Hello Ryan.
This is my first time reviewing your work, but I hope you've read my other reviews and have and idea on how I do it. Straight to the point, before I do line-editing.
1. Your title is supposed to be "The Lonely Canary: Story" instead of Lonel, right? Or is it intentional?
2. One thing must be clear. "its" means "belongs to it" while "it's" means "it is". You got it wrong throughout the passage.
3. Now, this may sound rude and rough, but your story isn't a story at all. It isn't even a vignette. Others said you've written "great/vivid descriptions", but to me, they're just a comprehensive inventory of consecutive actions. What do I mean by this? An example:
The clock strikes 7 a.m. The alarm goes off. John wakes up, stretches, and gets out of bed. He stands up, slips his right hand under his shorts, and scratches his crotch. He takes his hand out and then straightens his bed. He stretches again and walks to the door. He turns the knob and walks out of the opened the door. John then goes to the toilet, turns the knob to open the door, and walks in.
So the passage above tells us a little about John. He wakes up on time, he's a right-hander, he doesn't mind scratching his private parts (hell, he's alone. Who cares?), and he's a neat person. But is this a story? No. Is this a vignette? No. It's just a series of actions that leads us nowhere. Well, to the toilet, but that's beside the point. In prose (just as in poetry), every word, every description counts. Everything has to have a purpose, a meaning.
So this is your whole story: Lew is wet, and fumbles with his keys because it's dark outside. Gets in, walks straight to the kitchen to get some booze, and notices the house is dark. Not only dark, but empty. He plays around with fridge-magnets. Then somehow he thinks of the canary beside the entrance. He's already in the kitchen. He didn't notice the bird when he entered? It didn't make any noise then? Anyway, he then sits in the dark and the cold because he can't be bothered switching the light and heater on. He thinks about the cleaning ladies. The storm is still rampaging outside, but Lew sits listening to the canary working up a frenzy, and watches a mouse eating his biscuit crumbs. He sits, and cries.
1678 words compressed into 124 words (including comments). Ask yourself this: is there a story behind those 1678 words? Do you really need to put in all those sequential actions? You're a poet. You know you have to evoke powerful emotions and imagery using the least words possible. Why squander word counts on unnecessary stuff?
Lew is lonely, but clearly he isn't always alone. His home used to house his family. But where are they now? That's your story. Why is Lew alone? What happened to his family? Start asking yourself "What if...?" You can begin the story with Lew alone at home, in 2 or 3 paragraphs at most. Then flashback mid-scene to a full house, where everything is fine, the house full of life. Then something happens. Something bad. Then end the story with the present, the canary thrashing in its cage, struggling to escape, but trapped and alone, a metaphor for Lew's life. Then Lew bows his head and cries while the canary wails, waiting for the door to open, to welcome somebody home.
Well, that's my suggestion, but what's important is that you have to start asking yourself questions. What made Lew lonely in the first place? Not what Lew does first, second, third, and so on.
Now, for the line-editing:
* * * * *
It was dark and he couldn’t find the key-hole to his front door. Barely able to figure out which key was which, he was forced to feel through his ring to find the hexagonal shaped head with the single edged pattern. After finding the deadbolt he proceeded to jab with the tip of the key until he found the hole; it was raining and the key kept slipping. Entering soaking wet, Lew got out of his jacket as quick as he could and rubbed the beaded droplets of water from his slickly pomaded hair with a scarf that was hanging loosely (you can do without both adverbs) from the coat rack to his left. Brushing off the sweater he was wearing, he decided to take that off as well (three times you say the same thing. brushing off, was wearing, taking that off): he hated feeling wet. After calming himself from the rush in doors, and the irritability of being rained on (again, repetition: he hated feeling wet, then 'irritability of being rained on), he paraded (awkward, ill-suited verb) into the kitchen to fix himself a strong drink. It was habit working for him up until this point , ; the routine order of things after he walked through the door , it never changed. He slowed his pace as he walked down the hallway, beginning to notice that none of the lights were on; the house was completely dark, almost pitch black. It left him feeling dismal for a moment, with the panic-stricken sense that he had forgotten about something. Before two years ago, he had never been the first one home , ; the lights were always on when he came through that door, there were always voices in the air, and laughter , but now, . Now there was only a chilling silence , that echoed off the walls. Every footfall was emphasized, every breathe breath punctuated by its effort, the sound of a sigh that would normally go unfelt , now rattled about his rib cage with discomfort before falling dead on the floor. It must of (remember, must have, should have, would have, and not must of, should of, would of) must have had something to do with the storm raging outside, he figured, and the darkness as a result. Still, he thought, without the lights on, and without sun beaming through the windows . Something , something still didn’t add up. He had lost something, and he felt very cold.
