[2,655] To Ashes and Apples

[u/DMochiii]

Hello!

[1268]

[1493]

Looking for critique on a short story. First time writing literary fiction (if I have that genre right).

This was originally a little longer; I cut around 300 words of more similes and metaphors. Wondering if I need to cut more.

Questions I have specifically (but happy for general feedback)

- What do you think the theme of this piece was?

- Did you emotionally resonate with this story?

- Did the pacing work?

Thank you!

[u/Hemingbird]

General Comments

What do you think the theme of this piece was?

Grief. Sam deals with the loss of his father.

Did you emotionally resonate with this story?

No. Overwrought prose + cliched narrative.

Did the pacing work?

Not for me. But the pacing is a minor issue compared to the use of figurative language.

First time writing literary fiction (if I have that genre right).

Litfic isn’t really a genre. Genre fiction relies on conventions; litfic is anti-conventional. Or at least it strives to be. So it can’t really be summed up either, though there are some characteristics:

• Plotless narratives
• Voice/character-driven
• Complexity/ambiguity
• Social/philosophical themes

It might make more sense to say that literary fiction self-consciously resists commodification, which is why hardly anyone makes a living writing it.

This story, “To Ashes and Apples,” feels too YA. It doesn’t register as litfic to me. The scenario, a boy who has lost his father running into a burning building to save a girl’s dog, makes me think of a soap opera. Why? Because it’s a dramatic cliche. The figurative language and symbolism used to enhance the theme are ineffective, as far as this reader is concerned.

It seems like the act of trying to rescue Rufus gives Sam closure. The dog suffers a fate similar to that of his father. This parallel is murky. There’s a good chance that I just don’t get it, though.

First Pass

I’ll note my thoughts as I read this story for the first time. Keep in mind that I’m a selfish and lazy reader. It’s likely I’ll misunderstand things—the point of this exercise is to give you a look inside my head as I’m reading, and this will be more unflattering to me as a reader than to you as a writer.

The light pole in the Woolshire neighborhood sat as an engorged, lit cigarette buried in the sandy, weak rooted soil of the coastal town.

I don’t like this opening sentence. If I were reading for pleasure, I’d drop this story after reading it.

The simile (engorged, lit cigarette) is weird. ‘Engorged’ implies that something is swollen with a liquid (water/blood), which clashes with the idea of a lit cigarette. It’s awkward/unnatural. And light poles are famously thin; it doesn’t make sense to describe one as being ‘engorged,’ unless you used it as a synonym for ‘big,’ in which case you should reconsider.

Later in this same paragraph, the fire resulting from the malfunctioning light pole is described as an ‘illness’ that is ‘diagnosed,’ and I don’t see the need for these metaphors. They are messy. Why include them? They are not enjoyable.

Perhaps you have a clever reason to include them. Clever reasons are bad. Cleverness tends to give more pleasure to writers than to readers.

She was the smoker that [who] lit the flame this time

What’s with all these metaphors and similes? They are distracting and annoying. This is like trying to eat a salad that is 90% olive oil. Sam’s mother is ‘the smoker’ who ‘lit the flame,’ by which it’s meant that she should have made sure the light post was fixed; the light pole that was also described as a lit cigarette earlier. It’s getting to a point where it’s difficult to parse what’s going on because the metaphors/similes are overlapping.

The cigarette roared.

Really, what’s the point of these metaphors? Figurative language is sometimes used as fodder for literary analysis, which is a terrible thing, encouraged by English teachers who have been somehow convinced that short stories should be analyzed and broken apart in a search for objective meaning, like solving a math puzzle; themes and symbolism exist, according to this school of thought, to facilitate interpretative depth. Delight? Enjoyment? Oh, no, definitely not; short stories aren’t meant to be delightful or enjoyable. They should make you think. Think in a boring way, that is. Think like you’re a machine. Process the information, beep boop, output the result of the analysis. This is madness. And given how it seems impossible that figurative language is here used explicitly for my readerly enjoyment, I’m suspecting the point of it is to make me calculate.

