Feedback Challenge response
From
wojelah , for the Feedback Challenge at
iamtheenemy 's: feedback on four works by
szm , who writes mostly Torchwood. I've only dabbled in Torchwood, because it's been difficult for me to find pieces that really ring true to my sense of the characters (not a judgement on the fic, just a statement of preference). Lucky for me, there's some lovely stuff here.
First, the short:
Conversations With the Dead: PG, Lisa visits Jack while he's on the Valiant. I went into this fic interested, but uncertain, and it was well worth the venture. There's very clearly a little bit of the unhinged about Jack, given Saxon's perpetual sadism, and that, for me is what made this work.
szm does a very nice job of drawing Jack's mental state, such that the idea of a spectre - and conversations with same - just seem like more of the usual. Then the Master brings up Ianto, and the bluntness of his line sets us up well for accepting Lisa and her geas as a very real thing indeed. The only thing that jarred me just a little were the bunny ears, which on first read seemed out of... tone? for the piece. On re-read, they didn't feel as jarring, fading instead into the larger picture as part of the insanity. Overall, a very subtle picture of Jack's desperately attempting to cope with a world gone so, so wrong, and the irony that it takes a ghost to drag him back to reality.
When You Run and After She's Gone: G, paired drabbles, focused on Suzie and the team. Confession: I love drabbles, and the art of making 100 words do the job of many, many more. These two drabbles are a perfect example - the first one is a conversation between Jack and Suzie, and the language is sharp and clear and sounds like them. The second is Jack's observations on his team - around a sentence each - and really does neatly encapsulate them. Just two perfectly clear snapshots of the characters.
And now, the long:
The Matron and Torchwood: G, Joan Redfern, after everything's over.
Another confession: I think Joan's a wonderful character - strong, resilient, a teeeeeeeeeeeny bit angsty, with a good head on her shoulders. This piece captures all of that.
Let me start with what I love most: The voice
szm uses for Joan just -sounds- like her: clear, declarative sentences, with the occasional full stop that makes the reader pause and process, and realize Joan's feeling more than she's saying. Consider: She found herself as spokesperson. At first no-one wanted to listen to her, a hysterical woman. But soon they had no choice as she was the only one with anything like a coherent story.
Even if it wasn’t entirely true.
and
David just smiled and said ‘thank you’, and really he had a very pretty smile. Joan found herself wanting to tell him secrets, all her secrets. She frowned. That wasn’t right.
and The man shrugged, Joan saw a brief flash of something unnameable in his face. “I don’t believe he means to hurt us,” he said, suddenly unable to meet Joan’s eyes.
“But he can’t help it,” she continued for him. “He’s just so much… bigger than us. Like a boy playing with ants.”
(For the record, that last simile is just dead-on lovely.)
Also fantastic is the flow of events: Joan Redfern working for Torchwood is not instantly a logical leap I'm primed to buy without question. Fortunately, szm's prose is so very matter-of-fact, and the sequence of events so smoothly reasoned, that I never get thrown. If you start me out like this...
It was every bit as chaotic as she had expected. Police, army, and parents milling around looking for explanations, demanding them in most cases. She wished the headmaster was still here. Most of the teachers were next to useless and the boys were all terrified. It was far more than they should have to deal with.
She found herself as spokesperson.
... then it seems perfectly natural she'd come to Torchwood's attention, and their methods are well-known, so I'm not surprised at the drugging. Moreover, the reader's gently primed with Joan's careful poise at the beginning, so her slightly defeated revelations at the end are completely rational.
The OC is well-drawn, fleshed out with just enough detail to give me a clear picture, without so much information that it distracts, and I love how grudgingly sympathetic the unrevealed man has become by the end of the piece: he drugged Joan, and that hardly predisposes me to affection, but szm teases out the pieces of Jack without using his name so gently that, by the end, it's the only logical conclusion.
Plus, who wouldn't love the idea of Matron Redfern trying to keep that lot in line?
