Salt

[GCJ]

Hi there,

I have multiple reasons to ask for a critique, but as a relatively new writer I'd like to know above all else whether, in the eyes of those who do this, my writing is of any standard.

This is a story I initially became stuck on, changed, and never really finished. As such, I adapted it to a (very) short story of just over 1000 words. It has never been published, as per forum rules, and isn't part of any other published work of mine or anybody else's.

Constructive criticism is very much appreciated.

Cheers,

G
---

August 23rd 2054

Monday morning early shift was a killer for Thomas. It didn't matter whether he'd had good intentions of getting himself a restful sleep or not, it just never happened the night before he went back to work.

As he passed from the shop floor through double glass doors and into the atrium, the din of the factory floor softened behind him. Starting upstairs towards the canteen, he removed his silver-grey bump-cap and wiped the sweat off his brow with an out-turned palm. It was eleven, and Thomas had another three hours to go before he knocked off and drove the sixty minute commute back to his home town just outside Houston. The lunch hour always brought it firmly home to him just how much he detested factory life; clock in, work to the schedule of a holo-pad that threw breakdown alerts at him for most of the day, get to noon, have a break, and then almost feel the clock tick second-by-second until it flicked over to the magical fourteen-hundred hours. Even the queasy horn that marked the end of his shift, a thing that sounded like a 2020's relic, grated at him.

Factory work in that day and age was increasingly rare, but some of the new-world commodities were so difficult to make that technology hadn't quite managed to make the technicians that repaired the robots redundant. Yet, anyway.

Time, Thomas often thought as he gained in years, was precious above all of those commodities; valued above all else, and to be cherished. More precious than silver, gold, platinum, or the holo-pads they were churning out at a rate of fifteen thousand an hour.

He arrived in the canteen to the sight of Trevor already tucking into what would best be described as a nose bag. Trevor, Thomas thought to himself with an inner chuckle, was a great hand on the factory floor but could quite possibly injure one of those extinct Rhinos if his path to the canteen was ever blocked by an unlikely herd grazing at the foot of the stairs.

Ordering a cheese, tomato, and chopped onion baguette and picking out a bottle of Coke from the open refrigerator, he threw down a fifty dollar note to the girl behind the checkout and muttered genuinely, "Keep the change Donna."

"Gee, thanks Tom. So kind," she replied in a tone buttered with a sarcasm that had been spread far too thinly over the years.

Thomas glanced at her expressionlessly before drawing his look away, a pallid gesture that said far more than words could've, and then wandered over to their table being careful to avoid any supervisors that were grabbing a quick bite before heading back out to chase their targets.

"How did the Dynamo fare at the weekend Trev?" Thomas asked as he scraped out a chair.

It was one of those loaded questions intended to open the conversation lightly, primarily with the aim of avoiding the prospect of work coming up on his lunch break. Knowing just fine that the local pro-soccer team Houston Dynamo had gotten right royally humped at the weekend, evident by the highlights playing on the various televisions mounted around the canteen, Thomas waited on the answer he knew he'd get while he distractedly inspected the quality of his baguette before committing to it.

Trevor, hunched over his plate with food in both hands and a dark brown sauce of some description leaking from the edge of his mouth, looked up at the television drooling, "S**t, dude."

His eyes shifted in the direction of a screen mounted just above and to the right of where Thomas had sat down, wordlessly pointing him to the replays that he couldn't bear to watch again.

"Thought so," Thomas replied before sinking his teeth into his lunch and making a mental note to himself to swing past the hypermarket on the way home for some beer for the baseball game.

"Dude," Trevor slobbered, "did you see the news earlier? Those Middle-Easterns are kicking up a major s***-storm with the Africans. Just about every country down there has kicked out every African on the first flight home. Damned holy war going on. Christians and Muslims are going crazy at each other. Are those Africans nuclear?"

Thomas, a perpetual under-achiever, had never put his education to much use other than a brief sabbatical from factory life to work on oil refinery construction projects before the new energy revolution arrived; before the dust brought back from various dwarf planets and asteroids changed the energy paradigm and spawned the mega-corporations.

Nowadays, firmly back in the monotony of a regular job following the collapse of the hydrocarbon industry, he listened to the news closely. With a sceptical mind set on what was behind the blinding white of the news anchor's practiced smiles, Thomas was acutely aware of the narrative that underpinned every bulletin and most of the mainstream television programmes from soaps to documentaries. It was, to him, a false narrative that had been spelled out word for word as he travelled the world talking to different cultures from Nepal to Venezuela.

