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]

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.

Then there are the more mature passages. So far these seem to be limited to descriptions of mental states. You have two choices here. One is to get out of the child-voice (not the best term, since it's not totally childish) altogether, which I don't think would be unpleasantly abrupt as long as you're thoughtful about how you do it. The other is to stay in voice, or even go deeper into the childish bit.

Neither will be that easy. In either case, the second of the three challenges I have in mind is stuff like the imagery in the "funnel" graph and in the last one about the gears in our minds. I see what you're going for, but I could see myself not seeing it, as well. In my experience, this kind of stuff never comes out right the first time anyway. It's hard to come up with nice-sounding, non-pretentious, easily intelligible images about our mental apparatus-(maybe) especially in a story about children. Maybe you're thinking you can use children to see it in a less pretentious, more descriptive way. I think it's possible, but you also have to have them produce something articulate. But I do like what you're doing in both these places, and I don't think it'll take any kind of major structural overhauls or anything to make it work.

The third thing is the children themselves. Writing children is a bitch, imho. I have to say, you do a good job here-I love the kids all craning their necks to look at Steve, and especially Lindsey "stating" her answer. The teacher is mostly well characterized as well. But Danny doesn't entirely cohere as a child. E.g., He stares Steve while they're in class instead of just laughing like everyone else. Just a sentence about how Danny was a pretty sensitive kid or something like that would have helped me out a lot there. (Speaking of which, what's up with Steve's reaction about where his parents are? Is he just supposed to be embarrassed that he doesn't know, or does he have some idea they're dead? When I read it for the first time, I sort of assumed that something bad had happened to them and Steve didn't want to talk about it.) Danny sometimes seems a shade too mature. E.g., wondering if Lindsey's hand "was going to fall off" is a bit too clever.

About the reactions to the deaths. I didn't buy Granny rushing off to go have a good cry with ten-year-old Danny standing in the doorway. Steve's reaction seemed a bit textbook at first, but the moment when he and Danny became best friends justified that for me. It was Danny's reaction to Steve, though-the whole looking-into-his-eyes bit-that I think needs real attention. Danny is just way too mature here. Besides that, can you really tell that much about what someone's thinking by looking into their eyes? Of course Danny needs to have that insight (though maybe not consciously?), and he and Steve need to bond over it, but you can and should use a more realistic and meaningful medium than eye contact.

(continued)

[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"-collective
Steve 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
The teacher's delivery of the "urgent" note to Steve doesn't seem very teacherly
"Well, that's kinda awesome." "Yeah."-Classic Robert. Funny.
"Danny remembered that when he first heard this ..."-why is he "remembering"? Anyway, this graph needs a little work.
"Danny then backed out of the room, slunk down on the mild, blue wall-to-wall carpeting..."-change to "Danny backed out of the room, sank down on the mild-blue carpet..." (no "then"; "slunk" doesn't mean what you think it does; no replace comma with hyphen in "mild, blue"; replace "carpeting" with "carpet" and kill "wall-to-wall," since most carpet is wall-to-wall)
"Danny loudly cleared his throat"-too mature?

[milkweeds00]

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

I am planning on slowly revealing that the narrator is an adult Danny, which I hope will go a bit towards explaining away Danny seeming to be a bit more adult in the situations; at key moments I think his older self, the narrator, is kind of mixing up his recollection of the event and how he actually acted. I'm going for a sort of distant, Nick Carraway-ish observer attitude in Danny, but I'll keep in mind not to make him seem too adult as I continue with the story.

Though I unfortunately may not be working on this much for at least the next week; there's one more week before the school year's over and taking care of paperwork for my students may be a little hectic. I've also just begun summer classes for grad school, so that's gonna eat up time too. Sigh. But once I finish this story I will definitely post it and then begin to revise, and I know your comments are going to be of incredible use. I'm especially looking forward to revisions on the funnel and gear imagery stuff, which I know is not working at the level I want it to. I hope I can get it there in revisions. Thanks again for your time and thoughts.

[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.