Donner
02-07-2002, 12:02 PM
**This was an excellent exchange between writer and reviewer originally posted in General C&C, so we thought it should be moved here as an example of how the whole process can work and work well. Be enlightened!
Donner
(With headings edited)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Lightening
Author: ladida
My mother would sit with a needle
in her hand repairing ripped up jeans
while the T.V. would be playing Saturday Night Live.
"Lightening never strikes the same
place twice," she'd say, but it always did.
We never did stop buying our clothes
at the Goodwill. Even after she promised
a hundred times to buy that blackberry
colored dress that I saw at JBYRON's.
Each time we'd pass by she would come up next to me,
her breath fogging the shop window,
and her voice climbing up on the ruffles of
that dress as she told me how all the boys
would come chasing after me. I'd say
"mama, you're living in the clouds".
And she'd stand up on her tip toes, her sandals
hitting the floor with a thud, as she put her arms up
toward the sky, " Honey, I can't reach ‘em yet," she'd tease.
Her fingers scraped the clouds as her back arched
over, her arms extended from her body as rods
do when preparing for the thunderstorm.
- Grace
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Critique: Andrea345
Hello Grace,
Couple things you need to look at besides cutting what’s turning this piece into prose with line breaks. Lightning never strikes once in this piece, so lightning striking twice just doesn’t fit. “We never did stop buying our clothes at the Goodwill” is the “proof” because that’s the only statement of the theme. Now, if lightning was supposed to be about disaster & not about the financial ability to buy clothes, then the focus is lost. However, your final lines: “her arms extended from her body as rods // do when preparing for the thunderstorm” while logically and semantically flawed have promise for supporting a theme of getting lightning to strike even once.
First of all, I’d suggest you spend your time condensing most of this to the fewest possible words. For example, how important is it that “Saturday Night Live” and “JByron”s be identified? I’m not familiar with JByron’s and unless you’re talking top couturier there is no point. It doesn’t show a standard b/c one might not exist.
Without strophe breaks I’m not sure of all the setting changes. Strophes / stanzas (in formal verse) usually indicate a change of some sort, either theme or setting, character, something big. So, I can tell you I was confused reading the “Lightning never strikes” lines just after reading “Saturday Night Live.” How are those two ideas connected? The answer is, they’re not.
As I mentioned, b/c you’re not writing about disaster the idea of “lightning striking twice” and “it always did” is not supported. I don’t get that not being able to buy a fabulous new dress is a disaster. Now, what prevented it’s purchase might have been disastrous, or lightning striking: medical disaster, illness, job loss, mental incapacity from revising too many pieces (heh). Lightning striking is something, well, extraordinary. I can’t find anything there. On the other hand, the absence of good luck & the final desire of your mother to become a lightning rod for good fortune is an interesting one. It does tweak the cliched theme.
It also seems as though you haven’t really gained a focus. For example, you start out with “ripped up jeans” but you drop that & go to “Goodwill.” Then you drop that to go on several lines about promises. There’s only twinkles of metaphors here. The jeans could equal “Goodwill.” What about the first time you saw that dress? What came between you and the dress. What were these “hundred of times” promises? When did “you” take “your mother” to first see the dress? What was her reaction? Did you visit the dress daily? For how long? Did you ever try it on with her watching? Did you try it on one day & she repaired the jeans that evening? How bout tried it on while you’re on the way to the Goodwill store? Why does she make these promises? How does that make “you” feel? Why does she make the promises she can’t keep? What stops her? Was she unresolved about the dress until she saw you wearing it? Did that change her mind?
Take a look at the tense of your verbs. You’re adding a lot of words. “my mother would sit...” “we never did stop.”
Grace, you filled your space without paying attention to the sounds of the piece. Read your pieces aloud to yourself. Are there alternate word choices which would sound better together? What do the vowels in a line sound like? How do consonants (hard or soft) work to reinforce a mood or a feeling? Have you been paying attention to these details? It doesn’t strike me as though you have. You’re also working an awful lot of end stopped lines or lines which end logically on a line so that the one following is a bit too much of a surprise that it’s there.
