Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Sprague

This is topic Sprague in forum Fragments and Feedback for Short Works at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by Chessna (Member # 2703) on :

Can you please delete this Kathleen?
Thank you!

[This message has been edited by Chessna (edited July 08, 2005).]

Posted by abby (Member # 2681) on :

I not too experienced a writer at getting published anyway. Do you have a title in mind? Is Maria a dragon, or which other creature? What made her life too important? Just a hint or title here would do. Sounds good to me so far. Will the Tiger mother be the adoptive mother, or just the raising mother, with the birth mother playing a role, or watching her son from a distance?

Good luck!

Posted by Chessna (Member # 2703) on :

I have a couple chapters of my book written if you would like me to send that to you. It probably is not that great and it has a huge hole in chapter 4, but if you would like to read it up to that point, that would be fine with me. I am also working more on my plot. It isn't finished, so I could send you that too.

Maria is a Peregrine Falcon, as is said in chapter 2, and she is just to selfish and self-centered to care for a child.
Maria will play another role in a later chapter, but not for quite a while.

Riachelle raises Sprague until an event at the end of chapter 2 and the beginning of 3. He always will remember her as his real mother though, because Maria doesn't even treat him like a son in the later role. She doesn't even remember his name.

This is going to be a huge novel. That has always been my weakness in writing. There's just too much to write and it's too fun!

Posted by MaryRobinette (Member # 1680) on :

Hi Chessna,

Since you are working in Omniscent POV, you can just come out and tell us that Maria is a Peregrine Falcon right at the beginning. You want to avoid withholding information from your reader. As soon as it becomes available, mention it so that your readers will trust you.

In fact, with this section, you might consider moving your second paragraph to be the first and place the first paragraph right after "...hatched into a tiger". That way, when you say "it hatched into a tiger," you can immediately answer the question in the reader's mind "What happened next" by telling us that Maria refused to raise him.

This is a pet peeve of mine. So far you've given me no reason to think that Sprague is unique because there's another tiger who's raised a dozen tigers. Part of my reaction to this is because Maria's refusal to raise him seems to have nothing to do with being a tiger--as if it were not unusual--and much more to do with being any sort of child at all.

Good luck with this.

Posted by Kolona (Member # 1438) on :

What Mary said. For me, besides, I think I need some explanation of how a falcon laid an egg that hatched a tiger. Maybe where you write that "The tiger had raised many before," you can give some info about the 'many.'

Posted by tchernabyelo (Member # 2651) on :

I'd certainly echo Kolona's point. While you say "even more surprising, it hatched into a tiger", there isn't actually any explanation for this, or any real sense of shock. We, as readers, know that tigers don't normally hatch from eggs (let alone ones laid by peregrine falcons), and I think we need at least some hint about how this might have actually come about.

In general, however, I personally have a very hard time with anthropomorphic stories. I recognise many have been very successful (Watership Down, Duncton Wood, Redwall etc) but I find it utterly impossible to really empathise with intelligent animals in the same way as I do with human (or elf/dwarf/alien) protagonists.