Welcome back to Death Of 1000 Cuts – making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time. This week, it’s time for another In The Barber’s Chair, where we take an author’s first page and scissor it unto death. I could sure use some more first pages to look at! Please send me the first page of your novel or short story via the ‘Contact Me’ link on the right. Look at previous Barber’s Chairs to get an idea of what I’m likely to say.
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As always, read the piece below, then look at my comments in ‘The Cuts’. If you disagree with anything I’ve said, please do chuck a comment beneath!
Deity (by Kieren)
‘Invalid opinion. Try again.’
Monkey kneels on her bunk with her head bowed and her hands clasped together in front of her.
‘Forgive me, Deity,’ she says. She thinks for a moment, breathing in the subtle scent of incense emitted from the Deity screen at the end of her bed. Around her the Doolittle hums as it continues its pilgrimage through space. Monkey keeps her head bowed and repeats, ‘It’s just that I was really sure I saw something.’
‘My sensors detected nothing other than you. Your opinion is still invalid. It will be removed by free will or catechism.’
‘I know.’ Monkey clasps her hands tighter. ‘I believe you, Deity. I suppose I’ve just been uneasy ever since we picked up the ship, the Grievous.’
‘I have not provided incentive to be uneasy. This is another irrational opinion.’
‘I’m sorry to be wrong, Deity. But… Please remind me of the difference between fact and opinion.’ She had seen something. She’s sure. A moving shadow in an empty corridor.
‘All facts are based on accurate observation. Flawless observation is possible only by an omniscient observer. You do not possess omniscience, so your observations are flawed. This margin of error prevents you from perceiving facts, and therefore you perceive only opinion.’
‘Thank you. I had forgotten.’
‘Forgetting is understandable given your limited cognitive powers. You are forgiven, Monkey. Do not worry. Returning to previous topic. You are interested by the Grievous. Why do you think that is?’
‘Well it must belong to other people… You’ve told us about other people before, Deity. I want to know what they’re like.’
‘There are no people alive on the Grievous. Are you still interested?’
Monkey thinks. ‘I suppose so.’
Deity is silent, then his metallic voice emerges through the Deity screen and the speakers in the ceiling once again. ‘Knowledge of outsiders is important to understand the threat they pose to our pilgrimage. We are fortunate that we rarely pass them in this part of space.’
‘I’ve never seen an outsider.’
‘I know.’
‘Why was the Grievous where it was?’
‘Do you mean why did we come across it, despite the remoteness of the region we are travelling through?’
‘Yes.’
There is a pause and a click. ‘That information is classified.’
‘Oh.’ Monkey stifles a yawn. She should go to bed but Deity seems to be in no hurry to tell her to sleep.
‘You have an above average number of questions tonight, Monkey. That is fine. I am here to assuage your doubts. Your body language indicates that you are nervous. Try to eliminate your use of body language; it is inefficient communication.’
The Cuts
Before we begin let me hold my hands up and confess that I am a sucker for good SF. That’s not to say that I’m holed up in an improvised hillfort made out of genre paperbacks, taking potshots at anything vaguely real-worldy that approaches – I suspect that, in my Top 10 or Top 25 favourite novels ever, the majority would be literary fiction – just that my heart loves the spectacle and fun of other worlds, or weird variations on our own world. I love the way SF defamiliarises the mundane, and makes us strangers to ourselves. I love the cool speculation – sometimes a really good SF or Fantasy premise is like being given a big box of Lego. I think, if you can’t enjoy SF, then your heart is dead to stories. (NB: when I say ‘enjoy SF’ I emphatically do not mean ‘uncritically consume everything with a genre label’ – Sturgeon’s Law still applies, and, if you’re a true SF fan, you’ll be picky about what you read, aware of the clichés, and harder to impress)
I’ve encountered so many people in publishing and academia who approach genre fiction with a combination of confusion and baffled amusement. They can’t understand why you’d want to swim out from the tepid lagoon of social realism into anything stranger, but for the most part they humour genre readers as misguided eccentrics. It’s as if you’ve told them you think books make fabulous hats – they don’t quite follow your logic, they privately suspect you’re a little moontouched, but, to paraphrase the three crows in Dumbo, just to be sociable they’ll take your word.
And who can blame them? Why would you want ion cannons and ranks of arquebus-toting lizardmen when you can have dysfunctional middle-class couples very slowly working their way towards aporia and the richly-evoked ennui of the fitted kitchen? Who would be so crass, so infantile, as to want wonder in their literature?
All of which is a roundabout way of explaining why there might bit a little less apoplectic swearing than is customary in the critique that follows. I like SF. Presenting me with an SF first page is like going on Masterchef and picking scallops as your starter. They love scallops, do John and Gregg.
