#35 Foresight

Hello everybody, today we have a piece from Myles Abroad on Writing.com. It is titled Foresight, and will no doubt include floating glass spheres of mystical origin.

Paragraph 1

Oven-like heat saturated each breath. My eyes fluttered open, unease nagging until Mac’s steady, sleeping rhythm soothed me. Dawn light pooled shadows on his gaunt, worry-lined face as I ran a chipped fingernail along his stubbled jawline. A tight smile thinned my lips. It took a strong man to handle me, a stubborn, volatile woman, he’d say. Gifted, I’d say. Easing from bed, I crossed the worn floorboards and opened the curtains. My breath caught. Three floors below, a thick, pristine blanket of snow covered the street…

This is a well written paragraph and an example of good technical writing. It’s a little hard to explain but inspect the second sentence, look at the words that comprise it, count them, specifically how many have actual meaning and their ratio to words that don’t. (What I mean by this is the difference between words like ‘of/to/the’ {I.E glue words] and adjectives, verbs, and nouns, the words that provide a sentence with its meat, the words that tell the story.) I count eleven-to-two, and those two are debatable. Why does this matter? Because glue words tend to say nothing, they’re included just to fill in the gaps between what the sentence is actually saying, they’re fluff, fat, and almost universally uninteresting. In practice, this means a sentence with high glue-word density tends to feel shallow because you’re using a lot of words to say very little. In contrast, prose with low glue word density tends to be richer, and, with effort, convey more information or story. This does have the effect of making your prose dense, which can be intimidating to some readers, and will still need to be balanced for rhythm, but will provide a more rewarding reading experience. (This also introduces the topic of more information/description vs minimalism; obviously just adding a string of adjectives and meaningless verbs is not strong writing.)

Now for the critique. The first point I would raise is that despite the quality of prose and amount of verbs/adjective, there’s no real indication of a story. There’s no conflict, no desire, no mystery or question presented to the reader, nothing to propel them or the story forward, only the quality of the prose. This is not an aggressive criticism, but it is important both on the macro and micro scale. The author doesn’t present the readers with a story, and so doesn’t incentivize them to read on. Boring stories are books where the reader is never given something to desire

At last, we reach the technical critique, of which I have three. The first is for the first sentence, which feels incomplete. We don’t know who’s breathing, or why this breathing and its heat matters. The breathing interacts with nothing and effects no change, leaving it feeling random. My second comment concerns the phrase ‘and opened the curtains’, I would swap ‘open’ for ‘parted’. It successfully conveys the same action, but ‘parted’ provides more information, subtly describing the style of curtains and how she opens them, and the author already used ‘open’ above. The two ‘opens’ don’t echo, but word variety remains beneficial. I finally I set your attentions upon the phrase ‘blanket of snow covered the street’, specifically ‘blanket’, ‘covered’ and a wee bit of ‘thick’. The proper verb can often provide as much description, or more, than an adjective. Often times when the adjective and verb are siblings (as in this situation) you can simply rely on the verb and it will convey the same information. Here this takes the shape of —Three floors below, pristine snow blanketed the street…— Blankets are generally thick, so using them as a verb simultaneously conveys the adjective of ‘thick’, which in turn conveys the verb of ‘covered’ because that’s what a heavy snowfall does. This change might affect the rhythm of the prose, but the answer for that is not to revert to the inefficiency, but to replace it with new, relevant information. For now, we’ll combine and test the rhythm.

— Oven-like heat saturated each breath. My eyes fluttered open, unease nagging until Mac’s steady, sleeping rhythm soothed me. Dawn light pooled shadows on his gaunt, worry-lined face as I ran a chipped fingernail along his stubbled jawline. A tight smile thinned my lips. It took a strong man to handle me, a stubborn, volatile woman, he’d say. Gifted, I’d say. Easing from bed, I crossed the worn floorboards and parted the curtains. My breath caught. Three floors below, pristine snow blanketed the street…

The rhythm reads pretty good with only one suspect area in the ‘as I ran’, which may read just a little too fast. There is also another efficiency change that I recently discovered, centered on the ‘along’ which is necessitated by the sentence structure. Something like—…as I stroked his stubbled jawline with a cracked fingernail.— But this puts the two ‘his’ in close proximity so they echo. At that point it’s up to you to select your particular poison, but I still like ‘stroked’ over ‘ran’, itis more intimate, less commonplace, and slower/harder, which ameliorate that qualm I had with the rhythm going to fast around ‘as I ran’. You could also consider ‘traced’, which echoes less with the subsequent ED words because it’s softer’ while retaining the benefits of ‘stroked’.

