[3738] In Passing

[deleted]

We'll see if this is a full critique. If I don't finish it tonight, I'll come back tomorrow and keep working on it. I think I'm going to try to answer your questions through a good and a bad type list, so let's get to it:

The Good:

Right off the bat, the prose is great. It's quiet more-or-less with the proper amount of mental distance between it and the characters, which I think is likely due to the framing of the narrator being a ghost. The amount of imagery that you included in this story isn't quite my cup of tea but it was subtle and graceful, and that's about all I can ask for as I'm sure other people will appreciate it. It did help add a lens into Dodie's mind, which I'll concede is hard to do otherwise with this type of narrator. I do think you can use more em dashes and semicolons than you allot yourself, but, at this point, it would really be the icing on the cake.

The experimental aspect of this piece was also wonderful. For a while, I've been meaning to write a story told backward about a relationship (not the death of a loved one), it's kind of been marinating in the back of my mind, and you beat me to it. One of the things I was thinking of was how to unify all these pieces in a coherent progression if it's told backwards, and the way you've done it is clever and coherent. Setting up little sections of time, telling it through the evolution of the house, all *mwah*, chef's kiss. I applaud you for taking on a narrative convention and coming out alive, if not stronger for it.

The plot was handled tastefully as well. I'm glad that you let the reader do a little bit of detective work (although I have some negative comments on this as well). It's clear, through the ambiguity of the boxes lying around, the casual mention of weather and dates, that you've thought long and hard about what you want to reveal to the reader at what stage. It all came together quite nicely.

With these praises out of the way - and do not get me wrong, I enjoyed this piece, thought it was pretty good, but let's get onto my critiques.

The Bad:

So when I first started reading this, I found myself getting bored by page 4. It was only after I had finished reading the piece, or at least in the final pages, did I appreciate what you've done here. And this, I think might be your problem. Inherently we sacrifice storytelling tools when we fuck around with narrative, but I had a really difficult time seeing any overarching plot for most of the story. Granted, I am not a reader of plot. I could not tell you how many stories I've stumbled my way through without really "getting" the plot, and a lot of time, without super flashy language I'll get bored pretty easily reading a story. HOWEVER, if you consider me to be your worst reader, I think you should do more to cater to me. What I mean by this is you need to throw the reader more bones in the beginning and make the conflict clearer, because as of right now, I'm struggling to see any overarching conflict in the story, especially within the first few pages. Once the clues start coming in, once the reader starts getting an idea of what you're doing, you might not need to rely on it so much, but for the first few pages I think you need to do more.

I get it. One of the struggles I found when thinking about a backwards story is how do you implement conflict when you're at the end of the story? We start out with Dodie being depressed, but where do we go from here? nd I think that's the issue that arises when playing with structure like this: how do you introduce conflict when you start at the end and work backwards?

I think, regardless of the chronological order a story is told, a character needs to have a desire and the reader needs to desire to know more. Take for instance Memento (obv one of the few stories that successfully did this in the mainstream), the MC wants to figure out who killed his wife, and in the beginning it's revealed that he kills the wrong person. Well there's a character desire, plus some intrigue for the reader... Who actually killed the MC's wife, and how did the MC end up in this position? Right now, your story starts off too vague, and without any real conflict.

You COULD argue that the conflict is Dodie trying to get over her grief, but in my opinion, it's either too weak to be considered an overarching conflict, nor, because it's told in reverse chronology, does it get resolved in the end.

If you haven't read it, you should read the plot portion in "Writing: a guide to narrative Craft" by Janet Burroway. It's only like 30 pages long (you can find an older edition of the book pretty easily online), but outlines pretty well the common mistakes we as writers tend to do, especially with talking about stories lacking conflict. I think reading this really clarified what readers particularly need from a story to keep them turning the page, and perhaps it can help you too. I'm not sure whether or not I can really answer this question for you, because I'm still searching for the answer.

One thing that you could start out with is picking a new opening sentence. This is the form of short story, and - especially in a story like this - your opener needs to be as strong as possible, and should probably introduce a problem or conflict. The house rattling is an issue because the house has fallen into disrepair, but you don't make that clear. A house can rattle in a storm and there's nothing wrong with that. A house rattling in a storm because it has been neglected is a problem, though, if you see what i mean.

Probably the stylistic choice that is easiest to change and would at least make me feel so much better is getting rid of the ghost narrator. The first person narration comes out of nowhere in the end, and just adds more questions than it answers.

The narration doesn't really add much, because 3rd person limited POV is already a type of ghost narration. It appears to me as if you were trying to mirror Dodie's experience with grief to the ghost's loneliness, with them moving into the house as the ghosts respite and also symbolically Dodie's respite from her grief, but it's not coming off super well because mainly I'm confused. If you want a ghost narrator, that's fine, and I think the angle that you take in the end can work about overcoming grief and all that, but you should reveal that it's 1st person narration at the start of the story. You can even add the ghost's commentary on the events taking place or a slightly more developed and characterized voice if you do that. Either way, I think you need to move one way or the other in terms of keeping and expanding it to the entire story, or dropping the narrator altogether.

Not only that, but there are some instances where the ghost seems to have a view inside Dodie's head, which messes with the continuity of the story:

Her home seemed simply a place she lived and she did as she needed to live in it.

