Hello, piggg! I'm Eripsa, nice to meet you. I want to critique your story "The Midshipmen." You ask for a focus on grammar, but after reading there wasn’t any real pattern of misuse that calls for immediate correction. No habit of comma splices, a variety of sentence patterns, proper punctuation all around. Even in the dialogue.
I really like how you use interior dialogue and dialogue between different characters to develop them. It’s the preferred method to deliver characterization in short stories, in my opinion. However, there was one exchange of dialogue that read a little clunky:
piggg
Then Clay got up and got some cranberry juice.
“What, are you on your period?” my brother said when he came back.
“******** you, Josh,” Clay said.
“Oh come on, nobody even drinks cranberry juice on their period,” Thomson’s date said.
“It’s from a movie,” I told her.
“No, but really, it’s great for your complexion,” Mary said.
“Yeah, cause that’s so much ******** better,” my brother said.
“You know what Mary? I’ll fight you,” Clay said leaning into her face.
“Come on, man,” Morrisey said. Morrisey was six six then, and huge. He was playing rugby.
“No. Take it back Mary. No, no, I take that back. Let’s go outside, and I’ll fight you.” The two began punching each other in the arm.
“The funny thing is, she could take him out,” my brother whispered to me and Thomson. We laughed.
There are a lot of characters here, and they each say one thing. I understand the compulsion to provide characterization for all of the characters, but the sacrifice is quality. I don’t get a feeling for any of these characters as a result of this exchange, even though they all say something. The reason it reads as clunky is because you need to provide a tag for every different character, which breaks the flow of the writing. It’s also hard to visualize, since rarely do conversations work with one person saying something, then a different person, then another, all in perfect sync, without anyone stepping on another’s lines. What would read more natural here is a layer of conversation, with two or three people discussing the juice, then the girls talking back and forth underneath that. Really split the conversation up and try to work it out so that it’s evident who is talking without as many tags.
I’d suggest expanding this moment, except honestly I’m not sure what this scene is meant to accomplish in the story. By the end, I was still confused who Thomas was in relation to the others. A best friend of the brother? Or simply a fellow navy man? And Morrissey? And the others? I was surprised how little characterization Thomas actually gets, especially since the narrator is reflecting on his loss in relation to her brother.
I’m also confused about the relation of the driving scenes to the military scenes. What function were you hoping they would serve in the story? They only distracted me from the actual meat of the tale, which would be the untimely death of a friend, and the risk that the narrator’s brother may meet the same fate. And her feelings on that. I have no idea why the narrator would contemplate driving, or how it relates, and I’d really like to know. I can imagine and extrapolate why the narrator is thinking this much about driving, and about that particular memory of the party, and so on, except I don’t believe that a reader should do this much guess work. I completely understand if your personal writing philosophy is different, but I want to be clear about why I am commenting on the ambiguity of these scenes.
I like your style of many scenes coming together to create the narrative, and I don’t want you to , change it. However, to improve it I would suggest that every scene should serve one specific purpose in the story. I believe every aspect of a well-told tale is deliberate. Every word, every detail should advance the reader’s understanding somehow. Currently, there are missed opportunities in the beginning driving scenes, and in the middle party scene, and even at the end during the funeral, for you to really make the reader understand the narrator and empathize. Instead, I felt like I was watching someone I didn’t know experience something painful. I empathized because I have compassion for strangers, but I didn’t really relate or understand the purpose of the story on a narrative level. All of the minor characters felt like they were name-dropped, and then never fully developed.
This can be fixed in future revisions very easily. I think you’re a talented writer with a great intuitive sense of scene. You really set it up in my mind. I can picture everything easily. However, you can’t leave everything up to the reader to imagine. I want you to tell me some things. Most importantly, I want to know for sure by the end of the story why it has been told. What is the theme? A good theme can be described in a single sentence without a cliche, for example: “Jennifer wants her brother to come home alive from the war, and struggles with the reality that it might not happen.”
What is the conflict for the narrator, clearly? In other words, what is it she really wants? Currently I think it’s for her brother to be safe, but that’s a real stab in the dark. What is the climax of the story, which would translate to what the narrator either does or does not get? If you add those directions in the story somewhere, and I trust your skill enough that you’d know where, then this story will emerge from the fog as a wonderful, fully realized short story about a girl’s struggles with the reality of mortality. Or whatever it truly is. I don’t presume to fully know or understand your intentions.
It’s clear you have skill and talent from what I’ve read here. Really, I don’t mean to come off as harsh, and I’m sorry if I have. This is a great draft and I enjoyed reading it. I was interested, and would like to see any future revisions of this story.
Good luck on your future revisions!
Sincerely,
Eripsa
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