Would anyone like to critique my fragment of a draft of a short story?
Offline I'm trying to be more ambitious with my writing style. I don't know if I'm being successful. I would like to know what you guys think of this. It's not finished. I'll add more inbetween what I have now and also after the last lines written here. But I think that it is relatively a full self-contained story as is. Spelling errors are the result of a mistranslation from notebook to computer.
Subterranean Homesick Alien
The weak wood beneath Ben warped under his weight as he struggled to find an easy position on the creaking church bench. Though it was soon to be daylight, he was not sleeping so much as daydreaming amidst frequent interruptions from unusual, aching sounds from his new environment. He was lost enough in his own subconsciousness that he was only partially away of where he was and why. His neck was particularly irritated from lying uneven with his shoulders. His medium-length, light brown hair hung awkwardly in his face, causing him to sweat. He began to roll over, felt himself too near the edge of the bench, and rolled back over on to his back. His eyelids fluttered and then shut.
He remembered that his grandmother had died. Not recently, but it still mattered to him. She died from a hospital complication. She would have lived if she hadn’t gone to the hospital. He blamed the hospital. He didn’t visit her in the hospital. The hospital scared him– the dying woman, now unfamiliar with his name scared him. He hadn’t been to a hospital since before she died, and he wasn’t going back now.
She couldn’t understand him. They were from generations with different languages. She didn’t know why he liked his hair long or the songs with the curse words in it or why he loved his first skateboard that she bought for him or why she found herself lying to him when the dog got run over by a car.
He groaned and shifted to his right side. He could feel that he was very close to the edge of the bench. He could feel the open air against his chest and the gravity tugging him towards the ground. Hell, he might even be more comfortable there. Slowly, hands first, he descended onto the floor, once again on his back. Stained glass tinted the faint moonlight that dripped across his face through intermittent cloudcover. Through his hair, he could see rows of neatly organized hymnals attached to the front of each bench. He shifted slightly for comfort.
“Ben?” He remembered.
He didn’t answer. He felt the side of his arm.
“Did you do that to yourself?”
he felt guilty, but was very disoriented. He dropped whatever was in his hand. His mouth was dry from being slightly agape.
“Ben, you need stitches.”
He tried to speak, but his lungs felt heavy in his chest. He suddenly felt very paranoid and walked out the door into the Boston streets. He heard his name faintly in repetition.
His arm felt sticky. It had a distinct familiar odor each time he brought it to his face to clear away hair from his eyes and mouth. It was vaguely metallic and the smell made him panic, but he didn’t understand why.
He blamed the hospital and the sterile clothes and the unfeeling faces behind his grandmother’s surgeon’s mask. He hadn’t seen it but he thought that he could feel it and he tried to cry and the tears were metallic from the smell of the side of his arm in the church and he thought in scattered fragments about how he never visited her grave and whether or not she wanted flowers and if her clothes rotted away before she did and she was left nude and cold and metallic in under her gravestone.
Ben worried about small things as his mind wandered. He felt guilty. He tied his shoelaces together in first grade and it made his stomach turn over in the church. He never saw his grandmother’s grave. The service could have been in this church as far as he knew. Did they sing these hymnals? Were the songs about her? He could see the pages through their leather binding. He couldn’t see her name in the text. What was her maiden name?
The back of his shirt was wet. He reached under himself and the tips of his fingers found a sticky puddle. His eyes opened lazily to see what he was lying in. His eyes slowly focused on the fingers in front of him, backlit by the red glow of a protosunrise. His fingertips were invisible under a greasy coating of his own blood. Panic and fear penetrated his disorientation briefly. It was beginning to become difficult to keep his arm raised, so he pressed it to his chest and closed his eyes.
He was a soldier, gun slung across his back, over his shoulder. He was in a jungle and his war buddies were all under cover but he wasn’t and he was determined to kill the enemy so neither he nor them would have to go to the hospital when he felt a stinging in his arm. He heard his name in unison from behind him and fell over lightheaded with his friends surrounding him.
“Ben, did you do this to yourself?”
The gun was still over his shoulder, and he was afraid that it would accidentally fire and kill his grandmother and they would never make it to each other’s funerals.
The church shifted around him. Ben raised his head and knocked it against the edge of the bench.
