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Reply Subj: 'Over the Top' Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 at 09:54:15 pm EST (Viewed 12 times) | |||||||
Okay, you're aiming to publish this, so I'll feedback in far more critical detail than I would normally do with a story posted here. Let's start by saying it's a quality story, evocative and thoughtful. You've done well. Some key things you'll need to work on: 1. Paragraphs. Most of them are too long. Paragraphs in mood stories are like panels in a comic. Each one conveys a specific picture. there's another panel for the next progression. And like comics panels paragraphs pace the reader and shape their experience of the story. They tell the reader when to stop and assimilate what they've just read before moving on to the next salient information. 2. Long sentences. It's very natural when you're going with the flow and getting ideas and feelings out of your head into words that sentences go on. However, for a downbeat gritty tale like this you need mostly short, terse sentences in a chain, not one long poetic elegy. I think your natural style is strongest with short sentences piling up for cumulative impact. Play to that strength here. 3. Formal language. This is written in the first person, so sometimes "we'd" is better than "we would" et. al. to convey narrative. 4. Emphasis of sentences. Like many writers who are strong with imagery you need to take the time to make sure the syntax of the sentence spotlights the thing you really want to focus on. It's the literary equivalent of focussing a camera on the foreground or the background. Consider the difference between saying "In the dark dusty corner there was an old pair of boots" and "There was an old pair of boots in the dark dusty corner". In the former sentence we're interested in the corner. In the latter we're noticing the boots. A few times you weaken interesting images or events by not placing them front and centre in your sentence. 5. Immediacy of language: "Off we went, sliding in the mud, slipping in the gore." or "We had slid in the mud and slipped in the gore" both allow the reader to be detached from the action. "Off we went. We slid in the mud. We slipped in the gore." is stronger and puts the reader into the action. I've crawled over the first section of your story in detail down below to try and illustrate these five things and to show you the kind of thing a particularly anal editor might come back at you with. I hope it;s of some use; don't take it personally. go back and read the bit up top where I said it was good. Now the quibbles and nitpicks (one man's opinion): Quote: Over the Top Quote: December 1914 Quote: We had been here for months First line should be a grabber. "We had been here" is quite a weak construction of mixed tenses. You could say "It had been months" or "Months later..." and still get the same effect for more upfront impact.and almost every day was the same. The clouds were black, bursting with ash and smoke. The No need for the definite article here, and the last sentence started with "The..." too. Here you want the emphasis on onyx rain beading and a sense of continuity; the "the" works against your intent. onyx beads of rain that fell in waves smelled like pieces of copper. They slid down our skippers, little black streams pooling on the marshy ground. I kept on spitting to keep it from dribbling into my mouth. It had a sharp metallic taste, Try to avoid the passive tense where you can, even in a reminiscent piece like this. "It had a taste..." is less immediate for the reader than "It tasted..." like when you bite open your cheek and blood drums out. You need to break your paragraphs up some, especially the mood-setting descriptive ones. It lets the reader come up for breath. You need a paragraph break here. The black water ran down my back, trickling along the ridges of my spine, running along the crack of my ass. I felt seedy. My hands didn’t look like my hands anymore. They had deep, weathered lines in them, like long dried creeks on a desert bed. My fingernails were cracked with whiteness,How does whiteness crack fingernails; you need to tweak this. save for a thin film of shit colored hyphenate shit-coloured or the reader reads the line with shit as a noun not an adjective then has to do a double take. crud that protruded from the edges. Quote: Hollow men with vacant eyes rushed by all day Consider putting "All day..." at the top of the sentence. carrying shells and rifles. In the complete absence of warmth, they were machines oiled on instinct and powered by fear. They stomped here, dashed there, their frantic energy never dissipating, unless stopped cold by the other side.I had to stop and think what this last phrase meant so you might want to clarify it. All around them the air popped and crackled and burst with violent energy. Sometimes they burst too. Quote: But when they didn’t die