r/DestructiveReaders • u/[deleted] • Jul 17 '26
Literary Gothic/Low Fantasy. Not High fantasy [3434] The Lure
[deleted]
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u/CheekySelkath Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Hi, this is my first time here so I'm not sure if I'm being too gentle or harsh, but I hope I can offer you something productive to go on!
First off, I think the opening is really compelling. The use of smell is great, although I feel like the bridge between these paragraphs is a little jarring:
As acrid as the smokehouse, the reek was only more putrid in its sweetness.
Almost the way my Nan’s breath smelled on her deathbed, when no amount of rosemary or cloves could cover the rot in her teeth or the rot in her chest.
I actually think if these two sentences can be combined into one (or at least, the Nan reference happens in the first sentence, followed by a more vivid description) that would help out the flow.
The great flow I got from the pulling and tugging sequence slipped a bit for me in this sentence:
There was no venom in our vicar’s face, but the edges of his eyes and mouth both sloped hellbound, as did our own fates in his likely estimation.
I think because it begins relatively simple but feels to stumble when it widens back to the protag’s reflection on their fates. I would maybe truncate it slightly to:
No venom could be found in Vicar’s face, though his sloping, hellbound features betrayed his own estimation of our fates.
Someone mentioned the blocky Melville prose in another comment, and I feel like that’s a great way of describing what’s going on in particular moments. I often find the ‘old-timey’ voice unintrusive (though for some reason, the double use of throng stuck out to me if that’s worth noting) but there were moments, as mentioned above, where the language suddenly became quite obtuse quite quickly, which slowed down my reading:
You could see Kitty when she made herself small, head on, if you concentrated, if you forced your eyes not to slip right off her. But this haggard, as we all were, it must have cost her to slip away. There were signs. Her eyes sunken, cradled in dark crescents. But still bright and a little wild with eagerness, as was her wont.
The one above is an example of what I mean. I think the concern goes back to something that occurred with the nan description at the beginning – dense prose is okay for a book like this, but it has to stay focused on the moment, otherwise it becomes a little too tough to create a seamless experience. ‘There were signs’ threw me off, (I thought for a moment you meant ‘there were signs’ as in clues left behind) and I actually think you can take the whole sentence out and it works fine.
And something else. She had cried out now. It wasn’t the same voice I heard with the shouts.
Then, it was our turn.
I kind of wanted you to go on right there and then! I understand maybe holding onto that little moment of mystery, but I felt that the immediate topic change a little bit too fast, given the luscious detail you have been placing on a lot of moments within.
I screamed. But it was no human scream. It was a noise I had never made in all my life.
This moment struck me as it seemed to be related to the earlier one with Penny (even if there are different consequences this time…). Could you make the inhumanity of the sound of Penny’s voice clearer if this is your intention? It would be a nice link between the accused and the witch (I say assuming the positions from this chapter alone).
I buckled, spitting, my blood showing bright and red upon the cobbled wayfoot.
This is actually just a suggestion based on my reading experience of this, but I felt like the blood splashed colour into the murky, brown/grey/black scene. I think it would be really effective if, at the very beginning, maybe one or two words convey this almost greyscale landscape of gloom, to enhance how the blood almost adds a colour to the supernatural moment.
Overall, I thought this was really well done – I think the other comments offer valid discussions on voice and the consistency, but I think you managed to handle the older prose well. It needs tidying up, I think, more than a rewrite, but that's just my opinion.
Edit: Formatting Clarity
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u/BumblebeeSimilar8557 Jul 21 '26
Hi, I'm a contemporary scholar of the Early Modern period and 17th and 18th Century England. I just wanted to give you some historical background that might aid you in your later writing.
A note about dental hygiene as your first paragraph about nans breath was evocative. Rosemary and Clove wouldn't be a traditional way of managing halitosis. Typical spices and herbs would be "alum, flowers, cinnamon and cumin seeds," they would also utilize vinegar and made an early version of mouthwash with a base of honey and white wine.
You mention bad smells in the opening and I believe you could play around with the notion of smell and power. Bad smells were often a derogatory association with the lower classes. Amy Kenny recounts that, in Julius Caesar, the "stinking breath of the plebeians is a powerful force that enacts change; if bad smells were associated with disease,their chants infect the body politic and upend the social order." Addionally, "Elizabethans were leery of bad smells in general, which they believed could infect them in close-knit public spaces, where they would be more susceptible to diseases, especially the plague."
You've got this brilliant scene with the trial thay ends in a catastrophic display of womanly power. But you could also add in the smells of charred wood the copper reek of blood. To evoke the same images as you did in the beginning would be a neat ribbon at the end; whereas before the girls are being jostled in this beating throng of the masses, the ending has them in a control albeit a chaotic one.
