Death Of 1000 Cuts: In The Barber's Chair - The North Pier - Tim Clare - Author, Poet and Creative Writing Advice Podcaster

Salut mes amis, et welcome to another edition of Death Of 1000 Cuts – making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time.

Before we go any further, have you read my award-winning book about aspiring writers, the publishing industry, and artistic failure, We Can’t All Be Astronauts? If not, order it now. Make it a little present to yourself. If you enjoy this blog, I expect you’ll like the book too.

This week we’ve got another author’s first page In The Barber’s Chair. As always, read through the extract, decide what you think about it, then read my feedback under ‘The Cuts’. And if you or a friend would like to see your work given the same treatment, please send me your polished and redrafted first page (absolutely no more) plus a title, to the ‘Contact Me’ link on the right.

Right. Let’s do this.

The North Pier (by Laura)

You stand on the railings with your back to the shore. You’ve seen those Victorian hotels, the ones that line the promenade, a thousand times. You’ve seen the way their elegant façades stretch four storeys to the sky, distinguished faces rubbed raw by the wind and the rain. They stand, gazing out to sea, steadfast against uncertainty. A constant, unmoving edifice in a town that has done nothing but change since you left it.

Trees crouch awkwardly by the water’s edge, bent double by the suffocating weight of circumstance, their gnarling branches swept sideways, away from the churning ocean. They flinch from the sea – just as you once did – and every cresting wave seems to shake their knotted boughs, as though each tree is suffering from shock. No birds nest here. Nothing thrives on broken ground.

But you already know that.

Despite the time of year, the wind continues to advance over the water like a vanguard, attacking the coast in great waves of nausea. Coloured parasols and striped deckchairs litter the beach. Agitated by the breeze, their fabric bodies flap madly with impotent frustration. Seagulls stand resolutely on the retreating sand and process across the flats, hunting for dropped chips among the rock pools. But you don’t see this. The screech of those gulls is audible above the swirling water, and every throaty burst causes your breath to catch in your throat, as if you had been found out again. But you don’t turn around.

No colourful lights illuminate the fairground rides on the pier. Not so early in the morning. The theatre complex and bingo hall are closed now, but you can hear the early morning vacuums lapping at the shag-pile, peeling popcorn from beneath the seats. The theatre’s windows all face shore-wards, as if the building itself were frightened of the waves.

You are not frightened. You squint against the rising sun and stare out at the horizon, as straight and sharp as folded paper and as still as the grave. The sea swells beneath your feet, rushing over the iron girders, but out there in the distance, all is calm. Abby would smirk at this observation. She would say that it is evidence that all chaos is fleeting; you would prefer to say that serenity is a trick of perspective.

The South Pier is no longer the right name for the structure on which you stand. After all, there can be no South without a North. The bones of the North Pier, charred and blackened by the flames, have long since fallen victim to the waves. You can barely even remember where the North Pier stood.

You stand with your back to the shore. There is nothing left for you there.

The bare skin of your feet burns against the cold iron of the pier, numbed by the chill wind and the rawness of the season. The thin summer dress gathers around your pale ankles like an incoming tide. You didn’t bring a coat, despite the cold. A coat would only weigh you down. Isn’t it a little too cold for these theatrics? Do you want to catch your death?

Catch and keep it and never let it go.

Simon liked this dress. He liked the way it showed off your shoulders and your neck. Your décolletage. You would never let him see you wear it now.

Like magnets, you feel your hands reach for your neck.

The Cuts

You stand on the railings with your back to the shore.

Hmm. I accept this may be a ludicrous personal prejudice, but to me – outside of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels and text adventures – second-person narrators feel a bit stunty. There’s a clumsiness and a clutter to them – they immediately introduce three characters: the protagonist, the narrator, and the reader. We know that we’re not the protagonist – no matter how much the narrator insists on addressing us as such – so we end up watching this awkward hybrid in the starring role: half us, half this other person with different memories, different emotions, a different body. It’s an inelegant, unsettling mode.

Unless there is a sound thematic reason to cast this in the second-person, something you’re building towards, I’d consider sticking with the traditional first- or third-person options. That relentless ‘you, you, you’ can get wearying over an entire novel, which may, of course, be part of your motive for choosing it – to create a maddening, aggressive narrative style that feels like it’s interposing itself between us and the protagonist, placing thoughts in our head, forcing us to do things.

So actually I suppose I am flagging your choice rather than actively rebuking you for it. It is certainly on death row, but feel free to come steaming in with an eleventh hour pardon if you can confidently exonerate it*.

My main problem with this sentence is its tortuous logistics.

‘You stand on the railings’ – it’s that preposition ‘on’ that’s really baffling me. Railings are usually spiked, aren’t they? This sounds as if the protagonist is balanced precariously atop the railings, either standing on the wrought iron flukes or on the top bar crossing them laterally. It sounds like a position difficult to hold for very long – certainly ill-suited to contemplating one’s life.

