Today we see that even a good sentence structure can be problematic if it’s used too frequently.
What I gleaned about the story: A history professor is assassinated at his home, along with the assassins who whacked him. And all because of something to do with Paul Revere.
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Analysis: I’m not opposed to prologues, in principle, but I do need to get a sense that its inclusion was vital to the story. Prologues that are there simply to set a mood, or that only seem to convey information that could have been delivered in a single sentence of exposition feel like a waste of time to me. Just like any other scene, if it can be removed without eroding the reader’s understanding of the story, it should be.
Unfortunately, by my lights, the prologue that opens this story does not meet that bar. An unnamed old man in the 1700s dies in his bed, with his wife at his side. Another man (who, by his description, just might be Paul Revere) leaves with word of his passing. That’s it. And when you couple this with the almost purple prose (every noun comes ashore with at least one supporting adjective in tow), the prologue put my guard up rather than sucking me into the tale.
Note: Everything feels slightly over-written, as though the author isn’t sure that the drama of what’s happening is enough by itself, so he’s trying to up the stakes by offering more forceful (and plentiful) adjectives while overselling the verbs. It hasn’t fully broken immersion though, so I’m not throwing a flag on the play just yet.
Analysis: A pool of blood and brain matter covered the desk and spilled onto the floor, its coppery scent mixing with the unmistakable smell of cordite. The victim had clearly been caught off-guard, his still-warm corpse slumped over the top of an enormous, elegant desk.
A parallel aside is my term for the sentence structure of the form: This thing happened, something else happening alongside. It can be a very effective sentence structure, but only when used sparingly. I find it particularly draining to run into dense fields of them, and so far, they’ve been coming at me quite thickly, so I’ve already been sensitized to them. Then when I finally hit the quoted passage, with two long ones in immediate succession, I found myself mumbling: “Was there a sale on parallel actions somewhere?” And when I start muttering to myself about the writing, my immersion has definitely broken.
Analysis: The officer who had grabbed Nunez outside walked up, notebook in hand. What? I don’t remember somebody grabbing him. So I went back and looked. Nope. No grabby hands in sight. So what could he mean? Is this an editorial revision that didn’t get excised? And then I realized that he meant grabbed as in “summoned.” To me, that’s a pretty big stretch—especially when the word “grab” or “grabbed” was not used to describe the earlier interaction.
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” Parallel-aside-itis”
I think that’s the first time I’ve seen this one come up here. It’s a WTF that I’m confident would crop up many, many times in a reading of my first drafts, and probably more than once on my later drafts. I just can’t help myself but throw them in constantly. It’s an indication of how I think I reckon: lots of parallel trains of thoughts running together, with one or the other rising to ascendency briefly before being lost in the mass again.
Weird really, since I’m a programmer by day. At least I’m aware of the problem and am on watch for it when revising.
Oh – so my condition has a name – Parallel-aside-itis. Good to know. ;-)
Why is blood so often described as smelling coppery? Who knows what copper smells like?
I work with metals and I have a good nose. I’ve just gone and sniffed at some copper tube. Nothing. It doesn’t smell. Honestly, I think writers are picking this description up from each other.
It’s been years since I got them, but as a kid, I used to get nose-bleeds, and I was always puzzled by why it smelled so much like hot solder. But the wire one solders in home electronics projects is usually copper, so when I started reading older, darker fiction, I always assumed that the notion of coppery-smelling blood was a reference to hot copper. Have you tried heating your copper tubes and then punching yourself in the nose? Maybe you should do a comparison test. For science. :-)
I have now heated a bit of copper tube with a gas torch. When I got within a couple of inches, there was a fleeting aroma – though it didn’t smell like blood to me. The smell went as the copper got hotter.
How many readers have done this experiment? You might as well say blood smells of camel fur. Few are in a position to argue, but as a simile it’s pretty pointless.
Brilliant. I might have to borrow this! Of course, I would have to include some camels in my story, so that the characters would know what I was talking about. (They get annoyed if I say things they can’t relate to.)
Every story is better for a few camels, is what I say :o)