This is the last in a round of critiques of the sample from Mike’s novel posted in Part 1. If you haven’t read it, the following isn’t going to work for you, and reading Parts 2 & 3 & 4 will enhance the experience.
This edit is a tough one, in a sense, in that the author has put many hours into crafting this narrative. As you’ll see, in my opinion most of it doesn’t well serve the telling of his story.
In the first segment of the opening to Mike’s novel, he depicts the finding of a man’s body in great detail. In this scene Mike shows us how deep his knowledge of his story goes. And the writing is promising.
But…
I don’t think this long, rich scene belongs in the novel at all.
Okay, Mike, pick yourself up and think about this:
Because we’ve all read (and been conditioned by) mysteries and thrillers, I think that the opening scene leads us to believe that the story is about the murder of the man found in the dumpster. Well, tisn’t so. I suspected as much when the narrative shifted into a first-person telling of childhood experiences. I asked Mike about it and, sure enough, the story never comes back around to the nature of the man’s death, nor the manner of his disposal, nor the men who discovered him.
The whole 1,035 words are needed to say just one thing. In the voice of the first-person narrator, it could be: “My father was found in a Dumpster, murdered, when I was one year old.”
So that richly written and imagined scene really serves no crucial story purpose and, to my view, misleads the reader’s expectations. Its relevance is that the murder begins events that led to the narrator’s being placed in a boys home. And that, not the father’s death or any aspect of it, is what the story is about.
I’d first thought that the opening segment could be used as a prologue. But I think it would still set up expectations of a mystery/thriller story. Nope, while it serves to inform Mike’s storytelling as backstory, it really has no reason to be in the actual story.
Yep, I say cut it. All of it. Ouch.
But, before we move on, let me take a look at the writing craft Mike shows us. Clearly he has devoted a lot of thought to word choice and other aspects of making his story real. If only more writers would do as much. But there are opportunities to make the writing crisper, more evocative. For instance, the opening paragraphs:
A crisp, bitter, winter wind knifed between the buildings of downtown Seattle, slashing like transparent rapids through the alleys and streets, seeping into the cracks around doors and windows, and stealing under people’s coats and hats as nature sought to balance hot and cold.
Darren McAllister’s stiffening body lay face-up in a green, rusted-metal Dumpster, half-hidden by discarded pizza boxes and a bulging black plastic trash bag. A dervish wind whipped pages of a copy of Woman’s Day back and forth, slapping his face. The coroner would identify the small, black-rimmed hole behind his left ear as the cause of death, placing the time of his final heartbeat at around 3:00 A.M. on Sunday, February 3rd, 1973.
I feel that the weight and profusion of words and the string of clauses sapped its strength. Remember, edits are subjective although informed suggestions. Additions are in red, comments in green, and deletions struck out.
A crisp, bitter, winter wind knifed between the buildings of downtown Seattle, slashing like transparent rapids through the alleys and streets. It seepeding into the cracks around doors and windows, and stole stealing under people’s coats and hats as nature sought to balance hot and cold. (3 adjectives are one too many, I think. Mixing metaphors—knives and rapids—piles on incompatible imagery and only clouds the meaning. And what is meant by “nature sought to balance hot and cold?” I feel the author has waxed poetic here, but I don’t get what he’s after. Could be just me, though. At any rate, the sole purpose of this paragraph is to show the reader what the weather is like. The author labored over this paragraph and, unfortunately, the language became labored. Narrative needs to flow with ease, and I felt that this paragraph had the rapids, not the wind.)
Darren McAllister’s stiffening body lay face-up in an open, rusty green, rusted-metal Dumpster, half-hidden by discarded pizza boxes and a bulging black plastic trash bag of trash. A dervish wThe wind whipped pages of a copy of Woman’s Day back and forth, slapping his face. The coroner would identify found a the small, black-rimmed bullet hole behind his left ear, and placed placing the time of his final heartbeat at around 3:00 A.M. on Sunday, February 3rd, 1973. (I “opened” the Dumpster so the wind could whip the magazine pages, an excellent image. Details such as “bulging,” expecially in the opening, where a reader is tuned to picking up clues at to what’s going on, could be misleading if they aren’t significant to the story. I immediately wondered what it was bulging with but, of course, it didn’t matter. If it doesn’t matter, then why include it? Also, a small, black-rimmed hole doesn’t sound like a cause of death to me, but a bullet hole gets me there.)