There was no message left on the table, or on the answering machine , ; no sign of anything unnatural, actually, just vacancy (personal opinion: though they mean the same thing, 'emptiness' conveys a stronger emotional impact, while vacancy conveys a sense of unoccupied space). He found the bottle of whiskey he was searching for in the cupboard above the microwave, then poured it straight, just over a lime because there was no ice ready. This was a sad compromise. (is this whole segment in bold needed? You can do without) Sipping from the glass without any expression either give him an expression or lose it altogether), he arranged the magnetic word cut-outs on his fridge into a playful poem that read: "Water is leaking on the flood plane and the spoon my father gave isn’t big enough to dig me out of this mud'. - It can be tough sometimes. There aren’t many words to choose from, so you're forced to be creative, and there is only one 'me' cut-out left, which is almost impossible to work with. (tense and PoV confusion. Keep it in third person, and change it to past tense. Not everyone has these magnetic cutouts on their fridge, so you can't generalize it. Plus it comes off as awkward, these 2 sentences.) Lew looked at the fridge for a while, studying any other opportunities to superimpose a better word. He ended up spending much more time trying to find problems with the insignificant little poem than it actually took him to piece it together. It was as satisfying as it was going to get, he figured, so he left it. (meandering; I don't see the point in this.) Feeling a minor sense of accomplishment, he continued to sip from the rock-glass as he leaned against the island counter-top in the middle of the kitchen. Thinking of nothing in particular {either he's thinking of something, or lose this altogether. Plus, the whole sentence is hanging and incomplete), just trying to feel the whiskey burn as it slid off his tongue and down the back of his throat.
There's a Canary that sits perched (perch is a form of sitting, so it's redundant. Again, tense confusion. Whole story is in past tense, so keep it that way. Suggestion: use "perched" instead of the whole highlighted bit.) in a fancy, antique cast-iron cage, in the bonus room in the front of the house, right beside the entrance (redundant. "right beside the entrance" is enough). It was never really his Canary until now, and he never really cared for it much. That's not to say he didn’t take care of it, because he did. He fed and watered it and cleaned its cage regularly. He just never had much love for the little bird. It was sort of a left-over, a remnant of the past which, to Lew, always served as a vivid reminder. It was often too difficult for him to hear the Canary sing it's pretty songs, because they no longer held their beauty. What he remembered of the way it used to sing, so joyous when anybody would walk through the door, it could liven up the entire house like a rain forest. (the whole sentence is confusing. I think you meant this: He remembered the way it used to sing, so joyous when anybody walked through the door. It livened up the entire house like a rain forest.) Now, it just seemed sad. It sits sat on it's perch and cries almost (almost what?), staring at the doorway, just waiting for a friendly face to enter, and the only one that ever walks walked through is was a stranger's (now this is a good point for your story. If Lew has been here for years, and has been feeding it, why is he a stranger to the canary?).
