Hey everyone – welcome to Death Of 1000 Cuts – making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time.

If you’ve not been here before, this is a weekly fiction editing blog where we take the first 250 words of an author’s novel or short story and we look at ways to make it better. New work is always welcome! (although the waiting list is very, very long) If you’d like to submit, please read the Submission Guidelines.

Thanks for letting me have a break and not stoving my head in with a monkey wrench. This has been a really, really exciting week for me – I’ve seen the first bits of artwork for my debut novel, The Honours, which is out next April from Canongate. It’s the first ever real, tangible stuff related to the book I’ve ever seen. An artist has taken in-world ideas and created images out of them. It’s a bit like hallucinating – like walking down the street and seeing the three-headed goblin dude from your dream.

Do you think you might buy a copy when it comes out? I hope so. I reckon the work I do is worth supporting, and if you agree, keep an eye out and I’ll put some links up when it’s available for pre-order. I’m going to do some little launch events and readings and if you’re UK-based and would like me to come to your area please drop me a line via the ‘Contact Me’ link on the right. I’d especially like to visit independent bookshops, libraries and schools, because you guys are warriors, yo.

Anyway, usual drill – read the extract below, decide what you think, then read my thoughts after ‘The Cuts’.

Untitled (by Laura)

So there I was in peace and quiet, with a thick fantasy novel called Lissis after its titular character, a girl who raised dragons for a living. Actually it was a pretty good day.

I turned a page.

Nearby, a locker door swung open. Farther away, somebody was running in the hallways. In front of me, Lissis Megum was caring for a diseased egg. She had to adjust the incubation fires very carefully. The black-spotted egg sickness was a deadly one, and this egg was a rare gold, laid only once every thousand years—

“What are you doing at my locker?” a girl asked, her voice so loud that it snapped me out of Lissis.

“What?” said a boy.

“What are you doing? What did you take?” The girl’s voice crescendoed into a shriek: “Give it back!”

“I didn’t take anything! I found it open!” protested the boy, and I slammed my book shut and stood up on trembling legs. There was going to be trouble here that would probably result in all witnesses being required to visit the school counselor and talk about what happened.

I did not want to talk to the school counselor.

The Cuts

So, I try to work through every submission I get sent to DoaTC, roughly in the order I received them, unless they massively ignore the guidelines (they’re poetry, non-fiction, some sort of weird passive-aggressive love letter) or they grievously offended common decency (i.e. ‘satire’ where the main character is ‘a chav’ and presented as a subhuman knuckle-dragging ignoramus with no redeeming features, overt racism/homophobia). Most submitters are brilliant at reading the submission guidelines and sticking to them – so much so that the waiting list for this blog is now over a year long.

And still people continue to submit! Thanks dudes. I’m really glad you’re generous and ambitious enough to want to contribute your work. There would be no blog without you.

Still, I sometimes get asked ‘do you pick the worst ones?’ or even ‘are they real?’ (as if I have time to write a fiction extract in a different voice every week) – which is a little unfair. I don’t think the quality of submissions is especially low – certainly not compared to my 10 years professionally critiquing manuscripts. This is pretty much mid-range standard-wise for aspiring authors with some experience under their belts.

Still, it’s easier to write this blog when the extract has some obvious, major flaws. They’re easy for you, the reader, to spot, and it’s easy to explain why they don’t work. They provide neat, teachable moments.

The purpose of this chuntering introduction is to featherbed you against the painful realisation that I don’t have a huge number of furious objections to this piece. Oh yes, you may very well raise your eyebrows, and no, I’m not mellowing in my dotage. It certainly isn’t perfect! I’ll go through the extract as usual and explain the bits I like, (and the bits I have problems with) and hopefully that will allow a smooth segue into a quick digression on voice and genre, which I think are particularly pertinent this week.

Got that? Still reading? Hooray.

So there I was in peace and quiet, with a thick fantasy novel called Lissis after its titular character, a girl who raised dragons for a living.

