Short Story / Sought

Wow. Thanks for your vote of confidence!

Yes, thank you. I hadn’t actually thought of flashbacks for some reason, though they’d do quite nicely. Although I don’t want to draw it out very much – and I’d like to leave the mother issue slightly vague, allowing the reader to use his/her imagination and to sort-of personalize the story – but perhaps a flashback to a particular emotion moment could show motivation without involving too much plot.

Again, thank you.

Oh, and if it isn’t too much trouble, could you please mention some of the grammar errors you found? I probably will catch many/most of them, but I wouldn’t want to miss any. But don’t feel like you have to – you’ve been a great help already.

Here’s the grammatical stuff, and a few other things.  Obviously, some is just opinions or personal preferences :).  Also I’ve picked out the first examples, rather than repeat the same things over :).

“Junk… trash… bill… trash…”  In the case of the ‘bill’, I think this needs to be capitalized.  The ellipses indicate pauses, but for the Bill, it’s the start of a new sentances.  If it’s all lower, it implies the pauses are all of the same nature.  Thus the list is equally spaced.  If you capitalize the ‘bill’, you make it so that the pauses are of different length/meaning; as in “Junk…this is trash…  Bill… this is trash…”  I hope that makes sense :/.

I would break for a new para at the sitting.  It just helps to separate the two better.  Stylistically, punchy paragraphs are always better for the reader, as they’re more engaging.  Especially at the start of a chapter or section.

Similarly in the second piece of speach, you should be breaking again.  Really you should only run on with speach if you have a ‘said’.  Otherwise, always start speach with a new para.  Again, flow is enhanced.

“her daily mail”—’the day’s mail’.  In the UK there’s a newspaper called ‘the Daily Mail’ :)

“milliseconds”—too precise, too technical, when ‘moments’ or just ‘seconds’ covers what you mean.

“austere white paper”—can paper be austere?  It seems too much of a stretch.  Perhaps the font can be, but the paper itself?  ”Crisp white paper” or similar might convery what you’re after.

“unforgivingly black-and-white”--avoid all “ly”’s as much as you can.  Obviously, they’re needed--slowly, for example—but if you’re sneaking words like ‘unforgivingly’ in here, it’s because you either think it’s too weak, or you’re gettign it to do too much and need to expand out and tell us what you mean (or what your character is feeling) in more detail.

“as she reread”--couple of problems here.  Firt off “read and reread” might be better.  You need to state more clearly she reads it, before you can say she re-reads it.  But also you should avoid using “as”’s like you should with “ly”’s. ‘As’ implies simultaneity, but in stories, things should always be strictly sequential.  Action--reaction is the keystone of narrative fiction.  Also, you break this sentance too harshly and suddenly with the dashes when what you need is flow.  Break this all up and give it more sequential flow.  She reads the letter; she looks up, her soft, tanned face blighted by a disguted sneer; she looks back down, rereads the letter, her lips narrowing like her pursed lips in anger… (or whatever the flow you go for is)

“bottom drawer in her file cabinet”—’bottom drawer of her filing cabinet’ (may be a dialect issue, like American-English versus British-English)

“dusty one laying”—tenses.  How can it be laying, if she’d picked it up and put a letter in it?  It had either ‘been laying’, or better still, describe the file itself, then her grabbing the file first, then glaring at it, then putting the letter in.

“Didn’t so much”—is probably best done with a semi-colon.  Admittedly, it’s very stylistic-preference, but this jarrs as a sentance start, and would work well with a semi-colon type run-together.

“represented work”—do you mean it represented her actual work (her job)?  Or do you mean hard/unpleasent tasks she’s forced to deal with (or ignores)?  Also, narratively this seems odd.  She’s all fired up, yet she whacks the letter in a file she hardly touches (dusty) and therefore presumably is effectively going to ingore it?  That’s sort of what this implies, though I think I knew what you meant.

“Everyone wanted to know why and how her mother had done what she had; why the lady that Jo had never really known had decided to loose her mind and turn fistfulls of classified information over to small time gangs.”—quoted this, as it’s actually quite confusing, because of consistency of reference.  Clarity is something you must strive for because you don’t want to loose your audience due to something so fixable.  The problem here is you’re asking the sentance to do a hell of a lot, but you’re not helping the reader, because there are two ‘she’s’.  There’s the she that is Jo, and the she that is her mother.  You refer to both as hers, both as she’s and both as their names.  Try for consistency of reference, or at least breaking things up when you can’t achieve it.

“Jo suddenly drew back from her keyboard”—last we knew she was stuffing a letter into an envelope.  If actions happen, they need to be described, or the reader gets lost.

“past several minutes”—’last few minutes’

“inside her hardly”—’inside her head’, or ‘in her mind’.

Italics are a tricky issue—generally you should avoid them, but I would say stick to making just the voices in italic (the voices should be starting on new paragraphs again, btw).  See my refs below about the ‘problems’ with italics.

