Charity Marie Blogs!

A Review of a Review & Thoughts on Short Stories

I've been doing this writing thing now for two decades. I started when I was 14. Teachers told me I was talented so I kept writing. I fell in love with writing, so I kept writing. My work got published, so I kept writing. Life got busy, but I kept writing. I went to college and kept writing. My work really started getting published in the last ten years and I won an award (which is still hard for me to believe). I had my daughter and kept writing. I saw trauma and grief and experienced horrible things, but kept writing. Now, after twenty years, I'm still writing and have no desire to ever stop. It's been the most constant thing in my life through all those years. You'd think I'd have mastered it somehow, right? Nope.

Am I better than I was at the start? Absolutely! Is there still room for improvement? Without a doubt. Do my drafts still suck? Oh so much! But they're also much better too. My revising is better too. I'm better at shaping stories, at detailing them, at dialogue and structure, at plot and theme, and all the other many things that make a story great. I'm better at understanding the craft and how stories work. But there's still room to grow. So in light of that, I thought it might be helpful to share a review I received this morning and some of my thoughts about it. Have you ever struggled to understand a review, and to accept what is offered? Since it's a public review and we're all here to learn, I'm sure he (or she) won't mind. But I had to pay tribute to the in-depth review I was given and use it as a tool to help others.

You're a good writer and this is a well-crafted piece.
This, was for me, an amazing compliment. A perfect stranger, right off the bat, recognized my skill. Whoa, I'm blown away. Even now, having someone say that just tickles me to pieces! But, everything that comes afterward calls this statement into question. Regardless, I will take the compliment at face value because I want to see how I can possibly improve the story. And I learned a lot from the review, regardless. Sometimes, even if there's a lot wrong with a story, it can still be well-crafted, AND you can still be considered by others as a good writer. Interesting how a thing can be both sides of a thing? How a piece can be good but still need a lot of work?

I had the feeling, in the opening paragraphs, that you may be paying too much attention to the maxim "Show, don't tell." Writers everywhere quote that bit of wisdom as though it's settled science, and most attempt to slavishly follow it in some form. I can state categorically that this "rule" is responsible for more useless verbiage than any other guideline that you might encounter. It results in endless narration, in close-up detail, of this and that and something else, all offered in realtime so that we are privy to every one of your characters' thoughts, words and deeds. The thing is, we don't really need to know everything. Ever. The full version of that rule is "Show what needs to be shown, tell what needs to be told." Telling is how you convey mood, setting, backstory, perspective, and other necessary information without getting drowned in a morass of needless detail.

This is an absolutely true statement and I've been battling that damn opening for about two weeks now. I've tried everything I can think of (except a professional editor), including every suggestion from every review and that's the best I've gotten to so far. Openings are so hard! Ugh! I know what I'm trying to convey, which is this moment of peace and serenity that she feels, where everything is right and calm before the day gets started. But I can't seem to capture that feeling. And I realize that as with everything in life, moderation is key. *sigh* I've got four days left to figure it out.

Your job as an author is to create the minimalist spontaneity of real dialogue, without the incoherence. What you don't want to do is what you've done: make your characters sound like they're reading from a script, the purpose of which is merely to convey information to the reader. That's a waste of dialogue.

I agree wholeheartedly with the idea of this. But I'm not sure I agree with the idea that I haven't achieved that in this story. Michelle has an informal speech pattern, with just a little slang, and a description of a Texas accent. Roxanne's dialogue is more formal and deliberately professional. She's kind but succinct, and pretty to the point, with this individual who has come to request help. My only concern is she may have been a little too much to the point. I think the reader might have read through too fast on this part. Also earlier the reader didn't realize the main character's name was Roxanne so I'm already thinking some details have been missed. It happens, and I'm not offended. I'll take another look at the dialogue just in case.

Dialogue is to 1) reveal character traits and 2) push the story along. For my money, you should junk the entire conversation as well as the opening. Your story begins when she pulls into the front yard and encounters Nathan. Everything up till that point can be reduced to a few well-chosen bits of exposition. You need to orient your reader in your main character's universe, that's all. You don't need to present her CV.

I'm not so sure about this. It's always hard to pick exactly where the action truly begins. You need this background information in order to be sympathetic to all four characters involved when they come together and interact. Without this, it's a random woman showing up at a house for no real reason we know of. You lose credibility as an author, you've lost trust, and the hook. You also lose the guided dream state that is created here. I'm going to create a dropbox that shows the story in the way this was suggested and request some feedback as an exercise to see if this can work and what's lost by doing this.

The problem you reveal turns out not to be much of a problem at all. Your main character already has eleven dogs. One more is a problem? I don't think so. Taking Blue is kind of a no-brainer for her. Meanwhile, Michelle can't wait to get rid of the poor mutt. She's not without empathy—she doesn't want to dump him at the pound and a certain death sentence. The fact that blue has a shot at a decent home is just fine with her, but her real priority is that the home be located somewhere else, not with her. So I'm happy to report that everyone, including Blue, turns out just fine. Well, there’s Nathan, but we’ll get to him in a minute.

