Reviewing with River

[I'd just use a review link, but the item and author are no longer on the site, so I've excised identifying information from this copy of the review.]

Reviewer's Rating: (2.0)
Review Length: 10,145 Characters | 10,127 w/o WritingML

==== start of review ====

Review Request: XXXXXXXX

What is on the page:

The way this is labelled and referred to, I am not sure whether to review this as fiction, "faction," or nonfiction.

This contains quite a bit of material to work with. There are lots of details and inner information about how the characters react to what happens. What's missing that isn't actually worked up on the page is suggested by what is already there. What's there that isn't connected to the main character perhaps could be connected if changes were made in the situation, depending on whether this isn't nonfiction. So there should be enough material to make a novella out of it.

The next step would be to create an overall structure that functions. Some decisions seem not to have been made yet.

I am equally at a loss as to what to call this arrangement of the material structurally. At present, describing this as a collection of material is more accurate than describing it as a novella. Some of the parts are just an anecdote of something happening where the point seems to be to inform the reader about something, rather than being an actual short story with a plot. Some of the parts aren't even about the title character, and the person they are about crosses paths with the title character, but doesn't become much of a factor in "his" story. Putting the parts together creates a collage representing the times (which would be appropriate for a historical nonfiction piece), but doesn't seem to create a cohesive story arc about one person, such as a novella (which is fiction) would call for.

In order to create a story arc, the main character has to have a problem that he wants to overcome, or a goal he wants to reach. Problems he has plenty. The wanting to overcome them seems to be lacking. Goals? A case could be made for surviving and for living up to being a tough guy. They conflict with each other, though, in that achieving the first requires accepting the need for help, and being a tough guy in a different kind of way, and he seems unwilling to resolve this conflict. This makes him into the kind of fatally flawed Greek hero who is fated to self-destruct, and who cannot escape his fate no matter how much he tries -- except that this guy isn't trying, and if he isn't trying, he isn't going to change, and that's one of the requirements of the main character of a novella.
. . . Which leads to another core problem: getting the reader to identify with the main character. Other things about the organization make this more difficult than it needs to be, but when the reader realizes that the guy isn't trying, the reader starts looking for the thing that will turn the guy around, and that never happens, so the reader who sticks with it to the end becomes increasingly frustrated and dissatisfied. It isn't the success or failure in escaping his fate that is important, but the character growth and change that come from trying.

It also would not be possible to encapsulate the point of the overall narrative in one statement at this point. There are too many different points being made about where to put the blame: XXXXXXXXXXXXX. Some of these relate to the times but don't really have anything to do with the title character's story arc.

The title character's final words speak of a message, but it wasn't clear what that message was.

One thing to be aware of: A piece of writing can either sermonize or tell a story, but it will fail if it tries to do both at once. A story needs to be strong enough to stand alone and "create" its message without the sermon ever actually being given.

Stage in the writing process (2.0): Enough material has been created for a first draft, start to finish, but the core structure and character decisions (and implementation) that would make it a functional draft of a novella (3.0) are still missing.


Suggestions:

A lot of information is given through telling instead of showing. When information that would make a good scene is told instead of being dramatized (shown), the reader will feel cheated.

Sometimes the prose used in the narration feels raw and rough-cut like the vernacular used in the speeches. That means that the prose isn't invisible to readers from other places; continually dealing with it becomes an obstacle to them becoming part of the story. Using a smoother, more mainstream style in the third person narration, and using the vernacular only in the speeches, would make the read accessible to a broader audience.

The story uses omniscient viewpoint, but this isn't a comedy. The omniscient storytelling style is not one that is normally used these days in professionally published works. Third person limited past tense is the most natural POV, using as few viewpoint characters as possible and changing viewpoint characters only between scenes or chapters, not in the middle of a scene.
. . . This story could go two different ways. One is that this is the main character's story, and the reader finds out what happens to him and how he reacts to it and why he makes the choices he does that bring him to this particular ending of the story. The other is that this is what happened to him from other people's perspectives, and the story is a collective attempt to make sense of what happened -- kind of like a journalist piecing together accounts from various people who knew someone. The first method is a more powerful way to tell the main character's story, even though it means figuring out how to get information that is currently "inside" other characters into a form that the main character can experience from the outside. The other kind of narrative makes a different point. Which method to use depends on which kind of story is desired.
. . . The omniscient POV as used here keeps the reader at some distance from the action so they don't experience it as if they were the character, since it is often narrating the experiences from the inside of most of the characters in the same scene.
. . . This also results in some repetition where the reader is given the same information more than once. For example, XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX.

The story arc is not linear. Some of the time shifts don't seem to have a reason. If a story can be told in time-line order without any flashbacks, it will be stronger. If that's not possible, then keep the flashbacks to a minimum.
. . . In terms of hooking the reader, the conflict in XXXXXXXXX is not the beginning of the main character's problems. The story could start with the incident with XXXXXXXXX, and add problems as it goes. Starting where it does deprives the reader of the chance to connect with the character as a normal person first, which would increase the empathy for the character, which will help to hold onto the reader during the less appealing parts.
. . . On the other hand, while the conflict in XXXXXXXXX is very vivid, that sort of thing happened to a lot of people and starting there kind of forces the story to go two different directions at once. What is unique about this character and why he is significant is how his life came to an end. Consider starting with the end of his life, and then using one half-flashback to go back to the beginning with the earliest information and continue forward in time-line order. Answering the question "How did this happen?" creates reader interest in the parts of the story that aren't as "exciting," because they provide character insights. This approach has some things in common with a murder mystery novel. This approach could use either the focus on the main character POV or the journalistic focus from the outside.

When the story is told in time-line order (or nearly so), the "flashbacks" of memory can be a brief reference because the reader has already experienced them as a scene, and only needs to be reminded of what is being remembered, rather than be told the whole thing again (which is repetitive).

The goal is to create a single narrative structure in the reader's mind, where everything that is added is "grown" from the structure, and not assembled separately and then "bolted" into place. Whether simply moving ahead in time, or moving from one thread of the story to another that was dropped earlier, the reader needs to be oriented right off by the transitions that begin each part. The XXXXXXXXXXX commentary gets in the way of that.

Having a character think about the backstory is not a particularly effective method of managing that information, although it is a bit better than having the narrator simply tell the backstory. Both methods stop the story action. Using bits of it integrated in the action works much better. If the plot does not require the reader to know a particular piece of the backstory in order to understand what is going on, then it does not need to be included. Dramatizing backstory in a scene in timeline order makes it part of the action.

The ending should feel inevitable. The development of the story should make the case for the ending that it couldn't have turned out any other way. In particular, everything that is included in the story should contribute to making the ending feel inevitable. What doesn't contribute to that should be left out.


Keep writing!

==== end of review ====