Feedback challenge: Phineas
Jun. 28th, 2004 11:17 pmI'm writing feedback for
phineasjones whose Harry Potter fic is here.
I read All Souls Day a long time ago, but it's always stuck in my mind as one of the more outstanding Remus/Sirius stories.
I admire its subtlety. I love the way each word seems carefully chosen to express an exact thought or a sensation - its very precise, yet at the same time manages to be not at all obvious in its meaning. I like being told just a smidgen less than I need to know. Like the opening passage:
Remus stirs from a thin sleep and opens his eyes to see white sunlight through almost-bare trees. It's cold in the room; he can feel it even through his extra blanket. He rolls over and swings his legs over the side of the bed. Pulls on the robe draped across the single chair in the room. Everything looks exactly as it should. As it always does. He thinks, maybe today.
It's immediate and vivid, as though I'm there with him, and you use the present tense very cleverly to do that. Lupin's thought at the end is so telling and says a thousand things about his life and his state of mind: it's a great hook into the story. I read 'Blue' as well, for this assignment, and you do the same thing in that: an excellent, deft use of present tense which gives that whole story great impact.
You have a wonderful narrative voice - it never falters; I'm pulled along with the characters wherever you choose to go. That's a rarer skill than it sounds, believe me. You have an authorial voice that I trust, and tell All Souls Day obliquely through sight and sound and touch, letting the reader see the world directly and vividly through Remus's eyes. You tell us just enough about what's going in his head on to help the story along, but you don't overdo it. You don't tell the reader everything, but just enough.
I've long admired All Souls Day, in fact I rec'ed it about a year or more ago.The original rec, which is quite brief, is here.
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I read All Souls Day a long time ago, but it's always stuck in my mind as one of the more outstanding Remus/Sirius stories.
I admire its subtlety. I love the way each word seems carefully chosen to express an exact thought or a sensation - its very precise, yet at the same time manages to be not at all obvious in its meaning. I like being told just a smidgen less than I need to know. Like the opening passage:
Remus stirs from a thin sleep and opens his eyes to see white sunlight through almost-bare trees. It's cold in the room; he can feel it even through his extra blanket. He rolls over and swings his legs over the side of the bed. Pulls on the robe draped across the single chair in the room. Everything looks exactly as it should. As it always does. He thinks, maybe today.
It's immediate and vivid, as though I'm there with him, and you use the present tense very cleverly to do that. Lupin's thought at the end is so telling and says a thousand things about his life and his state of mind: it's a great hook into the story. I read 'Blue' as well, for this assignment, and you do the same thing in that: an excellent, deft use of present tense which gives that whole story great impact.
You have a wonderful narrative voice - it never falters; I'm pulled along with the characters wherever you choose to go. That's a rarer skill than it sounds, believe me. You have an authorial voice that I trust, and tell All Souls Day obliquely through sight and sound and touch, letting the reader see the world directly and vividly through Remus's eyes. You tell us just enough about what's going in his head on to help the story along, but you don't overdo it. You don't tell the reader everything, but just enough.
I've long admired All Souls Day, in fact I rec'ed it about a year or more ago.The original rec, which is quite brief, is here.