they "we"? had no recourse but to endure for days and weeks and months, reliving the same monotonous routine over and over again. Hell is not just blood and death, comma not needed here as it slows down the flow of the sentence but spending all day wallowing in frozen streams of mud and human waste, thousands of miles away from anyone who cares about youYou can put that comma in here though, or start a new sentence: "It's being so hungry..." Short sentences work best for this kind of description. and being so hungry you can eat the vermin that scurries over your boots.New paragraph You lean against the sandbags that separate you from the unknown and try to imagine what awaits on?the other side. One day you will maybe the collquial "you'll" might work better here. find out, but you have you've? no idea when that day will be. Hell is waiting for that day, but that day never coming. Hell is Belgium. Paragraph - you want the reader to come fresh to the character intro No one knew this better than the stout, but You don't need "but" muscular soldier who slumped down next to me that day. His piercing eyes recalled the grassy knolls of his Irish homeland and as they were too big for his face, they were pretty much all you focused on when you talked to him. Good description but slightly garbled sentence construction for what I think you're aiming at. Try "His piercing eyes were too big for his face. They recalled the grassy knolls... and were pretty much all you focussed on when you talked to him. New paragraph for his speech.“They told us it would be over by Christmas,†he grinned slyly, a Don't need "a" hoarseness obscuring a slight brogue. “I know that’s what you’re thinking, lad. But I bet your parents didn’t get you everything you wanted for Christmas either!†he let out a smooth chuckle, but I didn’t think it was so funny. “My name’s Quint,†Paragraph here his hand shot out for the expected shake. I took it limply and told him my name. I asked him when he thought it would be over. Para “Who knows? Probably when we kill every German there ever was. Or they kill every Englishman there ever was,†his Here and elsewhere you need to use a full stop before the speech mark and a capital for a new sentence if the next sentence isn't a variant of "he said." Full marks for using descriptors to attribute speech rather than a succession of "he saids" and "he replied" etc green eyes widened as if he had stumbled upon some stroke of brilliance and no need for "and". Short sentences keep the gritty pace. he couldn’t keep his lips from curling into a mad grin. “On second thought, that doesn’t sound so bad. Maybe I’m on the wrong side,†he laughed hysterically at his own joke. He mussed up my hair as he stood up. “Anyway, who knows? Maybe it will end by Christmas. We still have two days.â€Â Quote: This trench had been dug with the utmost haste under the cover of darkness, so there was no undercover shelter, New sentence here. "There was..." Avoid really long scene-setting sentences. Let two sentences take the strain and each conveys a simpler thing better.. "There was only..." only a crude scar that we sliced through the earth with our shovels. And this was where we had huddled down to sleep for the past week. Para. That night as the guns fell silent, I dreamt I was paralyzed. While struggling against this impotence, a dark figure peeked his head over my trench. This sentence suggests the dark figure was struggling against impotence. Try "While I struggled..." In his hand he held something long and sharp, that glistened under the moonlight. The focus of this sentence is supposed to be "something long and sharp", not his hand, so shift it round to fcus the reader: "He held something long and sharp in his hand. it glistened in the moonlight." He climbed down the slick muddy wall and approached me. Para. Everyone around me was asleep. Still I couldn’t move.Poor grammar, and doesn't emphasise the personal pronoun. "I still couldn't move." I opened my mouth to scream, but only a soft gurgle, so soft almost to have never existed, squirmed free of my lips. Shorter sentences. Don't pause for a descriptive analogy in the midst of describing an action when you can put it as a qualifier after: "I opened my mouth to scream. Only a soft gurgle squirmed free of my lips, so soft..." Para He sat on my chest Full stop. and for the first time I saw his face. Shimmering under the moon’s golden light, my enemy’s face was revealed to be the same as mine,You don;t need to use "face" twice here. "Shimmering under the moon's light it was the same as mine." Did you want the moonlight to be golden, by the way? except slackened and distorted This last difference is important enough to deserve a sentence of its own, because it moves on the reader's perception. First the enemy looked just like me, then he was the same except for one scary difference.. His tongue lolled around comically, unanchored by anything. He