One could also make an argument for deleting ‘jawline’ as ‘stubble’ almost always refers to a beard, but again I don’t think that provides any particular value. ‘Jawline’ is a strong word and detracts little from the sentence or rhythm. Moving on…

Paragraph 2,3&4 (combined for their brevity.)

Something’s wrong.

An eerie tingle climbed my spine. Tick-tick-tick began to beat in my head, like a clock counting down. 

Run, Dee!

There’s still very little to comment on in these paragraphs, just the second paragraph. For here, I would argue that the simile of ‘like a clock counting down’ is unnecessary since rhythmic ticking is widely indicative of it. This messes with the rhythm of the second sentence, making it too short, but I believe we can combine it seamlessly with the first and thus alleviate that issue. — An eerie tingle climbed my spine and a tick-tick-tick began to beat in my head.—

Unfortunately, this is serviceable but not particularly pleasant. One element of this is that by marrying the two sentences, we add a need for them to connect, a desire for the first part to build into the second that isn’t satisfied. Another reason it’s not pleasant is that the word choice is drabber here then in the first paragraph, more generic and less energetic. (Also the more I reread the sentence, the more value ‘clock counting down’ manifests. The ‘counting down’ aspect is vital as a vessel of tension because it paints this sentence in ominous light, and as a transition because that ramping tension is a means of conveying ‘pressure to act’ to the reader, which is then voiced in the ensuing dialogue. I still just struggle with the repetition.) With all these thoughts expressed, what I have concocted is —An eerie tingle slithered up my spine, taking root in my skull where it became a heavy tick-tick-tick, like a clock counting down.—

You’ll notice I reverted all my previous changes; I decided that tension and transition provided more value than the repetition cost. I also added a significant number of words and left the sentences combined (This last part because I felt it improved the aspect of building tension: it gives pacing and a sense of gradual increase.) Other than that, I swapped for more evocative verbs and nouns. I chose ‘slithered up’ over ‘climbed’ because snakes are often disliked, and ‘slithering’ is a more defined action than climbing, giving the readers more to grasp onto and imagine, feel in their heads. I chose ‘skull’ over ‘head’ because ‘skull’ is distinctly more gothic, which makes it more distinctive than ‘head’ (as that has no particular connotation) and darker (building into the tension.) The ‘where it became’ is just a transition phrase that connects the initial shiver with the eventual ticking. I added the ‘heavy’ because it makes the ticking more weighty (who’da thunk?) but what that does is makes the reader think of large hollow spaces, like in cathedrals or universities, full of cold stone and dark nooks, all of which increase the ominous factor. This is the same trick as what the author did with ‘counting down’, it uses a sound most readers will be familiar with to cultivate and borrow a desired emotion, and thus enrich a scene with minimal effort and more evocatively than if the author had spelled out their desire, I.E. telling.

Whether my outlandish additions and rewrite benefited the paragraph is up to your, and the author’s austere judgement. Here is the compilation of my villainy, limited as it is.

— Oven-like heat saturated each breath. My eyes fluttered open, unease nagging until Mac’s steady, sleeping rhythm soothed me. Dawn light pooled shadows on his gaunt, worry-lined face as I ran a chipped fingernail along his stubbled jawline. A tight smile thinned my lips. It took a strong man to handle me, a stubborn, volatile woman, he’d say. Gifted, I’d say. Easing from bed, I crossed the worn floorboards and parted the curtains. My breath caught. Three floors below, pristine snow blanketed the street…

Something’s wrong.

An eerie tingle slithered up my spine, taking root in my skull where it became a heavy tick-tick-tick, like a clock counting down.

Run, Dee!—

(The sentences not-italicized are to indicate internal dialogue/thoughts. They are italicized in the original file, but I’ve had to invert that setup here.)

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