I’d suggest a full gutting of this one and refocus on the image of those final lines. How do you get the reader to that point? Where will your story begin, what are the two or three (maybe four) most important events / comments / ideas which must take the piece from point A to that final one. The focus of this piece should remain “your mother” b/c she has the most striking action. “You” must remain incidental. Show me how this woman decides she must become a lightning rod.
best wishes,
-a
[This message has been edited by Andrea345 (edited 02-04-2002).]
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Response: ladida
Hi Andrea,
I am sorry for the delay in responding to your critique, but I wanted to thank- you enormously for taking the time to write such a comprehensive critique. All the questions you brought up: "When did "you" take "your mother" to first see the dress?", ect. are very insightful. Hopefully they will help me add a lot of what is missing in explain the theme. A lot of the points you brought up are well taken and I will use your suggestions as I revise.
I think some of the condensing you suggestion would be rather hard to do. A lot of the extra words that you point out I could easily discarded, but others seem rather important. "Saturday Night Live" adds to the scene. If I would just say that the T.V. was on then the scene seems rather blank in my opinion or if she had been watching the news ( it would have reflected a (more) serious person). Maybe these connotations just work for me? JByron's was just a regular department store much like Sears or JCpenny type store. But if the reader will not identify with Jbyron's then I would like to substitute Sears or Jcpenny because I want the reader to understand that it is just a normal department store.
Sounds. I suppose this is one of the hardest parts from me. I have just checked out Robert Pinsky's " Sounds of Poetry", hopefully that will all sink in. In Mary Oliver's book "A poet's handbook" its fascinating the way that, she dissects Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening. All the liquids, semi vowels, mutes? Who knew letters (and sound) had so much influence? So in short, I am just starting to truly appreciate and hopefully soon I will apply this knowledge. I certainly will try in revision.
I don't mean to sound picky, but I have read some poems ( not trashy poetry on the Internet), which change settings, ect but still have no strophe breaks. So I am wondering, is it something mandatory for understand or is it more a question of personal opinion?
The disaster that you were wondering about is in part finical. That is shown through the "ripped up jeans", " Goodwill" and the desire for a department store dress that the daughter never receives. The other disaster is the mother's inability to fully be able to live up to the ‘reality' and take action in her promises to her daughter and most importantly herself. At the end the mother becomes a "lightning rod". She reaches up to the sky, as she is joking with her daughter. The mother's optimistic, frivolous nature causes her to become a "lightning rod". Behind the optimism, and exterior she knows consciously that she continually setting herself up for disaster.
Thank- you again!
- Grace
[This message has been edited by ladida (edited 02-06-2002).]
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Critic's Reply: Andrea345
I think some of the condensing you suggestion would be rather hard to do. A lot of the extra words that you point out I could easily discarded, but others seem rather important. "Saturday Night Live" adds to the scene. If I would just say that the T.V. was on then the scene seems rather blank in my opinion or if she had been watching the news ( it would have reflected a (more) serious person).
I have to agree that "watching tv" would be a waste of space as well. "Saturday Night Live," while showing someone who watched comedy was not so far out of a norm that I took your point to mean she was a humorous person. To me, it didn't carry the connotation you were looking for. Added to that is the lack of sonic structure. "Saturday Night Live" just didn't add anything except an empty name, a piece of information which seems unattached to anything special or unique about this person.
When you began focusing on your mother's actions towards the end of the piece, that's where her humor comes across. What she says, what she does, how she says it - those are the important qualities which make her humorous. Not just because she sits down & watches a tv show fifty bejillion other people watch. Sewing the torn jeans may be an important element to the setting and the character, having her watch a popular tv show doesn't strike me as essential.
