Believe - Prologue

[milkweeds00]

This is the prologue of a story I've tentatively titled "Believe." Please read it and comment, even if only to say you read it. Thanks.

BELIEVE - PROLOGUE

“Do you have it?”
            “Yep.”

“Radical. Come on, put it in before she gets here.”

Steve handed the piece of chalk to Danny. Danny rushed up to the front

Comments

[crispy47]

I'm on my way out the door, but I just printed this. I'll have some comments for you tomorrow.

[milkweeds00]

Great, looking forward to it.

[crispy47]

So I wrote this a long time ago (when I said I was going to), but lj hasn't been letting me comment. Hopefully it will work this time....

First, I don't often like stories about children. Don't ask me why, I just don't. But I did like this. Contra Michelle, I thought the presence of a distant adult narrator in the last graph was really valuable, and I think you could do with a little (not a lot) more of it.

The narratorial voice is I think one of three big challenges you've put before yourself. You often use voice more in harmony with the child characters themselves (e.g. "She was the best teacher in the fourth grade and every kid knew it"; "Grandmommy"). The difficulty here is that it's not an entirely childish voice-in some ways it's like an adult speaking to a child-and it can drift into a sort of agelessness that I don't think helps the story (e.g. "The class held its collective breath"). I think the child-sympathetic voice needs to be maintained better. It shouldn't be hard

[crispy47]

Here are the notes I took in the margins of the print-out.

Steve "flashed an oafish grin"-cliché
Danny "wondered if [Lindsey's hand] was going to fall off"-out of character
"'...,' Lindsey stated"-perfect verb
"Can anyone tell me how to tell when to celebrate...?"-the two tells tripped me up a little
"Really Stephen? How interesting."-how interesting was a bit much for me
"a strident but lilting tone"-it took too much effort to imagine what that would sound like
"The class held its collective breath"-collectiveSteve is "staring off into space at what only he knew, seemingly lost to the world"-too long, too "knowing," since it might be taken as Danny's observation; the idiom "at what only he knew" is used awkwardly

[milkweeds00]

Thanks for the excellent, in-depth comments, as always

[crispy47]

Hehe. I think the adult-Danny narrator is a good justification for some of what I pointed out. It's the sort of thing where, if all goes well, the reader gets mildly annoyed or distracted by those out-of-place elements that he perceives as sloppiness on your part, and then realizes later on that you've been playing him like a fiddle all along. If all goes well. And then you've also got to somehow not sacrifice the readability and overall goodness of the story in order to set that up.

I'm confident you'll get the gear-and-funnel bit. It's so easy to get sucked into your own little invented system of metaphysical symbolism when you do stuff like that. Fortunately, in my experience anyway, if you let it sit for a while then when you come back to it the stuff that doesn't work sticks out like a sore thumb.