Today we see that sometimes, a sonic fork is just a fork. Even if it’s sonic.
What I gleaned about the story: After a tragic accident claims his wife, Dmitri takes a better paying job on Ganymede to pay for his son’s much-needed corrective surgery. But things are not working out as planned, and now it’s up to his daughter, Alina, to take the lead and get this family back on track. Before it’s too late.
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Analysis: Openings are holy territory, so I’m always a hardass on things that rub me the wrong way at the beginning. See, at that point, the author is still a nobody who has proven nothing to me. We have not yet gone through feast and famine together. We have not broken bread, or heads, and so I’m still at my most skeptical. It’s not a conscious thing. It’s just human nature, and I think most readers share this trait to some degree. So when I hit this headword echo in the very first paragraph, I grumbled, and writing notes like these are my anti-grumbling medication. Doctor’s orders.
Analysis: On the first two pages, I was told about: vidi-tablets, mecho-pets, simu-pet bots, plasta crates, and acto-boot braces. This is a common problem I see in science fiction. The author is so anxious to convince the reader that this is set in the wonderful future, that they then drown us in a sea of tech items to prove the point. But often, as in this case, they come so densely that they go beyond background painting and actually call attention to themselves. And as I’ve said before, when I’m paying attention to patterns forming in the words, I’m no longer immersed.
In this particular case, only the acto-boots seem to have been crucial to the plot. Everything else is just throw-away world building details. When it comes to such inventiveness, less is more. One or two items are enough to illuminate the SF landscape for us, and ideally, they should be important enough to the plot to justify the extra detail that comes along for the ride when you use the more technically descriptive phrase. A sonic fork is only a sonic fork if Jimmy stabs Sally with it. If it’s on the table behind her when he does the deed, it’s just a fork. Even if it happens to be sonic.
What makes the problem more distracting for me in this case, is the “acto boots,” which enable the crippled boy, Martin, to move around, despite his handicap. The family continues to refer to them as such all through the scene. This seems unnatural to me. Humans are lazy. We use as few syllables as possible for commonplace items. Use the technical term once to establish their nature, if you must, but in everyday speech, most people would just call them boots, in the same that wheelchair patients usually just call it their “chair.”
Note: At the beginning of the second scene, four years later, we read: This certainly was not the way that Alina had imagined spending her sixteenth birthday when they had first arrived here years ago. But she had to do something, and she had put this off as long as she could. She had to find a way to get them off the base, for Martin’s sake, before his T.S. became irreversible.
This seems to me like a crucial story point has been skipped. It’s fine to recap events after they’ve happened, to keep a story moving, but readers want to be there for the important plot moments, and this feels like it was one of them. In the scene prior to this, Alina and her family had just arrived and were getting settled in to wait for Martin’s surgery. Obviously something has changed, and she is now going rogue to do something about it. But I’m not happy being told about that pivotal moment after the fact. I want to see it for myself.
Analysis: So that noted passage above turns out to have been the start of something irksome. That reference to “Alina” is the last concrete anchor we get for some time. It is followed by 15 references to “she” and 3 counts of “her” before another “Alina” shows up. And that was over the span of half a page. It’s not that I lost track of who “she” referred to. Alina is alone in the scene, so there really was no confusion. The problem was the monotony of the she-references, which quickly began to echo for me.
This problem usually shows up with the “I” pronoun in 1st POV stories, because the author has no other handy labels for the self. But in 3rd POV, other options are more plentiful. So mix it up. Use a few “she”s and then drop in an “Alina.” Maybe “the raven-haired girl” or “the prickly teen” can be thrown in for a bit of variety. These are simple tricks for stamping out the trudgery of pronoun profusion, and at the same time, offer a painless way to drop in a bit more characterization.
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‘Maybe “the raven haired-girl” or “the prickly teen” can be thrown in for a bit of variety.’
Not sure about this. It sounds so contrived and so unlike normal speech that I’d notice it, recognize why the writer had done it, and be way out of the story. Also, to nitpick, shouldn’t it be ‘the raven-haired girl’?
I have to agree with Lexi. Even if your narrative is third-person rather than first, writing in deep POV is still like putting the reader in the head of the viewpoint character. Nobody thinks of themself as an adjective, particularly a hyphenated one, so I would find that jarring, too.
Yes, I messed up the hyphen. Thanks for spotting it.
But what does speech have to do with anything? I’m talking about using these kinds of phrases (very sparingly, of course) as alternate ways to refer to a character in the narration. And certainly, the phrase you use has to be chosen to suit both the character and the narrative style. Not as a regularly recurring replacement for the pronoun, but when you find a paragraph or scene that is burdened with too many of them, this is a handy ace up your sleeve to relieve the monotony. And it’s done all the time by the pros.
I’d say that these days novels tend to be written much less formally and more like natural speech than they were in the past. As readers we are used to that, and coming across an expression no one would ever use when talking jars.
If I said about my daughter, “The prickly teen/raven-haired girl is reading in her bedroom,” I’d be saying it humorously. I’d never say it straight, and nor would anyone else.
I think you’re allowing yourself to be distracted by the particular choice of words in my example. As I’ve said, the phrase you use needs to be chosen to suit the situation and style of writing, but the point is to find ways of referencing a character other than the standard pronouns, to use when the pronouns are getting too deep, or in situations where there are too many characters interacting together for the generic pronouns to be clear. And for this, simple noun phrases are best.
Consider this simple interrogation scene, taken from The Blade Itself, by Joe Abercrombie. It takes place in a small room, with four men (although only 3 are mentioned in this passage): “Confess! Or not,” Glokta said, “and I can come back with my instruments.” Frost moved forward, his massive shadow falling across the fat man’s face. “Body found floating by the docks,” Glokta breathed, “bloated by seawater and horribly mutilated… far… far beyond recognition.”
Do you see the problem? It’s in the second sentence. The word “his” had already been used to refer to Frost, so Abercrombie couldn’t just say “his face,” meaning the prisoner’s. He had to find a different way to refer to the man, to avoid pronoun confusion. So he chose a simple noun phrase instead: “the fat man’s face.” When it’s chosen properly, and well-suited to the scene, a noun phrase reference is entirely invisible. But suppose I told you that my wife and I were talking about the waiter while we were out at dinner, and I said “Look at the mole on the skinny man’s face.” That would sound entirely unnatural. And so this is why I say that you cannot use your everyday conversational style to judge the suitability of narrative passages. They are not the same thing at all.
Hmm…I’d have to consider a lot more examples to be sure which of us was right. I can’t even be certain I never do it in my writing, though I don’t think I do.
My feeling is that PJ nailed it, and that sort of circumlocution is authorial intrusion, which used to be common and accepted, and now gives prose a quaint, dated air.
I assure you, it is done all the time. Not just in ancient books, but even in books being published this year. And it will be done in books published ten years from now, too. Because the problem of pronoun confusion is never going away, and this is one of the only viable solutions to it. And it only intrudes when it’s done clumsily, but that can be said of any narrative device. Now that I’ve sensitized you to it, I am confident you’ll start seeing it all over the place. Even in books you’ve already read where you’d never noticed it before.
I agree with both Lexi and Ellle. I actually recoiled when I read that sentence in your review. If I read that in a book, I’d immediately flag it as author intrusion or I’d start to wonder who exactly the narrator was because it certainly wouldn’t be Alina.