The same thing with the department store name. It's not the name of the department store which is important. It is the unattainable dress. The unaffordable dress, the dress which is so far beyond the means of your mother but which she gets carried away and promises to buy. The fact that it's at an average department store makes that store's name even more dispensable. There's no meaning to it, no double entendre, no nuance, no character, no overtone, no foreshadowing, no myth. The dress holds all these things. The new dress. "Goodwill," in contrast, does at least carry the conotation of "used clothing." However, if the hand-me-downs were even more directly handed down (older sister? cousin? next door neighbor?) then the meaning would escape the trap of Goodwill Industries going out of business & no one fifty years from now knowing what you're writing about.
Sounds. I suppose this is one of the hardest parts from me. I have just checked out Robert Pinsky's " Sounds of Poetry", hopefully that will all sink in. In Mary Oliver's book "A poet's handbook"
And this is where you choice of words will really make the idea of this piece shine. I guess, if there'd been a show named which had some alliteration, which sounded silly, or which had some sonic qualities then they wouldn't have seemed so much like throw-away words to me. Sound is only one layer to a poem but it's a cool one. I spend at least one revision, if not more, in the rough draft process on sound.
I don't mean to sound picky, but I have read some poems ( not trashy poetry on the Internet), which change settings, ect but still have no strophe breaks. So I am wondering, is it something mandatory for understand or is it more a question of personal opinion?
Not, picky, this is an interesting question & you should post it to Voyages. Strophes (stanzas in formal verse) have the function of a paragraph in some ways. Yes, I'd have to say, that strophe breaks were in one way, a matter of taste but I also think that there's effects on the piece a writer needs to pay attention to. I see strophes as affecting the pace of the piece. They don't always have to operate as visual cues to a change in setting, character, etc. Check out Rachel's (TheBroad) strophe breaks in her piece "Mercury Falling" in Merciless. Did you know strophes could be enjambed the same as a line? Have you thought about how they might function to set off changes in pace instead of theme? What about adding a longer pause & letting the reader savor and idea & then surprise them at the start of the next strophe with a twist?
Visually, they do help the reader but there's reasons not to have them as well. I can't think of a good example, so ask that as well in Voyages. I know that some of Walt Whitman's verse seems to have looonnng strophes, but it feeds the expansiveness of the pieces I've read. He also uses big honkin' sentences. Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" is written as a single strophe. It's a monologue and carries that sense of a long-winded monologue very well. The language, of course, is wonderful. That's the best example of a single strophe work I can think of. I'm sure that there are others.
I can say that I was reacting visually. I was also reacting to the sense that there didn't seem to be the expansiveness of thought or voice to support the idea of having this as a one-long piece. There was no rushing language to help propel me along. I tend to view long strophes with dismay unless I am carried away by the language and the imagery. Otherwise, it's just hard to read and if there's lot's of action, then it's easy to get muddled. Strophes, like any other element in a poem deserve their own consideration.
The disaster that you were wondering about is in part finical. That is shown through the "ripped up jeans", " Goodwill" and the desire for a department store dress that the daughter never receives.
This won't strike many adults as a disaster. Unfortunately, this sets me up to view the writer as selfish. Just because a parent cannot afford new clothes does not make them a terrible person. Hunger, now that's sad, but worn jeans. Nope.
The other disaster is the mother's inability to fully be able to live up to the ‘reality' and take action in her promises to her daughter and most importantly herself.
This is somewhat interesting. That's why I was suggesting you explore the promise, the act of making the promise, the promise as the metaphor. Why would a responsible adult even make the promise? That is a contradiction. If they can't afford the dress, don't promise.
At the end the mother becomes a "lightning rod". She reaches up to the sky, as she is joking with her daughter. The mother's optimistic, frivolous nature causes her to become a "lightning rod". Behind the optimism, and exterior she knows consciously that she continually setting herself up for disaster.
To keep lightning as disaster, you'll have to spend a lot more energy on disaster than "can't get a new dress." What if she went to work drunk - again. Just threw out boyfriend #43? You'll have to demonstrate frivolity & disaster which will appeal to a wider audience than the 13-19 year olds. On the other hand, if you changed the idea from lighting as disaster to something rare, an act of the gods, luck striking out of the blue then your mother's frivolous act has the appeal of asking for luck while at the same time being pathetic & disastrous for her child. It holds interesting overtones.
good luck revising,
-a
Donner
(With headings edited)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Lightening
Author: ladida
My mother would sit with a needle
in her hand repairing ripped up jeans
while the T.V. would be playing Saturday Night Live.
