Quote:
Originally Posted by tmcdmck
Thoughts on my opening few lines for a short story?
"The bright sun's warmth counteracted the blustering wind. Joe was glad to be wearing T-shirt and shorts. The wind grew stronger, but still Joe was glad. His skin felt fresh and clean. A grey haired man wearing glasses and a green wool jumper with patched elbows cried "Good morning!" from a canal boat named "Old Rosie II" as she chugged towards him."
-- The sun's warmth is not counteracting the blustering wind, but the
effect of the blustering wind, I imagine; that is, the wind's cool. This is misworded.
-- "counteracted" is quite a mouthful of a word, and it looms up like a mountain in the middle of this sentence. It's a natural fit for words like "pharmaceuticals," but not when you want to get in and out of a sensual feeling like the warmth of the sun, the cool of a breeze, or the subtleties of the one quarreling with the other on the surface of one's skin.
-- "still Joe was glad." Even with the follow-up sentence about his skin feeling fresh and clean, this is a little awkward. Is a mere wind, which is even here impliedly too strong anyway, enough to make him glad, or is it something else making him glad, and the increasing wind simply not enough to derail the gladness that had previously besotted him?
-- "grey haired" should have a hyphen
-- "A grey haired man wearing glasses and a green wool jumper with patched elbows cried "Good morning!" from a canal boat named "Old Rosie II" There is something a bit removed rather than direct here. Compare perhaps to: "A grey-haired man wearing glasses and a green wool jumper with patched elbows cried, "Good morning!" from his canal boat, the "Old Rosie II"
-- See how you feel about changing the rest of the sentence, "as she chugged towards him" from passive to active, something like this: "as he piloted it ..." The fellow may not be doing the steering, but whether this substitution fits well or not, what I am getting at is the change from active to passive. The boat is not being guided by an invisible or even passive hand, but ... someone is guiding it. Action is happening and people are doing rather than being done to. Making things active rather than passive imparts vigor and immediacy to a scene, and also its characters. By saying the boat is being piloted and who is doing the piloting, not only is the description more vivid, but so is the grey-haired old man himself. He is now a doer, not a done to. We don't wonder what he's doing; we know what he's doing -- steering a boat. If you are missing the chug, you can still find a way to get it in elsewhere, as in something like, "as he careened the last lurch of her chugging frame expertly into a smooth arc toward the slip." I chose the word "frame" because I don't know anything about boats and it was the best I could come up with at the moment. But any noun will do. You can get the feeling of the chugging in there one way or another if you play around with the words a bit.