So yeah, your first sentence introduces the protagonist, which is good. I can accept that he or she might plausibly use clichés like ‘peace and quiet’, but they’re abstract adjectives that don’t excite our senses. More than that, they describe absences – ‘peace’ and ‘quiet’ are the absence of stress and noise, respectively. There’s not much here to put us in the moment.

Come to think of it ‘there I was’ is pretty meaningless, too. It does serve a purpose, however, by introducing the narrator, and it also gives her (I’ll plump for the female pronoun for the purposes of brevity) the beginnings of a voice, with the breathless, dramatic immediacy of a tall tale told round a campfire.

Replace ‘peace and quiet’ with something like ‘the empty classroom’ or ‘the lunch hall’ – something concrete that gives us an environment to picture the narrator in. Engage our senses, and allow us to deduce for ourselves that the room provides ‘peace and quiet’.

‘titular’ is out of register. It’s a bit fiddly and pleased with itself. ‘main’ would suit your narrator better.

Cap up on ‘fantasy’. It’s the genre, Fantasy. And I’d suggest that you render book titles in italics, as in Lissis.

‘a girl who raised dragons for a living’ is super super generic, even as a description of an imagined Fantasy novel. It’s a risky thing to include in your first line, because it’s a cliché, even if the cliché is at one remove from the reality of your story. I’m not sure ‘for a living’ is necessary – better to end on the relatively strong punch of ‘dragons’ than the weaker ‘living’, which is just a bit of expositional tidying up.

Actually it was a pretty good day.

I like this! I know – mad, eh?

It commits all sorts of stylistic sins: ‘actually’ is a meaningless fluff word, the ‘it was’ formulation as the main verb renders the sentence a piece of static portraiture, there’s not a single concrete noun or adjective in the line (the closest we get is the broad concept of ‘day’), and you even qualify the eye-gougingly bland ‘good’ with ‘pretty’. Even saying the day is ‘good’ is too much of a commitment!

Yet I like it. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. Also I do not contradict myself. Also I contain – not multitudes – but peanut M&Ms.

The thing is, a lot of compositional rules go out the window when writing dialogue. More enter, swarming through the air vents like cockroaches, but they’re different. You’re trying to capture a voice.

First-person narration isn’t dialogue, exactly, but it doesn’t always cleave to the rules of solid third-person composition either. Indeed, most of the truly memorable examples – by virtue of the fact they play to first-person narration’s strengths – markedly break many fundamental rules of third-person narrative.

What I’m saying is: imagine the rules. Now imagine them covered in cockroaches. Sweet. You’re golden. Off you go, kiddo.

But seriously, this apparently throwaway, apparently awful line, gives us voice. We have a character who is a bit whimsical. Who perhaps doesn’t always have things go her way, but can be optimistic when they do. They ‘actually’ is nice – it’s as if this thought has just occurred to her. It gives the narration a bit of immediacy, and some intimacy.

I turned a page.

Giving this a line on its own implies some shit is about to kick off. It’s a simple, concrete image that you haven’t fucked up. As long as some shit kicks off next sentence, we’re good.

Nearby, a locker door swung open.

Ok, this is almost an inciting incident. Not great, but passable. Cut ‘nearby’. It’s not like the reader is going to think the locker door is part of the narrator’s face unless you specify. She’s aware of it. That implies that it’s near.

Maybe think about that verb ‘swung’. How does she know if her nose is in a book? Did it squeak open? Crash open? What noise does she hear that alerts her?

Farther away, somebody was running in the hallways.

Again with the finicky positioning clause. Cut it.

Same problem as before with the hallway running. Your narrator is absorbed in a book. Engage our senses. She hears the thunder of footsteps in the hallway. Show, don’t tell. Let us deduce that it means someone is running.

In front of me, Lissis Megum was caring for a diseased egg.

Okay, I like how you’ve used the rule of three to foreground the immediacy of this story she’s reading. Two positioning clauses in the real world, the third in the fictional one. You set up a pattern with two beats then subvert it on the third. That’s solid composition.

I just don’t think it’s worth the cost of having two shitty sentences beforehand. You don’t gain enough. I’d just start a new paragraph to mark the switch from real world to book world. I don’t like ‘In front of me’ – it’s an ugly phrase – but maybe some variation on ‘In my hands’ could be nice, if you want to keep the narrator foregrounded.

