posted
Two tree mice, frollicking among the pequans, compete with the pickers to complete their winter hoard, together. They compete not only with the pequan pickers, but with each other. The girl runs through the waist-high hay calling over her shoulder with a smile for him to catch her if he can; this is how the competition is between the tree mice. He beats her to the hoard this time; she lets him. They cuddle in the warmth of their tree, looking at their trove, believing in their future together.
We can be happy.
[This message has been edited by stevenrushing (edited February 03, 2004).]
posted
That's substantially too long. 13 lines would normally be about 100-150 words, I think you're closer to 300 there. Posts: 626 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
The genre is speculative fiction. This particular scene is of a young man having a conversation with the father of the girl he is in love with. This young man is the only one of a ruling class who can speak with the servant class. The servant class has been broken over hundreds of years. They were not allowed to speak, learn to read or write, or do anything other than menial labor. They developed a means of communicating ideas through emotions on an element. It is not like thinking thoughts to each other. Rather it is like they are in a dream together. You know the strangest things can happen in a dream. In this "dream" the young man is allowing himself and his significant other to be represented by "treemice". To explain the competition between the "treemice" he switches the representation to a girl calling over her shoulder for her love. The point of veiw is supposed to see many different things, but through the same eyes.
The conflict in this story is this young ruling class teenager trying to convince the ruling class that this servant class is more than a herd of animals to be exploited. He wishes to spend his life with this young servant girl. Above all, he wishes for the ruling class to understand the depth of the emotion these people have attained by teaching them to experience it.
posted
Now all you need to do is get some of that portrayed in the story. I read most of what you posted before you cut it, and quite honestly, I thought the pov was from one of the squirls. If it is from the pov of a squirl, you might want to rethink it a bit. I didn't even come close to getting anything from you intro that remotely resembled your description.
You don't give any clue as to who/what the "pickers" are. Most readers can deal with a lack of knowledge at the beginning, but when they can't understand what they are reading then it won't work. Your POV is shaky. If I think you are writing a story about squirls, and after the explination I read it again and can almost see that there is couple in the story also, it isn't doing the job.
Not trying to be harsh, but your concept and the story aren't turning out to be the same thing. You want the story to be clear, not vauge.
posted
I never got to read the part you cut, but I agree with Luc. Your concept is interesting, but I haven't seen int develop. I'm very confused by your animal terms, actually. Are these really animals? In speculative fiction, it is a mistake to use metaphors in the first part of your story, while we're still learning the world. In a genre in which ANYTHING can happen, we're likely to take you at your word.
Posts: 3567 | Registered: May 2003
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posted
I'm glad I asked the genre and audience, because based on the anthropomorphic field mice, I thought it might be a children's book.
If you're going to start with a dream (which is generally not a good idea, but in the case of a culture which communicates through dreams, it might work), you need to let us know it's a dream, and that it's a form of communication. A first line such as "Devan closed his eyes and began sharing the dream-state with Ema's father" would clue the reader in that what follows is a dream, and that therefore it should not be taken literally.
As to the description of the dream itself, you need to make things clearer. For example, it was not immediately clear that "the girl" was one of the tree mice, especially since she's running through waist-high hay. Is that hay that's waist-high on a human, or on a tree mouse?
If the dream communication is like watching a movie, then the somewhat distant descriptive style you've used is all right. But if your main character imagines himself as one of the tree mice, then I think it would be more interesting to relate the dream from his perspective as a tree mouse.
Besides which, you should probably go in a completely different direction with the kid's argument. Right now it seems that the only thing he's likely to persuade anyone to believe is that it's possible for a member of the ruling class to lose his wits by imitating the lower class.
I think that you should put the father in the position of teaching the boy...teaching him things that are reasonable, but not reachable by reason alone. Important, but not of calculable worth. Your opening lines should hint at the profundity available to someone that has spent his entire life thinking in this fashion. To have your opening lines be those of a novice to this way, who learned the rational arts first, undermines the thematic idea that there is value and truth in the insight of the dream-sharing.
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