Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-39080011-20190410124824/@comment-28266772-20190410153456

''Stumbling backwards. Breaking through the glass, shards cutting into me, that sinking yet rising feeling as I fell '[<- fall, not fell. You write in the present tense, so stay in the present tense]'. The ground is close, the painful end, and I can’t stop myself…''

'[Okay, so sentence structure… Sentences are made of up of smaller pieces called clauses. There are two types of clause. The independent clause which has a subject, action, and object e.g. Mary (subject) pushed (action) Kate (object). And then there’s the dependent clause which usually does not have a subject. A dependent clause is defined by the way it won’t make sense on its own. For example…'

'“knocking her over.” Is a dependent clause. There’s an action (knocking) and an object (her) but it makes no sense on its own without a subject. It needs to be attached to an independent clause with a comma, or a conjunction, to make sense. Hence, “Mary pushed Kate, knocking her over”. '

'So with that in mind, “the painful end” makes no sense where it is. It reads poorly, ruins the pacing, and demonstrates a poor understanding of basic sentence structure. You can’t just stick *anything* between two commas.] '

I wake up in a cold sweat, the dream fresh in my mind, the feeling of falling from such a height still there [comma splicing – this refers to when people stitch multiple independent clauses together using nothing but commas, which you do above three times]. Terror claws at my gut, [you don’t need that comma] and I have to breathe [As opposed to all of us who breathe on a voluntary basis?]. I didn’t fall, it was just a dream. Just a dream. '[you use repetition like this a lot, but it doesn’t really do anything. It feels forced.]'

My room feels too closed in, yet too exposed at the same time. I rush to the lightswitch, [no comma and depending on where you’re from that may need to be two words for light switch, not one] and turn it on.

My heart racing, I walk to the kitchen [It’s a good idea to stick to the independent clause up front, in this case it should either be “My heart races as I walk…” or “I walk to the kitchen, my heart racing…], hoping that a glass of water would [present tense means “will”, conditional tense means “would”] cool '[<- weird word choice. Do you mean calm?] 'my nerves. I fill a glass with water and [no one needs you to explain this process] take a sip. I still feel kinda nervous, anxious.

A scream pierced [<- tense is incorrect] the uneasy silence. I drop the glass, and it shatters. I then realize which glass I was using.

This [That/it] was her favorite cup, the one I got her on our last trip out of the country. [holiday or vacation]  Our last trip…

The cup was broken, broken beyond compare '[repair not compare. I think you’ve muddled some common sayings]', just like my life, just like me. I picked [pick, remember your tenses] up the pieces, the glass cutting my fingers. The pain kept [keeps] my mind away from the dream, where it would have wandered otherwise. '[redundant: as soon as you mention keeping the mind away from the dream, you don’t need to clarify. Your audience won’t be like “well obviously the glass is keeping his mind occupied from thoughts of why dogs don’t have belly buttons”.]'

I threw [throw] away the pieces, my mind numb with pain, with loss. I had a few hours before I had to go to work, so I went [go] over the the [repetition] living room, sat [sit] on the couch, and flipped [flip] on the tv.

Anything to take my mind off of her.

''Darkness. The inside of a casket. I push up. The lid lifts, and soil fills what was [the] empty space. I keep my eyes closed against the earth. Pushing through, I make it to the surface, pulling myself out of the grave. The moon lights the stones, and I can see the house from here.''

That’s where I’m going.

I wake up. This time, there isn’t the terror, just unease. I feel like something’s watching me.

Too scared of what I might find, I just keep my eyes on what’s ahead of me [this is where you say what’s ahead of him which, if I remember correctly, is the TV]. The feeling’s building [the feeling builds] as I go to turn on the light '[while I’m at it… “the feeling” needs to be specific. You can say paranoia, anxiety, vulnerability, etc.]'. I flip the switch.

The room remains dark.

I flip the switch on and off, again and again. Nothing changes, except my levels of panic '[feels cheap. Try something like “Nothing changes and I start to panic”]'. The rest of the house is even darker '[what? What exactly is the luminescence hierarchy going on here? There’s no need to complicate things like this.]', so there’s no use leaving the room. [just say something like “It’s so dark I can’t leave the room”]

I feel a cool breeze against my back. Wait. The window shouldn’t be open.

I turn around, [no comma] and there she is.

Her skin is deathly pale. Shadows the shade of bruises are under her eyes.' [You need to tone that last sentence down a little. It’s a weird of way of saying she has bags under her eyes. You could say she has sunken eyes, or bruised skin beneath her eyes (why do you not comment on her eyes? Seems like a missed opportunity. Are they glassy? Bloodshot? Empty? Angry?)] [Her] Skin is stretched tight over a [her] bony frame, and [her]' gnarled fingers stretch out towards me. [without the her, this sentence lacks any focus or structure, and feels like a weak attempt at sounding poetic] Cuts trace '[cover, not trace. Trace means to find or investigate, or to copy] her skin, bloody marks, [no comma, insert “and”] ragged scars [do what?] across the canvas that is her [her what?]'. She looks like what she is, a corpse.

