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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Paragraph Review Six - Untitled by Emily

Fighting the urge to yell and draw attention to himself, Jacob instinctively whipped the dish towel from it's customary place on his shoulder and wound it tightly round his finger. He tried to remember if he'd actually washed his hands after prepping that last batch of chicken or just wiped the worst off on the towel, meaning to throw it in the laundry next time he passed. He wasn't sure if you could get salmonella that way or not, but it had to be better than bleeding out in the middle of the kitchen on his first day at work.

"Shit" he muttered under his breath, realizing with dismay that even through the thickness of five layers of material, unmistakable blooms of poppy-red were appearing; the razor-sharp edge he'd honed to perfection that very morning had come back to bite him on the ass, or the finger at least. 

"Where the fuck are table nineteen's app's? They should've been sent five minutes ago, but the docket's still up! What the fuck? Did I look like I was joking when I called 'em?" Chef lumbered towards Jacob, all set to make an example of how little tolerance he had for time-wasters, but his anger turned to exasperation as he took in the scene. 

"Oh for fuck's sake, what'd you do?" Without waiting for a reply, he yanked Jacob's hand towards him and peered under the blood-sodden towel. 

"Taz! Take this clumsy fuck out for some air, see if you can find a glove or something for him to wear. Callie! You're on app's now, move it, I need that table sent NOW!"

Cold rough brick pressed into Jacob's back and the wet concrete step he'd slumped down on was rapidly adding to his discomfort. Taz had handed him an antiseptic wipe and a clean dish cloth then disappeared back inside, and as the adrenaline wore off, the pain was becoming more apparent. Gingerly unwinding his make-shift bandage, Jacob could feel the blood welling to the surface, and sure enough, once the pressure was off, thick drops started to splatter at his steel-toed safety shoes. He tore open the wipe with his teeth, weighing up the benefits of having a slightly cleaner wound against the cons of that stinging agony once the alcohol touched exposed nerves, but eyeing the state of the cloth he'd just peeled off, he didn't really have a choice. 

This was all Jade's fault, he decided. If she hadn't given him that age-old ultimatum of 'get a place together or get out of my life', he would still be happily slaving away in the same little cafe he'd worked in since he quit school. That was ten years ago now, getting paid just enough to get by on but feeling like part of the family and getting satisfaction from knowing that the regulars were regulars because of his food. This time last week he'd been cheerfully singing along to the radio, elbow-deep in coleslaw, (gloved hands replacing the mixing blades that had broken months ago and couldn't afford to be replaced,) deciding what specials to go on the board that day. 

"Now look at me" he thought, "bottom of the brigade, in way over my head, and watching rats dine on leftovers that are worth more than my rent back home."








All set?  Ok, here we go:










Fighting the urge to yell and draw attention to himself, Jacob instinctively whipped the dish towel from it's customary place on his shoulder and wound it tightly round his finger.


(Surplusage: excessive or nonessential matter.  There's a bit of over-writing in this piece which makes the sentences feel clunky and breathless.  There are a billion ways to rewrite this to repair the problem, and the challenge lies with the writer to figure out which bits of information are essential to the story at this stage, and which are merely superfluous.


I'll give a couple of examples, just to show how they can change the flavor of the sentence:


Fighting the urge to yell, Jacob whipped the towel from its customary place on his shoulder and wound it tightly around his finger.


Fighting the urge to draw attention from himself, Jacob instinctively whipped this dish towel from his shoulder and wound it around his finger.


Fighting the urge to yell and draw attention to himself, Jacob whipped the dishtowel from his shoulder, and wound it round his finger.


Etc.


And that's without changing any of the wording - merely removing some words.)






 He tried to remember if he'd actually washed his hands after prepping that last batch of chicken or just wiped the worst off on the towel, meaning to throw it in the laundry next time he passed.


(Same issue.  Figure out what's essential.)




 He wasn't sure if you could get salmonella that way or not, but it had to be better than bleeding out in the middle of the kitchen on his first day at work.


(This is solid - we have Jacob's internal conflict, and the information that it's his first day at this job - though clearly not his first day in a kitchen.)


"Shit" he muttered under his breath, realizing with dismay that even through the thickness of five layers of material, unmistakable blooms of poppy-red were appearing; the razor-sharp edge he'd honed to perfection that very morning had come back to bite him on the ass, or the finger at least. 





I have mixed feelings about 'or the finger at least'.  Besides needing a comma of its own, it feels a little bit like the writer is trying a bit too hard to be cute or clever.  It could work as part of Jacob's voice, perhaps, as a sentence fragment, or if the sentences weren't quite so ponderous.)

