Critique of Follow the Queen
(My comments will be in Purple. Words and punctuation that need to be deleted are in Red. Words and punctuation I added are in Purple. At the end I will have general comments about the passage.)
Our sense of smell is the strongest of all of our senses when it comes to evoking memory. That memory could be the whiff of a long lost lover's cologne, or the smells that take you back to our childhood. Unfortunately, not every memory that comes back to haunt us is an enjoyable one.
The coppery metallic scent of blood fills my nose as I lie in an expanding pool of my own blood. I can feel the sticky wetness puddle beneath me as I prayed that someone heard the earlier gunshots and called them in to the police. Nice opening tying smell into memory and leading into the scent of blood. The writer is setting up the suspense.
In the distance, I can hear the wail of sirens cut through the stillness of the night air. In the moonlight, Kevin Davis' body lay on the concrete, facedown in a pool of his own blood. He was dead; he had to be. Even with my eyes closed, I could still picture the bullet as it penetrated his chest. He died by my hand; I had no choice. It was either his life or mine.
As I sit in the small home office set up in my apartment, I still feel uneasy with the knowledge that someone lost his life by my actions. I still haven't quite sorted it through. My actions moved me into the same camp with soldiers and maniacs.
The incessant chatter of police radios shatters the stillness of the night. The strobe of blue and red lights fills my vision. "They're over there," I can hear a male voice say. The rattle and clatter of a gurney as it rolls across the tarmac to where I lay is the last thing I hear as my grip on reality slips and darkness fills my vision. Nice description. The writer does a good job of remembering all the senses.
When I finally manage to come back to reality, the only thing I can see is the ceiling of a hospital room. "So you've finally decided to join the living again, eh, Alex?" a familiar voice asked me. I turned to see Detective Nathaniel Walker reclined in a chair pulled up beside the bed. "You want to tell me what happened?" his voice was light and casual.
"Hi, Nate," I croaked. I didn't even recognize my voice as my own it was so thick with pain. "I don't know that any of it will make that much sense."
"Just tell me as much as you can, Alex. I need to know what happened and why Sheila has a dead man on the coroner's slab with a bullet from your gun in his chest."
"Well," I began. "It all started two days ago..." My kneejerk reaction to this is if the story started two days ago, then why not start the book at that point? Is there a reason for having this be the first scene? We don't really have enough of the story to tell, but given how short this scene is, I would doubt it. What is established in the scene? Alex has been shot; he shot a man named Kevin Davis and a detective named Nathaniel Walker is visiting Alex in the hospital and interviewing him. It seems as though Alex shot Kevin in self defense. The question that is left open is why did Alex shoot Kevin? Is this a big enough question to justify jumping ahead in time and then back into the past? I don't know. But it is something the writer should take a good, long look at.
****
Friday afternoon was a typical southern California spring day; the sky above Rosewood a clear azure without a cloud in sight. Two blocks away, the ocean rolled onto the beach with a subtle almost subliminal hiss. For the most part, I tended to ignore it, much as the rest of the three thousand some-odd residents of Rosewood. But on such a glorious spring day, that whisper of sound just seemed to fit. The squeak of the iron gate as it closed behind me must have alerted my landlord to my return from the daily jog on the beach. I'd just bent over to untie my shoelace and use the key tied there to open the door when a familiar voice called out to me.
"Alex? You got a minute honey?"
The silvery head of my landlady, Clara Simms, filled the window of her kitchen that faced the small patch of grass that separated her back door from my front door. "For you, Clara, anything." I called out as I trotted across to her back door.
What can I tell you about Clara Simms? She's the type of woman my mother would have called 'a pistol-ball'. Clara retired from the Rosewood police department ten years ago, but her true passion for all things culinary led her to take up baking after she'd retired. She sells the results of her baking forays to local restaurants, donates a large portion to local homeless shelters; she also caters the odd wedding reception orf lady's club meeting.