But she’s still beautiful.

“Cyra,” I whisper, barely able to talk, tears pooling in my eyes.

Cyra stands before me. My wife. [Maybe try, “my wife stands before me” or have him whisper “my wife” instead of cyra because we already know she’s called Cyra because of the story’s title]

She had died a year ago, when she had stumbled and fallen [fell] through the glass building where she worked.

'[few things, the wording of “through the glass building where she worked” is just a bit weird. It’s too detailed (who cares where she worked) but at the same time is oddly vague because glass buildings don’t have the kind of windows you can just stumble through. Most of the time a fat guy running as hard as he could at one would just… bounce off. It’s safety glass made for that exact reason. They don’t put nothing but sugar glass between people and a drop to the death. You could try saying something like “…when she stumbled and fell through a faulty high-rise window…” or something like that.]'

And when she [had] died, so had a part of me.

She walked towards me, reaching for me, her arms open [, reaching (for me)]. I rushed towards her, tears falling. I  [and] held her tight, burying my face in her dress.

Her nails traced my skin, leaving cuts, [no comma, “and”] shedding blood. She bent her head down to my shoulder, burying her teeth into my flesh.

But I didn’t back away. I was tired of the dreams, the shaking, the constant emptiness without her. It wasn’t just the house that was empty. It was me. And I was ready to let go.

I didn’t wonder why she did this, or why she was here. I felt the blood draining out of me.

I grabbed the gun from off of the nearby table and lined my head up with hers, and pulled the trigger. [this whole sentence is a swing and a miss]

Now I will be with my dear Cyra, forever.

-

Mechanical issues – so the big ones here are formatting (I fixed this on the actual article, but I wouldn’t count on other people doing this for you in the future), tense, and sentence structure. I outline the bulk of the issues above but, again, you’re gonna need to start catching these things yourself. You need to read up on sentence structure and tense and keep it in mind when writing. You need to be vigilant with tense because it’s easy to switch between them, and you need to make sure every sentence is put together with a subject in mind. You also need to be a bit more careful with word choice. You often confuse their meanings and use words that *sound* right, but which aren’t actually right.

Stylistic issues - you need to exercise a little discipline when it comes to your stylistic flourishes. True style comes from the artful execution of aesthetic with purpose, intent, and skill. It is not the consequence of letting yourself go and whacking down whatever you feel like in whatever order it comes into your mind. One is incredibly hard, the other is the easiest thing in the world. People celebrate the former and mock the latter on Tumblr. You’ve clearly gone for a kind of free-flowing stream-of-consciousness occasionally poetic style, my advice is to reel it in a little and focus on making cohesive prose first and letting your style come through in the words you choose and the details you highlight.

Let me ask something. How does Cyra smell? Does she smell of peat, bog, soil, rancid flesh, sterile chemicals, or a familiar perfume? What noise does she make when she moves? Does she click and rattle, squeak like a door under tension, or make no sound at all? Does she shamble, shuffle, or float like an apparition? Are her muscles hardened, or soft? Does the protagonist’s hands wander to her arse? Does he coddle his face into her breasts? Does he feel her heartbeat? See her chest rise? Is she wearing silk? Has it discoloured in the Earth?

The words you choose, and the details you decide to focus on, are how you make style, not in fragmented sentences and forced repetition.

Plot issues – none. Not really, short and sweet and I really like the gimmick of the protagonist seeing his dead wife’s journey through the grave via his dreams.

Onto the positive!

I’m not a particularly positive critic because the fact I go so in-depth means that I really don’t have the time or patience to artificially make things nicer than they should be. But I’m not here to be cruel, either. I’ve made some snarky remarks and I often try (emphasis on try) to be a bit funny, but it’s all meant in good faith. The fact I’ve taken this time out means I think you’re worth the effort. And I hope you take this criticism and move forward with it to be a better writer. Despite studying English up to A-Level no one really explained to me what things like dependent and independent clauses were, how tenses worked, or even what terms like “show, don’t tell” mean in the wider context of writing.

Jokes aside, you’ve written a concise and interesting story with a good hook. You need to exercise a little more caution and discipline overall, but you’ve clearly got talent and I look forward to seeing more of your work here in the future. To really get the most out of this place in the future though, I’d start off just posting to the workshop first.

Moving forward, I’m going to leave the m4r tag for now because you need to take some of these changes and apply them. You shouldn’t apply every single change I recommend (I can’t write your story for you) but you should absolutely think on why I made the recommendation, and try to address the issues I’ve raised the best you can.

At the absolute minimum, you need to fix the tense issues and any other glaring grammatical errors e.g. comma splicing, word repetition, to avoid deletion.