Blog 43

Hello everybody, today we have a piece from Luckie on Writing.com titled Ironic Despair.

Paragraph 1

Today was the day. He was going to do it this time. He never understood the phrase ‘enough is enough’ until today. He lies on his back in a soggy cardboard box, scanning his thoughts as he contemplated this kind of lifestyle. There was no way he was going to suffer any longer. His worries now consisted of thinking about whether or not he should take any of his belongings, what very little there were. He assumed he wouldn’t need them where he was going, any-damn-way. Exhaling loudly through his nose, he struggled to crawl out of the container. Blissful thoughts of no longer being poor, no more begging on the street, or scavenging a stranger’s barn for bits of grain the farm animals may have overlooked. (It was an anomaly if it did happen). No, today, he would bury his woes head-first into the Earth, throwing himself from a cliff and plummeting directly down through the gates of Hell. Hell was something that worried him before, but no longer

Tone is important in writing, sometimes vital when the characters, story or scene possess real definition. This paragraph has a story and a character it’s trying to convey, but the tone is off. The first few sentences read rushed, excited because of their repetition, someone hyping themselves up. But, that’s not the story the author’s telling here. This is a story about despair, and suicide, and despair is heavy. It’s isolation and hopelessness, it’s exhaustion. Tone is about making the reader feel these things, immersing them in it so they share the character’s emotions. And this is where the paragraph missteps; it’s energetic, nervous, and in so doing undermines our character’s misery. It becomes superficial.

I imagine the nervousness was intentional, the man is committing suicide after all. I just think it conflicts with the desired narrative. (The synopsis was something to the effect of a man finding hope.) Unfortunately, tone is also difficult to implement, so I don’t know how much of it I’ll be able to adjust.

Now for the prose itself.

The first three sentences are more or less a repetition of one another, the first two blatantly while the third is different but ultimately saying the same thing. Above I mentioned how this gives the prose a nervous connotation, but I also dislike it from a repetition and vagueness standpoint. These sentences dance around what ‘it’ is but don’t benefit from or actualize the ambiguity. It’s there but the author leverages it to no purpose, resulting in the sentences inclining more toward teasing than grim. (It’s not a significant inclination, but it’s still a subtle discord.) Finally the double ‘today’ echo slightly. So, my rather nuclear edits are as follows…

—He was done. Done suffering. Done living in this soggy cardboard box contemplating his life. It didn’t matter. He didn’t matter. So why subject himself to it.—

Like I said nuclear changes, these are unlikely to persist but maybe.

There are several things to discuss with this. The first, and most significant, is the deletion of the first three sentences. Their theme is still present in ‘he was done’ but it’s altered subtly. ‘Today was the day’ is a phrase that casts the attention forward (often with connotation of jubilation) it conveys movement and progress even if the author did not intend them. ‘Done’ is stagnation, finality, and those are better suited to our desired tone and our character’s disposition.

The second sentence, which was migrated and condensed from later in the paragraph, serves two main purposes; building the tone with ‘suffering’ and cultivating an aspect of wear. The intent and hope from the repeated use of ‘done’ is that through the character thinking in that repetition it gives the sense of someone who has lost and suffered over and over again, of having been ground down by life. The multiple ‘dones’ don’t echo unpleasantly because of alliteration, which I used again in ‘didn’t matter’.

For the third sentence I removed the ‘lying on his back’ mostly because it didn’t have a purpose and didn’t read particularly well. Whether he was lying face down, up, or sitting does nothing to affect the story, character, or atmosphere, which results in it being little more than filler. (The last comment is more about why I could remove it than why I did.) After that I reduced the ‘scanning his thoughts as he contemplated this kind of lifestyle’ to ‘contemplating his life’ because ‘scanning his thoughts’ is basically just saying ‘thinking/contemplating’ and ‘kind of lifestyle’ didn’t feel appropriate. A ‘lifestyle’ has a connotation of choice, poverty is rarely a choice.

Then we have the statement of ‘it didn’t matter’ and soft reiteration with ‘he didn’t matter’. These are pure additions with intent, the first sentence devalues his life, actions, and ability to affect. The second devalues him as an individual deserving of respect, love, or life. These sentences build the tone of hopelessness and despair, and internally validate his resolution to commit suicide. There’re also elements of isolation and of being rejected from society, further building the atmosphere and validating the decision.