"Lightening never strikes the same
place twice," she'd say, but it always did.
We never did stop buying our clothes
at the Goodwill. Even after she promised
a hundred times to buy that blackberry
colored dress that I saw at JBYRON's.
Each time we'd pass by she would come up next to me,
her breath fogging the shop window,
and her voice climbing up on the ruffles of
that dress as she told me how all the boys
would come chasing after me. I'd say
"mama, you're living in the clouds".
And she'd stand up on her tip toes, her sandals
hitting the floor with a thud, as she put her arms up
toward the sky, " Honey, I can't reach ‘em yet," she'd tease.
Her fingers scraped the clouds as her back arched
over, her arms extended from her body as rods
do when preparing for the thunderstorm.
- Grace
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Critique: Andrea345
Hello Grace,
Couple things you need to look at besides cutting what’s turning this piece into prose with line breaks. Lightning never strikes once in this piece, so lightning striking twice just doesn’t fit. “We never did stop buying our clothes at the Goodwill” is the “proof” because that’s the only statement of the theme. Now, if lightning was supposed to be about disaster & not about the financial ability to buy clothes, then the focus is lost. However, your final lines: “her arms extended from her body as rods // do when preparing for the thunderstorm” while logically and semantically flawed have promise for supporting a theme of getting lightning to strike even once.
First of all, I’d suggest you spend your time condensing most of this to the fewest possible words. For example, how important is it that “Saturday Night Live” and “JByron”s be identified? I’m not familiar with JByron’s and unless you’re talking top couturier there is no point. It doesn’t show a standard b/c one might not exist.
Without strophe breaks I’m not sure of all the setting changes. Strophes / stanzas (in formal verse) usually indicate a change of some sort, either theme or setting, character, something big. So, I can tell you I was confused reading the “Lightning never strikes” lines just after reading “Saturday Night Live.” How are those two ideas connected? The answer is, they’re not.
As I mentioned, b/c you’re not writing about disaster the idea of “lightning striking twice” and “it always did” is not supported. I don’t get that not being able to buy a fabulous new dress is a disaster. Now, what prevented it’s purchase might have been disastrous, or lightning striking: medical disaster, illness, job loss, mental incapacity from revising too many pieces (heh). Lightning striking is something, well, extraordinary. I can’t find anything there. On the other hand, the absence of good luck & the final desire of your mother to become a lightning rod for good fortune is an interesting one. It does tweak the cliched theme.
It also seems as though you haven’t really gained a focus. For example, you start out with “ripped up jeans” but you drop that & go to “Goodwill.” Then you drop that to go on several lines about promises. There’s only twinkles of metaphors here. The jeans could equal “Goodwill.” What about the first time you saw that dress? What came between you and the dress. What were these “hundred of times” promises? When did “you” take “your mother” to first see the dress? What was her reaction? Did you visit the dress daily? For how long? Did you ever try it on with her watching? Did you try it on one day & she repaired the jeans that evening? How bout tried it on while you’re on the way to the Goodwill store? Why does she make these promises? How does that make “you” feel? Why does she make the promises she can’t keep? What stops her? Was she unresolved about the dress until she saw you wearing it? Did that change her mind?
Take a look at the tense of your verbs. You’re adding a lot of words. “my mother would sit...” “we never did stop.”
Grace, you filled your space without paying attention to the sounds of the piece. Read your pieces aloud to yourself. Are there alternate word choices which would sound better together? What do the vowels in a line sound like? How do consonants (hard or soft) work to reinforce a mood or a feeling? Have you been paying attention to these details? It doesn’t strike me as though you have. You’re also working an awful lot of end stopped lines or lines which end logically on a line so that the one following is a bit too much of a surprise that it’s there.
