About 8 months ago I gave myself an assignment. I wanted to write a complete short story. I also gave myself a deadline (early June). But then the story refused to be as short as I wanted it to be and life events forced the setting aside of literary aspirations for a while. But recently I was inspired by Rowyn’s completion of her novel and I wrestled my story to an ending.
There are so many things I wanted this story to say, but the only way I can find out whether it actually speaks to anyone but me is to ask people to read it. So I am now inviting anyone who reads my journal to visit the link below and read my story. Anyone who wants to comment is welcome to do so. I’m actually hoping for some feedback. You can leave it either in the comments section below, or you can email it to Howard via the Schlockmercenary.com site and he’ll forward it to me.
Thanks in advance to anyone who bothers.
http://www.tayler.com/Sandra/bethansgarden.html
Feb 20, 2005 Edit: The above link has been updated to a final version of the story. People are still welcome to read it and comment.
Okay, I’ll start off with:
I read the story and I enjoyed it.
Now, assuming you would like some honesty:
1) I think the story itself is good. If you want to continue working on it, I would trim it up a little bit.
2) You might want to fix some punctuation errors that make some of the dialog a bit difficult to handle.
3) There are also a few grammatical tweaks you could make that would make it more easily readable.
4) You might consider, if you were going to format it for print, setting Beth’s viewpoint sections off somewhat, perhaps by centering them with wider margins. A neat trick might be to make her first viewpoint section fairly narrow (with two or three inch margins), then slowly spread the margins for her sections out until they are printed as widely as everything else.
5) You mainly focus on things from Hanna’s and Beth’s points of view, and you might want to fix the one or two places where the viewpoint drifts just a hair.
Hope this is what you are looking for, and that it helps. I did enjoy it a great deal.
I liked it. The magic reminds me a lot of Pratchett’s headology–the role of witches in society.
There’s one aspect of the story I particularly liked, and I’m not sure if it’s me reading too far in or if you intended this…
It feels like Beth is autistic. The “words causing change” part of the story was what made me think it…it felt like portions of The Strange Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time.
All in all, a good short.
I doubt I could give any helpful suggestions or criticism, so I’ll just give my reaction.
Wow. It’s really, really good. To be honest, I didn’t expect to finish reading it. Once I saw the words ‘seer’ and ‘curse’, I wrinkled my nose. I usually hate stories involving any type of magic–writers (in my experience) tend to ignore characters and go on and on about the magic and the world they’ve created. But you didn’t do that at all. That’s what hooked me. You didn’t write about spells and special effects. You wrote about people, and the relationship between them.
Good stories mean something to the reader. They answer a question, or show the reader a new perspective. Good stories involve the reader, changing the reader’s mood or the way they look at things. Yours is a good story. 🙂
Thanks for the input. I’d be interested in some specific examples of each of your sugguestions so I know what to fix. What do you mean by “trim it up”? Which punctuation errors and gramatical tweaks would make it more readable? Where does the viewpoint drift? I’m so close to this story that it is hard for me to see these things unless someone points right at them.
Of course giving specific examples might take more time than you’re willing to devote. I wouldn’t be surprised or upset if that were so, thanks for taking the time to read and comment at all.
I keep meaning to read that book. Yes I used some characteristics of autistic people that I know when forming Beth’s character.
Thanks for reading and responding.
The stories I most love to read are character driven. I wouldn’t spend so much effort writing a story that I wouldn’t care to read. I’m glad you enjoyed the story. Thank you for your good analysis, you told me that you like the story and you told me why. That kind of response is very useful. The “why” is more important than the “liking”. Someone who tells me they hated the story and why they hated it has given me information that I can use to either change the story or to write another one differently. Naturally I prefer people to like the story. I’m glad you did. Thanks for taking the time to read and respond.
I’ve read it. I quite enjoyed it.
Sometimes I had a hard time figuring out who was saying what.But that didn’t bother me too much.
I do feel like the story is missing something at the end. It seems somehow incomplete. If and when i figure out why, I’ll let you know.
Other than that I liked it a lot. 😀
I liked it. I liked the theme of thinking around a problem, of (borrowing from another post) headology.
It seems a little stilted – the sentences at points seem like individual parts, all discrete, rather than flowing together.
