Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26537256-20160716142055/@comment-4715955-20160717110616

A LOT of the narrative and dialogue are worded in a clumsy way that makes reading comprehension difficult at first. This line for example:

"When a line formed, the Speaker examined the various faces, painting his own to pass neutrality"

It's like a pothole or detour in a road: you want to avoid those to make the reading process as smooth and obstacle free as possible.

"When a line formed, the Speaker examined everyone's faces: a few expressed regret, others anxious glee, two solemn anticipation. The Speaker's expression was unreadable."

Another example: "Moving in disorganised rhythm, the line shortened as electives voted, eventually disbanding following Mr Redford's "No"."

I have no idea what's going on here. I get the impression that people are lining up to vote, but did they get their voting done or was it interrupted? Did Mr. Redford say "no" against the voting? Is "No" Mr. Redford's vote?

The cause of the poor wording is a poor attempt to make the narrative sound sophisticated. Just tell the story straight, in as few words as possible, and it'll not only be more effective, but infinitely easier to understand. Half of what happened in this story was lost to me because of the poor wording of each sentence.

There's also the matter of throwing the reader headlong into the middle of the action. Done right, it can grab the reader and never let go -- it's really the best way to begin a story regardless of genre. Done wrong, like it is here, and it just leaves the reader confused and disoriented. Though I think a lot of it has to do with the clumsy wording of this story in general. Starting us off with a council meeting about a subject that isn't initially revealed is a great way to pull the reader in and make them want to know what's going on, but you don't want it to be too jarring. You can open with a good first line to grab the reader's attention -- either a line of dialogue or the first line of narrative -- then establish the setting so we know where we are and have a sense of what's going on before the story runs away without us.

Take the first line of Richard Stark's novel "Firebreak" for example:

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.

SLAM. We know where we are, and we know what's happening, and we immediately want to know who is calling, who the dead man is, and why Parker killed him. Didn't take no purple prose to pull it off, neither.

So basically tell the story in as few words as possible, and don't try to make it sound flowery. Otherwise you can end up with a story like this, which gets so muddled in its own purple prose that entire passages are indecipherable. I honestly don't even know what was happening at the end because I couldn't make heads or tails of the narrative. It came off as something really pretentious; appropriately enough, the pretentious wording made it impossible to tell.