[stylist] my entry1 weird thanksgiving

Robert Leslie Newman newmanrl at cox.net
Fri Nov 23 04:26:55 UTC 2012


Vejas 

I too enjoyed your story! (Gee, you really do have a thing for multiple
births. Interesting.) 

My suggestion concerns a point early in the story that needs work to make
the transition in thought more smoothly. Here is the passage:

"...Milena sighed.  Last year she'd seen people waiting on Tuesday, but that
was the earliest she'd ever seen.  That family had been visiting Florida
from the Netherlands, and had been given so many dirty looks it wasn't even
funny..."

And my feeling is this - I think the sentence starting with "That family"
--- those two words "that family" are not the best choice to introduce the
idea of "people waiting" As in, we didn't know she was referring to  a
family "that family" --- she only referred to "people." And so this sentence
starting with "That family" made me have to stop and puzzle out if we were
still talking about who she was referring to, those "people waiting." Word
choice can either aid or break the flow of a tale. And so if you were to
maybe start that sentence with "it was a family," then the word "it" makes a
plausible back reference to "people" and helps us with the transition to
learning that the people waiting was a family.

Thanks 
  






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