Here’s this segment as edited. Did we lose anything that was needed?
A bitter winter wind knifed between the buildings of downtown Seattle, slashing through alleys and streets. It seeped into cracks around doors and windows, and stole under coats and hats.
Darren McAllister’s stiffening body lay face-up in an open, rusty green Dumpster, half-hidden by discarded pizza boxes and a bag of trash. The wind whipped pages of a copy of Woman’s Day back and forth, slapping his face. The coroner found a small, black-rimmed bullet hole behind his left ear, and placed the time of his final heartbeat at around 3:00 A.M. on Sunday, February 3rd, 1973.
At least that’s my take.
The rest of the first part was a similar mixture of riches and excess. Mike needs a good editing to clear away the clutter and realize his potential.
But what about the second part of the narrative, where a man’s first-person voice takes over with the story of a little boy? Mike does the same thing as he did in the first section—puts on the page much of his deep knowledge of this man’s life and background. The trouble is, from this reader’s point of view, much of it was not needed to move the story along. In fact, much of it stopped the story from moving along.
Here’s the opening I’d suggest Mike try:
My father was found in a Dumpster, murdered, when I was one year old. After the state took me away from my alcoholic mother, I lived happily with my grandmother until one sunny Saturday morning when I was five. And then I lost that, too.
(I moved the second paragraph, which describes the grandmother, to later.)
It was a soft, pleasant face, with laugh lines framing her mouth that grew even deeper when she laughed, pushing her cheeks up to accentuate the crows feet at the outer corners of eyes the color of a Persian blue sky reflected in a pool of spring water. It was exactly the kind of face you wanted in your grandmother.
Sledge could best be described as a thick man. At five-eight, and around 190 pounds, he was built like stevedore. His hair, having receded halfway toward the back on his head save a small tuft that hung tenaciously to life just above his forehead, had originally been red, but was now grey with only his eyebrows giving away the original color. His broad hands terminated in stubby fingers attached to calloused palms, and his muscled forearms were like a real-life Popeye. He didn’t talk much, preferring to keep within his mind, perhaps somewhere in the past. He put the fear of God in most men, but he was always gentle with me. The only person who seemed able to back him down was Grandma.
I would learn, years later, that Sledge earned his name while working as a roustabout in the circus where, as legend had it, he sent some man to his final reward using a sledge hammer. Exactly what this unfortunate man might have done to earn such a violent end remains a mystery.
I would also learn, again later in my life, that my father, Darren McAllister, had been a small-time crook, gambler, and occasional drug dealer, losing his life after he swindled some L.A. Mexicans. At least, that was the conclusion of the cops. While I was probably fortunate not to have had his influence during my formative years, there has always been a part of me that wanted to know the man, if for no other reason than to determine how much of my personality was genetic.
Over time, in addition to the knowledge of my fathers’ demise in downtown Seattle, I would learn of my mother’s drinking, late night carousing, and her abandonment of me and my siblings, my sister Susan, the oldest of three children, and Darrin Jr. a year older than I.
After having Child Services declare her unfit, she had tried to place us with relatives, succeeding only in getting my aunt to take me. My siblings were placed in foster homes, and it would be many years before I would reunite with them. My mother died when, apparently drunk, she walked in front of a car on Aurora Avenue.
What I did know was that I was happy living with my grandmother, Minnie, and the man called Sledge, in our tiny house in the South Park neighborhood of Seattle. My happiness would end abruptly on a Saturday in September, just past my fifth birthday.
I sensed something was wrong the day my life changed. The night before, after going to bed, I heard Grandma and Sledge arguing in the kitchen. That wasn’t so unusual. What was different was that they seemed to be arguing about me. I wasn’t able to catch all that was said, but I heard my name mentioned several times. I tried to recall if I had done anything that made me the subject of their dispute, but nothing came to mind.
Sledge wasn’t around when I got up on Saturday morning. I hated it when he was gone, especially on a Saturday. That meant no fishing in Lake Washington, a pretty reliable weekly ritual that I looked forward to all week. Sometimes he would take off for the weekend, but he would always tell me on Friday that we weren’t going fishing. This week he had said nothing to me.
(Yes, I’d take all that out. It’s backstory. Nothing much happens. Yes, some tension is introduced in the next to last paragraph, but why not get to the story.)