It was a narrative that told him starkly that the tinned food and bottled water he'd been hoarding in his out-house, along with a hunting rifle and six hundred-odd rounds, would be put to good use before too long.

"Yep, they're most definitely nucl..."

The Global News Network sports channel mutedly bleating out breaking news about the transfer of a Brazilian soccer player to the MLS froze, twisted into interference, and then blackened completely. Trevor, now focussing intently on a well-ravaged husk of roast chicken, paused mid-bite and shifted his eyes up to the screen inquisitively as silence interjected the ordinarily bustling ambience of the canteen.

Just as he was about to break the hush and begin explicitly cursing their employers for making a hash of installing the GNN cable network with the lowest bidder, five white words filled the screen - all twelve screens in the canteen - against a black background.

Thomas' mouth fell open, matching the descent of Trevor's lunch as it dropped to the table from his slimy fingertips and landed with a damp thud. A siren, far distant, began whining out a drone that set both of their brows sweating. Panic, then disbelief, gripped them as the realisation that factory life wasn't all that bad flashed through them in a cruel instant.

"NUCLEAR ATTACK IMMINENT. FOLLOW PROTOCOLS."

A tear leaked from Thomas' eye, borne of regret, of the end of his time, and rolled over the bulge of his cheek before racing down to follow the contours of his shocked gape.

Salt was the last thing Thomas tasted when the flash arrived six seconds later; when the bricks and blocks pulsed through him, tearing him to his constituent parts.

Salt.

 

[Brian G Turner]

At the beginning, someone is doing routine things and nothing happens. You give us objective descriptions of pretty irrelevant things, but avoid any specifics such as what his job is, even though that might actually be important. He lacks drive, so it's difficult to empathise. The whole intro is very generic, which means it's missing those authentic details that help negate suspension of disbelief. It waves a big flag to the reader that this character is not important.

The lack of change from a 50 is a great touch, though. Why? Because you give us specifics, and show how your setting is different to now by showing us instead of telling us.

The announcement should be dramatic, but your character's reaction is unrealistically wistful. What regret? And describing the path of the tear just zooms us away from the character so that we can be emotionally distant, when surely the opposite is true?

The ending is clever and I liked the focus on "salt", but it's lacking emotional impact.

My suggestion is that if you want to look to rewrite this, you make any issue of regret the focus at the start. Don't be generic, be specific, and use something real from your life so you can better communicate a sense of authenticity. Do that right, and your ending should be far stronger for it, because you will have given it context.

And, by the way, if you want to see what it's like to build up character with a surprise, watch this 1 min 30 s video:

 

[Martin Gill]

I'm with Brian here. Grammatically your are fine - I haven't gone at it with a fine toothed editorial eye but there's nothing glaring in your style. But I didn't find myself engaging with the story. If this hadn't been a critique I'd have stopped. You tease at a future world without giving enough of the experience for it to be enough to interest me, and the same goes for Thomas. He's just bored. That's not wildly interesting. He's bored in a dull job, then gets blown up.

You have the core of something interesting and you can string words together. I'd focus more on Thomas as a character - why is he interesting and why do I care when he explodes?

 

[pambaddeley]

The viewpoint is also very detached and external, almost like a film rather than in the character's POV. I found it odd that he's described as wiping his sweat away with 'an outturned palm'. He actually wipes it away with the back of his hand unless I mistake what you describe so if you think about it, his palm doesn't come into it.

An example of the external non-involvement is this: "Thomas glanced at her expressionlessly before drawing his look away, a pallid gesture that said far more than words could've"

Basically, it's omniscient narrator POV which is looked on as rather oldfashioned these days and it doesn't help that the character is bored with his situation. I would also watch some of your present tense usage as, for example, "Ordering a cheese, tomato, and chopped onion baguette and picking out a bottle of Coke from the open refrigerator, he threw down a fifty dollar note" - so he's doing all these actions simultaneously according to that initial 'ordering'. The logical order would be 'he ordered ... and picked out .... then threw down'.

