Sunday, June 14, 2009

Lilly

Lilly said:
Shuddering sensation raced up Alinna’s arms and along her scalp. Her L’inar nerve lines forced her skin up into narrow bands and ridges along her neck and hairline, and down her back under her flight suit as her excitement turned quickly into concern and fear. She was going down, her small ship hurtling toward the ground at an ever increasing rate. Caught in the downdraft of an out-of-control human airjet, her tiny spy ship was as doomed as the human craft that had crashed to the ground in front of her moments ago.


You have reaction before action here, and that's sort of backwards. See what I mean? She's got this physical reaction, and then we find why-- she's crashing. The problem with this is that it makes her come across as a sort of unthinking physical being, reacting automatically without any sense of the stimulus.

I would say try and rewrite this with the action as the driver of the paragraph-- in the first sentence, maybe. I get the idea from the end that maybe you were already narrating a battle or something, as apparently another craft had already crashed, so it could be you're doing this in a linear, action-first narrative and I'm just seeing the reaction part. But I can only see what's here, and what I'm seeing is that the time sequence, the cause-effect, the stimulus-response is messed up. Think about the topic (first) sentence as the action, and try that. Let's just see it reversed:

She was going down, her small ship hurtling toward the ground at an ever increasing rate. Caught in the downdraft of an out-of-control human airjet, her tiny spy ship was as doomed as the human craft that had crashed to the ground in front of her moments ago. Shuddering sensation raced up Alinna’s arms and along her scalp. Her L’inar nerve lines forced her skin up into narrow bands and ridges along her neck and hairline, and down her back under her flight suit as her excitement turned quickly into concern and fear.

See what you think. Action before reaction-- put us in the person, and she's going to experience the action before she reacts. Don't be outside watching the person react. If we're in her, we perceive the action/event, and then feel her reaction.

Shuddering sensation raced up Alinna’s arms and along her scalp. Her L’inar nerve lines forced her skin up into narrow bands and ridges along her neck and hairline, and down her back under her flight suit as her excitement turned quickly into concern and fear.

Too much here-- choose which sentence you want to keep, and trim. What is really important? The nerve lines (tells us she's more than human), flight suit. Fear. What else?

The event-- the spy ship plunging to the ground-- should inspire fear and dread in the reader. You don't need to pound home the sensations of the character. There's nothing wrong with a little perception from the character, but don't overdo. The real impressive thing is to make the READER feel the thrills and chills. So if you're going to really get descriptive, describe the event/action in a way that makes the reader react. Don't spend too much time describing how the character feels-- let the reader feel it. Narrate the action more than the perception. This is a terrific action moment, so exploit it.

A

4 comments:

Lilly Cain said...

Thanks Alicia!

You're quite right of course - I have this first paragraph backwards. AS I read on into my story all the action is arriving, but her sensations need to filter into it rather than preceed it! Thanks for the lightbulb moment!

Lilly

Leona said...

The right side of her face was melted off. Her skin hung in reddish-orange stringy pieces from the side of her nose and around the eye socket. The flesh was blackened where it wasn’t raw and bloody. The precision of the line splitting her face almost in half was too perfect to be an accident. The perfection of the left side only served as a gruesome reminder of the cruelty and malice that had to be behind the maiming.
There was very little blood on the girl’s clothing but the skin hanging from the jaw bone had melted into the rich heavy fabric of the dark blue dress and had pulled as her head had lolled, making a squishy sound that caused Savannah’s stomach to roll.
She heard Daniel-Jirel’s repeated no’s as he looked at Jenna’s face. She could also feel the guilt rolling off of him in waves. He rolled her partially over, holding his breath as he turned her to check for more wounds.
The body was cold; telling him there was no chance to save the baby that rounded Jenna’s body. He held back his despair by looking around to see if he could find clues as to who had done such a despicable thing. He was afraid he knew but hoped he was wrong. He was fairly certain the damage to her face had been done by an optical resonator crystal laser.

I'm not sure what's considered a snippet, but this is a short excerpt from this scene.

Thanks for all you do to help us writers do more for our craft.

Leona Bushman
Rebellion on Piza 7
http://leonabushman.com/Welcome.html

Edittorrent said...

Four sentences tops, please. You can choose which four, or I will choose the ones which interest me the most (that is, that I want to change the most).

Your choice, Leona! :)

Alicia

p.s. And it might be a while before I get to it. Miles to go before I sleep and all that.

Leona said...

Please do the ones that make you itch to fix :) THANKS!