He was an undercover surgeon in his grandmother’s operating room and the main surgeon was about to make the first incision but Ben noticed that she was beginning to stroke and he reached out and the main surgeon cut him by accident and red metal oozed from his arm.
“Ben, you need stitches.”
The sun was peering over the horizon like a sickly, unblinking, Cyclopian eye. In a moment of lucidity, he realized that he had wandered into the church on a Saturday night and, in a couple of hours, old people and their relatives would be shuffling in so that the reverend would say nice things about them at their own funerals. A hope of self-preservation passed through his mind– an evolutionary cry for help from a deceitful body. Neurons fired elegantly under his skull.
“You’re not clotting fast enough, Ben.”
Ben is seven. He’s anemic. He hates hospitals. Granny cures his cuts with kisses.
There was no clock in the church, but he could hear the chime of the bell tower. It rang an indeterminate amount of time and then settled into obscurity. Ben hoped fleetingly that a person was in the belfry ringing the church bells, but was fearful that it could be machine-operated. Had it been ringing all night?
“Ben, you’re going to be OK.”
“She died last night.”
“Ben, what are you talking about?”
“When is her funeral? I’m not going to miss it.”
“She died years ago.”
“Her birthday was on May Day.”
“”Ben, are you alright? What’s wrong with your arm?”
“Ben?” He remembered. Voices in unison again– a church choir from her throat.
My Brand New Blog - Jesu Ad Nauseum.
God of the Gaps: As knowledge approaches infinity, God approaches zero. It's introductory calculus.
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Not too bad. I can't type much here due to carpal's/RSI in my forearm and wrist that has killed a once burgeoning writing/music career, but I highly recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-25th-Anniversary-Nonfiction/dp/0060006641
Randomly:
In trying to make/develop your own style & stand out, you do the opposite; don't use this stuff: "The sun was peering over the horizon like a sickly, unblinking, Cyclopian eye." or, "Neurons fired elegantly under his skull."
Read the book, it's at the library--you'll find it an enormous help!
EDUCATION! EDUCATION! EDUCATION!
I intensly despise criticizing something that is incomplete. However, since you asked for it, the most glaring thing to my eye is your use of sentence structure. A great many of them are too long for their own good. Which has a side impact of making the shorter sentences that follow appear too abrupt. It's like you're being jerked around a bit mentally. It's not a major problem, but it does have an impact.
Just my opinion.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Hi Zymotic,
I agree it's usually a bad idea to critique something that's not finished, but here goes. Of course, this is just my opinion only.
My overall impression is that it's an impressionistic look at life and death through the eyes of a young man and his relationship with his grandmother. Kind of a 'what's the point of it all?' kind of story.
I like how you try to get into his head, and have it flow like a 'stream of consciousness', from one scene to the next. The intensity of emotion comes through. I can empathize with Ben.
I would say the biggest critique I would have would be the grammar and flow of sentences. They seem too 'constructed', like you are forcing it to come out 'poetically', or something. As a result, they don't really flow very well, and it is jarring to read some parts of it.
Another thing is that the stream of consciousness style makes it hard to follow the continuity of the story, which is a very important quality that a story must have. When a character is in one scene in one sentence, and in a different scene in the next sentence, you need to make it very clear to the reader that a perspective shift just occurred. I understand that you're trying to make the different scenes blend together, but a little more attention to these shifts is necessary to keep the reader *within* the story, rather than an outside observer of the story. I should never say to myself, "Okay, now the author has shifted perspective to another scene." Instead, I should be able to fluidly follow Ben from one scene to the next.
Both of these criticisms (grammar/flow, and perspective shifts) derive from one particular flaw that I think many early writers (myself included) make, which is to write the story as *they* perceive it, rather than taking care to write it so that *the reader* can follow it.
In other words, the story is flowing from your consciousness onto the paper, which is good, because it really gets into the depth of the story, into Ben's head, as it were. However, you have to leave enough 'breadcrumbs' for the reader to follow your flow of consciousness. So, basically what I'm saying is that when *you* read the story, it will make sense to you, because you have all the important details in your head, and the written story is a kind of 'shorthand' to remind yourself of the *story in your head*. However, the *written story itself* does not contain those important details, and therefore this makes it hard for someone *else* to follow the story, because they have to conjure up their own details to 'fill in the blanks'.