Even at eighty-eight, she could still easily work circles around men and women half her age. In addition to her daily baking and cooking, she also keeps the rose garden that borders the tiny plot of grass that separates my apartment from her house in perfect shape.
From time to time, I will make use of her connections still on the force when I'm not partaking of one of her latest concoctions that floods out of her kitchen. When she's not elbow deep in flour, or whatever she's working on, she's forever and a day trying to get me into her weekly card games. Be it bridge, pinochle or canasta, it didn't matter. If it's a card game, she knows how to play it and play it well. She had the reputation among her circle of friends as a card shark and there were very few that could take losing to her week after week.
General Comments:
This is a great opportunity to talk about tense because the writer switches tense several times in this passage. It is easy when jumping back and forth between time frames to confuse tenses. Verb tense conveys time. Verbs change form to show time. The simplest tense is called, surprisingly enough, SIMPLE TENSE. Simple tense divides time into present, past, future. I see; I saw; I will see.
Let's take a look at the first portion of this passage again:
Our sense of smell is the strongest of all of our senses when it comes to evoking memory. That memory could be the whiff of a long lost lover's cologne, or the smells that take you back to your childhood. Unfortunately, not every memory that comes back to haunt us is an enjoyable one.
The coppery metallic scent of blood fills my nose as I lie in an expanding pool of my own blood. I can feel the sticky wetness puddle beneath me as I prayed that someone heard the earlier gunshots and called them in to the police.
In the distance, I can hear the wail of sirens cut through the stillness of the night air. In the moonlight, Kevin Davis' body lay on the concrete, face down in a pool of his own blood. He was dead; he had to be. Even with my eyes closed, I could still picture the bullet as it penetrated his chest. He died by my hand; I had no choice. It was either his life or mine.
As I sit in the small home office set up in my apartment, I still feel uneasy with the knowledge that someone lost his life by my actions. I still haven't quite sorted it through. My actions moved me into the same camp with soldiers and maniacs.
The incessant chatter of police radios shatters the stillness of the night. The strobe of blue and red lights fills my vision. "They're over there," I can hear a male voice say. The rattle and clatter of a gurney as it rolls across the tarmac to where I lay is the last thing I hear as my grip on reality slips and darkness fills my vision.
When I finally manage to come back to reality, the only thing I can see is the ceiling of a hospital room. "So you've finally decided to join the living again, eh, Alex?" a familiar voice asked me. I turned to see Detective Nathaniel Walker reclined in a chair pulled up beside the bed. "You want to tell me what happened?" his voice was light and casual.
"Hi, Nate," I croaked. I didn't even recognize my voice as my own it was so thick with pain. "I don't know that any of it will make that much sense."
"Just tell me as much as you can, Alex. I need to know what happened and why Sheila has a dead man on the coroners slab with a bullet from your gun in his chest."
"Well," I began. "It all started two days ago..."
Now the first thing you will notice is that the passage now looks like a rainbow. I have identified the different types of verbs by color as follows:
Present tense- blue font. Present tense is happening NOW. I eat dinner. Jaala plays soccer. Frith plans her wedding.
Past tense- brown font. Past tense happened in the past. It is over. Done with. I ate lunch. Jaala played soccer. Frith planned her wedding.
Future tense- yellow font. Future tense will happen in the future. It has not yet happened. I will eat. Jaala will play soccer. Frith will plan her wedding.
The simple tenses are... well... simple. Easy enough to understand. Now let's complicate things a little and look at the perfect tenses. The perfect tenses describe actions or occurrences that are still having an effect at the present time or are having an effect until a specified time. The perfect tenses use an auxiliary verb (known also as a helping verb and the main verb's past participle.)
Present Perfect - green font. I have eaten. Jaala has played soccer. Frith has planned her wedding. Now it's a fine point but basically what we are saying is that in the here and now, we have done something and are still doing it. Frith has planned her wedding-- and is still doing so. Jaala has played soccer and can still do so. I have eaten and will continue to do so.