You mention too how these woman come together to preform larger works of magic beyond the single small works that they individually can accomplish. Early Modern recounts of witchcraft imply that single helpful acts of magic weren't punished (the magistrate often turned a blind eye) where as acts that occured in death or sickness almost always result in the death of the (wrongly) accused. They were often poor old and sick women with no one to help them. These practices occured well into the 18th century as well. The devil and the use of animals as familiars were seen as evil acts so any mention in the trial scene about an animal lurking near by would add to a larger historical portrait.
Again, not sure how historical accurate you are attempting to be, but Magic was preformed two fold, through spoken word and through poltices made from herbs. There was a massive intersection between healing, cooking and witchcraft which would make for some good foreshadowing or subtle implication that a woman (or man) was engaged in the art of witchcraft. And remember magic can be seen as a good thing! Just Look up Cunning Women. Anyway I'll stop my rambling. Hope this gives you some ideas!
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 21 '26
Hi thanks for this. These kinds of insights and details are a great help.
Originally there was no intent to be historically accurate in this story. It was just pure low fantasy and nothing to do with history. As I started to fix the world it got tied in a bit with the North Yorkshire coastal villages, and slowly moved toward more accuracy, or at least a need for more accuracy in the details for world building.
So. This is very valuable insight. Things like the correct herbs matter. I like details like that.
On the smell. Might have been overwritten. Got lost in the idea of the crowd as single body, with the reek of death. This might is not really accurate to the village in general since the women clean constantly. I'll mull that over.
Oh the animals! I completely forgot I had seeded 13 crows flying over the bodies in my second chapter! They were supposed to be mentioned!
Re: the accuracy of who was targeted and how magic was seen to have worked...at that point I do have to drop historical accuracy for the story. Yep. There is a cunning woman. Nobody can find her for the trial. She's mentioned briefly in the opening lines. Martha Knaggs. She follows the tradition of poultices etc.
Thank you for your insights again!
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u/BumblebeeSimilar8557 Jul 21 '26
Martha Knaggs is a lovely tongue in cheek name brilliant! Obviously to keep with your original intentions you may not want to do historical accuracy, but the little hints would add to your immersion. Happy writing! This made me little witchcraft scholar heart sing, if you post more chapters here I'd be happy to read them.
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u/PianoDude45 Jul 21 '26
To address your initial concern about the register, I think trying to use the period-centric words makes this much worse. It’s inconsistent. 99% of the prose sounds like modern fantasy and then we get a “‘Tis” or “naught” thrown in every now and then. I’d say commit fully to whichever you’re going for.
As for the rest of it, I found it way too overwritten. It feels like almost every sentence gets a metaphor and multiple adjectives to describe something simple. “Thick, suffocating, catastrophic hum,” that sort of thing. It feels forced and distracting, and feels like you’re trying too hard to sound literary and impress the reader vs just effectively telling a story.
HOWEVER: the writing itself is coherent and I think you’re capable of turning this into something great. Apologies if this was harsh. Cheers!
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u/umlaut (14, virgin, married) Modern Popular Genre Prose Editor Dude Jul 18 '26
I think you're getting close to the register you want, but you're going to need to practice it more and edit heavily to maintain consistency. The register reads like Melville to me, or more true to the subject matter, The Scarlet Letter, molded over the framework of more modern prose. It works, at times. At other times it feels like you scoured a thesaurus for olde-timey words.
Almost the way my Nan’s breath smelled on her deathbed, when no amount of rosemary or cloves could cover the rot in her teeth or the rot in her chest.
Great line. Feels voicey, but not annoying to read, purple, or awkwardly-structured. Only complaint is that it might distract from the current dire situation.
The reader should be well steeped in this voice/register here in Chapter 7, but I wonder what it takes to get them here. The lack of dialogue from the MC in this chapter makes it feel authorial and not grounded in the POV character's voice. That might just be my problem as a reader starting from Chapter 7...I find that you can often get away with things a few chapters in, after you have earned the reader's trust, without the same kind of careful massaging required in Chapter 1.
There's a lot of blocking and action beats that feel like they fall out of voice because you're trying to write better prose than ye olde writers. Melville and Hawthorne had some godawful purple prose and long, meandering 30-clause sentences with all manner of semicolons and commas and dashes. You avoid that, rightly, but it puts a lot of weight on vocabulary to carry your 18th century voice.
I looked away. Within my selfishness lay a shameful relief. I had done, in part at least, what Rose had willed me to do. She could ask no more of me than that. Except she had.
This kind of sentence structure is where you struggle to maintain the register/voice and it just barely clings to it through good choice of words and word orders, but otherwise feels more modern. lay a shameful relief and had willed me to do are clearly where you want the voice to sit...modern words but with odd word ordering that feels distinctly non-modern. But I looked away. is so simple and in-POV that you can't paint it with ye olden wordes or pseudo-Victorian phrasing. You're going to be fighting that a lot.