“tried to act normal”—is there someone else in the room?  If so, she has no-one to ‘act normal’ too.  Otherwise, she ‘tried to ignore the voices’.

” – good enough”—’been good enough’

“and burning with tears,”—either needs a comma before the ‘burning’, or it needs to be ‘burned with tears’.

“was the agony; the tiny, screeching voices.”  I’ve quoted just this bit, but this seemed a little odd to me.  Is the agony generally about the voices?  Then if so, why is it only now that she crumples?  Or (as I read it) the “You thought you could hide from us!” line is meant to be particularly agonising, but I’m not sure I understood quite why this one line was more painful than the others…?  Some tweaking and clarification may help.

“Never escape!”—’You’ll never escape!’.  It seems odd that the voices would talk in quite such a broken, almost garbled fashion.  I would have thought the voices, being simply parts of Jo’s own mind and feelings (unless she’s schizophrenic), would speak in her voice.  Isn’t that what really makes them awful?  That it’s really her own self-doubt/paranoia/fear/whatever that she’s cowerng from?

“pushed herself off the floor”—’herself up off the floor’

“Pulled at the air”—there are a few incidences of this.  The problem is consistency of use, really.  If you’re doing this, it needs to be more tightly focused and specific to paragraphs, not odd sentances within those big paras.

“She was empty: no energy, no emotions; nothing left between her mind and her soul. All had been stripped away – nothing left but herself and her tender, bleeding heart.”—There’s a degree of repetition here.  Repetition reduces the impact of the individual version, so either blend them together, or pick the better on.

“Will you answer Me if I speak to you?”—doesn’t lead on from everything.  Unless you put in a part about her screaming at the voices that she won’t answer them, or adjust this so that it’s more saying “Will you answer my voice, if I speak?” then you lack a really strong tie-in.

“but this time to her knees.”—here you’re almost contradicting the statement that Jo didn’t know what happened above.  You’d be better saying it was deliberate, thoughtful, controlled, as it then contrasts then with the ‘don’t know’ element.

“Tears followed”—’More tears followed’

“and, yes, love “—odd phrasology that breaks with the narrative of the piece.  Could just go ‘beauty, sorrow, love’  (the sorrow seems slightly too contradictory as well)

“tearstained”—’tear streaked’.  Staining to me implies make-up.

“decorum”, “propriety”—language change again, a bit like the ‘love’ line.  Narrative should remain constant in style and voice in a section.  If you want to change voice, use line breaks to tell us the viewpoint or perspective is changing.

“And all was as it should be.”—similar sort of thing again really.  It’s a statement very outside of the previous narrative flow, which was from Jo’s p.o.v (this line reads like someone else saying it, not Jo) for one thing; but also presumably Jo’s problems remain, it’s just that now she either has the courage/willpower to face them, or move on, or whatever.

Sorry if you feel that’s a horrible disection.  I tried to cover everything in plenty of detail, and as I say, it’s not bad at all, this is all really just polish stuff, and that’s what re-drafting is all about :).

I’d recommend getting a book called “Self-Editing for Fiction Writers” and reading “Elements of Style” too.  They’re very useful for this sort of stuff.  ”Techniques of the Selling Writer” is pretty good and useful too, but less so for technical specifics than the other two.

Wow – thanks for the help! I must say that there are quite a few points here that wouldn’t have stood out to me, partly because I haven’t had experience with that many people’s perspectives. Certainly not “a horrible dissection” – the piece needs to be dissected! Your comments will be most useful when I go through for a re-write. :D

And thanks as well for the book suggestions. (I’m looking them up right now, actually.) ... and … hmm … since I’ll be taking a creative writing course next year … (yah, I’m just in my senior year of highschool) ... if I can’t get one of these right away, maybe we’ll use one as a curriculum… which would be handy.

So… in closing, one final “gracias” and I’ll be off to check out those books.

Yeah, definitely a religious piece. Thanks for reading it anyway!

And thanks very much for your honest and insightful suggestions – I’ll definitely take them into account when I do another rewrite.

Thank you! I really try to be as helpful as possible, and it’s nice to know that it isn’t in vain! :) So thanks again…

Hmmm… I didn’t think about that. Thanks!

About the “It simply said hello” bit… I suppose that I had a very clear idea of what I meant by that, but maybe that doesn’t come across so well. I was thinking this: She turned to face her soul – actually let go enough to take the chance and look inward for the first time in a long time – and her soul didn’t reject her as she’d feared; didn’t scream, repremand, or explode with emotion; simply said hello. It greeted her where she was – in still and quiet – and let her find her way back. As weary as she was, she couldn’t have taken any greater reaction. Do you think I ought to explain that or would it be too wordy (in which case I’d have to change it to something more like what you suggested)?