Search options

I'm choosing #3:
(3) George opened the curtains. It was a bright sunny day without a cloud in the atmosphere. The turquoise blue sky made him think yesterday’s fiasco might have been just a dream.

Passive voice: it was a bright sunny day; made him think
Redundant: bright, sunny, without a cloud, turquoise blue
Reporting: (the sky) made him think
Wordy: in the atmosphere; just

I changed it to:

(3) George opened the curtains to a cloudless sky. Yesterday’s fiasco might have been a dream.

Since "cloudless sky" has become a convention for expressing optimism, it seemed adequate if the main idea is reassessing "yesterday's fiasco". If the colour of the sky is important for some reason -- a tropical vacation? -- that might be added in later.

I found I was having a hard time writing this entry without excessive verbosity!

I had written an in-line review for another group member's work -- and saved it -- but my internet lost connection, and it disappeared.  Is there a way to retrieve it?

I’m struggling with the concept of “voice”, so I chose two books that seem to me quite different, but by the same author, in hopes of pinning this down!

At the time we were given this assignment, I had just started reading The Mermaid’s Child by Jo Baker, because I had enjoyed her book, Longbourn. The Mermaid’s Child turned out to be a previous book, from some ten years before.

The Mermaid’s Child is written in the first person, the POV that of Malin, a child of indeterminate age — she has ‘never had a birthday’. Her father has told her her mother was a mermaid; her grandmother says she was a whore. When Malin’s father dies, she runs away to search for her mother. The story feels allegorical, a quest through often fantastical situations for the possibility of love.

Longbourn is the “downstairs’ story of Pride and Prejudice, the lives of the servants on whose labour the Bennet family depend, while barely noticing them. The POV varies among the servants, but the primary protagonist is Sarah, a young housemaid. This is a more realistic, down-to-earth story, told in third person.

Both books are dense with detail at the micro level, especially ‘gritty’ details of life at the low end of the class spectrum, the endless labour required and enforced. For both protagonists, the world they know is severely proscribed, and the wider world a dream: for Malin, a fascination with a schoolroom map and her lost mother, and for Sarah, snippets of information from the books she borrows from her employers and contrasts with her own life. The dreams of change help draw one into the stories.

Both protagonists are orphans and outsiders, although Sarah is part of a community of outsiders, and Malin is primarily on her own — the connections she makes temporary, and kindness likely to be prelude to exploitation. Both girls recognize and question the arbitrary fate that sets them beneath those exploiting them, and struggle to break free to build lives they’ve chosen for themselves.

What I find in common in the two books: detailed and often beautiful writing, with unusual images; an uncompromising view of human nature, and of nature itself — the world is sometimes beautiful but often bloody cold; the questioning of the conventions of the world; the search for independence and meaningful connection.

I originally approached Longbourn with prejudice — not being much in favour of books based on other books — but was caught on the second page by Sarah’s observation, “really, no one should have to deal with another person’s dirty linen”: this from a person the world obviously intends will do little else for the rest of her life! I was more distant from Malin, struggling to reconcile the precision of the details with the fantastic situations they described.

I find it interesting that the first-person voice was more distant for me, and don’t know whether that’s because of my reluctant engagement with a brutal world, or a sign of the author’s growing mastery in ten years of writing.

Just noticed -- this Assignment asks for the next five pages of our manuscripts, while the course outline says ten pages for each two-week period.  Is this a change?

Diagnosis:

I swear I worked with the person who wrote this selection!

I assume some of the digressions are part of the narrator’s persona, the mental condition that traps them in a dead-end job, and I hope Roger’s damn dog can help get them out of it. I’d edit with that in mind.

I don’t know if there’s a term for the second sentence: I think of it as the “Little did he know . . .” school of writing, which attempts to heighten suspense by convincing you there are exciting things to come. I’d cut that sentence.

Much of the third paragraph seems to be an ‘information dump’, and irrelevant. I’d cut the five sentences, beginning at ‘The minute’ and ending at ‘rabbits; also, the sentence in brackets.

I’d certainly get rid of Roger’s neighbour’s kid, and probably cut from ’These things happen’ but I might read further to gauge how much evidence of the narrator’s condition to leave in. It seems it could be a delicate balance, between making the narrator convincing, and driving the reader away.

I wouldn’t bother about the various redundancies until I’d decided which sentences needed to be cut entirely.