Hatrack River Writers Workshop: The Hospital

This is topic The Hospital in forum Fragments and Feedback for Short Works at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by robinlindh (Member # 3327) on :

Fiction, ~250 pages, full omniscient, critique just these 13 lines, and please be brutal.
***

It was two o’clock in the morning, a Saturday, and winter was coming to an end. The unused hospital room, located at the end of ward D, was cold, dark, and unventilated. It had a pungent odor of stale urine, and it was cluttered with broken and forgotten equipment: wheelchairs, metal canes, walkers, and gurneys. Timothy, an intermittent patient at Total-Care Hospital, had been dropped off by his mother as per her committed contract with the hospital which offers respite--two weekends a month.
Sometime between the hours of two o’clock and three o’clock that Saturday morning, Timothy was removed from his bed and taken to the unused hospital room, located at the end of the hall. Timothy was never seen alive again.

[This message has been edited by robinlindh (edited April 11, 2006).]

Posted by Susannaj4 (Member # 3189) on :

First sentence is way to long.

What are you suggesting here? I don't even want to think about what's going on.

Lot's of commas. Any way to rewrtie the sentences without so many of them and not lose your punch?

Good imagery by the way.

Posted by Omakase (Member # 2915) on :

I found this opening to be too wordy and not overly clear.

The first sentence (which doesn't read well) sets the setting at 2 AM in an unused room. Then we jump to Timothy crying - so is he in this "unused" room? Also it says that he is in an overcrowded room. Overcrowded typically implies too many people, but I don't believe this is what you want -- again it is confusing.

I've seen shrill used as an adjective or verb, but never a noun. The notation that he cries every seven seconds doesn't fit in with this narrative.

Some of the other confusing sentences were:

quote:
His screams, interrupted by coughs and gagging on saline tears, were not muffled but welcomed, igniting a tinge of excitement.
Timothy could not speak, that handicap was most appealing

Who's getting excited? Why is that handicap appealing?

Cleaning up some of the extra commas and extra words will help this read better; saline tears is redundant, his size no bigger (again if you say bigger we know it's size)

Check your verb tenses also.

As this is written, I wouldn't read further because of the problems mentioned above. The prose isn't strong enough to pull me into the story and wonder what's going on.

Posted by Ray (Member # 2415) on :

I'd like to know what he's doing there, and why he's compelled to be in there. Otherwise, there's just a lot happening that I don't care about.

Also, you should tell me that he's in a soundproof room in the first paragraph, although I'm kind of wondering why there's all this junk in there when if Timmy was the patient, I'd think he'd be the only occupant. And your giving two separate ages in sentences that aren't even side by side is confusing. To cure that, all you have to do is "he was a fourteen-year-old in an eight-year-old body" or something to that effect.

Posted by Rahl22 (Member # 1411) on :

Clarity is a problem, which might improve with a close grammar sweep. I didn't have much of a problem with sentence length, though. Open any published work and you could find longer sentences than you've got here.

Posted by Woodie (Member # 3346) on :

Overall, I like the idea. I wish it had a bit more emotion, however. It sounded like the POV was of a reporter. I wanted some more human feeling. I also did not like how the first paragraph jumps around in time--for a second I thought the mother checked the boy into the hospital at 2am.

Posted by sholar (Member # 3280) on :

The first version had some problems with clarity and long sentences, but it did draw me in a bit more than the edited version. Without seeing both together it is hard for me to elaborate. The opening description in the new version is much more clear.

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

What's your narrative order?

Posted by RedSakana (Member # 3127) on :

This seems very detached/distanced to me, and I think it is because of the verbs. If you rephrase the sentences a bit to get a more active verb, it would hook me more...e.g.:

Instead of: "...Timothy was removed from his bed and taken to the unused hospital room..."

Try something more like: "Two of the night security staff dragged Timothy out of his bed and forced him into the unused hospital room"

Also, you might play around with the order in which you present information to the reader. The way it is now, you describe the unused room, then tell me later that Timothy was taken over there. As a reader, I don't care what's in the room until I know the character is in there--so you might be better off starting with Timothy being dragged into a room, and once he's in there, telling me what the room is like.

Posted by Susannaj4 (Member # 3189) on :

Are you afraid of what you've suggested is happening to Timothy at this point?