect), I’m just not that great at explaning myself sometimes :p. Often it’s easier to try and show people what I mean than describe it.
Anyways, I’m done, lol.
I think this is an improvement, although there are still things I’d trim out or rethink:
In a couple of places in this graph there’s just too much–for example, we don’t need to hear that Gideon’s fingers are cool–we know that the blood is comparatively warm. If you give me too many qualifiers to keep track of, my brain slides off your words. Similarly, the “sleepy orange candlelight” makes no sense to me, and I get stuck trying to parse what sleepy has to do with orange or candlelight. I love the image of all the fevers from his boyhood ganging up on him at once.
And then sometimes you just have an image that doesn’t work: “the brackish blood bit through his palate”? Bit? Unless you mean that it’s acidic, which is not what the context suggests. Even seared would work better.
My chiefest problem is that you start out with blood apparently flowing freely from a wound, suggest that it’s still flowing freely, and then it’s suddenly dry again. So you spend your first 13 lines raising the specter of an unclosing wound (is it seeping? has a scab fallen off and started blood flowing again? is he in danger of exsanguinating?) which, I gather, might kill Gideon before he can do some unspecified thing. And then it turns out the wound is not bleeding. All okay. The net effect is as if you ran into the room shouting “we’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna die–no, wait, we’re all gonna live.” It raises a false suspense which irritates, rather than intrigues, me.
If the wound has opened and Gideon is waiting for it to scab over before he can go on to do the thing he has to do, say so. If he’s not sure whether he will live to complete his task, that’s a legitimate source of suspense. At this point the opening is just a little too evasive.
I don’t know if there is a grammatical problem with “bled warmth” but it sounds strange. Technically, he would bled blood with the quality of warmth.
“He sat against the wall, sweating and shivering….”
For me, the narrator’s ‘point of view’ changes in this segment. Before and after this segment the POV is from within the character’s mind. This segment seems to be from a more distant third person voice. Authors do switch the POV within stories, but my it is my impression that this instance was more of an oversight.
I think this section needs more explanation. Why is he more concern about waking up the children than possibly bleeding to death? Why is he surrounded by sleeping children? I think you probably have believable reasons for these questions, but I need more information to understand his concerns.
On the first reading, I also wondered why Mom and Ashley were waiting for him in the middle of night, especially when they are on another planet having a good time on a beach. Now I am assuming they are dead. So why wouldn’t Mom and Ashley want him to stay alive? If Gideon wants to die and join them, I might wait and include this section at a time when his suffering, depression or religious inspiration can be shown in more detail. Or take more time at this point to show this.
Issues of clarity aside, I am interested in finding out what happens next.
Michael,
I like this opening a lot better than the last. It’s clearer and a lot of things that were confusing in the first are no longer confusing. I wouldn’t have read past the last version. In this version, I’m beginning to see an interesting story.
That being said, I noticed that same tonal shift that Daniel did, so a big “ditto†on that.
So, here I am all intrigued but still not swept up – I’m still not pulled in, so I asked myself “why?†and I came up with this really long, long essay (did I mention that it was long?) – and I’m going to apologize up front for the length.
Gideon discovers that he’s bleeding – good start. BUT I would have expected to read Gideon’s reaction to the blood immediately after he noticed it. Instead, we get two sentences of detached description before we get to his reaction, and then his reaction (his thought processes) are further broken up by other stuff. This drains the urgency out of the discovery that he’s bleeding but can’t afford to right now.
So, here are some things that (for me) get in the way.
**You tell us twice in the first 2 sentences that he’s bleeding. We only need it once.
**I thought that “[h]e pulled up his hand and studied the blood under the sleepy orange candlelight†evoked a rather clinical and passive image that I’m not sure you want right there. Did he really “study†the blood?
**You are telling us what he did (“studyâ€). But you don’t tell us what he sees when he looks down at this hand; you don’t give us anything that evokes a sense of what he’s feeling about bleeding. I think it would be more interesting to be inside his head than to read descriptions of his actions. What did he see when he looked down at (or studied) his hand? After all, it isn’t the fact that he studied his hand that animates the story — it’s what he sees that provokes his reaction.
**If the “sleepy orange candlelight” sentence is there to tell us that he’s in a storehouse in an era that uses candlelight – then consider if we need to know that detail there – in that particular place or if you can get away with telling us later on.
