Hello and welcome to Death Of 1000 Cuts, making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time.

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As always, read the extract below, decide what you think, then read my thoughts under ‘The Cuts’.

Waters (by Carolyn)

“The trial is over?”

Nemara didn’t look back at the Mother who approached her in the Water Gardens, but the rushes and waters of the shallow marsh she stood in allowed her to hear the younger girl approach behind her, her steps each kicking up a small splash.

“Yes,” The younger girl replied. Even though they were technically of equal rank, it bothered Nemara when her title was not used. “The Table of Hierarchs decided-”

“I know what they decided.” There had been only one outcome to the trial he moment the charges had been brought. There was only one punishment for speaking witness in favor of a false elemental avatar. The false idol would die and Orson’s father would face the Deepness. Idiot old man.

A lock of hair pulled free from her braid and swept in front of her eyes. Once she had been dark blonde, but was now going silver in her 19th year.

“I am sorry, Nemara,” The mock sympathy irked her more than the lack of titles, “I know your child is of his bloodline.”

Nemara crossed her arms over the swell of her stomach, no protective instinct in the gesture. She remembered the last time she had seen Orson, the way he’d begged her to come with him as he and his family had been escorted to the caravan that would take them to the penal lands, calling out that he loved her, that he needed her. She’d turned away from him, humiliated. What right did he have to make such demands? Elements knew he hadn’t been the first to give her a child.

The Cuts

“The trial is over?”

Good. Some people complain about opening a story with unattributed dialogue, but those people are douchenozzles, Carolyn. Unwiped, faintly odorous douchenozzles.

Sure, we don’t know who’s speaking yet. Sure, in real life you don’t hear disembodied speech without being able to attribute a rough age and gender to it. So what?

Hey imaginary naysayer, guess what? Similarity to real life is not a good metric to judge a story on. Unless you’ve suffered serious head trauma, you probably don’t drop into random locations unsure of anyone’s name, the year, and whether or not magic is possible.

Readers aren’t complete idiots. This unattributed dialogue introduces several implicit questions as well as the literal one. It throws us straight into the narrative present, into an ongoing scene. It’s like – hey, this is a living, breathing world, you got here late, pay attention and try to catch up. That’s a lovely feeling to have as a reader. You feel as if the fictional universe existed before you arrived, and simultaneously, a completely separate bit of your brain feels relief that clearly this author respects your time and isn’t about to fart about with barrowloads of drab exposition.

So yeah. Good.

Nemara didn’t look back at the Mother who approached her in the Water Gardens, but the rushes and waters of the shallow marsh she stood in allowed her to hear the younger girl approach behind her, her steps each kicking up a small splash.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly is probably expecting me to come down on this sentence like a diarrhea-filled bin liner dropped from a tenth-storey window, but I think it’s mostly successful. Mostly. Long isn’t bad, per se – it’s just that as you continue a sentence, the possibilities for fucking it up grow exponentially. There really needs to be a clear relationship between the various elements of the sentence, and a clear purpose to linking them.

First off, this made sense to me on a first pass. It’s more or less clear. At first I assumed the Mother was the speaker, given that she is approaching Nemara – implying she wants something from her – and Nemara identifies her primarily through sound, but that gets cleared up fairly quickly. You could slightly improve clarity by rephrasing to make it clear that Nemara was the speaker (i.e. ‘Nemara spoke without looking back at the Mother…’ or ‘As she spoke, Nemara didn’t look back at the Mother…’ – out of those two, I think the first is less clunky; experiment to see if you can find a more elegant way of putting it). It doesn’t serve any purpose to withhold this information, and you’re gambling that the reader attributes the dialogue to the correct character. 60% of your readers might do that, but that is an appalling hit rate, Carolyn.

By making Nemara the subject of the sentence and limiting the information we’re given to what she perceives, you very clearly position her as the protagonist, or at least the viewpoint character for this third-person limited scene. That is shrewd and deft, Carolyn. That is actual craft right there.

There are some pronoun issues towards the end of the sentence – two hers, next to one another, either referring to a different character. The her in ‘behind her’ is Nemara, and the her in ‘her steps’ is the Mother. This is more or less comprehensible, but for every three readers who follow you, one will stack it here. That’s not good enough. You can get round it by rephrasing as ‘each step kicking up a small splash’ which removes the second pronoun without, I think, obscuring who the steps belong to.

The repetition of ‘approached’ and ‘approach’ clunks a bit. You don’t have to make a fetish of synonyms, especially with simple words like ‘said’ and ‘took’ and ‘door’, but ‘approach’ is right on that borderline of being just unusual and long enough to be noticeable. You could get round this by cutting the second ‘approach’. The sentence reads fine without it.

I really, really like the curveball you throw with the apparently simple description ‘the younger girl’. Such a neat, disruptive bit of world-building. When we read the first half of the sentence, I think most of us see ‘Nemara’ and ‘Mother’ and our brains position Nemara as the younger of the two. This is why you’re absolutely justified, if you can manage it, in trying to retain this as a single sentence. The epistemological lurch (that’s a phrase I just made up but it describes perfectly what good SF world-building does – it disrupts our assumptions in ways that resonate throughout the entire fictive superstructure we’ve provisionally constructed in our heads; it’s a pleasurable shock, akin to minor religious epiphany) is strongest if the reversal takes place within a single sentence, as the linking of the clauses means the flip happens while the fresh concepts ‘Nemara’ and ‘Mother’ are still setting.