It was good 🙂
That was incredible. I have to admit that I was getting a little teary at the end… I loved the way you constructed the story. You brought the background elements in perfectly (for a story like this, I think) – slipping them into the background, instead of basically beating the reader over the head with them. (That’s a problem that I find myself facing a lot in my own writing…)
I’m looking forward to your next attempt at storytelling. (I really hope there is one…)
I read a story 😉
I really enjoyed reading your story. While it could be a little tighter in certain areas (Mistress Yasbell’s name changes to Ysabell, for example, although that may just be a typo) the story itself is well-constructed. A short story is, in a way, much more difficult to write well than a novel. You have far less space to let the reader get to know the characters, and you’ve done that very well. Without that essential element, the whole story seems two-dimensional.
The theme of healing yourself by helping others comes through strongly, as does magic in everyday life. While this kind of story is not really the genre I usually read, it lasted through the distractions of reading at work which very few stories I’ve read online have managed.
Unfortunately I can’t offer very much specific advice — I know what I like, but I don’t really analyse it much. I’m glad you gave us this opportunity to read your work, though.
Good luck with the writing, I’d like to read more when you’ve written it 🙂
I’ll take a look at it again, later, and write you a longer and more focused critique. Now, keep in mind, this will be one person’s opinion, so some things that I think could be fixed up, other people may not agree with.
However, I think a few things would make the story easier to read, in terms of, um, mechanics.
I will try to write a more detailed review later, and will e-mail it to you via Howard, if that’s okay.
That would be great. Thanks!
woo hoo!
Excellent story Sandra!
Seems like something I would read in my Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress books. (currently reading book #21)
If they were to concentrate more on the sorceress/healer/ Green magic type of stories, you could definitely get it in there.
(small critique: just a few typos and moving a word or two, like when someone else spoke and you had, “Hanna smiled” right after it, when it would be better understood in front of Hanna’s next sentence.
That’s all. )
From one hopeful author to another, Good Job!
yay!
I’m reading your story now, and I find that from force of habit, I’m nitpicking at it (that is, commenting line-by-line on things I like or don’t like or are grammatically incorrect. I taught writing classes for a couple of years and it’s become habit for me whenever someone asks for feedback.)
But before I get TOO far into doing so, I figured I’d check and make sure you WANTED to hear nitpicky things, or if you’d rather I just gave an overall opinion when I was done. 🙂
Both types of responses are helpful in different ways. Feel free to respond in whatever way comes most naturally to you.
Hi Sandra,
I’m a little late to the party on this one; haven’t been checking the LiveJournals in a while. But I just finished your story and thought I’d add my comments. Writing is a passion of mine, so this is likely to be a long post. Feel free to disregard any comments that you don’t find helpful 😉
I found the story to be very powerful. It actually SAYS something about the world and people and the way they interact with each other. This is something I particularly admire because my own stories are often filled with nifty-cool gizmos that have no long-term resonance.
After the first page or so I was deeply involved in the story. I cared about the characters and wanted to find out what happened to them. Someone mentioned getting teary eyed at the end. I didn’t quite cry, but I did feel emotionally touched, which is a tribute to how well you’ve rendered the characters.
One weakness I perceived in the story is that, at the beginning, I thought it was going to be “just another tale of a misunderstood child, spoiled by thoughtless parenting and coaxed into bloom by a kind and understanding friend.” In truth, the story is nothing like that. Beth’s parents are far from uncaring, and Beth herself has not been warped by others’ preconceptions of her. She really is unique, and the story is partially about the struggle she and her family have in both accepting and shaping that uniqueness. The story is also about Hanna’s own private curse, and her inner struggle to come to terms with her past and face her future.
The weakness I perceive is that many of these themes are not apparent at the start. Some readers may lose interest after the first page because they don’t know you’ve gone beyond the stereotypical. There are a few ways this might be addressed, if you choose to do so:
(1) Emphasize Beth’s differences early on. People unfamiliar with children Beth’s age might not recognize how different she is from normal children based on the descriptions you’ve given. It may help if you use Hanna’s thoughts to show that Beth does not behave at all like other children Hanna has known, not even the ones with insensitive parents.
(2) Hilight Hanna’s own inner struggle earlier in the story (more on this below).