I’d suggest a full gutting of this one and refocus on the image of those final lines. How do you get the reader to that point? Where will your story begin, what are the two or three (maybe four) most important events / comments / ideas which must take the piece from point A to that final one. The focus of this piece should remain “your mother” b/c she has the most striking action. “You” must remain incidental. Show me how this woman decides she must become a lightning rod.
best wishes,
-a
[This message has been edited by Andrea345 (edited 02-04-2002).]
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Response: ladida
Hi Andrea,
I am sorry for the delay in responding to your critique, but I wanted to thank- you enormously for taking the time to write such a comprehensive critique. All the questions you brought up: "When did "you" take "your mother" to first see the dress?", ect. are very insightful. Hopefully they will help me add a lot of what is missing in explain the theme. A lot of the points you brought up are well taken and I will use your suggestions as I revise.
I think some of the condensing you suggestion would be rather hard to do. A lot of the extra words that you point out I could easily discarded, but others seem rather important. "Saturday Night Live" adds to the scene. If I would just say that the T.V. was on then the scene seems rather blank in my opinion or if she had been watching the news ( it would have reflected a (more) serious person). Maybe these connotations just work for me? JByron's was just a regular department store much like Sears or JCpenny type store. But if the reader will not identify with Jbyron's then I would like to substitute Sears or Jcpenny because I want the reader to understand that it is just a normal department store.
Sounds. I suppose this is one of the hardest parts from me. I have just checked out Robert Pinsky's " Sounds of Poetry", hopefully that will all sink in. In Mary Oliver's book "A poet's handbook" its fascinating the way that, she dissects Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening. All the liquids, semi vowels, mutes? Who knew letters (and sound) had so much influence? So in short, I am just starting to truly appreciate and hopefully soon I will apply this knowledge. I certainly will try in revision.
I don't mean to sound picky, but I have read some poems ( not trashy poetry on the Internet), which change settings, ect but still have no strophe breaks. So I am wondering, is it something mandatory for understand or is it more a question of personal opinion?
The disaster that you were wondering about is in part finical. That is shown through the "ripped up jeans", " Goodwill" and the desire for a department store dress that the daughter never receives. The other disaster is the mother's inability to fully be able to live up to the ‘reality' and take action in her promises to her daughter and most importantly herself. At the end the mother becomes a "lightning rod". She reaches up to the sky, as she is joking with her daughter. The mother's optimistic, frivolous nature causes her to become a "lightning rod". Behind the optimism, and exterior she knows consciously that she continually setting herself up for disaster.
Thank- you again!
- Grace
[This message has been edited by ladida (edited 02-06-2002).]
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Critic's Reply: Andrea345
I think some of the condensing you suggestion would be rather hard to do. A lot of the extra words that you point out I could easily discarded, but others seem rather important. "Saturday Night Live" adds to the scene. If I would just say that the T.V. was on then the scene seems rather blank in my opinion or if she had been watching the news ( it would have reflected a (more) serious person).
I have to agree that "watching tv" would be a waste of space as well. "Saturday Night Live," while showing someone who watched comedy was not so far out of a norm that I took your point to mean she was a humorous person. To me, it didn't carry the connotation you were looking for. Added to that is the lack of sonic structure. "Saturday Night Live" just didn't add anything except an empty name, a piece of information which seems unattached to anything special or unique about this person.
When you began focusing on your mother's actions towards the end of the piece, that's where her humor comes across. What she says, what she does, how she says it - those are the important qualities which make her humorous. Not just because she sits down & watches a tv show fifty bejillion other people watch. Sewing the torn jeans may be an important element to the setting and the character, having her watch a popular tv show doesn't strike me as essential.
The same thing with the department store name. It's not the name of the department store which is important. It is the unattainable dress. The unaffordable dress, the dress which is so far beyond the means of your mother but which she gets carried away and promises to buy. The fact that it's at an average department store makes that store's name even more dispensable. There's no meaning to it, no double entendre, no nuance, no character, no overtone, no foreshadowing, no myth. The dress holds all these things. The new dress. "Goodwill," in contrast, does at least carry the conotation of "used clothing." However, if the hand-me-downs were even more directly handed down (older sister? cousin? next door neighbor?) then the meaning would escape the trap of Goodwill Industries going out of business & no one fifty years from now knowing what you're writing about.