glared down at me with white translucent balls of jelly, punctuated by black pits. His skin was as yellow and creamy as the ancient moon above us. Para. These things are important in pacing the reader. You want to dicatate when the reader allows themselves a mental blink before carrying on to the next development. I realized he was not some monster You don't really need "I realised..." here. You can be more immediate. "He wasn't some monster, but something I might become too, nurtured and raised on the fruits..." from the beyond, but what I would become nurtured and raised on the fruits of this badland. Para. I felt the sharpness of something awful and cold slide between my ribs and wriggle around next to my lungs. Pressure. When I woke up, I could still feel a dull pain in my ribs. As I rolled over, with that imaginary bayonet wound still giving me phantom pains, I pressed against something frozen. Quote: When you’re really cold that’s all you can think about. There’s no refuge in the trenches. In the trenches, there is only mud. Do you repeat "In the trenches" foe deliberate effect here? If so then lose the comma. if not lose the second "In the trenches" The mud is cold and it gets in your boots and soaks into your feet, Break this up. New and more immediate sentences: "It squeezes... It leaves your skin..." squeezing between your toes, leaving your skin waterlogged and desensitized. Para At night, you can hear the wind howling over the mouth of the dugout. Sometimes the trench will create "creates" a wind-tunnel and it will "whips" whip like a train through our quarters, blowing our things everywhere, everything just littered all over the place. A table topples over and makes a loud bang and we think it’s a shell. But it’s only the wind. Para Some mornings, a man won’t wake up. His body will be as stiff as the ground it lays on, his lips purple and pursed tightly together, eyes frozen shut, frost hanging from his hair and fingers coiling around nothing. This was such a morning. Para to underline there's some action about to happen “Medic,†I rasped, the saliva in my throat still dried out from the winter freeze. Then I yelled it. They came stomping over, throwing "They threw..." is stronger than "throwing..." "carried" is stronger than "carrying". some raggedy, grey blanket over his body and carrying him off to parts unknown. Major Howe’s duty is to write a very comforting letter to his mum You mean the boy's mum, not the Major's telling her he died valiantly You mean the boy dies not the Major in battle against the Germans, You need to find a way to give the important sentiment at the end of this sentence room to breathe in a sentence of its own. in lieu of a death that seems so utterly pointless. But they would be wrong. It’s all utterly pointless.  Quote: His death wouldn’t be wasn't entirely in vain. He could no longer catch a bullet for us, but he would help us through his warm socks and feed us with his biscuits "his socks would warm us and his biscuits would feed us.". His cigarettes would calm our shot nerves Full stop. and his love-letters lend us a brief escape from this nightmarish place. He wouldn’t need them, for he had something of much greater value, a ticket home. Quote: By mid morning, my routine has had? The tenses in this sentence vary resumed and I found myself once more wedged between two frozen stalks of pock marked clay. A grey mist had settled in the air and cast its pall over everything. In war, You don't need this comma even the air is heavy and I felt its weight crushing me, grinding me down into the dirt. My gun was sheathed in a thick brown crust of debris and soil. When I touched the butt, the clamminess of my hand reduced it to a slippery coat of mud Full stop.and I knew then it would fail me when I needed it the most. ParaI saw Quint appear in my peripheral vision, a blurry figure invading my lonely meditation. He told me the dead bloke’s name was Billy something and tossed me a tin of biscuits. On the front of the dented tin was some smiling boy, splotchy with faded colors, marching merrily along to the tune of his oversized novelty drum. The red banner underneath his feet gave a rousing order to “March towards Victoryâ€Â, but each letter was fainter than the previous one. Para.Either the lid or my fingers were frozen, because it took a minute before it opened with a cold snap and a hiss. Inside the biscuits The biscuits inside..." were hard like bricks. The ends looked chewed as if a rat gnawed at them. ‘Impossible’, I thought. ‘How could a rat get into an air tight box of biscuits?’ I placed one of the hard biscuits on my tongue like a holy sacrament and bit down, but my teeth did not make a dent. I was forced to nibble feebly on one end like the rats, Full stop. and the thought crossed my mind that perhaps those were Billy’s teeth-marks. Repeat and rinse... IW | |||||||
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