Critique #86 — Michael Greenhut, 2nd revision
Kevin Andrew Murphy September 22nd, 2006
Gideon felt the wound on his stomach. Shit!
Warm blood glistened over his fingers in the sleepy orange
candlelight. Gods-damn it!
His heartbeat became a crescendo. A wave of anxiety brought chills
and hot flashes, as if all the fevers from his childhood had
vengefully returned at the same moment.
He couldn’t bleed all over the storehouse. Not yet.
He imagined Mom and Ashley calling him from the afterlife. Soon, he
would get his ass out of this rotting world and walk with them on the
white shores of Halamel, but not until he finished his work.
Gideon sucked on his hand, and the blood seared into his palate.
Salty, like water from the Halamel Ocean that waited for him behind
closed eyes.
He felt the wound again.
The blood had receded. Once more, the cut seemed frozen in time at
the moment of injury, two years ago.
Michael,
My first time jumping in on this. Hadn’t looked at the previous drafts.
The general scenario you’ve got here is engaging and interesting, gives us concern for the main character and interest in what happens next, but the devil is in the details.
The main trouble here is viewpoint. You waffle back and forth between a third person limited omniscient, staying with the thoughts and perceptions of your protagonist, and a third person full omniscient where the narrator tells us incongruous details, such as the firelight being “sleepy” (which it certainly isn’t to the protagonist, since he’s bolt awake clutching a bleeding stomach wound or flashback of same) and waxing lyrical by describing the pounding heart as a “crescendo”–which, if you’ve had your heart race like that, is generally the last thought in your mind, unless you’re an orchestra conductor.
Other business: Don’t swear. Or I should say, don’t swear without a good reason and don’t use colorless curses unless there’s an equally good reason.
I’m not saying that people don’t say, and think, “Shit!” and many other words, it’s just that they seem terribly modern, especially if you toss them into the first line of a story. Plus, there’s a certain turn-off factor for the more genteely brought up, who certainly have heard such things before, but don’t like hearing them much and aren’t impressed when they do. Besides which, saying “Shit!” when you’re injured also sounds like a genteel way of not saying “Fuck!” which is more likely if we’re going with a modern character.
Of course, someone with a bleeding stomach wound won’t be thinking “shucky darn!” either, but you do better with “gods damn it” (though you need to lose the hyphen). Maybe “Fucking gods!”? Or, alternately, you could have him take the name of some particular divinity in vain, the same way someone would say “Jesus!”
Anyway, what I’m saying here is that you need to chose all the words carefully so we can best understand the world you’re creating, and more than that, enjoy it.
Kevin’s covered viewpoint and swearing, and there’s not nearly as much of the ‘tone shift’ problem as last time (though it’s still there because of the third person omniscient bits). The one thing I’d say about the first two lines is that they’re tad formulaic: action + swear word = emotion; description + curse = more emotion? It’s just a personal thing of mine - like when people use the same word in consecutive sentences (Today I went to the shops. It was sunny today). I’d suggest trying to embed one or both of the curses into the ‘warm blood’ bit - it would just vary the rhythm slightly.
Secondly, be very careful about using ‘rotting world’ - unless you mean that the whole world is quite literally rotting, I’d advise against using it (it certainly gave me a very strange mental image).
I agree with Madeleine that ’seared’ works better, but it doesn’t quite seem to fit with ‘palate’ - I’d suggest replacing that with another word, or perhaps finding a different way to describe the sharp taste altogether.
‘Gideon sucked on his hand’ - again, strange mental image of grown man (I assume?) sucking on entire hand like a baby. Is his entire hand drenched in blood or something? If so, then I’m not sure he’d be sucking it clean (more wiping it on his clothes or something). If not, then does he need to suck the whole thing to get the blood off? Be more specific about the part of his hand he is sucking.
That’s pretty much it - I definitely think this is better than the last one though :).
Noted, and thanks to you both. This piece seems particularly troublesome when it comes to style. As I mentioned, I do tend to have problems with clarity, but I’m not sure what it is about this one. I think, though, that I wasn’t sure what people meant when they said I was jumping between povs until now. I always thought of pov jumping as going from one head to another without a proper break, but now I see the beast has many forms.
I find point of view/narrator’s voice to be one of the strangest parts of a story. Here are a couple of books I thought were helpful in sorting it all out:
Steering the craft:exercises and discussions on story writing for the lone navigator or the mutinous crew. Ursula K. Le Guin.
Characters and viewpoint. Orson Scott Card.
Thanks, Vivian. I’ll definitely check into Card’s book, since he’s one of my favorites
To Daniel, before I forget: The prayer didn’t get cut. It just got bumped to lines 14 and beyond. So, it’s still there, and hopefully any given editor will make it that far. *grin*
OK, we’re coming in on the middle of something here; clearly something dramatic, possibly life-threatening (the wound implies that).
But we don’t know what, we don’t know why it’s important, we don’t really know who the narrator is… without any of this information, it’s hard to feel caught up in the moment. You need some very good description to make us care for people and things we know nothing about, right off that bat, and for me, I’m afraid this doesn’t work as it stands. Even when you tell us stuff, you don’t tell us enough - he can’t bleed all over the storehouse - why? what storehouse?. I’ve no idea of the setting - we’ve got candlelight, vaguely implying a primitive world (technologically speaking) but we also have “mom and Ashley”, very modern-day American, and then we have Halamel, which I dont know at all. So I can’t even make any reasonable assumptions.
And, as if I’m not already thoroughly confused, you hit me with the fact that he got wounded two years ago? That’s just a “wha…?” moment. If I had an anchor to character or place, it might hook me. As it is, it’s precisely this point at which I decide “nope, sorry, forget it”.
Give me something, some firm bnugget that I can feel, some anchor to cling to, and this kind of beginning works. But there’s just way too much left unsaid here.