Past Perfect - gray font. Once I had eaten, I felt better. As soon as Jaala had played soccer, the rain started. After Frith had planned her wedding, she got married. My feeling better, the rain, and the wedding all happened in the past. Eating, playing soccer and planning the wedding happened BEFORE my feeling better, the rain and the wedding.
Future Progressive - orange font. I will be eating on campus next week. Jaala will be playing soccer next season. Fritha will be planning her wedding next year. These are all recurring events that will take place in the future. If Jaala were just to play soccer once next year, then we would say, "Jaala will play soccer." But because she will play it many times next year, we say, "Jaala will be playing soccer."
Past Progressive - lavender font. I was eating on campus last week. Jaala and her teammates were playing well last week. Fritha was planning her wedding last week. These are all ongoing events that happened in the past. They were not single incidents but were continuous events.
Present Perfect progressive -- aqua font. I have been eating at that restaurant for years. Jaala has been playing soccer for years. Frith has been planning her wedding forever. These are all serial events that took place in the past and are still taking place.
Now in this passage, the writer mixes tenses several times-- which leads to time confusion. The passage starts off in Present Tense, but within the same paragraph also uses Present Perfect, Past and Future Perfect. It's okay to use Present and Present Perfect at the same time since they both encompass the same time period, but in this paragraph, all the action is happening at the same time so the verbs should be brought into alignment as follows:
Our sense of smell is the strongest of all of our senses when it comes to evoking memory. That memory can be the whiff of a long lost lover's cologne, or the smells that take you back to your childhood. Unfortunately, not every memory that comes back to haunt us is an enjoyable one.The coppery metallic scent of blood fills my nose as I lie in an expanding pool of my own blood. I can feel the sticky wetness puddle beneath me as I pray that someone heard the earlier gunshots and called them in to the police.
In the distance, I can hear the wail of sirens cut through the stillness of the night air. In the moonlight, Kevin Davis' body lies on the concrete, face down in a pool of his own blood. He is dead; he has to be. Even with my eyes closed, I can still picture the bullet as it penetrated his chest. He died by my hand; I had no choice. It was either his life or mine.
This next paragraph is especially confusing because it also is in present tense but it obviously does not take place in the same time frame as the rest of the passage. There's no quick fix for this; the writer is going to need to move things around and restructure things a bit. The writer could move the next paragraph completely into the future: "Later I will sit in the small home office set up in my apartment and feel uneasy with the knowledge that someone lost his life by my actions." However, the last two sentences of the paragraph won't work well with future tense. My advice would actually be to forget about using present tense in the other paragraphs in the passage. Use past tense and then use present tense for this particular paragraph. If the writer wants to continue using present tense for the other paragraphs, then this next paragraph should be deleted. The info in it can be used later, if it is necessary for the story.
As I sit in the small home office set up in my apartment, I still feel uneasy with the knowledge that someone lost his life by my actions. I still haven't quite sorted it through. My actions moved me into the same camp with soldiers and maniacs.
The incessant chatter of police radios shatters the stillness of the night. The strobe of blue and red lights fills my vision. "They're over there," I can hear a male voice say. The rattle and clatter of a gurney as it rolls across the tarmac to where I lie is the last thing I hear as my grip on reality slips and darkness fills my vision.
Again in this next paragraph the writer suddenly lapses into past tense. All the verbs need to be brought into present tense as follows:
When I finally manage to come back to reality, the only thing I can see is the ceiling of a hospital room. "So you've finally decided to join the living again, eh, Alex?" a familiar voice asks me. I turn to see Detective Nathaniel Walker reclined in a chair pulled up beside the bed. "You want to tell me what happened?" his voice is light and casual.
"Hi, Nate," I croak. I don't even recognize my voice as my own it is so thick with pain. "I don't know that any of it will make that much sense."
"Just tell me as much as you can, Alex. I need to know what happened and why Sheila has a dead man on the coroners slab with a bullet from your gun in his chest."
