The Fish Road to Constantinople – MK Robinson
Congratulations on being selected for the YouWriteOn Top Ten this month – I very much enjoyed reading the opening of your story and I can certainly see why it was well reviewed by your fellow writers.
Plot:
The opening of your book is extremely well done – a prologue can be a wonderful way to begin a story and I felt you really seized the opportunity here to set the scene and grab a reader’s attention; I’d defy anyone to not want to immediately carry on reading once they’d finished your final paragraph! There was a very strong sense of narrative pushing your story onwards, which swept me up as a reader and I had a real sense that I was at the beginning of a very original, dramatic story.
You very quickly introduced your core characters, and I think the three children will work well for your story as it allows you to explore different issues. I’m assuming, for example, that Wyn will face very different challenges to Hartha and Eadwulf and that Eadwulf’s foreign background may come to play a part in the story? I wasn’t entirely clear from what you write whether Wyn’s mother had sent her daughter away before the attacks, to try and save her, or whether she’d been sent away for a different purpose. In either case it might be worth clarifying under what circumstances Wyn had last seen her family. I also wondered, as an aside, whether at that time 14 was quite old to remain unmarried? I’m assuming that the average life span was much shorter then and so people would have married and had children much earlier.
Your chapters showcase your skill in creating a sense of place and time and you kept the period details to a very good level, where a reader didn’t need to disrupt their reading to check your glossary but could understand the meaning from the context. I would personally advise against a glossary if possible, as there is sometimes an expectation that a book will be ‘difficult’ if it needs additional explanation, but this is entirely up to you and other readers may feel differently.
Setting
Your setting is a highly original one and I think that unfamiliarity gives you a wonderful opportunity to take your readers on a story that will feel very fresh and new. In historical novels it’s absolutely vital that you convey a sense of period and that comes not just from terminology but the way the characters speak and interact with one another. It can be a tricky balancing act to ensure that your characters don’t sound archaic or too jarringly modern so do bear this in mind as you write. I’d always recommend reading other books set in a similar period to see how other writers have tackled this issue but remember that you should write whatever feels most comfortable to you.
Quality of writing
There were some very striking lines that really captured your narrator’s desolation – ‘our pain made us companions, our heartache made us brothers and sisters’ was one I thought particularly successful as it really helps the readers understand the bonds that must have sprung up so quickly between anyone who survived the attacks.
There were a few points which I felt could benefit from a little re-writing to ensure your meaning is always clear. For example, ‘I recognised the older boy, but not the girl. They were Eadwulf…and Wyn’. If he didn’t know who the girl was then how does he know her name? You need to include a line explaining that they introduced themselves or swapped stories. And I think it might also help your scene-setting to explain how Eadwulf and Wyn had found one another.
One area that I think could benefit from some closer attention is your battle scenes. Action scenes can be very tricky to write because you need to convey a lot of information very quickly so that you don’t lose that sense of action and danger. I would recommend you experiment with using shorter sentences for these scenes as this helps to convey a sense of action, and you initially focus on just explaining what happened as clearly as possible, even just listing the steps involved if you find that helps to concentrate the mind. For example, when the Normans attack the 3 travellers after Wyn leaves the bag, I wasn’t entirely clear what was happening when you wrote that:
‘I leapt, not thinking of anything else to do.
It wasn’t pretty, and a man would’ve made a better job of it, but it worked.’
Does Hartha just throw himself at the rider? Is he trying to just dislodge the rider or attack him? It can be difficult when you can picture a scene so clearly to step back from the story, but it’s important that you focus on creating a very clear image in your readers’ minds. There were a few occasions where I felt that the battle scenes would be more impactful if they were shorter and starker, which would then allow you to concentrate on using more lyrical language in the remainder of your novel.
Characterisation
Because these early chapters are so plot driven we don’t really get much of a sense of Hartha as a character, beyond his understandable rage at what’s happened to his family. I would have loved to have seen a little more conversation between Hartha, Wyn and Eadwulf, or with Ceryl where we got a sense of what Hartha was like before the attacks and what kind of narrator he will prove to be.
Obviously his character will develop throughout the story as he faces new challenges, but I think it would really push your writing onto the next level if you could weave in some other elements of his character so we had a sense, for example, of whether he was a boy who had always longed to travel or if he’d always wanted to stay at home and farm. If we knew a little more about him then it encourages the reader to speculate to themselves as to what he might be feeling when Ceryl urges them to flee to Constantinople – will he be excited? Scared? Determined? – and that makes reading your work a more rewarding process for them.
Conclusion
This is a very promising beginning to your story and I hope that my advice proves helpful and you continue to write and to develop your story. As I mentioned before, your setting felt very fresh and original to me and I can certainly envisage that there would be a clear market for this kind of adventure story.
Hibakshu – Tom SwanCongratulations on being in the Top Ten this month for what I felt was a well written and very through-provoking story. I liked how you were careful to avoid portraying Dr Petersen as an out and out ‘bad guy’, but created a much more believable, well-rounded character who was forced by what he saw to expand his mental horizons. I was particularly impressed that you resisted any temptation to dwell on the distressing images that they saw in Mr Tanaka’s reflection as I thought your few tightly written lines had a far greater impact than any long descriptions of suffering and torment.
My one query came over his reaction to Mr Tanaka asking whether he knew the story of the sun-goddess. You write that:
‘Dr Petersen felt his stomach sink… This might be important to his mission. This could be useful data’
But I wasn’t quite clear why his stomach would sink if he thought that the story would be of use to him – wouldn’t it only sink if he thought the story was a useless anecdote or a diversionary tactic?
Overall, I thought that this was a very impressive story, and I hope you continue to write.
Lazarus V – Cameron DecoCongratulations on being chosen as one of the top entries on YouWriteOn! I very much enjoyed reading the opening pages of your book – the beginning in particular was very well judged to intrigue a reader, intriguing and atmospheric. The premise of your story feels very fresh and original and I loved the idea of the US Navy coming to Robert to ask him to use his techniques rather than the more obvious route of Robert pleading with the authorities to be allowed to put his untested theories into practice. Your dialogue in particular was very well judged, and was appropriate to the period without sounding archaic.
Robert is a great central character and you capture his energy, his desire to learn and to succeed perfectly. I can imagine he will be a very appealing protagonist in a full length work. I did want to clarify his age – I had imagined him as still quite a young man but when he’s reflecting on his nightmare he remembers winning a medal at sixteen and wonders ‘twenty years, on, what is it Robert wants?’ This would make him 36 now, and his sister Lilian 31, which surprised me as Lilian is still referred to as ‘a girl’ and I’d have thought that at this point in the twentieth century she would have been married by that age.
Congratulations again, and I hope you continue to write and develop your novel.
This post was last edited by ProfessionalCritique, 17 May 2010, 11:42
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17 May 2010, 11:39