‘Invalid opinion. Try again.’
Monkey kneels on her bunk with her head bowed and her hands clasped together in front of her.
So I like how you start in media res, throwing us into a scene already in motion and leaving us to figure out what’s going on. This is fundamentally good writing practice. Often, I see writers who understand this on a superficial level, and will pay lip service to it by opening with a piece of unattributed dialogue. They can’t hold their nerve for more than a few sentences, however, and they end up putting a huge infodump in the third paragraph to explain where we are and how we got here and where the protagonist went to college, blah blah zzz. It’s great that you keep this scene in the narrative present.
The first sentence of narrative could do with some trimming – I mean, technically, Monkey ‘is knelt’, to agree with ‘bowed’ and ‘clasped’; the way you’ve written it makes it sound like she’s in the act of bending her knees, as opposed to sitting with her knees bent. It’s a tricky stylistic decision – on the one hand, I can’t stand prattish pedants who insist that writing ‘sat’ for ‘was sitting’ is wrong, as if it hasn’t been a perfectly acceptable colloquial usage for decades, on the other, anything that creates unintentional, unhelpful ambiguity is axiomatically bad for your prose.
I wonder whether we need to see Monkey on a prayer mat or zafu instead of her bunk. Most bunks in ships and submarines don’t have much headroom – certainly not enough to kneel upright on. Is this a hard bunk? If there’s any sort of mattress, I imagine maintaining a respectful, deferent bow would be hard. What I’m suggesting is, perhaps you could imply that Monkey is kneeling, by giving us the physical sensation, i.e.: Her knees sunk a little into the memoryfoam prayer mat as she exhaled. Perhaps you could give us some pain in her kneecaps, to suggest she’s been kneeling for a while? I don’t know – it’s your novel.
The point is, you can use the problem – that it is difficult to elegantly and clearly describe someone kneeling – as motivation to improve your prose, and give us the information in a way that pulls double-duty, either through world-building (by introducing a prayer mat / introducing prayer mat building materials that locate your fictive world’s technological level) or through character development (by introducing pain in Monkey’s knees, thus giving us a point of empathy, and something that engages a sense other than sight).
No need to say her hands are ‘clasped together’ – ‘together’ is a meaningless fluff word. You can’t have your hands clasped apart, after all. You might consider replacing ‘in front of’ with ‘before’ – one word instead of three, but a little archaic, I grant you.
‘Forgive me, Deity,’ she says. She thinks for a moment, breathing in the subtle scent of incense emitted from the Deity screen at the end of her bed. Around her the Doolittle hums as it continues its pilgrimage through space. Monkey keeps her head bowed and repeats, ‘It’s just that I was really sure I saw something.’
I would start a new paragraph after ‘she says’. It helps establish rhythm, and, on a first page, it gives those all-important first lines some breathing space.
I like the introduction of incense – nice world-building, and engagement with the oft-neglected sense of smell. I’m not quite sure of how this room looks – cramped, spacious? Spartan, decorated with keepsakes? You’ve used bed/bunk interchangeably, which is mildly confusing. Don’t make a fetish of looking for synonyms. Repetition isn’t inherently bad, and offers its own sort of rhythm.
I think you just about get away with the introduction of the ship. Using the word ‘pilgrimage’ is a fantastically economical way of suggesting purpose while doing an extra bit of world-building – my only suggestion is to put a comma after ‘around her’, or maybe even extend the phrase to ‘all around her’. It’s fine that we don’t know what ‘the Doolittle’ is yet – you’re in-cluing us, we’ll pick up. Anyone who gets left behind, tough fucking shit, babies. If you want to get spoonfed, go back to the baby library. That is where spoonfeeding happens.
The introduction of Monkey’s having seen something implies an inciting incident. Good. We’re cooking.
‘My sensors detected nothing other than you. Your opinion is still invalid. It will be removed by free will or catechism.’
Oh fuck off. ‘My sensors detected’? That phrase is lifted wholesale from The Big Book O’ Science Fiction Clichés. We’re in a future where we’ve mastered deep space travel, where we can have conversations with intuitive AIs (presumably – I’m inferring this from the story), and yet Deity can’t help talking in awkward, faux-clinical robospeak. I don’t buy it for a second.
A human being wouldn’t say ‘my eyes saw a guy go past’, they’d say ‘I saw a guy go past’. This is a classic case of constructing part of your universe from the outside-in. You’ve dragged-and-dropped this dialogue from our collective consciousness rather than getting inside the character and creating it from the inside-out.
