Short Story / Peacocks Like Children Screaming (Analysis)

Hi there!

I loved this piece! At first I wasn’t too sure about spelling out the southern accent, but since you didn’t do it through the whole text, but mostly simply used the sentence structures to give it the right feel, it stopped bothering me and I got into the text with ease.

I liked the narrating voice, it worked well with someone observing the spectacle.

I loved the mom’s behavior just going completely against what the Christian faith is all about – or should be all about, anyway.

And little June Star, being all quiet. Her behavior also worked seamlessly. I wasn’t even surprised that she, just a little girl, could do something like that. Amazingly and beautifully portrayal of her, even though we never got a clear picture of her, it still felt as though I knew what would have driven her to it. Oh, it was perfect!

Sorry, I know this isn’t that constructive, but I truly liked this straight through!

Thanks for a few minutes NOT wasted! :)

Love,
Annie.

’bleeved he had just what we needed to set us straight—- believed

Our preacher told us at prayer meeting --- our preacher told us at the prayer meeting

They was me and my two brothers in the back seat, and momma and daddy in the front—- There was

Ledbetter kids—- Ledford

They probably hadn’t never seen nothing like that before—- Triple negative, overdoing it a little

I understand where you were going with the language and making it sound backwoods country. I love the story and the ending is very touching. Most people who try to do something relgious in a story they go overboard or don’t do enough. This had just the right amount with an ending that would make any christian cry tears of joy.

Very good work.

Well. I liked the way the story was written, very….Harper Lee-ish. I also like how the protagonist was never described, and how June Star was always shown as a little…odd. You built the suspense surrounding her very well. I really liked it, not too fond of the ending, something about six year old girls committing suicide doesn’t sit right. Good Job though.

Shane.

I appreciate you use of colloquial language. For the most part you are doing it well enough. You seem to get a better grip on it as the story progresses. I think you will need to do an edit and catch the beginning up with the rest. Writing like this, to be genuine, is generally much more difficult than using good grammar, keep that in mind.

Pg 3,

Given the colloquial I found it out of character for the children to be so literate that they would immediately feel confident enough to do a bible search given such scant information to go on.

Pg 4,

If ‘momma’ sat at one end of the pew, and ‘daddy’ at the other, how did she reach over and whisper to him?

Pg 5,

“Some old hymn…” devalues the story. First, be more specific, paint the picture. Second, don’t devalue the hymn. I know what you meant, but that isn’t how it reads.

Pg 6

“…two men [what] had come down…” The speech is difficult, but getting it right is worth it.

The story lurched into the absurd with the boys throwing the snakes out into the pews. This was disconcerting on several levels. You had a nice piece of fiction going here. I found the inclusion to be little more than a gatituitous debasement of the patritioners. Cutting that out and adding a more creative distraction would help the story quite a bit.

Beyond that it was a good story, I gave it high marks. I think one should tread cautious when writing about groups that are the targets of bigotry though, and I mean any group. It is very easy to appear to be producing a tool of repression instead of an honest story.

Hope that helps,

Joel.

This was hard to read for because how the narrator talked. BUT HEY I’m glad you did it that way, because it was like somebody other than the main characters who were in that church. Was sitting me down and telling me the story. You did a good job with all the characters and giving the Ledford kids their poor as trash image. I like the story and how this visiting preacher was portrayed. Only thing I didnt get was the ending. Did the girl die?

While the writing was solid I just felt nothing from this story. It left me wanting so much more. It never really felt fleshed out and I never felt connected or drawn to the characters. It was just another southern sounding story. There is a great deal more that could be done here I just may not be the right person to help you go deeper with this short story.

‘He was one of them old-timey preachers that always wears black and walks…’

This, as a grammatically correct sentence, should be:

‘He was one of those old-timey preachers who always wears black and walks…’

Of course, if your narrator does not have a fine grasp of English intentionally (which is what you seem to be striving for here) then what you have written is okay.

The first part characterising the preacher is okay but you do labour the point a bit. You say:

1. Like they was all carefully picked out
2. Them kind that never smile
3. Them kind that have big hands

So, really, you are making three comments about the one type of person. Perhaps you could combine these into just one sentence? Brevity is a useful skill to master.

‘She never said nothing to nobody.’

perhaps better as:

‘She said nothing to nobody.’

?

The rest of this isn’t bad at all, but for me there is too much narration. Your narrator tells us too much. For example, how much of this is dialogue? Action happening in front of our eyes? Not much. This is your choice and it isn’t wrong to have a lot of narration – the problem is that narrating is secondhand information and it is more immediate (and effective) for us, the reader, to see and feel the events for ourselves, rather than have them filtered via the narrator.

To compound matters, there is very little description here. You tell us about the preacher and the church and the aisles but what kind of church is it? Is it big? (HOW big?) Small? (HOW small?) Is it made of glass or wood? Too much description can kill a piece, but with yours there is not enough for me to be able to visualise the scene in my head. And if I can’t visualise it it does not come alive.

You characterise the preacher but what about the Ledford boys? Or Momma? June Star? What do these people look like? Again, I don’t know so this makes feeling the scene more difficult.

I like the ending but it could do with more of a build up. Plus there is no description of the bus hitting her. And the ‘Said he didn’t know what could have gotten into’ is another missed opportunity for dialogue to characterise.

So, overall, this is a decent enough little story but, for me, it has too much narration (telling) and not enough description of people and places. If you substitute some of the narration for description and dialogue then the piece would be more balanced.

Hooray!  Another fictional treatment on Urbis of the much-neglected topic of snake-handling!  Getting a “review request” was new to me, and it said I got this request due to my stats, but it’s hard to believe that it has nothing to do with the fact that I also did a snake-handling story on here (“Signs and Wonders”).  