Also watch over usage of dialogue tags other than the 'invisible' one 'said' and also adverbs - "muttered genuinely" - especially together like that which is too much. If it's really essential, he can mutter but then stick to said most of the time. You can of course avoid even 'said' if you 'tag' the dialogue to an action of the character's. But rather than use genuinely here it would be better to have him feel slightly hurt/offended by her obvious sarcasm - make it clear from his POV that he meant just to let her have the money, he wasn't making a nasty dig or whatever.

You have quite a lot of adverbs in this, as you can see in the following para:

It was one of those loaded questions intended to open the conversation lightly, primarily with the aim of avoiding the prospect of work coming up on his lunch break. Knowing just fine that the local pro-soccer team Houston Dynamo had gotten right royally humped at the weekend, evident by the highlights playing on the various televisions mounted around the canteen, Thomas waited on the answer he knew he'd get while he distractedly inspected the quality of his baguette before committing to it.

The problem with adverbs is they have a diluting effect. It's much better to use a specific verb - the difference between say 'he walked slowly' or 'he shuffled' or 'he inched' or 'he stalked' or whatever.

From an emotional POV, I'm also not convinced that a tear of regret would be the character's reaction unless you can convince us of it by something he's been experiencing emotionally earlier. Otherwise it seems that total shock or losing control of bodily functions with panic or whatever would be far more likely.

 

[GCJ]

Thanks folks. The comments you've left so far are exactly what I was looking for to help me improve my writing style, my understanding of character creation, and my ability to hold an audience.

To be fair, I chose a story I'd been struggling with from the off. Originally, it was part of the opening chapter to a much longer story, but after a couple of thousand words I abandoned it as directionless. I've no intention of taking it any further, but I think it would be an excellent cornerstone for me to work on as an experiment to see how, as my writing develops, I could take something rightly critiqued as below par and disengaging and attempt to turn it into a short piece that is thought provoking and contemplative.

I had reasonable confidence that my sentence structure was okay, but I do appreciate the comments about sticking to the tense the story is set in and to be mindful of the overuse of adverbs. I tend to write the way I talk and think, so perhaps such problems arise from regional nuances as much as practice.

On the 'out-turned palm' front, the only thing I'm going to defend, it is what one would see should he be observed. I do get the criticism of the line though, and I appreciate the thought. Perhaps I should have detailed that most factory workers leave the floor with sodden hands and the intention of bringing the palms to fore was due to that fact.

Again, that's an inexperienced writer who has only been tapping away since last June or July. I think I'm supposing the reader already knows things that I haven't taken the time to describe, and that's a problem I'll endeavour to address (thanks to you folks).

I watched the video that @Brian G Turner posted, and the imagination required to create such a piece is frightening. I truly missed the entire back story, drawn to the front absolutely and deliberately. Thanks for that. It was a lesson in itself.

The sentence about the tear, in retrospect, and considering he was about to be flashed to his very atoms, was resolutely lame.

I'm going to toy with it for a few months to see what I can do with it without altering the length too much. I think that would be a good way to develop my creativity.

Again, thank you so much for all the honest and wise comments. They are genuinely appreciated.

G

 

[GCJ]

Oh, I meant to add about the use of the word 'said'. I'm reading conflicting ideas about that. On one hand, some say the use of 'said' too often is unimaginative, but others say the use of more descriptive tags is essential. Thoughts?

 

[Martin Gill]

Ooh. Just watched the video because I was working before. that is an awesome piece of storytelling and misdirection

 

[RX-79G]

GCJ,

You are a good writer from most perspectives. I don't think it will be hard for you to adapt to the suggestions made so far on the broader scope of storytelling or specific language issues.

Nit pick: Quotations are not normally in italics. You have quotation marks to identify speech, so save the italics for emphasis, thoughts, etc. The two together make it harder to read.



Language: Aside from the non-involvement thing, a lot of your sentences are "too long". Which isn't to say that they are grammatically incorrect, run-on or anything like that. I just think they pack too many descriptors into one sentence for smooth reading:

Ordering a cheese, tomato, and chopped onion baguette and picking out a bottle of Coke from the open refrigerator, he threw down a fifty dollar note to the girl behind the checkout and muttered genuinely, "Keep the change Donna."

This sentence tells us an awful lot about the design of his loaf (or is it a sandwich?), the fact that he has gone through a selection process to arrive at Coke, that refrigerator is the doorless variety and where the girl is positioned relative to the checkout. It is actually a lot to consider. Does that sentence actually make for more enjoyable and interesting reading than a shorter version that leaves out or simplifies all those mechanical details:

Grabbing a cheese, tomato and onion baguette and a Coke from the cooler, he threw a fifty on the counter by the checkout and muttered genuinely, "Keep the change, Donna."