Does that make sense? I realise it might sound as if I’m making too much of this but fucking with reader assumptions without straying into out-and-out ‘gotcha’ territory is really hard and really powerful and sometimes, as an author, you can only really do it by accident. But I really liked and admired this move, is what I’m saying. It’s one of the great pleasures of quality genre fiction.

Holy shit. I’m crying.

I’m not. The only time I cry is when I hear the ending theme to Super Mario Land.

“Yes,” The younger girl replied.

Fans across the stadium throw their hands to their heads and let out a collective groan. Oh Carolyn, you were doing so well! You gave every indication we were in for a tightly-controlled treat, and now you’ve totally screwed the pooch.

For starters, dialogue tags start in lower case if they’re continuing the sentence.

‘Shit off,’ he said.

‘Shit off!’ He picked up the pony figurine and hurled it across the office.

In the first, ‘he said’ is part of the same sentence as the utterance, so it is in lower case. In the second, the utterance is one sentence, then there’s an unrelated description of an action in the narrative. It’s a new sentence, so it begins with a capital letter.

But far worse is your use of ‘replied’. Overdetermined dialogue tags are the fetid maggot-riddled bum eggs of Satan. We know it’s a reply because it comes after a question. ‘said’ works fine and doesn’t snag the eye. ‘replied’ is utterly indefensible. There is no room for argument on this. Editors and authors occasionally attempt a justification of ‘replied’ or ‘answered’ or ‘asked’ but never manage it because they are fucking wrong and they know it.

Editors: every time you let a clunky dialogue tag remain in a published manuscript, God kills a Japanese dwarf flying squirrel. By drowning it in front of some school children. Even if you don’t care about basic standards in the prose of your authors, you must at least care about that.

Even though they were technically of equal rank, it bothered Nemara when her title was not used.

Hmm. I like this, but show, don’t tell. This is explaining the reaction, but it needs to be paired with an actual gritting of teeth or furrowing of the brow or some physical betrayal of irritation. Perhaps Nemara’s gut tightens. Perhaps she has some tick that comes out when she’s annoyed. You can certainly explain why she reacts so afterwards, using this sentence (which from a technical standpoint is fine), but let us experience the direct response first.

I mean, this is a little borderline in terms of point of view – you’re stating something Nemara already knows to help out the reader, even though she would never consciously think it – but, for me, it doesn’t break frame and feels allowable. It’s nice to continue the world-building. We now know this is a society – or section of society – where protocol is important, even if it isn’t always followed by everyone. It also characterises Nemara – we might deduce from this that she’s a little haughty.

“The Table of Hierarchs decided-”

‘The Table of Hierarchs’ is a bit generic, in Fantasy-naming terms. It’s like calling them ‘The Council of Thirteen’ or ‘The Elder Lords’ or ‘The Humourless Cowled Authority Dudes’. Can you do better? I wonder if calling them something where we can’t immediately reverse engineer how you came up with the name might be wise.

“I know what they decided.”

Nice interruption. Dramatic, develops character. And notice how they world didn’t fall apart even though you skipped a heavy-handed dialogue tag like ‘she interrupted’ or ‘she snapped’?

There had been only one outcome to the trial he moment the charges had been brought. There was only one punishment for speaking witness in favor of a false elemental avatar.

First sentence is okay as a thought Nemara might have. It clarifies what she meant.

The second sentence is balls on toast. This is an info-dump, pure and simple. I like genre fiction, Carolyn, but when you lard your prose with these silly obtrusive made-up terms, you foreground its artificiality and fictional nature and my eyes start rolling so hard you could attach dynamos to them and solve the global energy crisis.

She might conceivably think: ‘There was only one punishment for what he’d done.’ But she wouldn’t obligingly think it all out.

And you know what? It’d be nice to have a bit of fucking mystery this early in the story. If you only referred darkly to ‘what he’d done’ my first thought would be: ‘what has he done?’ I mean, we can infer that it must be bad, but that’s all. What a great hook!

As it is, you give us all this blather about a ‘false elemental avatar’, which we have no context for, and our only questions are: ‘What the fuck?’ and ‘Why am I still reading this?’

The false idol would die and Orson’s father would face the Deepness.

Oh great. So now we don’t even have the mystery of what the punishment might be. This is the narrative equivalent of slapping one’s todger on the dinner table thirty seconds into a first date. And it’s not even a good-looking todger.

Oh, and ‘the Deepness’ sounds like a slam poet who hangs around after gigs to harass the female performers.

A lock of hair pulled free from her braid and swept in front of her eyes. Once she had been dark blonde, but was now going silver in her 19th year.

Another shameless info-dump. We don’t need to know this yet. Fundamentally we do not care. The trial is the important thing. Sure, the whole ‘going silver in her 19^th year’ is another interesting hint of weirdness, but it doesn’t work when you crowbar it in like this. Do you really expect us to believe that the lock swings down in front of her eyes and she can see from that proximity that it’s grey?

You’re trying to force all your world-building onto your first page. So many SF writers do this. It’s like they think they can get the nasty business of establishing the setting out of the way, then, having constructed their puppet theatre, they can get on with telling the story.

No. Setting and world-building are story. Controlling the release of information about your imagined world is one of your chief jobs as author. I understand the impulse to get it all down as quickly as possible – you’re discovering the world by writing about it, after all, and many of these asides are notes to yourself as much as anything else.

But you really need to know when to hold back. Deliver the story as naturally as possible, and only allow yourself to world-build through what is revealed through plot-relevant details, in the narrative present. Minimalism and discipline on this front are the sign of a superior writer. They’re rare, even in published novels, because they’re hard.

Hold your work to a higher standard. The story you want to tell deserves it.

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