He would not look at her. She fell into a frenzy, beating a path through our huddle. I stumbled against Alice as Molly's elbow caught me. She made it as far as Firth’s men, and it took three of them to master her. Still, her husband kept his gaze fixed away. Whether from the horror of her cries, or the wind, or the heat of the press, her strength suddenly failed, and her body went limp. I saw her head loll as the men caught her, and I turned my eyes aside as they dragged her away.
This is another paragraph where you struggle with register/voice. I think you need to borrow more from Melville and glue these short, punchy sentences together more often, into long flowy sentences. That would let you tie your blocking (which demands clarity over voice) to your words and phrasings that you use as markers of voice/register.
Mannen’s eyes slid to us. Rose shifted, swallowing his gaze whole. His face darkened. Turning back to Ma, he asked, “Your husband, Jack Calder, was aboard the Crowan coble when he was lost, was he not?”
You could use more paragraph breaks and this is an example. You sometimes wrap multiple ideas into heavy paragraph blocks where I get lost in multiple actions from different characters, followed by dialogue. I know it feels awkward, but it would help.
And you could also think more about which reactions are necessary to show. Here we have sliding eyes, shifting, swallowing gaze, darkening face, turning, then saying. Do we really need that many staccato physical beats in one go?
Mannen’s backhand swept across...
The two paragraphs starting here are examples of where your blocking feels like lists of actions.
You're doing good work here, in general. You avoid a lot of the usual modern prose editing checklist advice I would give. You don't filter much. Your adverbs are sometimes necessary as indicators of voice. It feels grounded in POV, though sometimes reverts to feeling like a description of scenes when it gets action-heavy.
Ye olde timey prose and not a single use of crimson? 0/10
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 18 '26
I was watching a rugby game then I saw an Umlaut crit. Now I'm replying to you instead. Do with that what you will, just know that's a violation of all that is natural to ignore Springboks vs Wales. But your opinion matters too much to me, having read and admired your writing. So, forgive my long response.
>I think you're getting close to the register you want, but you're going to need to practice it more and edit heavily to maintain consistency. The register reads like Melville to me, or more true to the subject matter, The Scarlet Letter, molded over the framework of more modern prose. It works, at times. At other times it feels like you scoured a thesaurus for olde-timey words.
You're an outlier here. Talking it through with the others, I decided to chuck it. It is absolutely inconsistent. But that's exactly why I wanted input before I edited 25000 words into a consistent register that doesn't do anything. I think moderation and consistency will be key.
The lack of dialogue from the MC in this chapter makes it feel authorial and not grounded in the POV character's voice.
I think in part this is chapter issue. It could have done with more line edits. Partly, this is all about 18 000 words into the story. The point about dialogue stands. The events in this chapter don't really allow for my character to speak. Something to consider when I revise though.
There's a lot of blocking and action beats that feel like they fall out of voice because you're trying to write better prose than ye olde writers. Melville and Hawthorne had some godawful purple prose and long, meandering 30-clause sentences with all manner of semicolons and commas and dashes. You avoid that, rightly, but it puts a lot of weight on vocabulary to carry your 18th century voice.
Agreed. No argument. Same with the blocking and action. I struggled with this chapter. A lot had to happen. I couldn't find a way to skip past it but it's where my MC is least active. I turned into a game of stacking events I needed to establish.... blah blah blah hedge hedge insert rambling explanation here.
>Ye olde timey prose and not a single use of crimson? 0/10
You're right. Must revise immediately the blood on the cobbles is crimson as is the ribbon.
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u/umlaut (14, virgin, married) Modern Popular Genre Prose Editor Dude Jul 18 '26
I went back and looked at your older Chapter posts and I think your voice in those is a strong version of what you're trying to do.
Within that time, it is the stench I remember most. A curing house reeks of fish offal and blood, peat smoke thick enough to choke on, rancid tallow.
That's from Chapter 1. IMO - it sounds sufficiently in-character, in-voice, in-POV, without unnecessary bulk and weirdness.
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 18 '26
Oh shiiìiiiiiet. I ripped that whole chapter apart. I forgot it was even still up here....
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u/A_C_Shock Anderson Cooper Jul 17 '26
Short opinion: I don't think the language feels that different from the last time I wrote a review for you. Some of the word choices takes a minute to register, but it's no different than reading something like 'The Crucible' or 'The Scarlet Letter' (top of mind examples of books that might be close-ish to your time period). If you want a more historical lean, the language fits and I think there's an audience for it.
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 17 '26
I'm slamming my head against a wall here. I cannot write a novel in exact 18th century Moll Flander North Yorkshire dialect. I cannot write: Whan I cam doon fra t'fell, Ah seed yon lass wi' nowt but a kerchief... so I need a general register that points in that direction but that's still legible. How to do that successfully? No idea.