I had my morning bowl of oatmeal and raisins with cream and sugar, a slice of cinnamon toast, and a glass of milk, as Grandma puttered around the kitchen, nervously glancing out the window. Grandma was a diminutive woman, five feet tall, and weighing no more than ninety pounds. At age seventy-two, she had a mop of pure white hair, and a face that reflected both the hard times, and the joy she found in life no matter her situation.
I watched her warily as I punched the raisins down into the oatmeal, watching the milk back flow into the depressions in the gruel.
After breakfast, I went outside to play in the front yard with my cars in the warm September sunshine. The leaves were starting to turn as hints of red, yellow and orange colored the edges. A gentle breeze slipped through the trees, rustling the foliage, sending a few of them leaves floating to the ground. I abandoned my cars to catch them before they landed.
Returning to my cars, (I moved him to the front yard just to simplify the staging of action.)
I staged a high-speed chase between the police car and the crooks. The crooks crashed into a the large magnolia tree in the side yard and were busted by the cops. I was the cop.
After the big chase I lay down on my back and studied the puffs of clouds in the sky, watching them morph into cats, dogs, cars, and trees,A seagull floated overhead, and high above him an eagle circled slowly. The tension of the morning, and the night before, was lost in the imagination of my five-year-old mind.
“Cam? Come in for lunch.”
I reluctantly surrendered my daydreaming for food.
After a lunch of macaroni and cheese, rye bread with butter, and a glass of milk, I returned to the yard to play. I was planning my next adventure when and then the sound of an engine a car brought my head up. I watched a car move slowly down the road in front of the house.
The A green station wagon, with all the windows down, rolled slowly to a stop in front of the house. I sprinted to the back door, dasheding through the kitchen and into the living room. as tThe screen door slammed behind me and I cringed at the sound, but Grandma didn’t rebuke me as she usually did.
I took up my favorite observation post in the wooden rocking chair by the front window. This was where I could watch the goings on of my world. I rocked vigorously as I watched the man. looked through the window.
We didn’t get many visitors at our house. Grandma kept to herself, not inviting close friendships, and Grandpa Sledge had run off several door-to-door salesmen, the grapevine warning others of his dislike for their profession.
Grandma fidgeted, wiping the yellow vinyl kitchen counter again and again with her apron. I rocked faster, the old rocker squeaking in protest. (If the boy is in the living room looking out a front window, he can’t see this action in the kitchen. Suggest you bring Grandma in to stand beside him and fidget as she looks out the window too.)
A small man, balding in front, got out of the driver’s seat, the hair on the back half of his head sticking out at odd angles made me think of a cartoon character. (Hard to see if he’s way out on the street. I’d save this detail for later.) He wore brown work pants, brown oxfords, and a plaid, short-sleeved shirt.
Walking toward the house with his head down and shoulders hunched, he stopped, placed one foot on the first step, looked up at the house, and then at (this is overwriting—we don’t need this amount of detail) looked at a piece of paper he had taken took from his shirt pocket. He returned the note to his pocket, his lips moving as if talking to someone., then he continued up the steps.
I knew that this man was somehow connected to what was wrong with Grandma and Sledge.
I gripped the rocker arms tighter as the man knocked at the front door. I watched him reach up, trying to smooth the bristle of hair on the back of his head. I wanted to run away, although I didn’t know from what, or to where.
Grandma let him in and offered him a seat. I moved as far back in my chair as I could.
The two of them sat on the couch, talking in hushed voices, occasionally glancing over at me. , tThe man smileding at me, and Grandma lookeding sad. I didn't like this man. I didn’t yet have a template for judging people, but the wWarning flags of fear were fully deployed in my mind. This man was trouble.
In my opinion, the story needs to involve the reader immediately in the life and plight of this little boy. Then details can be filled in as needed. Since the boy (as I learned from the author) is taken to a boy’s home, I suspect much of the detail cut about the grandparents and their lives won’t be needed.
It’s terrific that Mike knows this much about his character; he just needs to be more judicious about where he uses it.
In today’s viciously competitive climate for fiction, where even well-written novels go begging for a publisher, no narrative can dawdle its way through unneeded detail that does not serve the purposes of the story, that does not propel the reader forward, that does not compel the turning of pages.
Mike needs to wield a scalpel to reveal what looks to me like an interesting story, and to uncover the good writing underneath.
For what it’s worth.
RR
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© 2005 Ray Rhamey