Re: Is this good, or bad, or horrible writing?
- From: "Brian M. Scott" <b.scott@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 17:19:50 -0400
On 15 Jun 2006 18:32:08 -0700, fragglewrites
<fraggleofrox@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:1150421528.505106.271870@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
I tend to get bogged down in sentence- and even word-level
criticism, and you'll find both below, but I've tried to
note a few higher-level problems as well.
Overall the writing -- the actual stringing together of
words -- is a bit diffuse, and in a few places you've tried
to go beyond your working vocabulary; as long as you have
readers who can point out such problems, or can find them
yourself in an editing pass, it shouldn't be too hard to
work on them.
I think that you have in your own mind a very clear picture
of this scene, but it doesn't seem to me that it comes
through very clearly. For instance, I was well into it
before I realized that Zalimarr was standing near the coast
and not on an inland plain. I've the feeling that you may
be concentrating so much on providing telling details that
you're taking for granted a lot of background and forgetting
that the reader doesn't have it.
As noted below in more detail, I think that you have some
serious plausibility problems unless you can pull a very big
rabbit out of the hat. (Possibly you can: that sort of
ingenuity is frankly not my forte.)
Finally, so far it has a very generic feel (starting with
'East' and 'West'). Zalimarr's efforts to cover up the
eastern incursions aren't generic, but they're also very
implausible as presented so far, and as a result I'm left
with little incentive to read on.
Zalimarr could remember clearly the first time he had ever
seen a blackened plain of ash. The smell, the sound of
the wind, and even the chill of the breeze were imprinted
in his mind as though it were the very day. It made him
wonder again if the East would conquer, and if the West
was as defenseless as it had been said to be.
Why 'said to be'? It appears from what follows that
Zalimarr has first-hand experience to that effect. Is there
any reason not to say simply 'as it seemed'?
Maybe that was why he had first begun covering up the
attacks on it.
It's not clear what the antecedent of 'that' is.
Zalimarr toyed with a mound of ash with the toe of his
boot. The humans never caught on to what he did inn their
countries. He told them he was helping the illiterate
country people move from their port towns.
I'm a little confused here: 'illiterate country people'
suggests rural peasants, not inhabitants of port towns.
There was not
I think you mean <naught> 'nothing'.
but their ashes to move, yet somehow he got away with
covering up their deaths by supposedly moving them to
different countries. Perhaps he should have stopped doing
it doing it after the first time, so they would have
evidence to support building an army.
It'll take some doing, I think, to convince me that the
premise here is plausible. It implies extraordinary
abilities on Zalimarr's part, abilities that he should
continue to display.
Worse, I can't at the moment see his motivation. On the one
hand he appears to favor the West, but on the other hand
he's doing nothing to help them and a great deal to ensure
that they won't be in a position to help themselves.
He did warn them once,
Since you're telling this in simple past tense, and this
warning is in his past as he stands there, you want the past
perfect here: 'He had warned them once, ...' ,
and had scheduled for another meeting when they did
nothing,
Simply 'had scheduled another meeting' is more idiomatic,
but even with that correction the tone is off: up to now
it's been a bit melancholy and somewhat lyrical, and the
implied setting is pretty clearly pre-modern, but 'scheduled
another meeting' suggests the world of modern business,
government, etc.
but they began training a small group of elite troops just
to please him. But they knew nothing of the strength of
the East. Zalimarr stood on a blackened meadow of ash,
the wind tearing at the remnants of it like grains of
sand in a desert. A dark ship sailed the lifeless
horizon,
This came as a complete shock, since I had an inland setting
in mind. It took me a little while to work out why I had
that idea: it's your use of 'plain' in the opening sentence.
Zalimarr squinting at it through the dust, and
then turning to the ground, which was marked with
distinct words. I shall return, brother. The ink was
silver on the charred land, werewolves' blood, he knew,
and fresh at the cost of it.
'Cost'?
It had the aroma of something that should have been, an
entire village
That comma needs to go. Also, you're saying that the
message on the ground (or possibly the ink in which it was
written) had this aroma; is that really what you meant? I'm
not sure why a message, even one written in werewolves'
blood, ought to smell like a village with flowers!
of humans, and the sweet smell of the flowers in their
bloom that would have opened with the dawn. Yet now they
squandered in the dusk.
I'm not sure what you were trying to say, but 'squandered'
is absolutely impossible there: it's a transitive verb, so
it needs an object, and it means 'to spend (something)
wastefully'. Possibly you meant 'moldered', i.e., 'crumbled
to dust, dissipated'?
In frustration, Zalimarr kicked at it, mutilating the
calligraphy. The dust was blown away, and into the ocean,
the white foam ridges of the water swallowing it up like
a pack of ravenous wolves. He tilled the dirt with the
toe of his boot
'To till' is 'to prepare land for the raising of crops'; I
don't think that it works here even metaphorically.
until the words were indistinct for anyone to tell
'Too indistinct', perhaps?
if they were even written in the eastern tongue, as they
had been.
This seems an awfully roundabout way to say it, especially
if this is just another part of his efforts to hide the fact
of the eastern attacks.
Zalimarr studied it for a long while, a memory stirring
his thoughts, yet he left it quickly, not wishing to
revisit his past. Everything to do with his past was
tortuous to endure.
I'm pretty sure that you mean 'torturous', not 'tortuous'.
This post is already pretty long, so I stopped here.
[...]
Brian
.
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