Critique #85 — Pete Lorr
Kevin Andrew Murphy September 17th, 2006
“Why don’t you just call it a time-machine?”
“Don’t you think that’s cliche, even now?”
“No, I think calling it a ridiculous name like ‘Backtraveller’ is cliched and annoying.”
“But you’ll come, right?”
I leaned forward and folded my fingers in front of my face, “Go back in time with you?”
“Yes.”
“To change history?”
“Yes!”
“No, are you crazy?”
“But think of what we could accomplish, Doctor! Such a magnificent opportunity–”
“I’m not a Doctor! I’m not a nutjob scientist with a grudge against the past, either. I’m just a grad student trying to write a biography in peace.”
“Oh and it was a marvelous book, too, if I may say. Truly fascinating.”
I stared at the cluttered mess of typed pages and handwritten notes scattered on the table before me and wanted nothing more than to scream. This conversation had no right to be happening.
Pete,
The dialogue without dialogue tags is basically readable, but it’s late and I got slightly confused as to who was speaking at points.
There’s a lot of “as you know, Bob”ing going on here, but there’s some conflict in the dialogue, so it’s vaguely engaging. However, my main thought is that this reads better as the start of a one-act play as opposed to a short story.
The other trouble I have is that if someone has invented a real time machine, you’d think any historian would be just itching to do research, rather than finish a dry biography.
I would turn the page, but I’d have to get more engaged with the characters soon.
Well I’m glad it’s at least clear that the main character is a historian without me having to say as much directly. I worried that introducing the story with dialogue and not much about the characters would be too confusing to the reader. But I think I should be able to chop down some of the more useless bits of the dialogue (”Yes!”) without much trouble if that’s hurting my clarity. And I certainly hope the characters are engaging enough to merit writing a story about them.
Thank you for the advice.
I did like this–the hook for me was Speaker A implying that the book Speaker B had been working on was indeed finished and read further down the line.
But oh, I would like it so much more if it wasn’t talking voices, not even talking heads. Just a bit of sensory detail takes a story from one dimension to three for me. This might be my weakness as a reader, but for what it’s worth, there’s my reaction.
I like this. I enjoyed how the character who wants to change the past shifted to flattery to get what she/he wants. I agree with Sherwood Smith about wanting a bit more sensory detail.
When writing segments with some humor, I usually end up working it over so much I lose the ability to tell if it is funny. There are a couple of segments I think might benefit from putting the piece away for awhile in order to look at it later with fresh eyes. The Backtraveller/chiche section and the “No, are you crazy?” response. Possibly the “This conversation had no right to be happening” line as well, but then again I don’t know what it is leading up to in line 14.
Untagged opening dialogue is very risky. It’s five lines before we even get an “I” to anchor us to which is the narrator and which isn’t. On the other hand, you do manage a decent bit of set-up information in the discussion without it feeling too “as you know, Bob”, so it’s a plausible dialogue.
Ultimately, though, all it says is “hey, we’re about to have a time-travel story”. So I’m not sure you’re starting in the right place.