I’m not sure if the unnamed protagonist is supposed to be perched on the edge, contemplating suicide, or if she (I’m deducing from the dress that she’s female, although I accept that we don’t know for sure!) is merely standing against the railings. Basically, this is ambiguous, and I don’t think ambiguity serves your purpose. Clarify please.

‘with your back to the shore’ is, again, ambiguous. ‘the shore’ is where the sea meets the land, so our protagonist could be standing inland, with her back to the beach and sea, or out towards the sea, with her back to the beach. The paragraphs that follow – plus the contextual clue in the title – suggest that she’s on a pier, looking out to sea, but it shouldn’t take you several paragraphs to make this plain.

But wait, if that’s true, how – in the next sentence – can she see the ‘Victorian hotels’ lining the promenade? Is her head the Panopticon?

You’ve seen those Victorian hotels, the ones that line the promenade, a thousand times. You’ve seen the way their elegant façades stretch four storeys to the sky, distinguished faces rubbed raw by the wind and the rain.

Ah well, to be fair, you don’t say ‘you see’, you say ‘you’ve seen’ – so already we’ve left the narrative present and we’re harking back to an indeterminate past. At some point, the protagonist has seen some hotels, which may or may not be behind her. Well, that’s good to know.

Not really! This is vague and frankly irrelevant. I appreciate you’re trying to create a mood by going ‘ooh, look at the weathered buildings and how they evoke the grim march of time’ but resorting to this sort of monkey business this early in your novel will result only in the grim march of readers away from your book.

An ounce of clarity is worth a pound of faff! Maybe focus on locating your protagonist clearly within the scene before drifting off into a discursive digest of the town’s history, eh?

They stand, gazing out to sea, steadfast against uncertainty. A constant, unmoving edifice in a town that has done nothing but change since you left it.

I have mixed feelings about these two sentences. Which is to say, the first is awful and Must Die. It’s twee and faux-profound and you’re noodling on a theme instead of dealing with the concrete. Reveal character, advance plot. Don’t pontificate like a middle-class dad on a country walk, ruining everything by commentating on it.

As for the second: well, ‘edifice’ is a horrible word, being both pretentious and vague. Like ‘conurbation’ and ‘palimpsest’, it’s one of those pseudo-intellectual words that Will Self is forever strewing throughout his writing, arranging the furniture of literariness to distract from the absence of houseguests.

But look – I like ‘in a town that has done nothing but change since you left it’, although that final pronoun dangles redundantly. Close with ‘left’. This is a sentiment that reveals character, introduces some backstory, and suggests the beginnings of a theme. You just need to get to it quicker. The three sentences preceding it all say more or less the same thing. Condense them into one. Stay in the narrative present. And make sure she can see what she’s referring to.

Trees crouch awkwardly by the water’s edge, bent double by the suffocating weight of circumstance, their gnarling branches swept sideways, away from the churning ocean.

‘Trees crouch awkwardly’ – are we at the beach? I’m confused now. It is very, very rare to see a treeline come all the way to the water’s edge in England. ‘Trees’ is a vague noun. What type of trees? Pines?

That adverb, ‘awkwardly’, feels super-awkward. It makes the trees sound like bashful schoolboys. Besides, ‘crouch’ suggests bending one’s legs, not one’s back – the trees are more hunched than crouched – or maybe they are slouching.

In any case, ‘bent double by the suffocating weight of circumstance’ is crazy-purple. It sounds as if you are gasping and pounding at your breastbone as you write it. Show, don’t tell. If you want your story’s environment to suggest the protagonist’s mood, fill your boots, but don’t lay it on so thick.

And you know what, this idea that literariness comes from imbuing your characters’ surroundings with the pathetic fallacy writ large is a pervasive and very silly assumption. If you’re not careful, your whole novel ends up reading like:

Casey trudged down the grey, long, hard road. From a barren tree, an ugly crow with scabs cawed a tuneless song – a requiem for the drab aggregation of pain that is existence. A dustbin had toppled over, spewing its putrid, stinking contents over the heedless pavement. It was hollow and smelt of poo, much like life, Casey reflected, as she weaved around a rotting quiche, on her way to visit her dying father.

Dial it back! I know you’re trying to be evocative, but it’s better, and far more impressive, to be concise and clear. Don’t say the same thing thrice. Pick your best line, and cull the others.

Despite the time of year, the wind continues to advance over the water like a vanguard, attacking the coast in great waves of nausea.

I am very close to revoking your simile privileges. You are flinging similes and metaphors hither and thither like smoke grenades, obfuscating where you should be illuminating. For goodness’s sake, get a grip. What has a ‘vanguard’ got to do with ‘nausea’? These are two completely different analogies.

I know the temptation with a first page is to showboat – I’ve been guilty of it myself – but when you overdo the similes and metaphors it’s like you’re dumping the entire spice rack into the mixing bowl. Chill.