"Well," I begin. "It all started two days ago..."
Our sense of smell is the strongest of all of our senses when it comes to evoking memory. That memory could be the whiff of a long lost lover's cologne, or the smells that take you back to our childhood. Unfortunately, not every memory that comes back to haunt us is an enjoyable one.
The coppery metallic scent of blood fills my nose as I lie in an expanding pool of my own blood. I can feel the sticky wetness puddle beneath me as I prayed that someone heard the earlier gunshots and called them in to the police. Nice opening tying smell into memory and leading into the scent of blood. The writer is setting up the suspense.
In the distance, I can hear the wail of sirens cut through the stillness of the night air. In the moonlight, Kevin Davis' body lay on the concrete, facedown in a pool of his own blood. He was dead; he had to be. Even with my eyes closed, I could still picture the bullet as it penetrated his chest. He died by my hand; I had no choice. It was either his life or mine.
As I sit in the small home office set up in my apartment, I still feel uneasy with the knowledge that someone lost his life by my actions. I still haven't quite sorted it through. My actions moved me into the same camp with soldiers and maniacs.
The incessant chatter of police radios shatters the stillness of the night. The strobe of blue and red lights fills my vision. "They're over there," I can hear a male voice say. The rattle and clatter of a gurney as it rolls across the tarmac to where I lay is the last thing I hear as my grip on reality slips and darkness fills my vision. Nice description. The writer does a good job of remembering all the senses.
When I finally manage to come back to reality, the only thing I can see is the ceiling of a hospital room. "So you've finally decided to join the living again, eh, Alex?" a familiar voice asked me. I turned to see Detective Nathaniel Walker reclined in a chair pulled up beside the bed. "You want to tell me what happened?" his voice was light and casual.
"Hi, Nate," I croaked. I didn't even recognize my voice as my own it was so thick with pain. "I don't know that any of it will make that much sense."
"Just tell me as much as you can, Alex. I need to know what happened and why Sheila has a dead man on the coroner's slab with a bullet from your gun in his chest."
"Well," I began. "It all started two days ago..." My kneejerk reaction to this is if the story started two days ago, then why not start the book at that point? Is there a reason for having this be the first scene? We don't really have enough of the story to tell, but given how short this scene is, I would doubt it. What is established in the scene? Alex has been shot; he shot a man named Kevin Davis and a detective named Nathaniel Walker is visiting Alex in the hospital and interviewing him. It seems as though Alex shot Kevin in self defense. The question that is left open is why did Alex shoot Kevin? Is this a big enough question to justify jumping ahead in time and then back into the past? I don't know. But it is something the writer should take a good, long look at.
****
Friday afternoon was a typical southern California spring day; the sky above Rosewood a clear azure without a cloud in sight. Two blocks away, the ocean rolled onto the beach with a subtle almost subliminal hiss. For the most part, I tended to ignore it, much as the rest of the three thousand some-odd residents of Rosewood. But on such a glorious spring day, that whisper of sound just seemed to fit. The squeak of the iron gate as it closed behind me must have alerted my landlord to my return from the daily jog on the beach. I'd just bent over to untie my shoelace and use the key tied there to open the door when a familiar voice called out to me.
"Alex? You got a minute honey?"
The silvery head of my landlady, Clara Simms, filled the window of her kitchen that faced the small patch of grass that separated her back door from my front door. "For you, Clara, anything." I called out as I trotted across to her back door.
What can I tell you about Clara Simms? She's the type of woman my mother would have called 'a pistol-ball'. Clara retired from the Rosewood police department ten years ago, but her true passion for all things culinary led her to take up baking after she'd retired. She sells the results of her baking forays to local restaurants, donates a large portion to local homeless shelters; she also caters the odd wedding reception orf lady's club meeting.
Even at eighty-eight, she could still easily work circles around men and women half her age. In addition to her daily baking and cooking, she also keeps the rose garden that borders the tiny plot of grass that separates my apartment from her house in perfect shape.
