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Author Topic: Bitty
Kent_A_Jones
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Fantasy. Bitty is a working title. I need impressions and interest level. The work is a short story and also a chapter in a novel I'm planning. I will enter the outline or synopsis in the novel forum when I'm done cooking it.

Bitty was crying again. Her hand touched a sack of coffee beans in Sama Dirks’ General Store. Every emotion the beans and sack had ever drawn flowed into her. She was overwhelmed by the bean pickers’ despair. It was wrong to cry over something she couldn’t do a lick about, but she couldn’t help it.
Momma slapped her hand from the sack. “Bitty girl, stop that crying! Where’s your keel stone?”
Magician Lord Beltus had given her the Artisan crafted stone after her evaluation. She wasn’t a Magician as Momma had feared. She was a Sensitive.
Bitty fished into her skirt pocket. Her fingers touched the cold, smooth stone. She giggled in the midst of her crying. Her other hand snapped to her mouth. Gods, what would people think?

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extrinsic
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Not much interest on my end. Unsettled voice, causation glitches, untimely summary and explanation, and limited antagonism.

Causation, the first sentence tells Bitty's reaction effect to touching the bean bag beforehand, that the rest of the paragraph portrays. Effect follows cause.

Unsettled voice, the parts switch back and forth without pattern between overt narrator voice and covert character voice: first sentence, third and fourth sentence, entire third paragraph narrator voice; the remaining sentences don't close far into character voice either, except the somewhat lackluster thought at the end definitively signaled by the interjection "Gods."

Third paragraph untimely tells the explanation of the keel stone.

Verbs like "touched" are tell signals. They are sensations that are as a best practice described directly from viewpoint character viewpoint without narrator mediation. One, a character does not observe her or his actions as if a bystander watching her or himself. Two, a character does not mentally narrate her or his actions. Three, a character's nonvolitional actions are not thought out as a preplanned, deliberate act.

I can't see how bean pickers' miseries antagonize an empath beyond causing emotional reactions that practice coping with comes easily. This scene sequence takes place in a general store at least a continent away from the coffee plantation. Bitty feeling the pickers' emotions is a near anonymous and pointless empathic reaction. She can do nothing about it.

I think a closer and more personal antagonizing event is indicated for this sequence.

"It was wrong to cry over something she couldn’t do a lick about" doesn't to me defuse the lack of personal connection; it calls undue attention to it.

"'Bitty girl, stop that crying!'" Either "girl" is capitalized as part of the proper noun name or a comma is indicated to separate "Bitty" from "girl" used as an interjection. The exclamation point to me is ineffective as it is.

[ April 07, 2014, 05:56 PM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]

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Denevius
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There's definitely some potential here if you up the tension more.

The first sentence is definitely underwhelming, and when I initially clicked on this thread, I stopped there. The passive voice doesn't drag me into the narrative. Plus, it sounds like you're trying to imitate a child's perspective, but it comes off as baby-speak, which isn't appealing.

'Her hand touched' would be better written as 'She touched'. More active.

quote:
Every emotion the beans and sack had ever drawn flowed into her. She was overwhelmed by the bean pickers’ despair. It was wrong to cry over something she couldn’t do a lick about,
This, however, piqued my interest. I do like the idea of this narrator who involuntary experiences the pain of others through touching objects, but feels impotent in doing anything to help the people whose pain she feels. On the one hand, it reminds me of Rogue from X-Men, who goes her entire life not being able to touch anyone she loves, only those who are her enemies. It also brings to mind Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower", which had a young protagonist that experienced the pain of others to the point that it physically affected her body.

This, however, is what your opening is missing: stakes. We see this little girl being slapped by her mother, but it would be more interesting, and more tragic, if her mother bloodied her for having this ability. This would initially make the mother an unsympathetic figure, but if the world of the story works in a way that this power has seriously adverse consequences to the user, we can almost see how the mother's strict attitude to her daughter is a misguided way to help her.

Anyway, now I'm writing your story. What you have here has potential, but my suggestion is to change the age of the protagonist, unless you're able to do better with the voice. And increase the stakes, increase the stakes, increase the stakes. Give readers a reason to care at the very start of the story.

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extrinsic
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I don't see passive voice. Static voice, not dynamic voice, yes. Prescriptively, "She was crying again" is active voice. Passive voice is where the doer of the action of a sentence's verb is unknown or unimportant and in object position or absent rather than in subject position. Patently, Bitty cries; she's the doer of the action: active voice.

Also prescriptively, to cry, to shed tears, is an intransitive verb, meaning it takes an object. "Again" is an adverb and part of the predicate phrase, not a sentence object. //Bitty was crying again crocodile tears.// would be an example of an object phrase added to the sentence.

Another grammar issue for that sentence is the present past participle tense inconsistent with the overall simple past tense of the fragment. //Bitty again cried wasted tears.// would be consistent tense, put the adverb "again" in its proper syntax position, and include an appropriate sentence object phrase of the intransitive verb.

Otherwise, the broken stream grammar could be construed as character voice, if it had a strong signal that it is Bitty's thought. Frankly, I feel the sentence is altogether unnecessary, because it summarizes and explains out of causal sequence the following context and texture of the first paragraph and the second paragraph, where Bitty crying is expressed more causally and using stronger imitation methods anyway.

[ April 07, 2014, 08:52 PM: Message edited by: extrinsic ]

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