As a broad rule of thumb, aim to limit yourself to one simile or metaphor per page. Again, pick your absolute best, and cut the rest. Make them count. Too many in quick succession has the effect of driving a wedge between us and the things and actions you are describing. They end up foregrounding the text, not the fictional world behind it. Build some range into your prose. Give us some short, simple sentences.

Seagulls stand resolutely on the retreating sand and process across the flats, hunting for dropped chips among the rock pools. But you don’t see this. The screech of those gulls is audible above the swirling water, and every throaty burst causes your breath to catch in your throat, as if you had been found out again. But you don’t turn around.

See, so this clarifies the protagonist’s position a little, but the ambiguity has served no purpose whatsoever. And we’re contending with multiple points of view, here – despite the narrator’s contention that we and the protagonist are one and the same, we’re being shown stuff that ‘we’ can’t see – a dizzying and not terribly useful intellectual backflip.

Why are you showing us prosaic stuff on the beach? It’s not even surprising! Seagulls? Deckchairs? Who’d have guessed? This doesn’t feel real. It feels utterly generic. Cut, cut, cut.

See, this is better. There’s engagement with senses, some specifics. We get a time of day. I don’t believe you that she can hear the sound of vacuum cleaners over the wind and the waves. That sounds too convenient. Also, I doubt very much that a theatre would carpet the floor with shagpile. That seems asking for trouble. It’d be unusably filthy in a week. Maybe I’m wrong! Have you researched this? All these details, while better than the previous paragraph, still feel like the sort of things that anyone who has visited the seaside more than once could pull out of their jacksie. There’s no ring of authenticity, nothing idiosyncratic.

See – cut the hacky similes and this becomes a good little run of sentences:

You are not frightened. You squint against the rising sun and stare out at the horizon. The sea swells beneath your feet, rushing over the iron girders, but out there in the distance, all is calm.

Great stuff. Lucid, develops character, and look! Bang – we finally get a shot from inside the protagonist’s POV, looking down, that vertiginous lurch as we see spume break against the girders. And why do we get that first shift in our gut? Peril. Something’s at stake, at fucking last.

Abby would smirk at this observation. She would say that it is evidence that all chaos is fleeting; you would prefer to say that serenity is a trick of perspective.

No, no, no. Fuck Abby. Fuck this tedious trading of pet philosophies. Keep us in the narrative present. This is not compelling.

This bit of municipal history is boring. Certainly, it is not pertinent. Stop cutting away from what we care about to add footnotes. Hold your hands in the flames. Quit flinching.

The bare skin of your feet burns against the cold iron of the pier, numbed by the chill wind and the rawness of the season.

First half of this sentence = good, sensory, nice parallel structure. Second half = repeating what we already know, melodramatic. Cut.

Simon liked this dress. He liked the way it showed off your shoulders and your neck. Your décolletage. You would never let him see you wear it now.

This is the only bit of backstory I liked. I think, in part, because of where it comes. Round about now you can add a hint of what motivated this. But not before. Stick with the immediacy of the scene. I’m not sure I like the last sentence. Feels a bit redundant, like it’s stating the obvious.

There’s a difference between mystery and wooliness. If we’re like – huh, so where is she supposed to be? What’s going on? Is she on the edge of the pier? – that’s wooliness. It’s bad. You’re not in control of your story. If we’re like – holy shit, why is she doing this? Is she out of her mind? Who’s Simon? – that’s mystery. That’s good. Don’t close it down too early – it’s the bait drawing your reader through the story. By all means string us along. That’s just good craft.

Like magnets, you feel your hands reach for your neck.

I’m not sure why you’ve added ‘you feel’, suggesting the protagonist has no agency, and is merely a puppet. This may be deliberate – it may relate to the choice of second-person narrator – but I hope we can both agree that the ‘like magnets’ simile is dreadful and needs to go. With the syntax of the sentence, it reads at first as if you’re suggesting that ‘you feel like magnets do’ rather than ‘your hands reach for your neck like magnets’, which is still a pretty clunky way of suggesting that they’re drawn towards it.

The sentence reads far more powerfully as: ‘Your hands reach for your neck.’ Six words. Pow.

Thank you for sending me this first page, Laura. Sure, there’s some overwriting, but that stems from a lack of confidence in your content and writing chops to carry the day. Don’t fear simplicity! Compress down the messy POV, wind in the wiseacring, and focus on making us experience what it feels like to be on that pier, in that moment. Engage our senses. If you have to, go to a pier early in the morning and do some research (but please keep safe!). This has the potential to be an arresting opening scene, but you need faith in your skill as an author.

–

*For the most part, being able to argue the case for a suspect portion of writing is not a good metric for its continued inclusion. There’s a reason why writers are generally not allowed to respond verbally while their work is getting workshopped. We’re most of us pretty adept at rationalising and defending our own shitty writing. Of course use your own discretion, but be very, very suspicious of your justifications for not cutting something that a reader has flagged as problematic. Often, the root cause boils down to ‘but it’ll be a fucking ballache to change’.