The final sentence takes the place of ‘There was no way he was going to suffer any longer’ but follows through on my previous edits. More important is the tone shift. The original sentence is rebellious, defiant, and those are emotions with energy, which contradicts despair. The sentence ‘so why subject himself to it’ reaches the same destination by a different route. It’s tone is closer to surrender; the phrase ‘subject himself’ says that life isn’t just hard, its painful, that death would be easier and subtly emphasizes what the previous sentence said: that his death wouldn’t matter, wouldn’t hurt anyone or thing.

Here I would consider inserting a new paragraph. This section ends well here, with the next two sentences sharing a theme but also reading like an afterthought. ( His worries now consisted of thinking about whether or not he should take any of his belongings, what very little there were. He assumed he wouldn’t need them where he was going, any-damn-way) They should fit well as their own paragraph via something like…

—He was done. Done suffering. Done living in this soggy cardboard box contemplating his life. It didn’t matter. He didn’t matter. So why subject himself to it.

He just had to decide whether or not to take any of his belongings, what little there were. He doubted he would need them where we was going.—

For this section its mostly just trimming. The opening phrase ‘now consisted of thinking about’ is just a bloated way of saying ‘deciding’ or ‘considering’ and the additional fluff doesn’t provide real value for context, color, or emotion. I also excised ‘should’ because it’s evident in ‘whether or not’. Admittedly it converts to ‘to take’ (which is the same word count and arguably weaker words) but it avoids the double ‘he’ in close proximity, avoiding an unpleasant echo. I also deleted ‘very’ as unnecessary aggrandizement/multiplication and a little unpleasant to read because its clutters slightly. In general, words like ‘very’ (emphasizers) are unnecessary because the word their emphazising is already sufficient (as in this case) or there’s a better word. (I.E. ‘very small’ to ‘miniscule’.)

For the final sentence, ‘doubted’ replaces ‘assumed’ and ‘not’. Then I deleted the ‘any-damn-way’ as unnecessary and ultimately ineffective. It doesn’t add anything to the sentence as an exclamation or profanity. It’s meant to emphasize the rest of the sentence, but the sentence stands stronger and more evocatively on its own, reading more absolute while the ‘any-damn-way’ adds an element of flippancy or maybe rebellion or spite. The ‘spite’ could be an interesting element, but the story needs to be built around it a little more.

Here again I would start a new paragraph.

(Exhaling loudly through his nose, he struggled to crawl out of the container. Blissful thoughts of no longer being poor, no more begging on the street, or scavenging a stranger’s barn for bits of grain the farm animals may have overlooked. (It was an anomaly if it did happen). No, today, he would bury his woes head-first into the Earth, throwing himself from a cliff and plummeting directly down through the gates of Hell. Hell was something that worried him before, but no longer.)

For this opening phrase, something always read off to me but it took a while to grasp it fully. It doesn’t say anything. Why is he exhaling through his nose? Why is he exhaling loudly? (both ‘loudly’ as an individual adjective and the phrase as a whole suffer from this.) The character is performing an action that has no explanation and no effect upon the readers or the story. I tend to refer to these as ‘empty actions’ and it is something I struggle with in my own writing. Normally it results in boring sentences and saps interest; this specific phrase transgresses a little further in that it details something different from what readers would normally expect. This has the same effect as a lingering film shot: it tells the reader this is something important. This is a great rule to keep in mind and exploit, but the problem here is that the action isn’t important, at least not in the context we’ve presented. This leads to the phrase feeling simultaneously hollow and incomplete.

After that, I would delete ‘struggled to crawl’. It is a demeaning action and often naturally indicative of struggle because people don’t crawl unless they have to (or are playing). So ‘struggled to’ is unnecessary from that regard and thus results in a more cluttering effect. Next, I would consider swapping ‘the container’ to ‘his box’. ‘His’ because it’s more personal and I think reads better. ‘Box’ because ‘container’ sounds more academic (which boasts elements of authority, power, and control, which do not fit our narrative) but also because it reads more like a plastic Rubbermaid container to me than a cardboard box. (A reader’s predisposition can be a useful tool, but it also can be deleterious.) I also can’t decide whether to change ‘out of’ to ‘from’ or not.