It's kind of like writing a note to yourself, "Get the thing from the store, to fix the broken whatsit in the back room." This is fine on a ToDo list of your own devising. But if you want to give this list to someone else, you have to provide the missing context. The note may make perfect sense to you, but be utterly meaningless to someone who doesn't have the same 'things' 'stores', and 'whatsits' in their head.
I remember my first serious attempts at stories when I was in highschool, and they tended to be very short, and sparse in details, and highly impressionistic. They made complete sense to me, but other people who read them didn't 'get' them. They were stories written to myself and for myself. I don't regret writing them, and they still have a strong impression within me, but if I wanted to give them to someone else to convey that particular feeling or impression I had, I would write them differently today with a lot more detail and depth, to fully convey the feeling.
I also remember a short video I did for one class. It was intended to be a spoof of Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Segal movies. It was about 20 min long, which is quite long for a highschool project. Me and a friend wrote the script. I had some friends act it, and then I had to edit all the video footage together to make the final video.
The editing took way longer than the actual filming did. I realized, as I was editing, that I hadn't exactly filmed enough footage to convey the entire story. But I put it together the best I could.
Later on, as I was showing it to my classmates, I found myself having to explain the movie as they were watching. It wasn't clear who the main character was (he was supposed to be a cop), what the different scenes represented, why the film went from one scene to the next, what the character's names were, etc. I had left out *a lot* of detail. But for me, all that detail was in my head and when I watched the movie it made perfect sense. Unfortunately, when I showed it to others, it was confusing and disjointed.
Since that experience of putting in a lot of effort and creativity, only to have to explain the movie to every person who watched it, I realized that telling a story requires you to take into consideration the reader's perspective as *more important* than the author's perspective. Of course, the author's perspective is very important. But if care is not taken to translate that into the reader's perspective, then the story will not communicate well. It will not be interesting for anyone but the author.
So, I guess my overall critique of your story would be to put in more details and depth. Keep that intensity that you have, the emotion and impressionist/stream of consciousness thing, but convey the whole thing to the reader, not just bits and pieces, fragments. Also, don't try to force your writing to be poetic, i.e. don't overdo it. Write for the reader. (That is, unless you really are just writing for yourself, in which case, write however you like.)
Again, this is all just my opinion, and should be taken with appropriate grains of salt, etc.
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You clearly have a strong picture of the scene.
Sentence structure, agreed. Take out a bunch of the "hospitals" and try to glue some of the sentences together to make it flow better. One mistake a lot of writers make is to focus TOO MUCH on making the sentences flowery. Instead, try to spell everything out conversationally first so the story makes sense, THEN add some style. It's REALLY hard to me to edit/explain what I mean on the internet, but I can try to show you a possible way to revise...
He remembered. His grandmother had died of some complication. It had happened awhile ago, but it still mattered to him. She would have lived if she hadn't gone to the hospital. He blamed them. The hospital scared him, the dying woman unfamiliar with his name. He didn't visit her, didn't want to, and wasn't going back now.
You've got an interesting story; it's mostly about syntax!
*Our world is far more complex than the rigid structure we want to assign to it, and we will probably never fully understand it.*
"Those believers who are sophisticated enough to understand the paradox have found exciting ways to bend logic into pretzel shapes in order to defend the indefensible." - Hamby
Natural: thank you very much for the in-depth critique. I agree with it all, so I won't respond to the bulk of it line by line, but I definitely will take everything you said into account when revising.
I think that this problem might stem from writing it on paper first. On paper, paragraphs looks much bigger than they actually are and I feel like there's more there than there actually is. I only added 700 words to finish the storyline and the rest of my additions will be to make the current ideas more fleshed out than they are here.
Peppermint: With the "hospitals" paragraph I was trying to do something similar to what Hemingway does with the word "water" in "Hills Like White Elephants." That doesn't mean that I succeeded though, since you obviously read it and didn't take away my intended meaning. That paragraph is one of the ideas I am afraid I am going to have to kill.
My Brand New Blog - Jesu Ad Nauseum.
God of the Gaps: As knowledge approaches infinity, God approaches zero. It's introductory calculus.