From time to time, I will make use of her connections still on the force when I'm not partaking of one of her latest concoctions that floods out of her kitchen. When she's not elbow deep in flour, or whatever she's working on, she's forever and a day trying to get me into her weekly card games. Be it bridge, pinochle or canasta, it didn't matter. If it's a card game, she knows how to play it and play it well. She had the reputation among her circle of friends as a card shark and there were very few that could take losing to her week after week.
General Comments:
This is a great opportunity to talk about tense because the writer switches tense several times in this passage. It is easy when jumping back and forth between time frames to confuse tenses. Verb tense conveys time. Verbs change form to show time. The simplest tense is called, surprisingly enough, SIMPLE TENSE. Simple tense divides time into present, past, future. I see; I saw; I will see.
Let's take a look at the first portion of this passage again:
Our sense of smell is the strongest of all of our senses when it comes to evoking memory. That memory could be the whiff of a long lost lover's cologne, or the smells that take you back to your childhood. Unfortunately, not every memory that comes back to haunt us is an enjoyable one.
The coppery metallic scent of blood fills my nose as I lie in an expanding pool of my own blood. I can feel the sticky wetness puddle beneath me as I prayed that someone heard the earlier gunshots and called them in to the police.
In the distance, I can hear the wail of sirens cut through the stillness of the night air. In the moonlight, Kevin Davis' body lay on the concrete, face down in a pool of his own blood. He was dead; he had to be. Even with my eyes closed, I could still picture the bullet as it penetrated his chest. He died by my hand; I had no choice. It was either his life or mine.
As I sit in the small home office set up in my apartment, I still feel uneasy with the knowledge that someone lost his life by my actions. I still haven't quite sorted it through. My actions moved me into the same camp with soldiers and maniacs.
The incessant chatter of police radios shatters the stillness of the night. The strobe of blue and red lights fills my vision. "They're over there," I can hear a male voice say. The rattle and clatter of a gurney as it rolls across the tarmac to where I lay is the last thing I hear as my grip on reality slips and darkness fills my vision.
When I finally manage to come back to reality, the only thing I can see is the ceiling of a hospital room. "So you've finally decided to join the living again, eh, Alex?" a familiar voice asked me. I turned to see Detective Nathaniel Walker reclined in a chair pulled up beside the bed. "You want to tell me what happened?" his voice was light and casual.
"Hi, Nate," I croaked. I didn't even recognize my voice as my own it was so thick with pain. "I don't know that any of it will make that much sense."
"Just tell me as much as you can, Alex. I need to know what happened and why Sheila has a dead man on the coroners slab with a bullet from your gun in his chest."
"Well," I began. "It all started two days ago..."
Now the first thing you will notice is that the passage now looks like a rainbow. I have identified the different types of verbs by color as follows:
Present tense- blue font. Present tense is happening NOW. I eat dinner. Jaala plays soccer. Frith plans her wedding.
Past tense- brown font. Past tense happened in the past. It is over. Done with. I ate lunch. Jaala played soccer. Frith planned her wedding.
Future tense- yellow font. Future tense will happen in the future. It has not yet happened. I will eat. Jaala will play soccer. Frith will plan her wedding.
The simple tenses are... well... simple. Easy enough to understand. Now let's complicate things a little and look at the perfect tenses. The perfect tenses describe actions or occurrences that are still having an effect at the present time or are having an effect until a specified time. The perfect tenses use an auxiliary verb (known also as a helping verb and the main verb's past participle.)
Present Perfect - green font. I have eaten. Jaala has played soccer. Frith has planned her wedding. Now it's a fine point but basically what we are saying is that in the here and now, we have done something and are still doing it. Frith has planned her wedding-- and is still doing so. Jaala has played soccer and can still do so. I have eaten and will continue to do so.