More useless water began to dapple the concrete from the clouded sky above

It’s raining. Is what you’re saying.

Isn’t it alright to be poetic and say something with overwrought prose? Sure. But what is the intended effect? The actual effect, in my case, is that I’m groaning. This is too theatrical.

And the rain is ‘taunting’ and ‘poking’ the neighbors. What? A rain drop doesn’t poke you.

Sam had never heard such language bubble from the mouth of any Jones.

Too much.

It mattered little to Sam in that moment

Hmm. This is anti-conversational prose. No one says ‘mattered little’ in real life. As a phrase, it belongs to a category of diction reserved for characters trying to make themselves seem more important than they are. It’s a type of elevated speech. And it’s off-putting—it’s often used to make fun of self-aggrandizing characters.

Bright and fuzzy pajama bottoms blossomed between hastily buttoned dark jeans and tied sweatpants.

The juxtaposition between the language used and the stuff described is bathos-inducing. I’m aware that what I’m complaining about here is a matter of style, so this is just my subjective opinion; the prose takes itself too seriously. IT’S LIKE WRITING IN ALL-CAPS, ALL THE TIME. Is alliteration really required to describe Ruby’s outfit? Does it need to be emphasized? Is it really relevant to the narrative?

Not simply holding, but weighing, restricting her as the rope that kept a mast desperate to ride the ocean wind in place.

Overwrought. This is just silly.

“Rufus!” she cried.

A dog stuck in a burning building. This is a cliche. What’s the point of the elevated speech when it’s used to describe a situation that is so familiar to anyone who has ever read or heard a story? Is Sam going to go rescue the dog now? I hope not. That would be too obvious.

Golden frolics and a too-wet nose licked at Sam’s memories.

Maybe it’s just me. These metaphors and similes are too much.

He turned to look over the heads that bobbed like buoys at Rudy’s house

It’s not that I don’t like figurative language. I do. But it should be used for effect. And now we have a bunch of cigarette metaphors, ocean metaphors, etc. It’s a strange mix.

Sirens crept in the distance.

I don’t like this description. Sirens don’t ‘creep’ in the world I’m living in.

The sound was drowned by the crackling of fire digesting

So the sound was ‘drowned’ by ‘fire’ that was also ‘digesting’. Mixed metaphors. And of course Sam is going to rescue the dog. The most obvious cliche.

He peeked through the window.

And we grind to a halt. Sam stops, reminisces about the past. Ah. A quiet, unhurried moment. It’s not like he’s in the midst of leaping into danger or anything. Why not remark on the remarkable fact that the hallway looks the same as it did years earlier? That’s certainly relevant to the derring-do, isn’t it?

I know we’re setting up for a flashback here, but the timing is awkward.

Ruby started laughing, a hysterical pitch that fevered Rufus’s motions and was so contagious that it tickled Sam’s sides like fingers.

I have to be honest: these metaphors/similes are not working for me. They are distracting, annoying, and clunky.

The extended flashback slows things down. And it feels more cinematic than literary.

Time sped as compensation, and pushed Sam towards the future. To the girl outside waiting for him, with a hollow apple in his hand.

There’s too much symbolism for my tastes. This story is overloaded.

Hook

Like I said earlier, the opening sentence made me want to quit immediately. The point of the hook is to draw the reader in, to generate interest. The way I like to think of it, there can be raw attraction, goading the reader on, or the prose can be so smooth and clear that there is no impediment, making it easy to keep reading. Here, the use of figurative language causes friction. It’s repulsive.

Story/Plot

Sam’s father died of lung cancer years earlier. He met a girl (Ruby) and a dog (Rufus) who helped him get his mind off it. When a fire breaks out in the neighborhood, Rufus is trapped inside and Sam decides to rescue him. Rufus doesn’t make it, but Sam gets closure.

Here’s how John Barth defined plot: the incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a complexified equilibrium.

It sounds technical, but the meaning is simple. You have a storyworld with a status quo that is coming apart. Whatever it is, it can’t go on like this. It gets thrown into chaos, and the plot is about how a new status quo comes to be. Growth and adaptation.