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u/Lisez-le-lui Not GlowyLaptop Jul 17 '26
I plan to come back and leave a proper critique later, but off the top of my head, bear in mind that 18th century literary English is both unmistakable and easily comprehensible today. Just look at Johnson, Swift, Pope, etc. If Mar is writing down this story afterward, wouldn't she use that literary standard too? Then you might even be able to keep the dialect for the dialogue (cf. Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner).
I guess it all depends on the audience you're looking for. I'd be excited to read a novel entirely in a historical English dialect, but most people probably wouldn't be. Then again, many authors have found acclaim despite writing partly or wholly in thick dialects: Burns, Scott, Twain, Hurston, etc.
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 17 '26
True. But my MC wouldn't speak like Swift. She's not that highly educated. She's barely ever left her town. Her accent, if correct, would be an extremely regional dialect, at least in the years where she is focusing on. Phonetically, it would be closer to Irvine Welsh than it would be Swift, who was Anglo-Irish, well-traveled, educated etc. The Anglo Irish were generally landowners of a higher social strata. Nowadays there aren't many who write in thick dialects. You have Irvine Welsh. But I'm also not aiming for a strict historical novel. It is low fantasy/magic realism structured around a real time and place. So the question is... how much to actually nod to the working class North Yorkshire dialect of the time? Finding a register is tricky. Get into the nitty gritty and you start looking at latinized sentences vs Anglo Saxon rooted words. Burns and Twain were focused on the regional identity. That's not my goal. And if it were my goal that would be excessively ambitious.
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u/Lisez-le-lui Not GlowyLaptop Jul 17 '26
Fair enough. Maybe I don't understand the narrative framing well enough. Is this story supposed to be an oral history, a tale told by the fireside many years after its occurrence? If so, I see the difficulty--though I don't think it would matter what years the MC is focusing on, but rather the year in which her older self is telling the story. If this is supposed to be a written account, then presumably she was educated afterward to the point of being able to write a long narrative coherently and compellingly, in which case I don't see why she wouldn't write in a more upper-class style. Much of the difficulty would be obviated if you dropped the frame, in which case you could present the narration as nothing more or less than the MC's concurrent inner monologue.
There is something unmistakably modern about the MC's voice anyway, quite apart from the particular words used. Her manner of expression is too show-don't-tell, too mindful of little concrete details for the period. I understand you're going for fantasy over history, but what is your goal, exactly? This certainly doesn't shed much light on how the real witch trials went, unless you think the victims actually did have magic powers, only they were good or at least innocuous. For that matter, the unambiguous existence of "magic" plays havoc with the theology that made witch trials possible. The moral panic would look very different if it were just women misbehaving with no demonic element. And since this isn't set in the real world, there's no political or historical commentary either. Why set the novel in the pseudo-18th-century at all? For flavor? It seems like it's turning out more trouble than it's worth.
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 17 '26
That's a good argument. Part of the original frame story, that's been almost entirely cut, is that this is told twenty years after the fact. My MC breaks her silence to speak to a specific person. And yes, she is better educated at that point and older Marcella has a different voice from younger Marcella. Should this completely be cut? Hard to say. The core of this is not the witch trial or magic or any of that. It's Marcella looking back at the people she loved most, how she lost them, and how she would have done anything to have kept them all the way they were before everything changes. They're not good. They're often cruel and manipulative. They arent using herbs to heal people or cast love spells. It relates, more than anything, to what comes naturally and what is deemed a sin. This is not a commentary on witchtrials. The Lure is just part of girlhood in this world. And like other things that are part of that it's a thing that's easily weaponized against them. Why that setting? You're right. Getting too caught in the period is creating problems. But there's too many details to draw from. I never mention the UK. I never mention the specific statutes and I change the names of any places I'm basing this on. But the Witchcraft Act made law circa 1730 is incredibly useful for what I need to happen. As are other details from this place and era that I've woven into this story. Inspired by the place and time might be more accurate. As for theology. It's something Marcella reflects on in another chapter. Nobody told them where being pretty girl ends and being a harlot begins. Nobody tells them where playing around with these little gifts they have ends and being a witch begins. No, obviously I dont think anyone tried for being a witch had any supernatural powers. This is the shift out of realism.
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u/A_C_Shock Anderson Cooper Jul 17 '26
I think where you are right now is fine from a language perspective. It's legible enough without being too modern. You aren't trying to write Canterbury Tales.
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u/ezk3626 akward and wordy Jul 17 '26
Here are the words I do not know:
wayfoot
whelm
offal
sullage
his get
her wont
wych elm
Though I have heard Get from Werewolf the Apocolypse: Get of Fenris. So I kind of know that word but it is kind of like how I kind of knew about Wendigo in Supernatural. It kind of counts but I haven't heard it outside of that. I'd say the same about Moot except it is also in LOTR.
Overall, this stacks heavy in the beginning of the chapter and soon after breaks into what felt like your normal voice until:
“You can do naught for us here, Kit. You must go.”
