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Death flit over the windswept moor, clad in talons and a piercing eye. The hawk hung low in the amber sky, on the lookout for fresh prey. It had come to this terrain after years of wandering through empty skies and flat, grassy vistas, resting in the occasional grove and eating the occasional rabbit or fox. Now it came to eat, and die.
The hawk’s last meal hung under some low sage under the shadow of a rocky slope. The rabbit undoubtedly knew that the hawk was there; it was stiller than a corpse. An occasional twitch or sniff marked it out from the bramble and stone. Its burrow lay nearby, a scuffled hole in the hillside. Winds rolled, kicking up dust and loose brush. The predator hung in the air above, inevitably.
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What do you think?
[This message has been edited by scm288 (edited October 26, 2006).]
While the imagery is grand, if this isn't about a hawk and a rabbit I might suggest a different starting point that jumps us into the actual story more.
Some specifics:
"Death flit over the windswept moor, clad in talons and a piercing eye." verb should be past tense and the phrasing is incorrect - clad in a piercing eye as written, which doesn't make sense to me.
"it was stiller than a corpse. An occasional twitch or sniff" these two back to back sentences directly contradict each other
You repeat "occasional" twice in the third sentence which doesn't sound good.
The last sentence seems to be just a fragment of a thought.
I'm really not sure what POV you are writing in here, it is very muddled together.
Omakase: I now notice the problems that you mentioned, and I'll get to fixing them right away.
I know that the POV is a bit screwy, but there is a reason for it. It's from the hawk's POV, but I'm trying to get the reader to understand that, at the moment, the hawk is a foreign and instinct-based creature. I can't really get into the emotional processes of the hawk yet, as it isn't yet intelligent enough to have anything meaningful going on in its mind. It's pretty hard to pull off, introducing a main character that the audience can't really connect to right off the bat.
But this character does expand shortly. I just need a bit more space to do it in. Starting with the expansion will ruin this story; I need to give the reader a feel for what the hawk's world was like before it became... intelligent.
Any suggestions on how to do this? And any other grammatical/syntax critiques? Those were really good, Omakase.
[This message has been edited by scm288 (edited October 26, 2006).]
Now for the nitty-gritty:
quote:
Death flit over the windswept moor, clad in talons and a piercing eye.
This didn't ring true enough, and I think it's because you don't typically think of someone/thing to be clad in body parts. I wouldn't expect myself described as being clad in blue eyes and tan fingers. If that's all I'm clad in when I walk out the door, someone is gonna call the police.
Also, flit is the active and present tense of the verb, which might account for some of your POV/tense issues. Flitted is more what you'd be looking for in a past tense piece, despite sounding a bit awkward.
quote:
Now it came to eat, and die.
Something about this, beit too disjointed or simply too brief, doesn't quite work. You could be more specific about the cause of death early on, or simply separate the thoughts.
quote:
The hawk’s last meal hung under some low sage under the shadow of a rocky slope.
Two prepositional phrases stack against each other, using the same preposition (under), causes a sense of deja vu, like a stuck record. Definitely consider rewording. You paint a nice picture with the sage and rocky slope, and you can create an interesting sense of hawks-eye-view as to what how the rabbit is actually seen in that same sentence.
quote:
Winds rolled, kicking up dust and loose brush. The predator hung in the air above, inevitably.
The first sentence in this bit is out of context with the rest of the statement. As for the second, it was... inevitable that the predator would hang in the air above? As stated earlier, this adverb is all alone unless you fit it into the context of the sentence... in which case it doesn't really make much sense. You're looking for meaning that I don't think we're getting, whether it be that the hawk is inevitably going to descend or that the hawk seems to linger invariably in the air.
In either case, if I were a rabbit who noticed such inevitability, I think it'd be time to make that creepy little screaming noise and get the hell out of Dodge City. Again, you want to stay true to your POV, so it's going to need to be the hawk's interpretation of this moment that decides what you make of this last bit, unless you want to switch to 3rd person omni.
Also, I thought you lacked a hook -- but you've got a great one we just hadn't seen! "The day that the hawk became a sentient being..."