She had to adjust the incubation fires very carefully. The black-spotted egg sickness was a deadly one, and this egg was a rare gold, laid only once every thousand years—

So like, you’re sailing close to the wind with this kind of generic flummery, but the ‘incubation fires’ feels real to me – specific and crunchy enough to suggest a genuine book without actually drawing us too far out of the narrator’s reality.

So many novels will mention a character playing a video game and do a super-shitty job and making the game remotely plausible – even the passing allusion makes it clear that the author has never played a game in their life. There’ll be some vague mention of ‘he had to collect the gems then get the sword and fight the mummy’ and you’re like fuck you, buddy, if you can’t be bothered to do 60 seconds of research and watch some actual game footage on Youtube then I can’t be bothered to read your turgid slog through page after page of middle-class people being sad. It’s like making a high budget action movie then inexplicably shooting one scene in an empty sound stage with the background drawn on the back of an old Smashing Pumpkins poster in pencil crayon.

“What are you doing at my locker?” a girl asked, her voice so loud that it snapped me out of Lissis.

I’m not going through this again. Not ‘asked’. The question mark implies that. Either ‘said’, or, if it’s at high volume, maybe – just maybe – ‘shouted’.

Cut ‘her voice so loud that it snapped me out of Lissis.’ That is implied by the fact the narrator is no longer describing Lissis but the girl’s voice.

“What?” said a boy.

Maybe can we have a more interesting response? A lot of ‘What’s in this exchange.

“What are you doing? What did you take?”

Okay, so escalation. Good.

The girl’s voice crescendoed into a shriek: “Give it back!”

You might verb that noun and deploy it, Laura – your narrator wouldn’t. No ‘crescendoed’. Even I don’t use ‘crescendoed’ in casual conversation. Well, rarely.

“I didn’t take anything! I found it open!” protested the boy

No ‘protested’. I don’t even think you need ‘said the boy’ – it’s obvious he’s speaking as this is an argument. But ‘protested’ is a stylistic war crime and must be covered up at all costs before the UN discover what you’ve- IT’S TOO LATE! RUN! *SWAT team detonates flashbang, rappels from the ceiling, tasers and nets deployed; we wake to find ourselves in an underground facility, being experimented on* Wait… that is how the UN works, right?

and I slammed my book shut and stood up on trembling legs. There was going to be trouble here that would probably result in all witnesses being required to visit the school counselor and talk about what happened.

See, I like this too! There are stakes and I like the narrator. She (or he) is trying to deal with the situation and is both assertive and vulnerable. She slams the book shut but her legs are trembling. That’s relatable. Your protagonist now wants a clear something. To read in peace and to not get caught up in this escalating trouble. A story is happening! Yes!

I did not want to talk to the school counselor.

And this is a great line. It’s lovely that it’s out on its own and it implies a bigger story. Either the school counsellor is a weird douchebag or the protagonist has something they don’t want to share. If there isn’t any bigger story behind this line and it’s just a throwaway comment then you need to know readers will feel cheated because it implies some larger conflict and you’re making an implicit promise.

So yeah. Basically that is what I think. Some major textual revision to be done, but I would read on.

Wow. I take a week off and suddenly I’m a massive hippy.

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3 thoughts on “Death Of 1000 Cuts – In The Barber’s Chair: Untitled (by Laura)”

  1. “…a thick fantasy novel called Lissis after its titular character”

    Maybe I’m being pernickety here, but as it’s DoaTC I’m going to run with it. ‘Called after its…’ and ‘titular…’ feels like the same thing said twice. OK it’s first person and it’s not straight-up duplication, but it feels a bit clumsy, especially as it’s the first line. It made my teeth itch slightly, is what I’m saying.

    ‘…called Lissis after its protagonist’ feels better to me.

  2. Sweet catch! I agree, but I think ‘protagonist’ is out of register for the narrator. ‘main character’ instead of ‘titular’ (which is a horrible word wherever you put it) covers that repetition.

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