It’s good to know that writers are still inspired by Flannery O’Connor.  I clocked that with the title and (maybe?) the name of the crazy little girl of the Ledford clan, June Star.  Isn’t that from an O’Connor story?  I could be mistaken.

I know you must have already received lots of helpful advice on your grammar and diction from people who were attempting to review above their station without knowing about the tradition of writing in dialect.  I am, however, going to point out a few grammary things for you to take note of, because they draw attention to themselves not for being true renderings of colloquial speech, but because they make the sense of the sentence stumble:

“He was one of them old-timey preachers that always wears black and walks around with sour looks on their faces and has stony, fierce eyes that feel like they are looking right into your soul.”  I would change to:

“He was one of them old-timey preachers that always wears black and walks around with a sour look on his face and has stony, fierce eyes that feel like they are looking right into your soul.”  
OR
“He was one of them old-timey preachers that always wear black and walk around with sour looks on their faces and have stony, fierce eyes that feel like they are looking right into your soul”, just in the interest of keeping the verbs consistent with the subject concerning singularity/plurality.  In your passage you waver between singular and plural in a way that invites a ?? and a rereading, rather than being the kind of grammatically incorrectness that flows because it’s colloquial.

You walk a fine line when you write nonstandard speech (or any kind of dialogue for that matter); it is always a matter of selective stylization.  Writers can’t write in a way identical to the way people speak, with all the mistakes, repetition, ellipses, interruptions, wandering, etc without it being maddening and tedious to read.  It is especially tricky when the bad grammar isn’t safely contained in quotation marks but is demonstrated by the narrator him/herself.  There is an immediacy of thought and poetic precision that using dialect can give you in print, but sometimes this can go over the line and seem less interested in rendering a certain mode of thought and just turn into an uncharitable parody of people, in other words like you’re just tryin to make’em look ignint.  I’m thankful you did quite a bit of the former and very little of the latter.  I’ll mention the latter first:

“Said he ’bleeved he had just what we needed to set us straight.”  Since there is no phonic difference between ”’bleeved” and “b’lieved,” there is no reason to use ”’bleeved” unless you want us to think that this person would spell believe with two e’s, and that’s bringing in a rule about how their speech should look on the page that you don’t want to introduce and hold yourself to (and, on top of that, in ”’bleeved” the apostrophe is misplaced, since they are used to indicate that letters have been dropped).  

I think this is also the case with “yore” in “Do you love him with all yore heart?”  since I doubt most readers would read that word as sounding any different than “your”.

When you use a spelling that is improper in order to emphasize a certain kind of pronuciation that’s one thing; it’s something else entirely to use bad spelling to create the sound of a word that doesn’t deviate from the correct pronunciation.  Does this make sense?  When you do this, it verges on being condescending to your subjects, which isn’t necessary and can even be a bit too much if the story itself already substantially does that.  We’re obviously not reading about a Mensa meeting here, as you make abundantly clear, so there’s no need to lapse into cartoon with the colloquial English.  Have you ever read Toni Morrison?  She does a great job of giving you a sense of how people sound and think without it seeming like a caricature, which is important for another reason concerning stories like this:  credibility.  If you lapse into lampoon, you read more like a writer seeing it from the outside and at an amused distance, which blunts impact.

I feel like I went on a bit too long about that, considering that you mostly do the other kind of colloquialism deployment, the kind that is deft and elegant:  ”Said we was all backslidden.”  That’s incorrect as hell but there would be no other “proper” way to say it!

Here’s an example of when you do both right next to each other, but I think this one might have been accidental:
“Them kids run wild all over the place.  There faces was always dirty…”  I would say “Their faces…”.  But the previous sentence is perfect.  I can totally hear that.  I get the feeling that the “there” is accidental because the lovely description of the Ledford kids contains “their hair sticking up…”  I loved that whole scene, by the way, and have only one itty-bitty problem with it, which I’ll return to later.

First let me list a few choice turnings of phrase that I thought were delicious:

• “We gonna take ’em just like they are.  We want that preacher to see what kind of Christians we are, don’t we?”  Oh, indeed we do.

• “We pawed furiously at our Bibles.”  Beautiful.

• “I think even them serpents got a good dose of it, ’cause they stopped slithering.”  This was the perfect way to cap off the whole little passage where everything slows down and all attention goes to June Star.  It has a comic yet effective finality.

This reader had certain expectations as I read this, and a writer must carefully balance the frustration and satisfaction of these expectations.  When momma decided that she would take the Ledford kids to church, motivated by your hilarious version of pride at one’s own self-righteousness masked as Christian charity, making those dirty little kids into basically accessories, we know that she is going to get hers.  I thought it would happen when they went to the Ledford’s and told the parents that they were going to take their kids to church.  But then all the kids were there, waiting and ready (more or less).  Was it prearranged?  It seems so.  An earlier line about that might be nice, because I was half-expecting a funny showdown on the crap-strewn front yard but then nothing happened.  

What did happen, I liked even more, since as you’d already set up what the Ledford boys were like, it was perfect that momma’s accessories of righteousness would be the big undoing.  I also adored that mean twist you gave to momma’s charitable mission by having her pinch A BABY to draw attention to her good works.  Priceless!  

I seriously hope to read more of your fiction.  This piece was fun, and I apologize for how many credits you spent opening it as I went on a bit longer than I’d planned to.  I truly hope it was helpful.

This is my first time to do this. I had forgotten about this site long ago but it came into my mail box last night, I had trouble logging in.

I liked this story because it is so close to home from what I see around me sometimes; first the writer knows how to relate in a dialect seemingly from observation but not not from immersion or being a part of their life but I do admit hillbilly’s can and do become educated, I am still lagging. The story has a Larry McMurty “The Last Picture Show” theme down to the innocent being run being run over and killed.