Discussion → Gloria's Birds of Prayer
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This is the first of eight parts. I want each to stand alone so lots of questions and feedback are welcome. I hope to eventually post each as a short story, but that may be asking too much of it and myself.
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I broke my own rule and posted two on a page because no on but me is commenting, Deborah's hard at work on revisions, Ann's isn't exactly an 800 word section of a serial story, and no one else is joining. I'll give it a few weeks before giving up. I personally love the idea. gg
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gloria, I just read pts 1 and 2 of your story, and they are wonderful. Pt one reads very complete as a short story on its own. I love the multi-leveled imagery - it's all so rich.
Here's my one suggestion. You might want to consider bringing this one sentence in a little sooner:
I was the only Jewish girl in Hummingbird County New Jersey's public elementary school.Especially with the mention of the Lower East side early on, it would help to establish that visual triangle early on, to ground the story in a geographical reality and thus a solid image. I found that I was a bit distracted trying to figure out the location until the info was finally provided.
Other than that, I felt it was really great as is...
The second story was also good for me, same positive notes as above. I do love your writing, and your ability to explore so many levels of experience and thought in one story.
In this one, however, I did not get the clarity from a sense of either summation or lead in to the next set of thoughts in the last paragraph. I felt that you were introducing a lot of concepts in this one set of sentences:
“How can you know for sure what chickens are feeling?” I asked Mr. Unger, who ignored me. My parents seemed unable to tell what even I was feeling. So how could rabbis be certain that a quick slit of the throat was less painful than a blow to the head, a shotgun blast, a heave into an oven or even breathing poison gas? I had plugged my ears with my fingers while running out of the house when my baby brother had shrieked as the mohel, a sort of shochet in reverse, welcomed the boy to the pain of Jewish life by slicing off a piece of his penis.
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You start out with a question, end with a very definitive moment. I would have liked to know more of how that last sentence connected to the earlier ones. I felt a bit of a jump there that felt disconcerting, from an energetic level, and I wasn't quite sure where to go at the end. Not in a kind of "I wonder what's going to happen next" way, but more of just a sense of things getting a bit muddled.
I think what I'm attempting to address in my comments is a way to give each section a sense of clarity and completeness as a stand-alone story. Clearly there is a developed long story here, but I have yet to read the rest of it, so I still need to learn about your overall arc. In a way, that's good, because I'm viewing each piece with fresh eyes, with no internal knowledge of what's going to happen. So I really can see each piece as a separate whole unto itself.
I'd like to know if my comments resonate with you at all!
:)
D
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One other thought.
It's possible that the arbitrary dividing of each section into 800 words is forcing you to make artificial breaks in your narrative that may not be organic to the actual dramatic progression. Again, without knowing what is to come, I can't say exactly. So, if this is a factor, then even though I think it's a great requirement for the purpose of analyzing, as well as a great exercise in self-editing discipline, you might want to consider ultimately relaxing that restriction for the purpose of republishing your story as a serial. However, if uniformity of length and word count is of paramount importance even in the final output, then my comments take on a greater significance.
D
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D: Loved, loved, loved your careful reading and comments and immediately applied the first but it's the middle of the night and I need a fresher mind to address the others. I chose eight hundred words because that's about the attention span on Fictionaut and for flash fiction and I think it works well for concentrating the mind. I am taking all your comments very seriously. My gratitude knows no bounds.
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D: Finished editing one. Simple but essential, Two will take more workd but you are right on.
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Hi Gloria,
I'm SO GLAD my notes were helpful. Reading and interpreting fiction can be so subjective, but I trusts my instincts as far as energy flow, and I'm usually pretty good at detecting when things jar a smooth trajectory, so I'm very gratified that my comments resonated for you. Glad you were able to apply them for your purposes...I see that you took off the earlier sections... I'd LOVE to get a look at the edited versions, especially after making suggestions on the first versions you posted. If that's possible, I'd love it...
In any case, I look forward to getting up to speed on the other stories you posted here during my absence.
As I mentioned to you personally, I've been very involved in a couple of major PR pushes at work, a different type of writing entirely. As an aside, I have to say that I find that communicating for the purposes of promotion and business takes such a different kind of attention to detail coupled with a particular kind of energy that I start to find very exhausting after a while. I feel like writing and reading fiction really replenishes me. So I'm glad to be back... and I look forward to reading your latest stuff here!!
:)
D
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Wikipedia:
Charles Dicken's novels, most published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.[4][5] The installment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback
We've all seen them scattered among the flash fiction, these "little" segments of "enormous" stories trying to pass for small. I admit I've tried to do it myself with a story I really, really want read but no one here will read 7000 pages. It took a lot of work to change the serial format which to me is more readable and accessible.
Anything longer than 1500 words a section is verboten and has plenty of place on groups for longer stories and novel excerpts. Not here. Not among these flash fiction pieces linked together by a theme, but which can also stand alone.
Just as flash and microfiction are tiny stories that tell a life and are self-contained, so are the "sections" of the flashes in these linked serial stories. They are linked, but they each carry within them the whole of a story. This is not, in contrast, a "chapter book." It fits the Fictionaut model perfectly.
--Gloria Garfunkel
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