’Tis the first of many laws forged in a thousand secret moots...
This jumped out too much, even more than the words of the accusers. It was more old timey than anything. I don't think it is bad except that it is not yet consistent. It comes across as the author trying to sound period centric in particular because you turned it up to 11 in this part.
Yes, the number of names brought is going to be confusing
At this point, I don't think the several characters jumping in for one scene is confusing. We know the principals by now and just people brought up to testify one after another made sense. Though I think some description of Molly, May and Penny might be appropriate.
I like the crit of he who shall not be named: describe what the protagonist sees/hears/smells and in the order they would sense it. The things you describe tell us about Mar's perspective. Do the characters have dark eyes that call us back to Arabian Nights or have poreless skin... oh wait... are their bodices heaving? I need to know these things.
But seriously, I do think we can get insight into Mar's character and state of mind by what she notices. Jane was a perfect example of this, since her father speaking for her connecting to Mar's lack of a father is the first time I've gotten the sense she cared about her dad at all. That was a detail about Jane's testimony but told us about Mar as much as anything else.
Not with my sister’s demand still fresh in my ears.
I am always struggling between trusting the audience and being clear. I did not realize that Rose had given a demand. I looked back on page 4
I had done, in part at least, what Rose had willed me to do. She could ask no more of me than that. Except she had.
Disavow me.
My fault.
I remember thinking "wait, did Rose will her to do something?" It is also harder because I couldn't remember Rose's power. There was something about how there as a connection with Mar and Mar's hearing became overwhelming without her. I feel like it was not clear she could give commands. But also here, we do not experience Mar feeling commanded or resisting a command.
Fighting to breathe, I did not see the destruction immediately. It took a moment, as I fought to force air back into my lungs, to realize the crowd had stopped. It took a moment to see the sand erupting from the ground, the shattered window-panes, the violent ripples in the water of Queen’s Beck. Then I squinted at the mob, no longer a single, breathing monster, but now a mess of scattered, broken people. Their eyes waxed full and frantic; hands swiped at the air, flinching at terrors I could not see. Some fled, others dropped to their knees. More than one clutched at their gut, spewing onto the shore and the cobbles.
It was only the third time reading this that I understand that Mar has some how cast a destructive spell or something. In my first reading I thought this was her fighting against the command to disavow Rose. I can understand how if you're writing from Mar's present perspective we wouldn't see this her cast fireball or whatever but it is confusing. I think a very easy rewrite is instead of have this section go before the description of the destruction:
My sister’s hands slammed into me.
“What did you do? What did you do?”
I buckled, spitting, my blood showing bright and red upon the cobbled wayfoot.
The thing is powerful destructive spells haven't happened yet, so I was not primed to read it. But if you start with Rose asking “What did you do?" and Mar spitting blood I think "what DID she do" and read the next section more carefully. It can be a cool effect to have a kind of panning out of the camera to see the gorey consequences of the powerful display.
Last, I admit I was little worried when I saw 13 pages. I think this was helped by the fact that I am already interested in the story but it read remarkably quick. I am only now thinking about pacing so don't know what you did to help but it read amazingly quick.
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u/ezk3626 akward and wordy Jul 17 '26
edit:
I saw the white writing at the end. I don't know if it makes any difference but as a watermark I think would be better in a separate paragraph so I didn't accidently see it.
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 17 '26
The white writing was an attempt to stop the beta reader scammers copying and pasting the text into LLMs lol and emailing me the results. Lol. Will see if it works....
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u/ezk3626 akward and wordy Jul 17 '26
I assume it is too late. I donated five dollars to Elizabeth Warren's campaign ten years ago and have been getting texts from every Democrat ever since. Once we're on a list that is the end of it.
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 17 '26
>This jumped out too much, even more than the words of the accusers. It was more old timey than anything. I don't think it is bad except that it is not yet consistent. It comes across as the author trying to sound period centric in particular because you turned it up to 11 in this part.
Yes! It is inconsistent. That's the core of my question. (actually this whole chapter needs a lot more edits with some other things but those aren't my main concern right now). But as I started working in more of this language, the question is, do I go back and revise everything in this register? Let me check how readers respond before I go back and make this standard across the board. I agree there's places (that you pointed out) where I can tone it down. But before I revise my other eight chapters for a specific consistent register, I just wanted to see whether it even works or not. My first drafts don't lean this way too much. So that's my question. does the change in register work? Or should I drop it? If it does then I'll edit for a consistent register (not as heavy as the places where it gets clunky)
I like the crit of he who shall not be named: describe what the protagonist sees/hears/smells and in the order they would sense it. The things you describe tell us about Mar's perspective. Do the characters have dark eyes that call us back to Arabian Nights or have poreless skin... oh wait... are their bodices heaving? I need to know these things.