I'm not picking on lunch - the passage is representative of many in the excerpt. They remind me of some 19th century fiction, and I think they are relatively tiring to read because they contain so much information about the hows and whys of something relatively unimportant. A sentence like this would probably be acceptable if it was describing an important action sequence or emotional confrontation.

But the fact that you can construct such sentences with ease speaks well of you skills.

 

[J Riff]

And, what's with the salt? A longer story, as you planned originally, may have added some meaning to salt, and made the ending a little punchier. Still, it reads pretty well despite people tear it up ten ways. I will argue that an outurned palm is okayish... but yeah, adverbs dilute.

 

[GCJ]

Again, @RX-79G, that's feedback that I can't argue with and is correct in entirety. The re-jigged sentence certainly does make for easier reading, and has a better grasp of the Americanisms that I was trying to throw around in there.

I'm conscious of my tendency to spin sentences out too far at times. In a piece that I wrote which was much longer (circa 50K words), I found myself editing many of the sentences to be much shorter, and even rehashed some of them to smooth out the read. I never thought of it as a Victorian trait though, but on reflection you're right again. I tried to read Oliver Twist when I was a lad, and I got lost in the sentence structure and gave up. Perhaps it's time for a revisit purely as a learning.

Is it an absolute that italics can't be used during quotation? I sort of like it that way, but if it's off-putting then I suppose change is for the best.

Once more, thanks for the time you took to look over the story and offer your valuable insights.

G

 

[GCJ]

And, what's with the salt? A longer story, as you planned originally, may have added some meaning to salt, and made the ending a little punchier. Still, it reads pretty well despite people tear it up ten ways. I will argue that an outurned palm is okayish... but yeah, adverbs dilute.

Salt was a title that I chose purely because it was the last sensation that he experienced. The story was actually plucked from an unwritten book idea that dealt with the looming cashless society that we're rushing headlong into with little thought for how the day-to-day exchange of labour would actually happen.

Seeing as I struggled with the idea, and wanted to rid myself of it for the time being, I literally killed it off by deleting the first 1000 - 1500 words and altering the opening story to bring about a deadly nuclear attack. Initially, before I edited it to be a (mediocre) stand-alone short, Thomas would've survived a pretty weak nuclear attack. However, the act would've brought about a sharp shift to right-wing politics, demands for a cashless society to stave off any semblance of unregistered cash transactions that could've been used to fund foreign mischief, and the transfer of almost all skills across all classes to semi-sentient machines.

It was inspired by recent news that 'helicopter money' is looming to attempt to defeat the pure mathematics of capitalism, the markets are bubbling again, and a few other considerations.

Thomas was to be the narrator, describing his life from that moment of survival to the point he found himself at in 2090-odds. I saw him as Red-esque, from The Shawshank Redemption.

I don't mind people tearing it up. I'm grateful for their honest critiques, yours too, and especially for their time.

Time, as Thomas alluded to, is more precious than any commodity.

G

 

[RX-79G]

I tried to read Oliver Twist when I was a lad, and I got lost in the sentence structure and gave up.

I was thinking somewhat of Jules Verne, but I do think there was a time when a long, finely crafted sentence was a thing to behold. Now they read more like a demonstration of prowess, rather than the most accurate or pointed way to describe a scene.

Is it an absolute that italics can't be used during quotation? I sort of like it that way, but if it's off-putting then I suppose change is for the best.

It is a belt and suspender approach. The font style and size are very important to how people read - which is why you'll almost never find a book printed in san serif fonts. Italics aren't terrible, but they are conspicuous and somewhat disrupt the reading process. Which is good, because it makes them stand out, but bad if they aren't standing out for a reason.

I imagine an editor would simply remove them.

 

[Brian G Turner]

the imagination required to create such a piece is frightening. I truly missed the entire back story, drawn to the front absolutely and deliberately.

Look how they make us miss that, though - there's a character-centred story there, very simply put, but has something we can relate to. And the writing on the desk is a nice little detail. That's the point - everything seems so ordinary, but we can feel for what the story is before the punchline kicks in. It's the former we're still missing here, but I'm sure you can fix that up if you wanted to.