The next sentence is incomplete due to an absent verb and subject. (Which somewhat amusingly means it’s lacking everything it needs to be a sentence.) That aside this sentence is somewhat impotent; the scenarios the author provides are bad but the wording lacks bite. The sentence coasts on poverty being undesirable, on begging being demeaning, and scavenging being a bit of both. The author doesn’t add anything to this, nothing to make the readers feel pain or discomfort, nothing to make them share the character’s despair. Thus this sentence becomes more or less the equivalent of knowing 2+2=4. (That comes across more derogatory than I intend or like, but it’s an effective simile. People telling you something basic or common knowledge isn’t exciting or interesting until you add an external element.)

Moving on in this sentence, there’s mostly just cutting. ‘Stranger’ can go as an irrelevant distinction. I would also delete ‘bits of’ since that only serves to imply scarcity, which is both understood from the context of ‘overlooked’ and the subsequent sentence. We can delete ‘farm’ since ‘barn’ and ‘animals’ in conjunction serves to convey that, and finally ‘may have’ is unnecessary. Whether they overlooked the grain or not, he would still be scavenging here.

—Blissful thoughts of no longer being poor filled him, or no more begging, no more scavenging barns or waste bins for food the animals overlooked.—

I’m not entirely pleased with these changes, ‘filled’ tends to read lackluster to me and I didn’t add much to increase the sentence’s bite, mostly just ‘waste bins’. The phrase ’filled him’ is just to provide a verb and subject. I cut ‘on the street’ as where one begs shouldn’t really matter in this context. I switched to ‘food’ from ‘grain’ because it allowed me to include the ‘waste bin’ in such a way that ‘animals’ could refer to both farm animals and city animals. Adding ‘waste bin’ subtly increases the filth, indignity, and desperation of his situation. This helps give the sentence a little more bite. More would still serve the sentence good, but I don’t want to spend half-an-hour conceiving of a proper example so we’ll just scoot along.

For the next sentence (It was an anomaly if it did happen) I disagree with its theory. What the sentence says is that he’s searched many barns but has yet to find any leftover grain (the ‘if it did happen’.) I struggle with this because if you preform multiple searches without luck, I would assume you would begin looking for different avenues, like restaurant trash. You could argue desperation, but I say just delete ‘if it did happen’ to reduce the success from ‘never’ to ‘rare’. I would also consider deleting it outright. The original sentence already implies little luck and you can emphasize that by switching ‘food’ to ‘scraps’.

For the next sentence I have little to adjust. I would delete the ‘to’ from ‘into’ because I think it reads better. Then ‘down’ as unnecessary (both ‘hell’ and ‘plummeting’ carry heavy connotations of ‘down’) and some combination of ‘plummeting’ or ‘directly’. We don’t need both of them.

For the final sentence, just a simple rewording can reduce it substantially.

—Hell worried him once, but not anymore. —

OR

—Hell used to worry him, but not anymore. —

Mostly this just converts to active and deletes the ‘something that’ as inefficient and unnecessary. As for which of the two to use, dealers choice.

That’s it for this paragraph, so all my edits.

—He was done. Done suffering. Done living in this soggy cardboard box contemplating his life. It didn’t matter. He didn’t matter. So why subject himself to it.

He just had to decide whether to take any of his belongings, what little there were. He doubted he would need them where he was going.

Exhaling loudly through his nose, he crawled from his box. Blissful thoughts of no longer being poor filled him, no more begging, no more scavenging barns or waste bins for scraps the animals overlooked. No, today, he would bury his woes head-first in the Earth, throw himself off a cliff and directly through the gates of Hell. Hell used to worry him, but not anymore.—

This remains a little rough. The ‘he just’ at the start of the second paragraph doesn’t read sufficiently depressed and so dispels some of the first paragraph’s grimness. The ‘he’ might also echo slightly with the ‘he’ at the start of the first paragraph. I also was unable to resolve all my qualms with the third paragraph, but they’re easily fixed with time and effort. Finally, the two ‘hell’ in succession might pose an issue, but I don’t think so.

That’ll be all for today.

If you like what you’ve read here, consider checking out the rest of the story or some of the author’s other works. https://www.writing.com/main/portfolio/view/luckieschamroc

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