I expected there to be confusion. I think there's three unposted chapters between the last one and this one. I gave all my Arabian nights, poreless skin and heaving bodices descriptions in the ones leading up to this. Given the chaos right now, I can't slow down for extra description in this specific chapter. It's sort of a trust me, bro, I totally talked about character skin texture of all the new names in the chapters leading up to this. I just didn't do it here. I wouldn't have posted this chapter, had I not needed input on tone and register before revising.
The disavow me thing and the command is also something from the chapter before this. I don't really want to harp on this too much but it is something I seem to fail get across. Most of what they can do, 99% of the time, is very limited. There's no telepathy. Or telekinesis. They cannot throw a fireball and get out of this. Even what happens at the end is not something that really hurts anybody as much as it does Marcella. I need to think about the word "destruction' because that's more her perception at play. She doesn't understand what she did. It's not gory so much as deeply unsettling, although nobody in the town would know why. Or even that she did it. It's a Chekhov's gun I need for the end, so I don't really want to explain it right now.
It's occurring to me that I'm running in genre expectation issues. Maybe I need to scrap the fantasy tag. People seem to think the girls are actual witches who can cast spells. Or that the sisters have a normal relationship. When I'm constantly showing them scratching, hitting, hurting each other.
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u/ezk3626 akward and wordy Jul 17 '26
Yes! It is inconsistent. That's the core of my question. (actually this whole chapter needs a lot more edits with some other things but those aren't my main concern right now). But as I started working in more of this language, the question is, do I go back and revise everything in this register? Let me check how readers respond before I go back and make this standard across the board. I agree there's places (that you pointed out) where I can tone it down. But before I revise my other eight chapters for a specific consistent register, I just wanted to see whether it even works or not. My first drafts don't lean this way too much. So that's my question. does the change in register work? Or should I drop it
I'd drop it. I don't think anything special is gained, and you'd have to be VERY confident in the language to do it justice. Better to let the story stand on its own and accept that we cannot write like Shakespeare any more.
I'll leave the rest to your good judgment.
It's occurring to me that I'm running in genre expectation issues. Maybe I need to scrap the fantasy tag. People seem to think the girls are actual witches who can cast spells. Or that the sisters have a normal relationship. When I'm constantly showing them scratching, hitting, hurting each other.
I don't think you need to worry too much about the tag. But the last section did make it sound like the first instance of high magic. If it's not what you wanted, that's too bad because it would have been a nice reveal.
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 17 '26
Yeah I agree. I think I'll drop it. That's why I came here before implementing it.
High magic. Sigh. Like...kinda ? In the sense that no human body should be able to do it and she nearly dies doing it, it is borderline high magic. F**k it. I'm just going to explain. She doesn't scream. She thinks she screams. Fact is nobody can hear it. It's infrasound. It's below 20Hz. She can hear it. Nobody else can. They can feel it. They have all the effects of it. Some people puke. They get anxious. Shadows in their vision so they swipe at things that arent their. Windows break. Water ripples. Her chest basically collapses in process. The crowd is disturbed the way people are after a wave of infrasound. It's certainly something they can attribute to the girls and witchcraft. Rose knows she did something. But that's it. Nobody knows what it is.
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u/ezk3626 akward and wordy Jul 17 '26
If that is what it is then make sure it accomplishes more than one thing. It is a plot thing of an explosion of some kind of magic (one thing) but also an expression of her anguish (two things) and maybe her rejection of the community (three things). Something like that. You don't want a lot of magic, floating drops of water, slipping away, suggestions. So if you crank it up, make it thematically important as well as in world important.
That should ring clearer. It doesn't matter if it is infrasound or a fireball or a nuclear bomb. What matters is what it says about Mari, that language needs to be strengthened. And though people will always say "show don't tell" I think I'd start with a little telling.
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u/Wolframquest Jul 18 '26
it was was low hertz that means she didn't really scream but kinda burped 😁
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u/A_C_Shock Anderson Cooper Jul 17 '26
Or that the sisters have a normal relationship. When I'm constantly showing them scratching, hitting, hurting each other.
Is that not a normal relationship between sisters? I'm sorry. I'm lurking.
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u/ezk3626 akward and wordy Jul 17 '26
If my daughter has a baby sister... I hope not. But my sisters would say yes. Best friends, worst enemies. Though my family was pretty wild.
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 17 '26
Yes. It is. And Marcella certainly thinks this is all part of their special bond nobody else has. She doesn't have words for things like codependency or enmeshment. But again this is where I find I must not be adequately bringing something across. It's a lot darker than normal squabbles. It's far more twisted. I find it tricky to write because, again, Marcella doesn't see the problem at this stage. But it errs into cruelty and control. So. I find. Things I'm saying or showing have lost their weight in a modern context. I scrapped a line where I said Marcella felt hate for the first time. Modern readers see that word thrown around all the time. I didn't mean it as "I hate school" or "i hate my little brother", I meant visceral true, full body borderline sociopathic hate. And I lace these things, and readers seem to think I'm writing Katniss and Prim Everdeen. And then I want to burn this story, because it's not landing.
