trismugistus reviewed Version 1 -
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This has moments of really great stuff, but I also found it a little confusing in places.
The traditional point to make is one show the story, don’t tell the story and in some ways I could say that about this piece. You start off with a large paragraph that is sort of telling us something.
However, the problem with that analysis that it’s actually quite well written. The real problem I think is that it’s not entirely clear that those are Opal’s thoughts. Part of why I say that is that I’m not sure I quite agree with it, especially as a bald statement of ‘fact’, but it’s acceptable as someone’s thoughts.
In other words, it needs to be clearer that these are Opal’s feelings, not a statement by a third-person narrator.
There are easy ways to fix that – you could have her speak them. The shopkeeper could express puzzlement at her not completing it and she could explain why.
But to some extent I would actually remove it. Or at least replace it – have Opal looking at the jigsaw, admiring it thinking about the nearness of perfection. Then have her look at the last piece, examine it, before finally throwing it away. That way you leave it for the reader to fill in some gaps and make it a little more engaging – get them to think about Opal and her behaviour, rather than just state her thinking.
But there are other aspects – it seems a bit random that a bookshop has a jigsaw somewhere for people to fill out. I’d go into the background a bit more on that – is the jigsaw in the back room and Opal is a friend of the shopkeeper? Perhaps he’d let her in to sit next to the fire to get out of the cold and she does the jigsaw?
It just feels a bit like something is missing.
Her tearing the pages out of the books. I can see why she does it, for the same reason as the jigsaw, but it seems a little odd that the shopkeeper doesn’t mention it at all. Is that because he’s seen her do it before?
This is especially confusing since she tears the pages out before she’s paid for them. I’d have thought a shopkeeper would make a comment about her damaging his merchandise.
Also – the price. Is his comment about it being a lot of money sarcastic or realistic? Is a golden crescent a lot or a little? Also, why is she effectively setting the price of the books and not him telling her how much they are like in a normal shop?
With the banshees – this seems to be a non-standard definition of banshees. They come across more as ice/snow gods/devils than the banshees of Irish mythology. Also are they real or is that meant to be allegorical? It seems a bit unclear whether they’re just a metaphorical representation or actual banshees.
I also got confused in that they seem to behave contradictorily – in one part they’re knocking her off her feet and then they’re catching her and holding her up? I didn’t really get that.
The (magical?) tree was a nice touch, although I got a bit mixed up with the orphanage.
Are you saying Opal used to be an orphan at an orphanage and now she lives under the tree? How old is she if she’s lived half her life there then? Or is it that she ran away from the orphanage – this doesn’t seem to be properly covered.
To some extent I’d say quite a lot of these are covered by the show don’t tell point I was making earlier. This is sufficiently well written that it sort of doesn’t apply, but without proper use it’s leading to some points of confusion.
In other words, if you had a proper flashback/reminiscence to the orphanage (which could come later – it doesn’t have to be here) you could cover what you needed too properly and in more active and engaging scenes.
I hope that makes sense and helps – I enjoyed it more than the above criticism suggests, but I think it just needs a tweak in terms of story telling structure and it’ll be really good.
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