"Where the fuck are table nineteen's app's? They should've been sent five minutes ago, but the docket's still up! What the fuck? Did I look like I was joking when I called 'em?" Chef lumbered towards Jacob, all set to make an example of how little tolerance he had for time-wasters, but his anger turned to exasperation as he took in the scene. 


(Two things here.


The first recalls my own admittedly limited experience in a kitchen - there flat out wouldn't have been enough time for a rant that long.  The head cook where I worked did have profanity down to an art form; the longest thing I can remember him saying during a busy hour was "Fuck you, you fuckin' fuck!'.   The reply was much to the tune of 'argh', 'gah', or a similar wordless sound of derision.


Were Chef taking a bit of a walk over to Jacob's station, I could buy the longer phrasing.  Which brings us to point two:


That all important 'show'.  Don't tell the reader he's pissed, give visual clues.  We're told a lot about what he's up to, but not allowed to come to that conclusion by ourselves through creation of the scene.  Kitchens are generally noisy.  Like battlefield chaos noisy.  And entrance to Hell hot.  Chefs have bullhorns genetically built into them to shout above the noise, and often remind me of drill sergeants. I'm not sure if this guy is more basic training or Full Metal Jacket, but I'd like to know - and this is a perfect missed opportunity to express both that, and give the reader a little more about this particular kitchen.)


"Oh for fuck's sake, what'd you do?" Without waiting for a reply, he yanked Jacob's hand towards him and peered under the blood-sodden towel. 


(No issues here.)

"Taz! Take this clumsy fuck out for some air, see if you can find a glove or something for him to wear. Callie! You're on app's now, move it, I need that table sent NOW!"


(This feels like a kitchen - the show must go on.  Apropos of nothing, this gave me an extra grin because Taz is the name of my cat.


Subjective?  Absolutely.  I wanted to mention it, because so much of this stuff is so subjective.  This piece isn't quite there yet for me, but might work for someone else.)


Cold rough brick pressed into Jacob's back and the wet concrete step he'd slumped down on was rapidly adding to his discomfort.


(Yay!  This is the first view or outside stimulus we've seen so far.  I'd add a comma between cold and rough, as it constitutes a list.)




Taz had handed him an antiseptic wipe and a clean dish cloth then disappeared back inside, and as the adrenaline wore off, the pain was becoming more apparent.


(Watch out for that 'was' version of passive sentence structure.  While the sheer length of the earlier sentences overwhelmed this issue,  it's becoming pretty glaring in these two.  'was rapidly adding', 'was becoming more' - 'was' is one of those words that can often be omitted from the sentence without changing it with any noticeable significance.)


 Gingerly unwinding his make-shift bandage, Jacob could feel the blood welling to the surface, and sure enough, once the pressure was off, thick drops started to splatter at his steel-toed safety shoes.


(This could easily be two sentences.  I like the safety shoes - again, I'm a big fan of 'seeing' what's in the scene.)




 He tore open the wipe with his teeth, weighing up the benefits of having a slightly cleaner wound against the cons of that stinging agony once the alcohol touched exposed nerves, but eyeing the state of the cloth he'd just peeled off, he didn't really have a choice. 


(Exposed nerves?  That must be one hell of a deep cut.  Is there a more active/involved way to relate this information?  Right now, it seems that Jacob is completely detached while weighing his choices.)


This was all Jade's fault, he decided. If she hadn't given him that age-old ultimatum of 'get a place together or get out of my life', he would still be happily slaving away in the same little cafe he'd worked in since he quit school.


(Cool.  This is enough backstory to be interesting, without resorting to an info-dump.)


 That was ten years ago now, getting paid just enough to get by on but feeling like part of the family and getting satisfaction from knowing that the regulars were regulars because of his food. This time last week he'd been cheerfully singing along to the radio, elbow-deep in coleslaw, (gloved hands replacing the mixing blades that had broken months ago and couldn't afford to be replaced,) deciding what specials to go on the board that day. 


(Here we walk the line of info-dump.  I do like the coleslaw line, as it gives a great picture of the family cafe - but there's a touch too much wordiness here in general.)


"Now look at me" he thought, "bottom of the brigade, in way over my head, and watching rats dine on leftovers that are worth more than my rent back home."






This would be a pass for me, as it feels like the piece would just require too much editing work before submitting.


I want to talk a little bit about what I mean by a 'breathless' sentence.  Human beings process information at different speeds, sure, but there is a maximum.  That's why run-on sentences can be so frustrating.  Give a reader a sentence with too much information, or too many extraneous words, and the brain starts tripping over those words and needs some time to catch up.  You generally don't want to have a sentence where a reader has to go over the same line twice in order to parse all the information, and it's worse when that 'information' is just made up of additional words that don't really add depth or meaning.

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