[2575] The Thorn King's Bride: Prologue - rewrite

New here. Trying to get back into the swing of things writing after taking a mega break to have some kids and figured I’d do some reading/posting here because I liked the name and it’s not r/writing (don’t get me started). Anyway here’s my street creds: got published a while back (small, now defunct press in Minnesota) and actually got a movie option (never got made) because of a reddit post. Not bragging, just want you to know my background. Now for the critique.

The language is really stilted. I know this seems intended but the big problem you’ll run into is it’ll turn a lot of people off. Take your opening paragraph for example.

“The smell of blood and meadowsweet hung heavy in the air as Siar watched his mother struggle with the knight’s body. Had the knight donned his helm before entering Lady Caecilia’s barricaded rooms, >he would have likely lived to see the morn. Instead, he lay with the curled end of an iron-poker mired in the back of his head.”

I know it’s fun and super fantasyey to use things like morn, lay, mired, donned, etc… but take a look at an example paragraph of something that I consider solid fantasy (I’m not a super big fantasy guy so take this with a HUGE grain of salt), Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind.

“Carter stepped into the light, his face pale and smeared with blood. He clutched an old saddle blanket to his chest. It was an odd, awkward shape, as if it were wrapped around a tangle of kindling sticks.”

There’s a lot to unpack there. For starters, he uses words like stepped, pale, and smeared, when he could’ve went a lot more formal with things like strode or trudged vs stepped, drained or colorless vs pale, and streaked or splattered vs smeared. The reason it works better his way (in my opinion) is he uses shorter words like smear, step, and pale and marries them with things like tangle, clutch, etc… Why does that work? Because it aids the flow of the prose. Driving down a road with non-stop sharp curves is exhausting but driving down a country road with varying bends and breaks is much more relaxing.

Also, sticking with the opening, these do not sound like people who’ve just killed someone.

“He is dead, Siar,” Caecilia said, wresting the iron-poker from the base of the knight’s skull. “He cannot hurt us now. Come here, you must help me to move him.”

People are hopped up on adrenaline, shaky, and disoriented after violence. Just a thought but you could cut most of this sentence out and just have the character interrupt and say something like “Shut up and help me move him.”

“No. There will be no triumph. Though I do not doubt there will be some very unsavory conditions in store for us if we do not make haste,” Caecilia said sternly.

Those words sound pretty stern to me. The sternly adverb there isn’t necessary.

“We shall put him in the trundle.” Caecilia hiked her bloodied smock over her head. Siar saw gooseflesh appear on her arms as she wrapped her sullied linen about the knight’s ruined head.

This is pretty solid, though you could tone down the stiff tone a bit by getting rid of things like shall. All in all, a solid bit though.

“My husband’s host is on the other side of the Vale. He will come for us.” Her voice reverberated off the castle walls like an ancient curse.

I think this line is more powerful on its own without the description. Let the character speak, and let the reader interpret.

“No,” Siar answered before slamming the torch into Sir Errol’s face. Sir Errol collapsed to the floor, his coat of mail rattling against his shoulder plates as he wrestled with his helmet. Siar pushed the torch >further through Errol’s open visor, intending to at least blind the man before withdrawing.

I get what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to surprise the reader. But a dirty little secret of writing is that readers often times don’t like to be surprised. Instead, I’d suggest using a traitor as a source of tension. You can stretch this out pretty well and build interest if you reveal this guy’s a traitor before Siar kills him. The “do you know that I know?” game is great for building suspense and tension and will hook people in much more than any clever twist. Again, take it with a grain of salt but that’s been my experience.

“Siar nodded, a pit growing in his stomach as the smell of burnt flesh filled the passageway. Had there been any food in Siar’s belly, he would have surely voided it. But Siar had eaten nothing that day and >so he heaved quietly as he edged around Errol’s corpse. “

Voided seems really strange to say here. Wretched is a great word here or good ole puked. No shame in gross descriptions for gross things :)

“If morning ever came, he wasn’t sure he would live to see it.”

Good call on the ending. Build tension and try and usher the reader to the next chapter.