Past Perfect - gray font. Once I had eaten, I felt better. As soon as Jaala had played soccer, the rain started. After Frith had planned her wedding, she got married. My feeling better, the rain, and the wedding all happened in the past. Eating, playing soccer and planning the wedding happened BEFORE my feeling better, the rain and the wedding.
Future Progressive - orange font. I will be eating on campus next week. Jaala will be playing soccer next season. Fritha will be planning her wedding next year. These are all recurring events that will take place in the future. If Jaala were just to play soccer once next year, then we would say, "Jaala will play soccer." But because she will play it many times next year, we say, "Jaala will be playing soccer."
Past Progressive - lavender font. I was eating on campus last week. Jaala and her teammates were playing well last week. Fritha was planning her wedding last week. These are all ongoing events that happened in the past. They were not single incidents but were continuous events.
Present Perfect progressive -- aqua font. I have been eating at that restaurant for years. Jaala has been playing soccer for years. Frith has been planning her wedding forever. These are all serial events that took place in the past and are still taking place.
Now in this passage, the writer mixes tenses several times-- which leads to time confusion. The passage starts off in Present Tense, but within the same paragraph also uses Present Perfect, Past and Future Perfect. It's okay to use Present and Present Perfect at the same time since they both encompass the same time period, but in this paragraph, all the action is happening at the same time so the verbs should be brought into alignment as follows:
Our sense of smell is the strongest of all of our senses when it comes to evoking memory. That memory can be the whiff of a long lost lover's cologne, or the smells that take you back to your childhood. Unfortunately, not every memory that comes back to haunt us is an enjoyable one.The coppery metallic scent of blood fills my nose as I lie in an expanding pool of my own blood. I can feel the sticky wetness puddle beneath me as I pray that someone heard the earlier gunshots and called them in to the police.
In the distance, I can hear the wail of sirens cut through the stillness of the night air. In the moonlight, Kevin Davis' body lies on the concrete, face down in a pool of his own blood. He is dead; he has to be. Even with my eyes closed, I can still picture the bullet as it penetrated his chest. He died by my hand; I had no choice. It was either his life or mine.
This next paragraph is especially confusing because it also is in present tense but it obviously does not take place in the same time frame as the rest of the passage. There's no quick fix for this; the writer is going to need to move things around and restructure things a bit. The writer could move the next paragraph completely into the future: "Later I will sit in the small home office set up in my apartment and feel uneasy with the knowledge that someone lost his life by my actions." However, the last two sentences of the paragraph won't work well with future tense. My advice would actually be to forget about using present tense in the other paragraphs in the passage. Use past tense and then use present tense for this particular paragraph. If the writer wants to continue using present tense for the other paragraphs, then this next paragraph should be deleted. The info in it can be used later, if it is necessary for the story.
As I sit in the small home office set up in my apartment, I still feel uneasy with the knowledge that someone lost his life by my actions. I still haven't quite sorted it through. My actions moved me into the same camp with soldiers and maniacs.
The incessant chatter of police radios shatters the stillness of the night. The strobe of blue and red lights fills my vision. "They're over there," I can hear a male voice say. The rattle and clatter of a gurney as it rolls across the tarmac to where I lie is the last thing I hear as my grip on reality slips and darkness fills my vision.
Again in this next paragraph the writer suddenly lapses into past tense. All the verbs need to be brought into present tense as follows:
When I finally manage to come back to reality, the only thing I can see is the ceiling of a hospital room. "So you've finally decided to join the living again, eh, Alex?" a familiar voice asks me. I turn to see Detective Nathaniel Walker reclined in a chair pulled up beside the bed. "You want to tell me what happened?" his voice is light and casual.
"Hi, Nate," I croak. I don't even recognize my voice as my own it is so thick with pain. "I don't know that any of it will make that much sense."
"Just tell me as much as you can, Alex. I need to know what happened and why Sheila has a dead man on the coroners slab with a bullet from your gun in his chest."
"Well," I begin. "It all started two days ago..."
posted by Swimming Kangaroo | 8:59 PM
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