Unforgivable Sinner: G/PG, where Lucy winds up in Torchwood custody after everything.
Crazy is hard to write. It's very, very easy to devolve into pounding the audience with overwrought cliches or simply trying to shock and appall your readers into submission. As with the last story,
szm comes up with an entirely plausible scenario - Lucy Saxon ending up in custody in the Hub after (to the public) the unprovoked murder of her husband.
I love the style here - very spartan, focused really on physical description of situation and leavened with dialogue, but with minimal outlining of emotional state.
szm lets the characters speak for themselves and the readers draw their own conclusions, and it works very, very well. See, for example:
Jack smiled to himself. “Not just that, I don’t know what to do. I keep trying to think what the Doctor would do, but he’s not here.”
Ianto didn’t say anything. They sat in silence.
“I need to call Kathy Swanson, don’t I?” asked Jack eventually, letting go of Ianto’s hand and sitting back.
Running through this very matter-of-fact style is Lucy Saxon: described as dirty, untidy against the steel and chrome of the Hub and the careful facades of Ianto and Jack. It's a great contrast, and why dialogue like this...
“It’s okay,” she replied graciously. “You’re very pretty.”
“Do you need some water for your plant?” he asked nodding his head toward a mostly dead fern on top of the bookcase.
“Oh no,” she said, looking shocked. “I like it like this. Pretty dead thing. Like you.”
... catches both Ianto -and- the reader off-guard. It also means that the very last line of the fic, coming hard on the heels of what seems like a tidy resolution to Jack/Ianto, is just unnerving.
As for Jack and Ianto themselves... everything in their conversation is elliptical, beating around the shippy bush, using Lucy, and Lisa, and Detective Swanson as proxies for the conversations they need to have but probably won't. And yet, those topics work as proxies, and the conversations are had, if not in so many words, and they resolve gently into Jack/Ianto in some great lines of dialogue in an entirely believable manner.
All in all, a surprising scenario, carried out by not carrying things too far.
wojelah , for the Feedback Challenge at
iamtheenemy 's: feedback on four works by
szm , who writes mostly Torchwood. I've only dabbled in Torchwood, because it's been difficult for me to find pieces that really ring true to my sense of the characters (not a judgement on the fic, just a statement of preference). Lucky for me, there's some lovely stuff here.
First, the short:
Conversations With the Dead: PG, Lisa visits Jack while he's on the Valiant. I went into this fic interested, but uncertain, and it was well worth the venture. There's very clearly a little bit of the unhinged about Jack, given Saxon's perpetual sadism, and that, for me is what made this work.
szm does a very nice job of drawing Jack's mental state, such that the idea of a spectre - and conversations with same - just seem like more of the usual. Then the Master brings up Ianto, and the bluntness of his line sets us up well for accepting Lisa and her geas as a very real thing indeed. The only thing that jarred me just a little were the bunny ears, which on first read seemed out of... tone? for the piece. On re-read, they didn't feel as jarring, fading instead into the larger picture as part of the insanity. Overall, a very subtle picture of Jack's desperately attempting to cope with a world gone so, so wrong, and the irony that it takes a ghost to drag him back to reality.
When You Run and After She's Gone: G, paired drabbles, focused on Suzie and the team. Confession: I love drabbles, and the art of making 100 words do the job of many, many more. These two drabbles are a perfect example - the first one is a conversation between Jack and Suzie, and the language is sharp and clear and sounds like them. The second is Jack's observations on his team - around a sentence each - and really does neatly encapsulate them. Just two perfectly clear snapshots of the characters.
And now, the long:
The Matron and Torchwood: G, Joan Redfern, after everything's over.
Another confession: I think Joan's a wonderful character - strong, resilient, a teeeeeeeeeeeny bit angsty, with a good head on her shoulders. This piece captures all of that.