For instance, this line ^ is almost certainly inside Dodie's head, and if it isn't, it should be reworded because it certainly appears to be.

It's getting late so I'll quickly end it here for now:

I liked it. Cool story, good job with it, but I think it needs to start faster. There's just no momentum early on that makes the reader want to keep flipping the page.

Hey! I liked this. I appreciate experimental writing a lot and it's great to see people really pushing what a story can be and it's not easy. I find a lot of the criticism on here tends to be about a lack of clarity and this resistance to ambiguity is totally the opposite to what I want from a story. That said, I think a few things could be improved on here.

Plot/Pacing

You've got the seed of a great idea here, but I think you're asking a lot of the reader to put up with both a non-chronological narrative and a plot that moves at a very slow pace. I'm fine with periods of nothing happening, but sometimes you do this well and sometimes you don't. The description of Dodie painting, for example, was excellent and that was when my interest in the story really picked up. What was good about it was that you demonstrated her emotions through her actions and you kept them particular and interesting.

On the other hand, the descriptions of the weather and the house, as well as the entire opening, felt unnecessary to me. In answer to your third question, this is where the piece dragged. So often (I do this too) people sit down to write and the first thing they describe is the weather. Now, pathetic fallacy is a powerful tool, but you are using it again and again here and with the way the story discloses itself it feels like the descriptions of the weather are empty signifiers. If I don't know why someone is sad, telling me they are sad over and over doesn't feel useful and saps the story of its energy. If you trimmed some of the descriptions of the house and the weather, the plot would feel better I think. What is clear from these descriptions is that you enjoy writing them and you're good at it! But: always kill your darlings.

In terms of the reveals, I think they were handled well apart from the last one. You do a great job at judging the hermeneutic capacity of the reading throughout the story, by offering little bits of information here and there, but then undermine that by offering the answer to them on a platter. I really like the subtlety and understated-ness of this story and the ending just feels a little cheap in comparison.

Characters

Instead of descriptions about external objects, I would have liked a lot more specificity in the characters. They weren't completely generic, but I didn't feel like I knew them super well. As a comment in the doc said, the more we know the more we lose with the character's loss. I would also add a Kurt Vonnegut quote that may be useful: 'make every character want something, even if it's just a sandwich.' Desire is a productive force; it furnishes a story with its teleology. As it is, Dodie starts off sad, remains sad and moves out of the house sad. I guess we see some progress in her grieving, but it doesn't feel volitional, more like the general passing of time. Desire (and grief) can also be counter-intuitive and run at odds with what might be best for the individual or what society expects of the individual. Could Dodie express her grief in more erratic ways, could we see other sides of her character?

Vin seems slightly flat. I'm fine with the focus not being on him, but since he is narrating could there be an opportunity for characterisation through that?

Prose

You are a very capable prose writer and the style is clear and detached throughout. A few things I did notice though was your tendency to fill in dialogue sections with description. It can be tempting to write in every move a character makes but that can get in the way and feel overly fussy. The middle of the fourth section has an interjection from the narrator in almost every section of speech. This slows the pace down and could be handled better imo.

A few times I think you used adjectives a tad too much, where better nouns and verbs would work. The more specific and evocative you can make those, the less necessary adjectives become. One moment that stuck out to me was: 'It was stuffed with furniture and things with walls and windows dressed, and all of it swept enough to be called clean.' The 'things' here feels very underwritten in comparison to the rest of the story. Even furniture could be specified further. Having said that, this sentence ends really nicely—more of that!

Perhaps you could also split up a few sentences here and there, as a lot of these sentences end in subordinate clauses. Maybe try reading aloud for rhythm and feeling where the prose feels flat. Punctuation and prosody can be a really great tool for guiding the reader through difficult passages and adding energy.

I have added a coupla comments in the doc too, but here are a few more sentences that stood out:

'Who could have guessed what thoughts raced in her head?' - This (as well as the story more generally) felt kind of old fashioned to me. Not necessarily bad, but just an observation you might want to consider. Modern work exploring the same themes as you will often focus on the interiority of the characters through free indirect discourse but I think this would come into conflict with your narrator's reveal at the end, so it would be difficult to square that circle.

'soft and wet like a slushie' - You should either get rid of this or take it further. The word slushie and the idea of it in a moment of grief feels kind of trite to me. On the other hand, if you were to thread it into a memory of Dodie and Vin buying a slushie or something it could be better.

'seated around the coffee table in a circle of tightened jaws and wide eyes.' - love me some metonymy! You've really expressed the mood well through this description. In fact, this is what I mean when I say make the nouns work harder.

'As the night wore on, life continued to fade. The death of Vin Cressler washed over the house with silence on the eve of a hot day in August.' - Why do we suddenly get his full name? It feels slightly odd to me.

Setting

Even though the setting got a lot of description and was important to the story, it still felt slightly generic to me. Again, you take this two ways: either streamline the detail into specific things (I'm finding it hard to know where has Victorian cottages and a hurricane season) or take the focus off the setting a bit and what has/is going on in it. If you haven't yet, I'd read some Elizabeth Bowen. She's great with houses!

Conclusion

Good stuff! Keep it up! You're clearly a very talented writer whose enjoying what they're doing so please, please keep working on it! Glad I read it and will keep an eye out for following drafts.