Classmate Response: Week of 4/3/11

Lucas Chance: Zoe

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Loved it, Lucas! Here is my critique. (Note: I tried to be more complimentary than insulting. I feel all self-conscious about it now, guys!)

Nitpicky stuff:

The bar conversation (which I’ll mention again down below) was excellent but for a moment when I felt thrown out of the scene a bit. After Bill leaves, the other three keep on talking, and you haven’t used any names or pronouns so far. We don’t have a particular POV in this scene. Then you wrote: “He takes a drink from his glass. He says in a stupor to Bill: ‘You wanna kill her?’ ” I wasn’t sure who “he” was, and I was confused by him addressing “Bill,” since Bill had just left. Was he just thinking out loud about Bill, or was he addressing one of the other men, also named “Bill”? It was unclear, especially later in the fight scene when Molotov Man bites the (flaming) dust, since that group consists of Molotov Man, Frank and Pitchfork. Earlier in the story, there was this sentence: “Her face was misshapen with a jutting chin that She did not mind being exiled from Brairsburgian life.” The first part looks like an unfinished sentence, maybe? (You need to finish it so I can find out what her chin does! Knowing you, approximately 80% of the people and their various parts have magical properties of a nefarious sort.) Also, in the paragraph following her failed attempt at selling Peter tomatoes, I don’t think you need to use the word “fear” as many times as you did. How you described their reactions to her illustrated that terror and revulsion perfectly. At the beginning, I think you might have overused the word “so,” just a bit. I do this all the time with certain words that I get attached to for the rhythm aspect, so if that’s what you’re going for, I wouldn’t change anything. The cool thing about “so” is that I can hear you reading it aloud, and that gives it a storyteller “voice” which punches the story forward.

Awesome sauce: 

This is going to sound weird, maybe, but I loved how indifferent the story’s omniscient narrator was. That was my second favorite thing about it. Particularly when describing how Molotov Man fell down the hill to his timely end (I suspect), the narrator carried on this blasé tone, as if he could have added, “And he was very much dead. Well, sort of.” The nonchalance made the townspeople so much fun to read. My favorite part of the story was the conversation in the bar between all of the (very drunk) plaid townspeople. It sounded natural and spontaneous, and I particularly liked that you didn’t try to explain who the speaker was every time or even once in a while. Handling a group of nameless characters (well, nameless but for Bill) speaking all at once is difficult enough; doing it well and making it sound like organized chaos rather than just plain chaos is very difficult. Your scene made me think of this quote from Amadeus, where Mozart is saying that in a play, so many people speaking at once is just noise, but in an opera, it’s a perfect harmony. You wrote the “perfect harmony” aspect just right. I also loved, loved, loved the Bill/Zoe sex scene fade-out “Noises are heard.” A+++. That whole short paragraph was just perfect. All of the character work was understated, playing humorously with reader expectations. The opening paragraphs, describing the life of the townspeople and the contrast between how Zoe behaves and how she is reacted to, were terrific. I loved the natural way you went from describing Zoe, to describing the village, to describing how similar the townspeople are, to describing just how this makes Zoe stand out even more, and so on. It had this gentle snowball effect, so to speak, again very understated though direct, where the picture fit into place without reading like exposition. I thought it was the perfect way to set up the tale.

Great job!!

p.s. I went through the entire story envisioning the townspeople as having plaid skin. Intentional?