Critique #9 — Michael Kelly
Katharine Kerr June 26th, 2006
It was late afternoon when Sheldon spotted the building. Thick clumps of snow, like clotted cream, dropped from the sullen sky. The building didn’t seem like an ending, but Sheldon was tired and a sign in the window scribbled in jagged type stated: VACANCY.
The building was a squat three-storey affair with pale sepia bricks and metal balconies that once must have been painted black but were now rusted to the color of old, dried blood. The rust seeped from the corners of the balconies, trailing darkly down the brick like black tears. The sad structure sat midway down the street, low and fat, lost amid the taller, newer structures of glass and steel that had sprouted up around it like wild mushrooms.
Sheldon blinked moisture from his eyes. Just snow, he told himself. He clutched his battered red suitcase to his chest, and stepped into the lobby.
Botheration. Just dropped my mouse and had some stupid microsoft hotkey button interact with the settings here and flush a whole post. Ah well, time to recompose….
Michael,
As I was saying the first time, first off, if you’re doing any genre work, it’s nice, if not mandatory, to have some element of that genre in the first thirteen or so lines. Even if just foreshadowing.
Anyway, that said, on to the meat of the prose critique. You’re overmodifying some words and using the wrong similes. Thick flakes of falling snow is a beautiful image–in fact, I’ve used it myself in a recently published poem–but you have to use the image just so. Clotted cream, pleasant as it is, if dropped in spoonfuls from a height, would spatter like seagull droppings, not wet clumps of snowflakes.
There are more inexactitudes throughout this. Sepia bricks? Sepia is a color of ink, occasionally a tint for photographs, but not a word used for masonry. Why not just brown bricks? Everyone knows the shade of brown automatically. And while the ironwork can look like dried blood after it rusts, this is only after all the black paint has flaked away, since blood never turns actual black. And when the rust stains the brown bricks, it wouldn’t turn them black either.
More similar things: You scribble in script. You type in type. You cannot scribble a typeface because scribbling requires a pen, pencil or other sort of stylus, not a keyboard or old-fashioned lead typesetting case and printer’s press.
Also, why say that they are just “metal” balconies if you later on tell us they’re rusting? Why not just say “iron balconies” since iron is the only metal that rusts, by definition? All the others simply corrode.
Also, if you’ve paid any attention to what rust does with stonework, it does not drip down like tears. Yes, it leaves long streaks, but it also seeps out through the stone in a different sort of pattern than tear tracks. And it’s certainly not black in any case.
Then on to the glass and steel structures that have popped up like…mushrooms? WTF? Have you ever seen a prism-shaped mushroom, or a mushroom-shaped glass-and-steel structure? Maybe the Gherkin in London, but still…
Anthropomorphising your world to match your character’s mood–”sullen sky” and “sad structure”–is also a fairly transparent trick. The alliteration also starts to grate fairly quickly.
You’ve also described nothing but the visual here. There’s none of the auditory–none of the muffled quiet you get in that sort of snowfall–none of the sounds as car tires spray slush up into their wheel wells. There’s none of the kinesthetic especially, despite the fact that such snow, when it hits, clings and melts almost on contact, soaking you to the skin and then once you’re soaked and chilled, forming a crust of ice on the outside. There’s none of the scent of mud and cool wet air, none of the aroma you’d get from wet rust.
I’m sorry I can’t be more laudatory here, but all I’m finding in these first lines is overdone inaccurate descriptions, visual only, and a character I consequently don’t give half a fig about, especially since I’m being told about how oppresive and gloomy everything is rather than experiencing it.
Kevin,
Thanks for taking the time to read and comment. I appreciate it.
I agree with most of Kevin’s critique, though not about the sepia bricks (they do come in just that color, making for some unfortunate architecture in the wrong hands). I’d add one thing — more of a problem than the slight inaccuracy of some of the phrases, is that their tone is off. For example, you seem to be trying for an air of decayed menace in the description of the building, but “a … three-storey affair” is more jaunty than anything, or at least flip. This is also the problem with the falling clotted cream — it leads to imagining the cream spatting on the sidewalk, and then a giggle.
(How are wild mushrooms different from domesticated ones, architecturally?)
—L.
There are vast differences in the shapes of mushrooms — some of the wild ones look like slimy platters or steps going up a dead tree, just for one example.
The clouds like cream or milk seems to be a common motif in the various 13-liners so far. It doesn’t work well, leading to just the effect Larry describes.