Summary:

All in all, it was a little stilted for my taste and could use some shorter words sprinkled in to improve flow. The story is intriguing enough but I’m going to ask a quick question just to offer another perspective: Is this part necessary to the plot overall? Because starting your story with a guy on a beach, waking up bloody, broken, and just killed someone is a great way to build interest. Sometimes it’s the things we don’t see that draw us in. I do want to take a second and say that there’s definitely some flashes of talent in there. Don’t stop writing. Keep finishing things. You’ll do great. :)

Greetings,

There are some elements of a story that when not executed well, drag down and obscure the quality of every other element. The first is spelling. The second is grammar. You executed these well. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen another story on here with fewer grammar and spelling errors.

The third is prose, and herein lies the barriers you’ve erected around your prologue, complete with trenches and traps for the unwary reader.

I’ll be honing in on the many issues I have with your prose, and hopefully, it will boost your other elements should you choose to implement changes. However, I won’t limit myself just to your prose, since there are some other elements, like characters, deserving of critique.

Unnatural Dialogue

Many of your dialogue choices felt…wrong. There is a great degree of freedom in writing dialogue, because if it is stilted or full of cliche, it’s taken as a character trait rather than poor writing. Reading this, I came away with the impression that you did have an intention to write the mother-son dynamic with a high level of formality. This makes it slightly harder to critique, since I’m not trying to tell you how to write that relationship, just how to make it feel authentic.

Having said that, as the characters progress through the plot, they don’t adapt their dialogue to the circumstances. I would expect the mother to exchange formality and stilted language for concise commands and explanations. Similarly, a nine year old who just saw his mother murder someone and is now fleeing from the only home he’s ever known is going to relapse into normal nine-year-old behavior. My suggestion is this: Introduce nervous and informal language into Siar’s dialogue, but still have him address his mom as “Lady Mother”. He’s scared, but still trying to hold onto a thread of the formality that has been trained into him.

If I had to pinpoint the root of this problem, I would say you are hyper-focused on using dialogue to communicate information, where you should be thinking about crafting dialogue that communicate information and builds character.

Example time:

“What are we to do with him?”

“We shall put him in the trundle.”

These two lines come across as very relaxed. Like they were talking about where to put their coats, not where to hide a body.

that is why we must quickly hide him and then be gone

There is nothing that says urgency like answering every question of your 9-year-old child. Perhaps you are trying to show that Caecilia defers to her son (which is why she explains everything to him), but that’s inconsistent with other parts of her dialogue.

Wordy and Stilted

Outside of your dialogue, your prose also comes across as wordy and stilted. This is less acceptable since it can't be attributed to a character's way of speaking. You use many verbs (or nouns that can be converted into verbs) where you only need one, hiding the most important halfway through the sentence rather than near the beginning. There are a few cases where you use relative clauses easily reduced to simpler forms (more explanation in examples). Additionally, some sentences are structured where the most important or interesting clauses are hidden behind less interesting ones.

Example time:

he sank below the waves just to bob back up again.

Compare to this: “He bobbed in the waves”. It’s meaning is almost identical to your clause, but it’s more concise. You have a nice, visual verb here with “bob”. Hone in on it, excising the unnecessary words so that the imagery isn’t lost amongst them.

Caecilia brought an end to Errol’s screams

This is one example of your “too many verbs” problem (or a noun and a verb in this case). Convert “Brought to an end” to “ended”. Sentences starting with the subject-verb are powerful, as long as the verb is the right one. Compare the subject-verb pairs “Caecilia brought” and “Caecilia ended” and decide for yourself which evokes more feeling.

ghastly creatures that lurked just below the water’s surface.

And:

Siar only prayed the dark waters that carried him remained swift and true

“That lurked” and “that carried” can be replaced by “lurking” and “carrying” respectively for stronger sentences. For more on reducing relative clauses, see this resource from George Mason University: https://writingcenter.gmu.edu/guides/using-reduced-relative-clauses-to-write-concisely

If Siar’s memories of the battlefield were anything to go by, then the knight’s body would stink horribly in just a day’s time

Here, we see an example of the more important clause hiding at the end. This time, it’s behind an lengthy subordinate clause that has issues in its own right (“were anything to go by, then” becomes superfluous if you replace "if" with "from"). Reducing the subordinate clause would help, and moving it to the end would be even better.

