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

[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.