Quote: Review of Dragon at the Window, awrigley

I had a lot of difficulty with this. It starts, very slowly, with all the detail imaginable about not all that much. As a reader, I presume that the text is seeded with hints and clues, plot trip wires, booby traps. But that isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, so.

Then there is the dragon at the window, which is after all the title, so this has to be meaningful, but the narrative never quite holds it shape, any shape, it morphs for no discernible reason into shapes that are hard to associate with what the text has already loaded into our heads, the picture that has been created is suddenly wiped out and a new one drawn, before I can grasp any real significance of the previous image.

As there are no plot trip wires, it must be a story about the madness and paranoia of old age, but then we are diverted into a childhood, then a different story, and then another. There seems to be no clear plotline, no clear notion, on the author’s part, of what the story is really about. It begins to feel random and as a reader, it never recovers my interest. As a reviewer, I am left somewhat baffled.

Rather than leave it at that, I will try to convey what my reading experience was like, so that you have something to go on if you want to listen to what I have to say.

Think of that game where you draw on someone’s naked back. They have to guess the image you have drawn. As a metaphor for the task of creating an image in a reader’s mind, it is a good one.

If the drawing is too complex, the game is almost impossible to play. The person being drawn on loses track of all the different bits of information and how it all fits together. If the drawing is too simple, it becomes trivial and not fun to play.

In your case I would say that you have either made the drawing too complex, or there is no drawing at all. If the drawing is too complex, then what you have to do is pare it down to its essence to make it easier for the reader to build up the picture you want to convey in their mind. The picture being the plot, or the message, or whatever it is that you want to convey.

If, on the other hand, there is no picture, then you have an entirely different kind of problem. Languorous text, well rendered settings, refined brushwork or whatever are no use, narratively speaking, if the text does not engage and the reader is left floundering amidst aspects that, while effective, are never made whole if an essential ingredient is missing.

I am left with the impression that there is no ‘picture’. As a result, rather than a story it becomes a ramble and the reader is left frustrated by the experience. I feel that you are relying on descriptions and impressions to give the reader a worthwhile experience. In my mind, this doesn’t work and you need to give us a narrative that, in some way can become whole, rather than expanding into who knows what?

But I really don’t know. As, despite my best efforts, I began to lose the plot, or not be able to create a mental image, even a hypothesis of what this story is about, so I began to lose interest: no matter how much effort I put into reading the text, I would still not be able to glean any new relevant information.

A lot of reviewers will say that you have to deliver the smells and feels and sounds and sights of what you are describing. Taken on a paragraph by paragraph basis, this does deliver on that, but I was never sure what it was that was relevant to whole that I was picking up from each paragraph.

A story needs a plot to engage the reader. And a plot needs to be carefully constructed and delivered. This feels more like a succession of paragraphs. An increasingly disheartening succession of paragraphs.

Sorry, this one wasn’t for me. I will be very interested to see what others have said and that is what you should concentrate on too. Not the individual reviews, but the picture that you can build up from all the reviews you receive about how your readers respond to the text. There might well be something that I am missing, but what I am not missing, I feel certain, is that more work is needed to engage the reader, and more understanding of how the reader builds up their mental images on the basis of your text.

Other than that, there is good writing, very few typos (I only found one missing apostrophe) and in all other respects plenty of skill. Which makes the reason why this doesn’t work all the more mystifying and frustrating.

I also think that a lot of text could be cut without loss to the overall story, probably allowing you to fit the story within the YWO guidelines.

Typo: “I wont tell them…” apostrophe missing!