Sounds. I suppose this is one of the hardest parts from me. I have just checked out Robert Pinsky's " Sounds of Poetry", hopefully that will all sink in. In Mary Oliver's book "A poet's handbook"
And this is where you choice of words will really make the idea of this piece shine. I guess, if there'd been a show named which had some alliteration, which sounded silly, or which had some sonic qualities then they wouldn't have seemed so much like throw-away words to me. Sound is only one layer to a poem but it's a cool one. I spend at least one revision, if not more, in the rough draft process on sound.
I don't mean to sound picky, but I have read some poems ( not trashy poetry on the Internet), which change settings, ect but still have no strophe breaks. So I am wondering, is it something mandatory for understand or is it more a question of personal opinion?
Not, picky, this is an interesting question & you should post it to Voyages. Strophes (stanzas in formal verse) have the function of a paragraph in some ways. Yes, I'd have to say, that strophe breaks were in one way, a matter of taste but I also think that there's effects on the piece a writer needs to pay attention to. I see strophes as affecting the pace of the piece. They don't always have to operate as visual cues to a change in setting, character, etc. Check out Rachel's (TheBroad) strophe breaks in her piece "Mercury Falling" in Merciless. Did you know strophes could be enjambed the same as a line? Have you thought about how they might function to set off changes in pace instead of theme? What about adding a longer pause & letting the reader savor and idea & then surprise them at the start of the next strophe with a twist?
Visually, they do help the reader but there's reasons not to have them as well. I can't think of a good example, so ask that as well in Voyages. I know that some of Walt Whitman's verse seems to have looonnng strophes, but it feeds the expansiveness of the pieces I've read. He also uses big honkin' sentences. Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" is written as a single strophe. It's a monologue and carries that sense of a long-winded monologue very well. The language, of course, is wonderful. That's the best example of a single strophe work I can think of. I'm sure that there are others.
I can say that I was reacting visually. I was also reacting to the sense that there didn't seem to be the expansiveness of thought or voice to support the idea of having this as a one-long piece. There was no rushing language to help propel me along. I tend to view long strophes with dismay unless I am carried away by the language and the imagery. Otherwise, it's just hard to read and if there's lot's of action, then it's easy to get muddled. Strophes, like any other element in a poem deserve their own consideration.
The disaster that you were wondering about is in part finical. That is shown through the "ripped up jeans", " Goodwill" and the desire for a department store dress that the daughter never receives.
This won't strike many adults as a disaster. Unfortunately, this sets me up to view the writer as selfish. Just because a parent cannot afford new clothes does not make them a terrible person. Hunger, now that's sad, but worn jeans. Nope.
The other disaster is the mother's inability to fully be able to live up to the ‘reality' and take action in her promises to her daughter and most importantly herself.
This is somewhat interesting. That's why I was suggesting you explore the promise, the act of making the promise, the promise as the metaphor. Why would a responsible adult even make the promise? That is a contradiction. If they can't afford the dress, don't promise.
At the end the mother becomes a "lightning rod". She reaches up to the sky, as she is joking with her daughter. The mother's optimistic, frivolous nature causes her to become a "lightning rod". Behind the optimism, and exterior she knows consciously that she continually setting herself up for disaster.
To keep lightning as disaster, you'll have to spend a lot more energy on disaster than "can't get a new dress." What if she went to work drunk - again. Just threw out boyfriend #43? You'll have to demonstrate frivolity & disaster which will appeal to a wider audience than the 13-19 year olds. On the other hand, if you changed the idea from lighting as disaster to something rare, an act of the gods, luck striking out of the blue then your mother's frivolous act has the appeal of asking for luck while at the same time being pathetic & disastrous for her child. It holds interesting overtones.
good luck revising,
-a