I’m still not sure quite what the ‘free will or catechism’ part means. Deity’s relationship to Monkey (can I just take this opportunity to say I think Monkey is a supercool name for a female protagonist) feels inconsistent over this scene. When we enter, the power dynamic feels head-priest-to-acolyte, but by the end it’s more therapist-to-client, and I’m not convinced the transition makes sense.
‘I know.’ Monkey clasps her hands tighter. ‘I believe you, Deity. I suppose I’ve just been uneasy ever since we picked up the ship, the Grievous.’
‘I have not provided incentive to be uneasy. This is another irrational opinion.’
Nice subtle conveyance of emotional state with the tighter clasping of hands. Now I’ve sugared the pill, it’s time to call you on your bullshit.
You might as well have written: ‘I suppose I’ve just been uneasy ever since we picked up the Grievous, which – as you know and I have no expedient reason to state – is a spaceship.’ Don’t cheat. Monkey would say: ‘I’ve suppose I’ve just been uneasy ever since we picked up the Grievous.’ We’ll work out it’s a ship from context later on. Don’t sacrifice the plausibility of your story for the sake of expositional signposts. Readers enjoy being strangers in strange lands. Don’t spoil it by turning all the natives into tour guides.
‘All facts are based on accurate observation. Flawless observation is possible only by an omniscient observer. You do not possess omniscience, so your observations are flawed. This margin of error prevents you from perceiving facts, and therefore you perceive only opinion.’
‘Thank you. I had forgotten.’
I like this – and I especially like the implication that Monkey’s reply is a little sarcastic. Perhaps that’s just my projecting, but even if it is, that’s a good sign. You’ve left enough interpretative space for the reader to jump to conclusions, to speculate about character motivations. Good.
‘Forgetting is understandable given your limited cognitive powers. You are forgiven, Monkey. Do not worry. Returning to previous topic. You are interested by the Grievous. Why do you think that is?’
See, this is the part that threw me. Deity’s tone shifts here to this more nurturing, albeit patronising, counsellor. Deity might be arrogant, but it can clearly empathise and make reasonably accurate assumptions about Monkey’s inner life and motivations. What happened to all the ‘your opinion is invalid’ and having it ‘removed by free will or catechism’? That sounds like old school fire and brimstone stuff. This is less confession booth, more psychiatrist’s couch – Deity reminds me of Sigfrid, the psychiatric AI in Frederik Pohl’s Gateway.
I’m not saying you couldn’t have an AI that lurched between overbearing Old Testament master and indulgent pedagogue – I imagine plenty of exponents of imperialism treated their slaves and servants and coolies with exactly that awful dichotomous father-tyrant dynamic – but I’m not sure you’ve fully owned it here. It feels as if you’re still writing your way into the voice of Deity, establishing the parameters, moving from the stereotypical ‘bleep bloop does not compute’ AI voice of golden age sci-fi to something more nuanced and plausible.
Deity is silent, then his metallic voice emerges through the Deity screen and the speakers in the ceiling once again.
Why is Deity’s voice ‘metallic’? I suspect the answer is ‘because that’s the way AIs talk in 50s and 60s sci-fi and I haven’t bothered to think my way out of the cliché’. It’s as if transport technology is centuries ahead of our own, but voice synthesis software has somehow regressed, so Godlike AIs sound like a Speak n’ Spell. Come on, man.
There is a pause and a click. ‘That information is classified.’
‘Oh.’ Monkey stifles a yawn.
What the fuck? Why is Monkey intensely interested, then, the moment she hits upon something that seems to confirm her thesis, that suggests there may be more going on than meets the eye, does she become bored? Why make your protagonist suddenly thick/apathetic just as the story heats up? Again, I suspect the answer is ‘because otherwise she’d ask a difficult question on the first page that I want to stretch out over the next hundred’.
Do not wait. Get her to ask it now. Give us the guts and the peril right from the off. Escalate. You can clearly write, and write well. This is not of a publishable standard, but I wouldn’t stake either of my cherished testes on never seeing your work in print. So here’s the plan: bring the story forward. Make Monkey smarter, Deity less computery, and the dynamic between them clearer. Don’t make Monkey not ask questions because she’s thick, make her clam up because she’s smart – because she realises, immediately, that she’s fucked if Deity – or whoever made Deity – knows that she has realised more is going on than meets the eye.
I don’t know what your planned story is, obviously, but we need more pressure on this first page, a clearer dynamic. Your lack of exposition is great, although the scene suffers a little from white-room syndrome from time to time. It would be good to get one or two extra hints about what the room looks like. Overall, this is the best piece we’ve looked at so far. Don’t use that praise as an excuse to slack off. Use it as motivation to redouble your efforts and to be as hard on your prose as you can. This is your novel, and it deserves nothing less.
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