- Joined
- Mar 12, 2021
She tries to cram too many movements into one sentence, which causes her to lose sight of the subject. This makes it very difficult for readers to assign actions to the right actors. It's a common error for amateur writers, who don't have a strong sense of how sentence structure affects pacing, or how moving too quickly will scramble our sense of whose point-of-view we are in.
"Legs up, spread wide, the cold metal speculum stretched me open, separating the inside of my vagina."
The speculum's legs are not spread wide. Ellen's are. She thinks just listing sensations or observations will make it feel real, as if we are experiencing things in the exact way she felt them. But if she is not structuring those observations and grouping them together by character or by physical space, we can't make sense of the experiences. It should be something like--
"Legs up, spread wide, I lay perfectly still on the examination table. The cold metal speculum stretched me open, separating the inside of my vagina."
There are several moments like this where she is trying to convey a full scene in a single sentence, rather than slowing down enough to actually settle us into the environment. Crawling all the way back to her house after her rollerblading injury takes a single sentence. It creates the impression that she doesn't remember this well, or is exaggerating, because she spends way more time describing still images like staring at her own blood. That's fine to focus on the things that left the biggest impression on her, but when she puts it in a narrative form, it feels like she is fast-forwarding through things that we have practical questions about, like how much pain she was in while crawling, whether she could lift her legs, whether she tried to take off her skates, etc. A police interrogator would tell her to back up and slow down, and an editor should do the same.
In this one, she spends several sentences describing beavers, then cuts to "swimming in the river." The beavers are swimming? Or her? Suddenly she's "panicking" and "frightened my leg would suddenly snap." Is she actually getting bitten? Is her leg actually "snapping ... like the birch"? Or is she just recalling beaver facts and getting scared? I have no idea!
I also hate this sentence:
"Pulse rate rising, I'd overcompensate, sparing no effort to buoy up, to hide the hiding, cutting a rug three centimeters above the floor, eggshells everywhere."
I had no idea what she was trying to say here until "eggshells everywhere," and it's like, OK, you're trying not to "step on eggshells," so you are so full of energy that you are practically hovering above the floor to avoid them. That's a pretty cool image, but you have to put the metaphor you're playing with UP FRONT or it's just like wtf.