Passive voice and distant actions

Passive voice is sometimes useful when you want to emphasize the recipient of the action and de-emphasize the performer. For example, some of my sentence choices here are deliberately passive to focus my critique on the writing and not you, the writer. However, most of your passive sentences do not fit this criteria. Accordingly, it mutes the verbs and makes the characters seem distant.

Example time:

They were coming around the final bend in the staircase

Just unnecessary. Switch to “As they came” or “As they rounded”.

Siar’s senses were instantly assaulted by the sight and smell of death.

Compare to “Death assaulted Siar’s senses”. This is also an example of redundancy ("instantly", when assaulted implies that already) and wordiness (trust the reader to infer that the senses involved are sight and smell, not touch, hearing, or taste [ew])

he was dragged across the floor and pitched into the freezing river.

This is the worst case of the three I quoted because the action is important in reinforcing the relationship between the performer of the action and the recipient. It should be personal that his mother dragged him and pitched him into the freezing river. Don’t obscure her actions with the passive voice. (there is a free editing tool , https://hemingwayapp.com, that highlights all your uses of passive voice. It's not great for much else, but it does help with that)

Redundancy and Overused Cliches

Did the title of this section bother you at all? It should. By definition, cliches are overused, and adding overused as an adjective is unnecessary. You have a similar problem in your writing where you will insert a superfluous word, usually in the form of an adverb, that has no effect on the meaning. Not only will this cause readers like myself to pull out their hair, it contributes to the wordiness in your writing. Additionally, cliches litter the story — both phrases and imagery.

Example time:

Siar’s senses were instantly assaulted.

Assaulted already invokes the image of a rapid attack. "Instantly" adds nothing here.

Sir Errol pawed uselessly at his face as he banged his head against the wall.

Pawing is a good verb, a great verb, because it evokes the imagery you're going for all by itself. Don't dilute its power with a redundant adverb.

forgot how to speak.

And:

as black as the night itself.

And:

He did not even breathe. He imagined himself to be a shadow, dark and unseen.

For me, writing unique descriptions is one of the highlights of writing. You have a few great ones in here, but you also have these cliches peppered throughout.

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A Trundling Pace

I created this section mainly to address the description of the watergates, though it can be applied to the rest of your writing as well. One factor bogging your prologue down is the wordy prose, but I've already addressed this. Lengthy descriptions that break apart the prologue near its climax are the second.

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Example time:

The watergates on the outerwall were different from those of the inner gatehouse. They were comprised of two sluice gates on either side of a latticed gate. The sluice gates controlled the waters filling the castle moat while the latticed gate only barred exit through the north end.

Unless we are going to to revisit the water gates in the future, this whole paragraph could be excised. If you are planning on revisiting them, incorporate the essential details during the escape sequence, as Siar goes through them.

Visual Inadequacy

This is an interesting one, because I actually want you to use more words in your prose. In certain areas, that is. Sometimes, I did enjoy aspects of your imagery once I got through the slog of words. Other times, I was underwhelmed. When you have a tense, visually-interesting moment, more description would be nice.

Example time:

Sir Errol nearly stumbled back down the stairs

What does "nearly" look like. Is he windmilling his arms? Clawing against the walls? A lot more could be done here.

I had some fun doing a line edit/review of this in your word doc, let me know what you think.

General comments:

I get that the castle is under siege and the walls have been breached, but this doesn't seem to bleed through the prose. There's a lack of urgency, and I don't feel the threat of impending doom. Curious if other people agree. Maybe it's Siar's inner monologue?

And are you intentionally going for very formal dialogue? I don't think it would hurt to throw in some contractions here and there. Also try to vary sentence length some more.

Nobody's speaking like their lives are in danger. They're all speaking like they're at a formal ball.

To expand on that point, the pacing is a bit off. For example, when they're in the windlass room and Siar spends a page thinking about the workings of the gate and how the sluices feed water into the moat. It's fun worldbuilding but it should probably be condensed to keep the pace up. The pace and Siar's inner monologue does not match the hurried escape you're going for.

I think your prose, world, and characters are about 90% there, though. This is some of the better writing I've seen on this sub. Well done.