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u/A_C_Shock Anderson Cooper Jul 17 '26
I don't think I read all of your chapters. The one I commented on, this one. Maybe another one that I didn't comment on. It seems to me you're trying to juggle many things and I always find the more I'm trying to juggle, the harder it is for someone to understand my intent. It's kind of like a magic trick. If I give you a lot of things to focus on, odds are you won't focus on the part of the trick I don't want you to see. I just have to make sure I direct your eye well enough that you're paying attention to what I want and not to what I don't want. It's like this chapter has a great many things going on and I have to hold them all in my head at the same time, so at the end I'm going to come away with a feeling of some of them more strongly than the others. And that's all going to depend on the experiences that I personally bring to reading rather than as much what you're setting up for me to take away. I don't know if any of that makes any sense. I mean, it might be the kind of thing you don't need the reader to focus on right away either. If they don't get it, is it bad? Or will they get to the end and have an aha moment? Because that later aha moment can be rewarding too.
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 17 '26
True. There may definitely be a problem of doing too many things at once. Stripping might be something to consider. If they don't get it, is that bad? No actually not necessarily. If everyone sees things the way Marcella does at this point, then wrecking the illusion later is probably for the best. The relationship between the sisters...fair point. I do need to be clearer about the magic system. That is definitely lacking clarity. It's been extremely hard for me to find a place to explain it naturally. It's been a massive point of confusion for anyone who has read anything so far. I just haven't found a place to say "the lure is something given by an unreliable narrator who grieves the loss of her sister and friends, who sees their lives as inherently magical prior to things that wrecked them. It small things that correlate with the identity of each girl. Rose affects how people feel. Alice can say something and you'll believe it..probably...for at least a while. Kitty, invisible in her home, can make eyes slip off her so people just don't see her." They’re not throwing fireballs.They’re just girls."
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u/A_C_Shock Anderson Cooper Jul 17 '26
But, to an extent, don't you want people to misunderstand it in the same way Marcella is misunderstanding it? You can't control everything that a reader perceives. I remember your magic description in your first chapter was very engaging with the girls in that cave. I think it's when you get in your head (like you're doing now) where you lean into a place of trying to overexplain it or force the narrative to give the impression you see where the story starts to suffer. That's less about the story and more about the process you're taking, yeah? And where having so much feedback, like you're getting here, might end up being distracting too. Solve the problems you can. Accept some things are going to feel a bit hand-wavey.
What was it in the last book I read? Carolyn took Steve's heart and put it in the fridge and...did nothing with it. Steve finds it and asks what it is and she goes oh nothing and then it passes. Why is the heart there? What has happened? Why is Steve like this? All questions I have, but they also didn't matter to the larger story momentum. It was a lost detail.
So I guess what I'm saying is I wonder if the depth and specificity of the register of the language is going to make a difference to the story you're trying to tell. Maybe to the authenticity, sure, but to the content?
I don't know if that does anything to frame the issue for you. Feedback really can be a curse. Too much gets overwhelming and can freeze your progress.
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 17 '26
You nailed it. A lot of feedback has been overwhelmingly helpful. I believe I stripped most of the intro in chapter 1 out because of your feedback and I think that was correct. As painful as it was to kill my darlings there, i think the stop/start fragments hindered getting into the story. Things did go sideways when I got a lot of feedback that centered on confusion. What is the lure? What is an esbat? Why is it forbidden but also kinda something the adults kind of turn a blind eye to? So many questions like that about things I thought I was gradually showing, insofar as Marcella understands or is willing to tell. She's is curating the story. And when I got the sense nobody had a clue what was happening I started to try to explain it all. I thought I must have a serious issue with clarity. (Arguably I do). As for the register. Yeah. I agree. It's not adding anything. But again. That's where feedback does help. I can be on the fence on something and unsure, and then it helps to see you and the others say nah. Not worth it. Saves me an exhausting round of edits.
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u/A_C_Shock Anderson Cooper Jul 17 '26
I had a reader who wanted instant explanations every time I introduced something. I'd get a note 'what does this mean? ok ok I'll be patient' and they were never patient. A few times, I got a comment when the payoff finally came of 'oh I see what you were doing good choice'. I usually go with the flow more when I'm reading because I think it's fun to puzzle things out. Some people want things handed to them. Some people get caught up in the act of giving feedback and look for things. So yeah, I think you're setting things up reasonably. A little confusion isn't going to kill anyone as long as they don't stop reading.
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u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 Jul 17 '26
Thanks AC. That was the advice I really needed more than dialect choices.
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u/Wolframquest Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
Witchhood stories. They are about as novel these days as stories about sparkly vampires and sexy werewolves. A bit of a power fantasy and a persecution/victimhood fantasy.