I don't know about you, but I think it's just grand when life's events turn out fine and solutions simply step up and present themselves. In the real world. In fiction, they tend yield a plot template on the order of

issue identified > issue solved > end

which basically means you have a setup, a conclusion, but no actual story part. What's missing is the lingua franca of the short story realm: problems. In short, no problems, no story. It's as simple as that.

Now, this gets to the heart of where I'm concerned with the review. In essence, the reviewer says there are no problems in the story. Let's break this story down into its problems:
1) Michelle has a dog, Blue, who has bitten her son.
2) Michelle can no longer take care of Blue, and has been unable to find him a new home.
3) Michelle is about to have another baby soon and her husband is gone all the time.
4) Roxanne has 11 dogs already, plus a pregnant dog which will bring more on the way
5) Michelle is asking Roxanne to take in this dog who has a dangerous history of aggression
6) Turns out, Michelle's son is also autistic, which creates another problem with him flinging mud on Roxanne but further highlighting the problems Michelle is facing.
7) Blue is confused and being in this environment is stressful for him, but he shows redeeming qualities of submission and gentleness.
8) Despite all these problems, and the issues it will create for her, Roxanne decides to listen to her heart, do the harder but right thing, and add Blue to her brood of dogs, thus giving him a better life.

Yes, the solution is simple, in that she just takes him with her, but I don't think that means all of the problems are solved or that there are no problems. There's a lot of problems facing the characters in this story and many still remain, but I leave it up to the reader to visualize those in his or her own way, trusting I've given enough clues along the way for them to do so while still providing a satisfying ending.

There's also tension in the issue with Michelle and her son, as well as some concern for Roxanne as to what Blue's reactions to the situation will be. That part I probably don't present very well and need to work on.

Start with your main character. Eleven dogs? Really? Right now all we know about them is that they play in the yard in an idyllic, Disneyesque paradise. But who funds her? How big is her facility? Is there a husband who felt like they were at maximum capacity of 6 or 7 dogs ago? Is there a zoning problem with that many dogs? What do the neighbors think? Can she really absorb another dog as easily as she does in your version? Wouldn't there at least be some considerations for her to deal with? Her natural instinct is to take Blue. What might be in the way? If your answer to that is "Nothing," then what's it doing in your story in the first place? Remember, stories are about people with problems, and what obstacles must be overcome in order to resolve them.

I disagree that every single story is about people with problems. But more so, I disagree that this story has no problems it solves. The main problem is, Blue needs a home and gets one. Now, I will say, that in my head, Roxanne lives on a farm so there are no issues like what's suggested. You can't have that many dogs in the city, even if you wanted to typically. Minimum acreage for that many dogs is at least an acre, but preferably an acre per dog. She lives on about 20 acres of a family farm she inherited from her parents who passed away. She's single, divorced, no kids. Does the reader need to know all of that? Maybe. Maybe not. That being said, I like the idea of there being some obstacle and I think I already have it in Bella, the pregnant dog. There's always the potential for conflict between dogs, especially aggressive males. I just need to show it better and that's an easy fix.

There's more but it would make this excessively long and I think it's easy to see the pattern here. There's definitely room for improvement, but my instinct is, sometimes a story is just simple. Sometimes the writing doesn't have to be complicated. Sometimes it's just a heartwarming story meant to inspire and make you at the end go, "Awww" and feel good. Those were my simple goals here. Not every single story has to be written in the same way or follow rules or do certain things. And in some instances, there's no space to really complicate things. This story was written in a vignette style https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/vignette, a brief but powerful scene. The goal is to leave the reader wanting more.

Vignette is a small impressionistic scene, an illustration, a descriptive passage, a short essay, a fiction or nonfiction work focusing on one particular moment; or giving an impression about an idea, character, setting, mood, aspect, or object. Vignette is neither a plot nor a full narrative description, but a carefully crafted verbal sketch that might be part of some larger work or a complete description in itself. ~https://literarydevices.net/vignette/

What I really wish is some resources to support this had been provided. All of this is presented like it's fact and the only way to write a story, which makes it hard for me (or anyone) to really learn about it or seek more information. I'll probably email and ask for some resources to see if there are any.

So, when you're writing a review, remember to keep in mind that there's a lot of ways to write stories. And sometimes, when you get a review, you have to pick and choose what to use. Don't just automatically assume that what's given is gospel and should be followed to the letter. Look at what will make the story smarter and better, while still sticking to your original story goals. Sometimes you have to be flexible and let those goals change or expand on them. Sometimes, you have to be careful not to lose the essence of the story if a reader doesn't 'get' it. And there are always parts of a story a reader or reviewer may miss inadvertently. You know your story best, so be willing to stand by it but always be mindful of ways to improve the craft portion of your writing.



Charity Marie
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