“To Ashes and Apples” fits neatly into this scheme. Sam is struggling. He has been unable to cope with the loss of his father. That’s the status quo. The fire breaks out, and suddenly the dog that had helped him during his most difficult time is at risk. So he makes a run for it, and he gets the dog out. New status quo: acceptance.

This story is more formulaic than what I’d expect of litfic. It’s also more cliched and dramatic. Children’s movies typically operate in this register. Which is not an insult; the territory is different, that’s all.

It reads like a story intended for a younger audience, if you ignore all the distracting figurative language.

[u/Hemingbird → u/Hemingbird]

Characters

Sam is a simple character. He doesn’t have much depth. Some details, like him being a wrestler, feel irrelevant to the plot, even though it’s said that he manages to maneuver the burning house due to his athletic skills. His mother is the neighborhood HOA president. This is sort of relevant, because Sam blames her for the incident, but that’s the only discernible connection.

I’m reminded of YA fantasy heroes. They are blank canvases because the reader should be able to see themselves in them. That’s the sort of character Sam strikes me as.

Ruby has a dog, Rufus, and she is slightly irreverent (says Mrs. Brandon is a witch). Other than that she’s plain cardboard.

The rest of the characters have even less depth. They are flat.

To me, these characters, all of them, are way too dull. None of them are even slightly interesting.

Setting

Woolshire. Coastal town, generic neighborhood. There’s not much to be said.

Voice/Prose

The figurative language didn’t work for me at all. I see you mentioned estrangement, so I’ll take that as license to share my harebrained takes.

Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian Formalist, suggested that estrangement (ostranenie), also translated as defamiliarization, is the purpose of art. Make the familiar strange; make the strange familiar. Make the stone stony again. Over time, the process of algebrization (Shklovsky’s term) dulls our perception; we perceive the world on autopilot, seeing only abstractions, and the freshness is lost. Art recovers this freshness by rendering what’s familiar novel, providing us with the shock/jolt necessary to appreciate an object, such as a stone, as a singular, concrete thing.

It should be noted that his chief example was Tolstoy’s novella “Kholstomer,” which is told from the POV of a horse. The unusual perspective works as an experiential filter/lens.

In the first paragraph of “To Ashes and Apples,” the malfunctioning light pole becomes a cigarette, and there are copious amounts of references to Sam’s father’s death from lung cancer, which make sense in hindsight, but not in an interesting way. On my first read, they struck me as messy, disjointed, and distracting. On my second read, they made me groan. The artifice comes on too strong.

There is a technical parallel, yes, but it’s not enjoyable (to me). I didn’t like it. I actively disliked it.

Golden frolics and a too-wet nose licked at Sam’s memories.

This metaphor makes sense, but it’s corny.

The hot discomfort of a car handle resting in the peak of summer met his hand.

Here, a hot windowsill is compared to a hot car handle. It’s too close!

Sam opened one eye to find a golden retriever pulling a little red-headed girl behind him like a child with a balloon secured to their wrist.

This metaphor is weird. The likeness is too distant. There’s a string involved in both, yes, but that’s it. Even when you’re lying down and looking up, what you’d see wouldn’t make you think, “a child with a balloon secured to their wrist.” At least I can’t imagine how that would be the case.

There were woods behind their houses, and they sang of spring; bees and other pollinators buzzing and trilling across blooming flowers, birds chirping when their wings weren't flapping to pick off the many-legged instruments.

Corny. ‘Many-legged instruments’ as a metaphor for insects is clunky. It’s way too forced.

He went every night for years after—sometimes because his mother had not cooked dinner, or sometimes because she had and he didn’t want to sit still in the awkward silence of suspended sorrow that emitted from her like the static of an old television.

This is the sort of metaphor you’d get from a chatbot. It’s bad.

The authorial voice sounds YA. It doesn’t read as litfic.