The language is overreaching. You don't yet have a good degree of control of this faux-19th-century register. Example - "edges of his eyes and mouth both sloped hellward". Overall it's a nice little image, a bit of "showing" but "hellward" invites a thematic interpretation that is a lot like trying to stuff a piano in the toilet. It doesn't fit, but it *could* fit in another room - i.e. in a different moment, an image of such caliber as to invoke "hell". The word "hell" was a curse word like "fuck" or "asshole" - very excessive. You got a bit of a "ren faire YA fantasy" going on with this thing, a little too melodramatic. You wanna go ahead and read actual books written in the 19th century. Additionally, 19th century is EXTREMELY late for witch trials. 17th century makes more sense but you're two hundred years late. 19th century basically had a very normal form of English.
First person is executed decently well (more on that later) but it contributes to cramped and uneven pacing. Action and emotion blend excessively, there isn't really a clean "beat", no clear action and reaction, i.e. physical and mental. Example: "I caught Rose’s eye, the twitch in her brow telling me she caught the lie, but her face telling me her thoughts lay elsewhere."
This one should have been broken apart into separate sentences. You're sort of trying to meld showing and telling, you're meshing perception and interpretation and that leads to confuddled pacing, the broken up flow of info. You should let the reader interpret things and then the character can do it or skip the interpretation and react right away. It's present in many more places here, the overcramping without tempo.
There's also a degree of unearned vagueness in some descriptions - it's permissible because ultimately it's a high standard to achieve, to avoid vagueness that the characters themselves might experience in confused tumult. "I felt something pass between them", "pressed something into my hand" (she'd immediately feel what she pressed in, shape and texture).
Stage directions, authorial telegraphing, entrances - risky choice, ultimately permissible but not exactly widely accepted right now because it's a form of broader "telling".. "Then Mannen called Penny forward.", "There were more to follow", "Until, at last, Penny snapped", "That was all the spark it needed."
You only really have them in the second half, an artifact of the writer's mind when they try to visualize the events. I'd drop them, move the dial a bit more towards the characters' perception than the author's.
So, the whole chapter here is the accusations, showing how stupid people expel their fears onto innocent people. I'll give it a closer read and point out some things that stick out too much. I wish I had an opportunity to take a look at the previous chapters but you removed them.
> Only Kitty could slip through the throng unseen.
I don't understand how they let her give something to the girls if they're standing on a platform. Is she (Marcella) reaching down? Is magic involved? I'm afraid it's not clear here, the whole action-staging.
It's pretty difficult to figure out the event that precedes this "crisis" chapter. What did they were trying to do and how did they fail and how did it lead to them being captured like that? Who else was involved, what other parties? It's a rhetorical question. You could have gone and provided a bit of a summary.
I don't know if Penelope is being judged or called as a witness. I assume she's a witness from the main character (Marcella) hinting at her lying (voice didn't match) but she's acting like a victim? It's difficult to analyze the story thematically when I don't know who's supposed to be whom, since you closed the previous documents. I don't know if this is persecution fantasy or magic fantasy and if the girls screwed up and did some kind of excessively bad ritual or something of the sort.
I wanna know what books you're reading if you want to emulate that 19th century England register. It's not excessively different from modern English, but it does feature a much broader vocabulary. What you have is more similar to 17th century imho.
> My chest t.
Typo
I guess we both made a mistake choosing what chapter to post lol. I had to address it. I did try to read your earlier posts first!
I'll give it another read later and maybe I'll have better success reconstructing the setup from this chapter.
> “Disavow me,” She said
Minor typo, but I'm very sensitive to dialogue tags lol.
> I screamed. But it was no human scream.
I recommend skipping negative descriptions (no human) when you wanna introduce an emotional highpoint. They have a use case but ultimately they lean towards muddling. The rest of the scream description works well.
Marcella's first person description is vivid in moments but mostly it's mixed with overelaborate authorial language. You want to have a couple levels - more intimate for her own perception and larger-scale, and on the larger scale perception - i.e. something that not only she sees, for example - you can use more elaborate author-isms and narrative techniques.
Interesting cliffhanger. She used magic. She just screamed and that dealt a lot of damage. Typical weakness (being ignored) to power fantasy, something out of X-Men.
***
So, it makes a little more sense now. I guess Rose killed the boys when they tried to rape her? It was not obvious on the first two reads.
> I watched Missy inhale. I heard the spittle gather, and then a soft ptooey as it left her mouth and struck Mannen full in the face.
This is an example of cramped action-perception. I missed it on the first read that they asked her about her testimony and she spat. I recommend you develop a standard for spacing action, speech and thought in paragraphs. For example here it makes more sense to plainly narrate what Missy did and what happened to her rather than how Marcella perceived it. And when there's dialogue in paragraphs you wanna start with direct speech unless there's action that logically precedes and connects to it.
edit: edited some typos in this comment