 

[The Judge]

Just to perhaps correct a possible misapprehension, although Pam is absolutely right in her comment that the "Ordering a cheese, tomato, and chopped onion baguette and picking out a bottle of Coke from the open refrigerator, he threw down a fifty dollar note" makes it appear he's doing all these actions simultaneously, it's not actually present tense there. Strictly speaking it's the present participle being used in a participle phrase (actually two of them, with the two "-ing"s), but I find it easier to think of it as the continuous past ("I was running") as opposed to the simple past ("I ran") -- because then it reminds me that it is something that is continuing and should only be used if it covers the whole of the following actions.

Something like "Humming to myself, I picked out a cheese baguette and a bottle of coke, then threw down a fifty dollar note" is fine because the humming is continuing all the way through. Here in your version it's stretching credibility to see him doing these things at the same time, so I'd suggest either you keep to simple past for them as per her example, or "Having ordered a cheese baguette and picked out a bottle of Coke, he threw..."

By the way, if you've not found it yet, we do have The Toolbox which deals with issues of this kind and might be of interest.

Is it an absolute that italics can't be used during quotation? I sort of like it that way, but if it's off-putting then I suppose change is for the best.

The convention is that italics are used for thoughts, or for emphasis both in narrative and dialogue, eg "She said what?" so while there are no absolutes in writing, I'd also advise dropping the italics for ordinary dialogue (but keep it for eg telepathic conversations) as it looks odd.

 

[pambaddeley]

Duly corrected TJ - I do know about the present participle but I typed in a rush. As your example makes clear, what I was trying to say was that his actions weren't continuous in reality.

 

[GCJ]

I'm glad that it has been said that there are no hard and fast restrictions on writing, because I tend to view writers as artists and artists need to express themselves in their own way.

There are a few recurring themes that seem to be coming across that I'll endeavour to work hard on. Cumbersome and lengthy sentences, for a start. I'm aware that I tend to do this, but I'm thinking it's stemming from poor self-editing and an over-eagerness to add detail in a rush rather than to a careful plan. I get that discontented feeling in my gut with certain sentences and phrases that I've written, and you good folks have done an excellent and impartial job of picking them out perfectly.

 

[J Riff]

Don't worry about sentence length though - 100+ words is perfectly fine, been noticing it a lot lately, in classic writers especially. When you try to change something you've already written, it can be a tightrope act, very hard to do, almost always better to redo the whole piece.

 

[GCJ]

Don't worry about sentence length though - 100+ words is perfectly fine, been noticing it a lot lately, in classic writers especially. When you try to change something you've already written, it can be a tightrope act, very hard to do, almost always better to redo the whole piece.

I've already started to implement some of the valuable advice I've came across here in one of the things I'm writing at the moment. Sometimes it takes open and honest evaluation to correct some glaring problems and smooth out the less obvious ones. Thanks to everybody who has contributed to this thread.

 

[Danny McG]

At the beginning, someone is doing routine things and nothing happens. You give us objective descriptions of pretty irrelevant things, but avoid any specifics such as what his job is, even though that might actually be important. He lacks drive, so it's difficult to empathise. The whole intro is very generic, which means it's missing those authentic details that help negate suspension of disbelief. It waves a big flag to the reader that this character is not important.

The lack of change from a 50 is a great touch, though. Why? Because you give us specifics, and show how your setting is different to now by showing us instead of telling us.

The announcement should be dramatic, but your character's reaction is unrealistically wistful. What regret? And describing the path of the tear just zooms us away from the character so that we can be emotionally distant, when surely the opposite is true?

The ending is clever and I liked the focus on "salt", but it's lacking emotional impact.

My suggestion is that if you want to look to rewrite this, you make any issue of regret the focus at the start. Don't be generic, be specific, and use something real from your life so you can better communicate a sense of authenticity. Do that right, and your ending should be far stronger for it, because you will have given it context.

And, by the way, if you want to see what it's like to build up character with a surprise, watch this 1 min 30 s video:

I noticed the earphone guy in the background the first time I watched but misinterpreted why he was there.
I thought it was gonna turn out he was the one answering Evan on the desk and he was a psycho stalker.

 

[Dan Jones]

I see others have commented on some of the technicalities here, so I won't go into that, but thought I'd say that I really rather enjoyed this. It could be tightened up in places - some red ink wouldn't go amiss - but I think it's a really nice start.

One thing: you really don't need the first paragraph - I'd remove it