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It was known simply as The Angel.

On black velvet, surrounded by winking diamonds, divinity seemed to radiate from it, like a white nimbus.

Great sheets of light-bending metal stretched out like a pair of mighty, curved wings, marred only by sculpted canals of a deep blackness that mimicked the space around it. Great orbs scintillated with blue light at the apex of either wing, pulsing like beating hearts. Where met the wings, a body made all of light and curve and beauty bent forward, like a supplicant kneeling in prayer, something like a brooding, cloak-shrouded head protruding from its top. Sweeping down The Angel’s spine, past the wings, and back around in a crescent tail, a soaring buttress ended in a third pulsing sphere.

Lacking scale, it could not be looked upon, drifting there, without knowing, sickeningly and in the very core of your being, that it was huge beyond measure. It blotted out a great field of stars in its wake, and eclipsed entire planets with its passage.

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Let me know what you think!
 

The main thing I'm gonna say about this one is the description narrative is probably a mistake. Give me a human to care about and I'll follow, but a statue isn't going to move me. I think you describe it well, though. Just maybe put it later on in the chapter, and start me off with the person that I'm going to follow around on adventures.

[This message has been edited by pixydust (edited July 10, 2005).]
 

I agree with the previous post that openers that focus on people are more likely to be successful, but I can also see how some stories might do better with a different type. And if you're going to go that route, this seems pretty good to me. It certainly does sound mysterious and interesting.

After years of immersion in linguistics, however, I find that I am no longer completely normal as a reader. I noticed several things at a grammatical or stylistic level that I would change if it were my piece. Maybe you would not change them. However, I'm going to go ahead and point them out on the logic that if you don't know about them, you can't make a decision one way or the other.

(1) You had a number of similes in this passage -- things where you use "like" to describe something, as in "like a white nimbus" or "like a supplicant". It may make the passage a bit more powerful to rephrase one or two of these as metaphors: rather than saying the divinity was LIKE a white nimbus, you could say that it WAS a white nimbus.

(2) You have a number of modifiers that are ambiguous. In the end, it is clear what they have to mean in context. However, ambiguous sentences of any type slow reading speed and increase cognitive workload, even if the reader does not consciously notice the ambiguity. So, best to eschew ambiguity at all costs. Here's one ambiguous sentence I noticed:

On black velvet, surrounded by winking diamonds, divinity seemed to radiate from it, like a white nimbus.

The two possible readings are: it is the Angel that is located on black velvet and surrounded by diamonds, OR it is the divinity that is. The first reading is the one that I assume is appropriate, but under a strict application of English grammar rules, the second one is what what you would get. It would probably be better to avoid all possibility for confusion. I would suggest cutting the sentence in two, which would simultaneously increase your Flesch readability score (see "Open Discussions on Writing" for a topic on Flesch statistics). A possible rework would be: "It was surrounded by winking diamonds against a black velvet backdrop. Divinity seemed to..."

A second case of ambiguity is:

Lacking scale, it could not be looked upon, drifting there, without knowing, sickeningly and in the very core of your being...

This one did actually confuse me at first. You've got two participles in a row here -- "drifting there" and "without knowing". The default assumption in such cases is that both verbs will be performed by the same agent, but the correct interpretation of this sentence requires different agents: It is the Angel that is doing the drifting, but it is the observer who is doing the knowing. You could get rid of that problem, and simultaneously get rid of a passive sentence, if you reworded it to something like "As it drifted there without scale, you could not look upon it without knowing, sickeningly and in the very core of your being, that it was huge beyond measure."

But, as I said, maybe you like it better the way it is -- I simply bring these points up for your consideration. It is an interesting opener in any event.

Best wishes,

K.

The descriptive language didn't help me at all. I couldn't easily understand what was being described at first, and when I went back and reconstructed everything, I wasn't impressed with the core visual.
 

Anyway:
This is mostly an addendum to kkmmaacc's comments, with which I agree completely.

You have established a "literary" tone, which places very extreme demands on articulation and style. In order for a literary piece to be successful, the language has to be overwhelmingly compelling. Literary pieces have language as a character, so I am not concerned with the lack of immediate characterization -- but I would warn you that if you're going to write in this way, the linguistic standards are much higher and the market much more limited.

One of the most common ways of trying to create a compelling literary piece is to describe something cool in as fantastic a way possible. This is a strategy that usually fails.
It fails because:
1- Description is only interesting if the audience cares about what is being described, or if the description itself is enjoyable out of context (such as in humor pieces, for example, or in "high literary prose" where the sentences are works of art.)
2- The tendency is toward over-description, which actually makes whatever is being described less clear.

In addition, when people are over-describing, they tend to pump sentences full of clauses. They hook item after item together with commas, such as in the sentence which begins, "Where met [sic] the wings, a body..."which would be much more effective broken up into a couple sentences.

That being said, some of this is quite, quite good. The line, "Great sheets of light-bending metal stretched out like a pair of mighty, curved wings" is beautiful -- very fine imagery. And the opening sentence is a serviceable hook. But it continues to the point where it becomes less clear. As you go on and on about specific details, the image becomes more complicated (because you are tacking more and more details onto it) and thus harder and harder to keep straight.

This is something I have struggled with personally because most of my work has been "literary" (I come from a poetic background) and because I really enjoy describing things.

But my experience has been that you're much better just moving on. If you want to tell us all these beautiful things about the angel (whatever they may be), you can do that later. But if you don't get on with the story, people will either lose focus on what is being said to them -- or worse, they will lose interest.

So, my biggest advice on this is -- Yes, you're mostly good at descriptive language, but we get paid for story. Cut the imagery down to the sharpest, best written chunk (the "Great sheets" line is my personal candidate), and start the story. You can always go back and show us the angel through the character's eyes... which is where the description should come from anyway.

Oh, one more thing. Descending into second person, as you do in the second-to-last sentence, "...very core of your being..." (which is a cliche, by the way) is almost always a mistake. The people who buy literary prose mostly HATE second person, with very, very few exceptions. There is always another way of writing a sentence that doesn't involve a too-informal "you" reference, which almost always looks out of place in a literary piece. (Yes, there are exceptions, but this has not established itself as one of them.)

Nevertheless, I liked it. I'd like to read it all when it's finished; see what you've done with it.

~MR
 

I'm not sure about your use of the world "marred". Do the black panels actually mar the figure, or do they merely enhance it, adding contrast? Marring implies that they disfigure it in some way, and my impression is that you are trying to paint the Angel as a thing of fantastic beauty and (perhaps appropriately) almost religious awe.

pixydust mentions needing a person. It depends on what the story is about. If the Angel itself is the core of the story, then you're fine, but if there is a single human, then shifting the scene slightly so that you're describing your protagonist looking at the Angel might be better. You only need one line to do that, and you can also then twist your final paragraph so that instead of this generic second person sensation, you can root it in the observing character.

Hope that helps.