**Are the fevers of his childhood so important that they need to be mentioned here? I don’t know where the story is going, so the fact that he had a lot of fevers as a child might be important. But then, it could also be that you’re reaching for a metaphor.
**Where did these kids come from? Who are they? Why do you mention them and then suddenly you’re back to Gideon ruing his situation? Perhaps we don’t need to know about the children until the ruing is done and you have time to tell us about them.
**Are raccoons known for sleeping lightly? Do raccoons figure prominently in the story? Is there something symbolic about raccoons?
And now finally, we’re back to more reaction (Mom and Ashley can wait).
Consider something like:
Gideon pulled his hand away from his stomach. Red-black blood on his fingertips glistened in the candlelight. Gods-damn it! Not yet. Mom and Ashley would have to wait…. etc.
(Sorry, I don’t mean to rewrite – just like Daniel said, sometimes it’s easier to provide an example of what I mean.)
Then we move on to the next section.
“Gideon licked his hand clean.†I got an image in my head of someone licking their fingers after eating ribs – as in that much blood on his hands. You may want to evoke that image of Gideon in our minds, but you might not. If not, then the sentences needs an edit.
I wasn’t sure why you needed to tell us that the taste of his blood called forth the image of the Ocean. You’ve already mentioned the ocean (do we need it again in such a short space?) and I don’t know understand the blood/ocean association. If there’s a connection in the story, then okay, but otherwise, you might consider if it’s necessary. (I also had problems with blood being “brackish” and “biting a palate.”)
Now, we’re back again to the wound; it’s healed up and there seems to be something magical about the wound. (Do you see how diversions from the wound you’ve taken?)
The phrase “seemed frozen in time at the moment of injury†clanked on my ears, too. But what clanked mostly was that injury was now dry – so how could it be frozen in time at the moment of injury? Surely, at the moment of injury, it would be wet, bleeding, painful. So, I’m confused – is there some kind of cyclical bleeding that goes on with the wound – it replays its past (bleeding) to a point and then stops?
And then, I have to think hard (real hard, too hard) about what you’re trying to tell me. I think there’s some magic at work that keeps him in the “rotting world†by stopping the wound before he bleeds to death.
I think that’s an intriguing concept. I like that a lot. But I wish you’d be plainer in telling it to me (and tell me about it all at once) — it’s a great hook that gets buried by other things that I’m not sure I need to know when you tell me them (maybe I need them later).
Another point: it seems like you’re struggling to avoid the word “die†because clearly once the wound does the bleeding thing, he’d not going to die per se, but go somewhere else. “Pass on†might work instead. There are enough euphemisms that you could pick one that would clue us better.
All in all, you have a lot of sentences that tell us about his wound, but they are interrupted by other details. I think it would easier to follow (and therefore compell the reader to follow) if the you started out with a statement of Gideon’s problem (bleeding/mystical wound trying to draw him away from the world) followed by a sense of place and purpose/mission (storehouse and kids which imply a mission of some kind – the reason he can’t leave) which then launches you into the story.
My sincerest apologies if this is over-kill. I took a long time trying to figure how I could be intrigued on the one hand by the opening and not like it on another level. I hope it’s helpful. I don’t know what your story is — so some (if not all) of my comments may be off-base. It’s all just my opinion — use only what works for your story and toss the rest away!
Thanks for the responses, especially you, Kathleen, for taking the time to write such a long critique.
I must admit, revision is frustrating for me. Half the time I’m told that I don’t trust the reader enough, and the other half I’m told that I’m not clear enough. Sometimes I wonder if I even know how to revise properly, especially considering that I’ve been on critters.org for years and it hasn’t yet gotten me a single sale. Though ironically enough, I have sold 5 stories and a poem that _weren’t_ critiqued (to small press, paying venues). In the words of Jubal Early, “Does that seem right to you?”
Seriously, though, these comments will be extremely helpful if I can apply them properly, so thanks again. I’m starting to think that I just _can’t_ tell stories in a simple way no matter how hard I try, and I’m going to end up like James Joyce (and believe me — despite his fame, I wouldn’t consider that a reputation to envy). *grin*
I think I’ll post one more version of this on Friday.
I share your pain, Michael; believe me.
k