(3) One nifty trick for allaying unwanted thoughts in the reader is to place those suspicions in a character’s mind and then dispell them. In this case, when Hanna hears about Beth’s past, she might assume what I did: that Beth is a child whose parents believed so strongly in the “curse” that they never tried to raise her like a normal child and made the curse self-fulfilling. This suspicion could then be allayed as Hanna observes and interacts with Beth.
A second potential weakness I see in the story is the fact that Hanna’s reason for coming to the city, and her associated inner struggle, is introduced so late in the text. I find this problematic for three reasons:
First, while reading the story I felt that a lot of information was missing. Clearly Hanna felt forced to come to the city, but there was no mention of why she left her rural home, what she came to the city to do, or how she was financing her stay. The conversation with Beth’s mother also introduced aspects of Hanna’s character (e.g. association with witchcraft) that hadn’t been mentioned earlier. The net result is that I spent a lot of time wondering about these things instead of staying involved in the flow of the story.
Second, when Hanna’s history was finally revealed, I felt cheated as a reader because one of the viewpoint characters–the character whose head I was in–knew important, story-relevant information and HADN’T SHARED IT WITH ME! Hanna certainly must have thought about her home and her past when Beth’s mother asked if she was a witch, but none of those thoughts were passed on to the reader.
Third, Hanna’s inner transformation is a critical part of this story, but as it stands, the story’s beginning doesn’t reflect that. The first few pages make it sound like the story is only about Beth. Sure, there’s a little bit of hanging mystery, the question of why Hanna came to the city in the first place, but it’s not all that provocative. In my opinion, the story would be strengthened if a little bit more of Hanna’s past (not the whole shebang, just enough to let us know she’s got issues that must be dealt with during the story) were shared early on. This would also add a lot more depth to Hanna’s conversation with Beth’s mother.
A few other random comments:
(1) I was a bit taken aback when Beth’s mother revealed there was no “curse at birth”, that the seer was called on later. It’s a good plot twist, but for me a plot twist, although unexpected, must also seem logical in retrospect. Sometimes a little groundwork must be laid earlier in the story so that even while being surprised I slap my forehead and say “well of course. Why didn’t I realize that before?”
(The revelation that Beth knows all about the curse was, for me, an excellent plot twist. It never occurred to me that she might, but once I knew she did, it made perfect sense.)
Anyway, groundwork for this particular plot twist might include a little more emphasis on the landlady’s rumor-mongering, or a brief mention that several versions of the story are floating around town. Just enough to hint that the version I got on the first page might not be technically accurate.
(2) I loved the description of Tutor as being all angular and narrow like the letters he teachers. I also loved Beth’s thoughts on how his knowledge bits fill up her head but don’t make anything grow.
(3) I had a hard time believing that Tutor–a man of letters–would be so supersticious, insisting that Hanna must be magic. Their conversation is a critical part of the plot; I’m not recommending it be moved or even changed. But if you could give me just one scrap of information–about half a sentence–explaining why he might believe so easily in magic, then my suspension of disbelief wouldn’t have taken as much of a blow.
(4) Hanna follows Beth’s thoughts too easily when Beth wants Hanna to wish the Sad away with magic. Beth never made a verbal connection between wishes and magic. How does Hanna know that Beth is associating the two?
(5) Beth’s sudden shift to flailing motion when Hanna tells her she is leaving is poignant and touching. I feel that Beth’s motions could be described even more powerfully in the text, in order to match the inner turmoil that I perceive her to be feeling. You’ve shown me enough of Beth’s unique world that understand what she is struggling with, but still, I want to see Beth’s arms moving jerkily in all directions, feel her hands grasping frantically from object to object, looking for something to hang onto, seeking something that will soothe her. The scene already works well–I just think it could be heightened by another sentence or two of description and a few powerful verbs.
Whew. Ok, that turned into The Feedback Letter That Wouldn’t Die, but I hope some of the ideas in it are helpful. Again, I enjoyed the story a lot, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s going to keep lurking around in my thoughts at bedtime…
Bethan’s Garden
WOW! This is miles and miles beyond “The Purple Rabbit” (one of the first stories Sandra ever began writing). (Incidentally, as the mother of the author, I had the privilege of reading some of her earlier efforts.) I’m still processing it and will post more detailed comments later either here or email you. I love Hanna and Beth and their interactions.
One technical comment. I would advise you to include your name as author and a copyright notice in your posting. Things that are available on the Internet tend to be copied and pasted and shared and the URL and source sometimes gets separated from the text.