posted
1st thirteen lines: Maren left the morning after the two weddings. They had not at first planned to hold both weddings the same day, but her mother, Ilsa, decided it was foolish to hold two separate celebrations so close together. So Mark and Annalee were married in the morning and after some dancing and a midday feast, Peter and Ilsa spoke their vows. The older folks headed home in time to do their chores, but most of the younger couples were still dancing, singing and drinking when Maren went home alone to the house where she had been born. Matthias, who was more than a little drunk and almost old enough to be her father, had been looking for her to ask her to dance again, but she had excused herself to go to the outhouse, and then slipped quietly away though the woods.
When Maren was born, her father had cried for joy; her mother had told her the story a number of times. She found it hard to imagine - her father who had, in her memory, never cried. Not for the twin boy babies after Maren, both born dead; not for his leg, crushed by a log when Maren was 13, nor ever in the months after as he fought the pain and infection. And he had not....
Genre: fantasy/alternative history Story length: I have finished a first draft, over 150 typed single-spaced pages Critique wanted of: as much of it as you have to time to (or care to) read. Although I welcome any comments (and I promise not to argue or defend myself), I am mainly interested in whether you think the basic ideas work, whether you can follow what is going on, believe it, and care about it. ***Revision: Sorry about the lack of clarity - When I wrote the questions above, I was thinking of someone reading more than just the first 13 lines - but thank you to those who tried it!
[This message has been edited by enwalker (edited April 26, 2005).]
When you asked your questions, did you mean the opening or that when people read the whole story, those were the questions you wanted them to have in mind? The reason I ask is because I have no idea what your basic idea is from the little you've given.
I'll answer the last few questions as they pertain to what you've posted.
Yes, I can follow what's going on. Yes, I believed it. I cared about Maren in the first paragraph, but the second started to lose me. It felt like an info dump when what I wanted to see was a reason why I should care about her.
150 single-spaced pages is quite a bit. If I'd seen this a couple of days ago, I might have offered, but life happened and I'm not so sure I can handle that much right now.
If you can't find anyone on F&F, try looking around on the writing group board for members. I got the impression the groups are focused more on novels and stories close to that category.
posted
Actually, it isn't so much that you're dumping information as that you're not presenting the information in a sensible manner.
It's easy enough to sift what you've got here and realize that the reason Maren is leaving has something to do with the marriages and her father already being dead. Presumably, her married siblings will split the estate somehow and she won't really have a place except by their (by the way, which are her siblings and which are her in-laws?) charity, which she has some reason for not accepting.
But it's like a puzzle figuring that out, or even figuring out what time we're at in the narrative, since you skip between the morning after the weddings and the planning for the weddings and the dancing right after the weddings without any distinctions.
Then we get what is probably a reminiscence, a type of flashback where the POV character thinks back to previous events. But we don't know when she is doing this, so we don't know what context is guiding her thoughts. Is this after she's left, or before the wedding, or as she makes her way back home to avoid dancing with Matthias? We have no way of knowing and no confidence that you'll ever see fit to tell us.
I would say you might be starting your story in the wrong place if I had any confidence in estimating where you've started the story...but you haven't. You're just telling us various things about Maren in no particular order.
I think that you could have the start of a very interesting character, a strong, independent woman who is unwilling to accept the lack of an important role in life. But so far what you don't have is the beginning of a story, you have a bunch of incidents that could be connected somehow but since they aren't in any logical order that the rest of us can see, it isn't clear how you mean them to be connected.
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- but thank you to those who tried it!