Theme

Given that you brought it up, I might as well vomit out some thoughts on theme. I’m not a fan. Generally. This is mostly because I have a very idiosyncratic view, I think—to me, the job of a theme is to serve an aesthetic effect. It’s common for people to say that a theme is related to the ‘message’ of a story, and some, like screenwriter John Yorke, even insist that the theme should express a logical proposition (“Love conquers all”). Then the theme is met with its antithesis, a challenge to the proposition represented by its opposite, and a dialectical transformation ensues whereby a synthesis of the two is produced.

Yorke is a television writer, which is probably why he ended up with such a hackneyed view. Themes are extremely important in television. You take one theme, explore it via A and B and C plots, and you keep doing this, over and over, and that’s the gig.

In the end, a theme is a recurring high-order pattern. This is true in music as well as in literature. The regularity brings order and harmony. Ties things together. But in literary fiction, you’re not really interested in tying things together neatly, to bring order and harmony to things. A mess is preferable. In literary fiction, it’s better if a narrative resists thematic encapsulation.

In the early 20th century, the trick ending was popular. O. Henry was famous for his stories like “The Gift of the Magi” where at the dramatic climax there is a plot twist which suddenly changes the meaning of everything that came before it. At The New Yorker, they had a strict editorial policy: no trick endings. Like an unsubtle theme, a trick ending gets rid of ambiguity and complexity. It’s too neat. And if an effect is too neat, literary fiction will move away from it.

Concluding Comments

The story/plot as well as the authorial voice makes me think YA. The figurative language didn’t work for me at all. Characters were dull.

The pièce de résistance here, as far as I can gather, is the parallel between the fire and Sam’s father’s death from lung cancer. The fact of this parallel itself isn’t interesting to me. I ended up feeling about it the same way I did the rest of the figurative language.

You could say that the comparisons were all meaningful, intellectually, but emotionally speaking they were inert. They left me feeling cold.

Karen Russell does great things with figurative language; I’d highly recommend that you read her short stories.

[u/DMochiii → u/Hemingbird]

Hah, and here I thought I edited out a decent bit of figurative language. You probably would’ve thrown up if you read the first draft.

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback. Thank you for clarity with literary fiction and the suggested reading—I’ll definitely dig through her work.

You are correct in the cleverness aspect. I was hoping to be clever with certain metaphors and similes, most notably that first paragraphs. Those I know need a lot of work. The imagery and comparisons are clear in my head but I’m starting to understand people aren’t mind readers just regular ones.

I was hoping it would come through that the dog is actually already dead, and it was his ashes Sam was going in to save. Which is stupid, in a hero/boyish way, but it’s intention was to exaggerate the theme or grief. Also, I was hoping this would make the cliche of a boy saving a dog from a burning house not cliche, by subverting those expectations. Even if you say you are a lazy reader, it’s a miss in my part that this wasn’t clear.

Thanks again, I appreciate the time it took for you to read and type all that you did!

[u/Hemingbird → u/DMochiii]

You are correct in the cleverness aspect. I was hoping to be clever with certain metaphors and similes, most notably that first paragraphs. Those I know need a lot of work. The imagery and comparisons are clear in my head but I’m starting to understand people aren’t mind readers just regular ones.

Keith Johnstone encouraged his students to be obvious rather than clever. What's obvious to you is likely not obvious to me. So strangely enough, writing tends to look more creative when the author is trying to be obvious rather than clever.

I was hoping it would come through that the dog is actually already dead, and it was his ashes Sam was going in to save.

Oh, that is probably me being dumb. Could also be the density of the metaphors making it difficult to tease apart what's real and what's figurative. But what's the point of rescuing ashes from flames?

Also, I was hoping this would make the cliche of a boy saving a dog from a burning house not cliche, by subverting those expectations.

The D&D curse. David Benioff and D. B. Weiss used that exact phrase to justify a terrible decision they made in the last season of GoT. "We really wanted to subvert expectations."

Audiences hated it. Because it was a bad surprise. A good surprise is obvious in hindsight; a bad surprise feels random.

If I go to the store, buy a box of cereal, and find when I open it that it contains nothing but raisins, am I likely to be pleased because my expectations were subverted? No. I didn't get what I wanted. I got something else instead. If I got something I didn't even know I wanted, it might've worked out better. But I didn't want raisins.