Thread: [PICK] Red
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Old 13-12-2007, 12:23 PM
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Ambrose Ambrose is offline
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Re: [PICK] Red

You tend to overwrite. A couple examples:

His fingers had felt like ice, freezing her body limb by limb until she could no longer move, let alone run

By saying she cannot move, it is implied that she cannot run.

The golden ring on her left hand now felt more like an iron chain than the gift she had once so openly accepted.

It is clear that the golden ring is a wedding ring. The reader can surmise that she was glad to receive it at the time without you telling us.

The light from the hall illuminated into the master bedroom, where he slept like a king in his throne. Like Henry VIII, he had beheaded her time after time, each time his power growing with the previous drop of the guillotine. She watched him sleep, and all the while she wanted nothing more than to kill him.

Just because he is the boss of her does not mean you can liken him to a king. Plenty of unimportant people have been the bosses of other people.

Or to slip only a few drops of poison in his ritual vodka that he drank every night to help him forget his miserable life, and then he would never again have to wake up to another day.

Using the word ritual implies that he drinks it often. And why is his life miserable? He gets to cheat on his wife without apparent repercussion... how does that make his life miserable?

The lipstick. The lone pair of panties she had found in his pocket. The small napkin containing an elegantly written phone number tucked inside his briefcase. All red. She hated the color and the things it insinuated. Lust and adultery were all that came to mind, and she knew that things would never change.

This actually starts out a pretty good paragraph. Where you go wrong is the sentence before last. It is obvious what these things mean so theres really no need to mention that they brought to her mind lust and adultery. Give the reader some credit in knowing that he or she will be able to deduce that.

The entire room was red. The floor, the walls, the lights, the memories, the dreams, and especially the nightmares. She looked to the refrigerator and noticed the red streaks painted upon the door as if done with a paintbrush.

Trying to make everything red to intensify her emotional state seems melodramatic and painfully unrealistic.

My biggest complaint is with the ending:

She carefully turned the knob and pulled the door open just enough to light the small area inside. Gently slumped in the corner was a petite body of a woman no more than the age of twenty-five. Her green eyes were softly clouded over, and her auburn hair was sticky, but still clung beautifully to her neck. Her delicate hands lay lifeless on the floor surrounded in a pool of blood. Around her neck gently lay a beautiful white gold cross, with elegantly carved edges.


The story makes it seem like the wife killed her husband out of hate and jealously of him cheating. And then you have him kill her... this does not make much sense. Why would he kill her? If he did not love her anymore, why would he take the risk to kill her when he could just divorce her? The story would seem much more plausible if she killed him.
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Last edited by Ambrose; 13-12-2007 at 12:27 PM.
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