In Summary

At first glance, this looks like a perfectly acceptable piece of writing. It’s clear what’s happening and the narrative is organised effectively to show the character and action. The problem is in the precision of the prose.

Good writing should contain no repetition, redundancy, accidental ambiguity or errors. It should be easy to read and credible. Outside difficult literature, the reader should never have to pause – even just a blink or a flicker – to wonder what something means or if it makes sense.

Writers need to be more critical of their work than anyone else. They need to read it with close attention and weed out everything that doesn’t contribute, that overcomplicates or that is vague. We know that mouths scream. We know that nostrils smell. We know that ‘clanging’ is a sound and that an echo is not the same as a vibration. The writer must distil meaning rather than leave the reader to pick the sense out of the sentences.

There are some indications of good style here. I like the short sentences separated by full stops, which capture the staccato and fragmentary nature of genuine thoughts and therefore of the character’s mind. That’s why we don’t need her to speak out loud.

Sometimes, we’re guilty of ‘writing’ rather than writing. The former is about the gathering of words on a page: scenes and speech we’d like the reader to perceive. A recently released prisoner screaming dramatically in the street (despite being newly free). The latter is the direct visualisation of the scene in the reader’s mind as if the words themselves don’t exist. The reader doesn’t notice the punctuation or question the probability. It just comes alive. For this to happen, we have to hone our prose to the bone.