with Kathryn Price, Co-director at Cornerstones Literary Consultancy.
The Blood Between Us by Eric Springer
The Executor stopped walking as her
eyes caught a flash of color on the rugged path near her boot. The mist, her
ever-present companion in these mountains, seemed to pause with her. The cold wind
made the tatters of her gray cloak flutter and snap against the silence.
A wiry sprig of green grass twisted
its way up from between two stones.
The Executor pulled back her hood and
crouched down, the wind spinning out the length of her ghost-white hair. She
tugged the bit of grass from the ground with her gloved fingers and studied it
with pale blue eyes.
“That damn mule,” she muttered.
She had been on foot, leading the
stubborn beast through a snow-choked ravine when the lead went tight and the
animal stopped moving. The Executor had turned around in time to see its eyes
bulging huge from its anvil-shaped head, ropes of milky spittle stringing out
from its mouth. Then it made a woeful cry and fell over dead.
She watched the exhausted animal
collapse without a word, and then she had stripped her things from its back and
sorted through them in the snow. She packed a small bag with her bowl, a length
of rope, her book, and her sharpening tools. Then she lifted the bag and left
the mule where it fell, its steel-gray body already cold to the touch. She left
the soles of her old boots and the majority of her cooking things. Most of what
she left behind was food.
There are things always to eat in the
wild, if one was desperate enough.
The Executor rubbed the grass between
her fingers and let it fall away. It was just like that damn mule to starve to
death right before grass appeared. She began to curse it again but stopped
herself. It had been a bad idea to try to bring the animal over the jagged
teeth of the mountains, she thought, and this was the result. Now it belonged
to the nothingness beyond life, at one with the Nox.
The Executor had pushed through these
mountains for thirty days and seen nothing but rock and snow and stone without
end. The blind villager, the only one to whom she could speak without the other
shrieking in fear at the sight of her wretched appearance, had told her it was
so. He has said it was not possible, that there was nothing beyond the
mountains. No people, no animals, no life. He had said the world ends.
But the witch had told her
differently.
Critique by Kathryn Price
What
a beguiling, atmospheric opening scene. Reading this we can really feel the
bite of the wind; the lonely emptiness of the mountains; the bleakness of The
Executor’s prospects with her mule dead and her food abandoned.
In
many ways the relative sparseness of the description is a strength; it mirrors
the landscape and leaves plenty to our imaginations, whereas an excess of
description might overload us with sensory information which doesn’t fit the
scene. Those brushstrokes of detail we do have tend to be carefully chosen
adjectives and strong, active verbs (made
the tatters of her gray cloak flutter and
snap) which allow the descriptions
to blend seamlessly into the action rather than standing out.
With
that in mind, the majority of editing here should focus on line-by-line tightening, ensuring that all the
language has the same level of polish and precision. For instance, in the odd
sentence where adjectives weigh more heavily, is it possible to prune and
refine? A wiry sprig of green grass seems
(comparatively) over-detailed. Do we need green?
Perhaps substituting green for color where it appears in the first line
would allow the author to remove it here.
Similarly,
She tugged
the bit of grass from the ground with her gloved fingers and studied it with
pale blue eyes could be sharpened – it contains a repetition of with and the fourth colour adjective in
just a few sentences. Simply cutting with
pale blue eyes would work; in any case, alluding to the colour of her eyes
feels slightly external to what is on the whole a compellingly intimate 3rd
person point of view.
Anything
overtly or indirectly repetitive
would also be a good candidate for editing. We have spinning out … stringing out, that damn mule … that damn mule, leading
… lead, between … between, nothingness … nothing … nothing, end … ends and
lots of repetitions of then. Individually
these are minor and might even pass unnoticed but given the attention to detail
elsewhere they feel like easily-fixable glitches.
Point of view, touched on
above, is also worth another quick look. On the whole the author has handled
the intimate 3rd person POV well; there are just a few places where
a tiny tweak would keep this wholly consistent. I’ve already mentioned the
reference to The Executor’s eyes. The sentence There are things always to eat in the wild, if one
was desperate enough is slightly jarring because of the mixture of tenses. A simple shift into
past/3rd person would ensure this feels in keeping with the POV
elsewhere: There were always things to
eat in the wild, if she got desperate enough. (Note the switch in word
order, too).
The same applies to He has said it was not possible, that there was nothing beyond the
mountains. No people, no animals, no life. He had said the world ends. The
first shift into present tense here may just be a typo but either way the
sentence would read more consistently and smoothly as He said it was not possible, that there was nothing beyond the
mountains. No people, no animals, no life. He said the world ended.
The one other thing that might benefit from further
honing is the episode of the mule’s
death. As an incident for an opening scene I like this – it’s grim and
carries a strong sense of foreboding. However, I wonder if there’s more that
could be done with it. It feels more immediately dramatic than finding the
sprig of grass so it seems a shame that we only view it in retrospect, in the
pluperfect. Could we start in medias res here?
It also feels a little vague. We later learn that
the mule starved to death which
implies a slow, drawn-out end. Here we have a horrifying, visceral and sudden
conclusion: eyes bulging … milky spittle
… woeful cry (and these are great descriptions). The idea of starving to
death is important, though – it accentuates the quiet menace of the situation,
especially now that The Executor has had to leave her food behind. Might it be
possible to bring this episode into the now
of the story and extend it, showing The Executor struggling with her
weakening animal, forcing it to continue despite the fact that it’s clearly
dying (this would reveal a lot about her character, too) and culminating in a
variation of the death scene that we already have?
Where this opening succeeds most convincingly is in
creating a sense of mystery and otherworldliness, drawing us into a scenario
that is familiar enough to feel real to us but strange enough to raise
questions and keep us guessing. What is the
Nox; why would the world end beyond the mountains; who is this witch who has sent The Executor off on
her perilous quest; most of all, who is The Executor herself (what does this
mean? Why does she carry sharpening tools?
– a phrase that made me shiver) and what is she seeking? This is the kind of
lone ranger role that is conventionally given to male characters so I love the
fact that she is a woman (though a tough one) and I immediately want to learn about
her.
Overall, this scene achieves what every first page
of every novel should strive for: it drives the reader to keep turning the
pages to find out more. That’s perhaps the most indefinable quality of good
fiction – and the hardest to teach – so the author has a very strong foundation
to work from here. Great stuff.
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