Let me start with what I love most: The voice
szm uses for Joan just -sounds- like her: clear, declarative sentences, with the occasional full stop that makes the reader pause and process, and realize Joan's feeling more than she's saying. Consider: She found herself as spokesperson. At first no-one wanted to listen to her, a hysterical woman. But soon they had no choice as she was the only one with anything like a coherent story.
Even if it wasn’t entirely true.
and
David just smiled and said ‘thank you’, and really he had a very pretty smile. Joan found herself wanting to tell him secrets, all her secrets. She frowned. That wasn’t right.
and The man shrugged, Joan saw a brief flash of something unnameable in his face. “I don’t believe he means to hurt us,” he said, suddenly unable to meet Joan’s eyes.
“But he can’t help it,” she continued for him. “He’s just so much… bigger than us. Like a boy playing with ants.”
(For the record, that last simile is just dead-on lovely.)
Also fantastic is the flow of events: Joan Redfern working for Torchwood is not instantly a logical leap I'm primed to buy without question. Fortunately, szm's prose is so very matter-of-fact, and the sequence of events so smoothly reasoned, that I never get thrown. If you start me out like this...
It was every bit as chaotic as she had expected. Police, army, and parents milling around looking for explanations, demanding them in most cases. She wished the headmaster was still here. Most of the teachers were next to useless and the boys were all terrified. It was far more than they should have to deal with.
She found herself as spokesperson.
... then it seems perfectly natural she'd come to Torchwood's attention, and their methods are well-known, so I'm not surprised at the drugging. Moreover, the reader's gently primed with Joan's careful poise at the beginning, so her slightly defeated revelations at the end are completely rational.
The OC is well-drawn, fleshed out with just enough detail to give me a clear picture, without so much information that it distracts, and I love how grudgingly sympathetic the unrevealed man has become by the end of the piece: he drugged Joan, and that hardly predisposes me to affection, but szm teases out the pieces of Jack without using his name so gently that, by the end, it's the only logical conclusion.
Plus, who wouldn't love the idea of Matron Redfern trying to keep that lot in line?
Unforgivable Sinner: G/PG, where Lucy winds up in Torchwood custody after everything.
Crazy is hard to write. It's very, very easy to devolve into pounding the audience with overwrought cliches or simply trying to shock and appall your readers into submission. As with the last story,
szm comes up with an entirely plausible scenario - Lucy Saxon ending up in custody in the Hub after (to the public) the unprovoked murder of her husband.
I love the style here - very spartan, focused really on physical description of situation and leavened with dialogue, but with minimal outlining of emotional state.
szm lets the characters speak for themselves and the readers draw their own conclusions, and it works very, very well. See, for example:
Jack smiled to himself. “Not just that, I don’t know what to do. I keep trying to think what the Doctor would do, but he’s not here.”
Ianto didn’t say anything. They sat in silence.
“I need to call Kathy Swanson, don’t I?” asked Jack eventually, letting go of Ianto’s hand and sitting back.
Running through this very matter-of-fact style is Lucy Saxon: described as dirty, untidy against the steel and chrome of the Hub and the careful facades of Ianto and Jack. It's a great contrast, and why dialogue like this...
“It’s okay,” she replied graciously. “You’re very pretty.”
“Do you need some water for your plant?” he asked nodding his head toward a mostly dead fern on top of the bookcase.
“Oh no,” she said, looking shocked. “I like it like this. Pretty dead thing. Like you.”
... catches both Ianto -and- the reader off-guard. It also means that the very last line of the fic, coming hard on the heels of what seems like a tidy resolution to Jack/Ianto, is just unnerving.
As for Jack and Ianto themselves... everything in their conversation is elliptical, beating around the shippy bush, using Lucy, and Lisa, and Detective Swanson as proxies for the conversations they need to have but probably won't. And yet, those topics work as proxies, and the conversations are had, if not in so many words, and they resolve gently into Jack/Ianto in some great lines of dialogue in an entirely believable manner.
All in all, a surprising scenario, carried out by not carrying things too far.