The lights were still off , ; he didn’t bother turning them on. It didn’t really matter to him at this point. He never touched the thermostat anymore : ; the temperature didn't bother him as much. He never cooked, or cleaned in the past, and he didn't feel the desire to do so now. If he ever bought groceries, they would always be something he could eat out of the box, much like the Entenmann's he was pulling out from the pantry now. Mostly, he dined out. There was a small fish-and-chips place around the corner from his house where he ate frequently. It was a small place, family-run, with great home-style food, but it never got a considerable amount of business due to it's 'cash only' policy (is there a point to how business is for the shop-owners? Does it move the story?). Lew had a cleaning lady that came in on Thursdays, so he never needed to so much as tidy up. He'd been through two different Korean ladies already, and one Portuguese. It had nothing to do with their ethnicity, however but he was certain they had been taking things, especially prescriptions from his medicine cabinet. He never blamed them, though : . They never charged much money, and he figured their situation was a desperate one linked to their immigration status, which he was convinced was illegal (again, does this have anything to do with the story?). There were a few toys that had been left behind, and Martina (the current cleaning lady) would place any she'd found on the living room buffet, where they would wait and stare at Lew while he sat alone in his chair in the evenings. At one point in the past, Lew had become upset enough to throw them out of the room and into the next - one having broken a mirror. This had happened on a Wednesday night, so when he came home the next day, the mirror had been removed, and the toys had been placed back on the buffet.
The storm still raged beyond the shutters, it's shadow looming hesitantly upon the drapes. With every flash of lightning, within every frightening moment of white illumination, Lew expected to see the silhouette of a person's face and upper torso appear, hovering just outside the living room window. In a mystical way, he did see a face, staring back at him from the reflection in the double-pane, storm-proof glass : , pressing it's judgment. He watched the window for that face and at the tree which swung low and hard against the house, being thrown around in the violence of the wind, clattering it's branches off the eaves-troughs. This alarmed the Canary and it voiced itself frantically as it flew around in it's cage looking for an escape. There is no exit for you, little Canary, Lew thought. He watched the window and drank from his glass which had been filled up for the third time now. Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" sat untouched on the coffee table, next to an empty pack of Marlboro Reds and a green lighter. Picking up this pack of cigarettes, hoping there was one left, he slid off the cardboard sleeve, then threw the box back onto the table in disappointment. He played with the green lighter for a while, fascinating himself with the depth of the orange flame, emptying the vaporous fuel into his closed hand, then bursting it into a short-lived inamorata (Lew may be fascinated, but I'm not). The lighter ran dead eventually, then that too he threw back on the table. As he sat now with his arms tightly crossing his chest, slouched over in his chair, neck drooping at a mild arch as he stared at his lap (awkward and overly long), he heard the quiet scampering of something crossing his floor. It was a mouse he noticed, once he raised his head. A small house mouse : , dirty with a greyish tinge. It carried a surprisingly large cracker in its mouth, which looked like one of the Entenmann's he had been eating earlier; he must of dropped on the floor , he figured. The mouse stopped in the middle of this daring exposure and looked in Lew's direction. With the cracker still in it's mouth, paused, the mouse began to nibble at the lost wafer. For a moment Lew found himself puzzled, with questions crossing his mind , like: Does it not notice me? Does it notice that it's presence doesn’t bother me? Is it taunting me somehow? I wonder if I am just not that threatening?. Too many questions, he thought, and left it alone. So this The mouse continued to eat the wafer until it was fully devoured , . Then , it left in the same direction it came from ; , probably to find more.
He sat , looking at his lap, with his shirt untucked, wondering what his life has had amounted too, but there was no answer. He sat, looking at his lap, listening to the storm rage and to the yellow Canary sing it's sad songs. This rain forest had burnt itself down long ago, he thought, and why he should be reminded of it , well- . Well, he knew the reason for this punishment would continue to elude him. He sat, arms crossing his chest and in silence he cried for a very long time. The tears that streamed down his salt-stained cheeks , were given no supplication, and as his throat quivered, not a sound could escaped his lips. The Canary continued to sing, it's vibrancy filling the emptiness of it's matte black cage, waiting on for the door to open to welcome somebody home.
* * * * *
You write better than some of those I've come across on this site. In fact, if you find your focus, you can whip this into a good story. But that's it. You need a story, and not a list of meandering actions. That's the reason for the 3.0, and not less.
Hope this helps. Remember, ask yourself, "What happened?" and "What if...?" |
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| (3.5)
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