Story A Day: Revelation" by Albert E. Cowdrey

Returning to my story a day project, I'm studying Albert E Cowdrey's Revelation in the October/November issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I can't say that I've read anything by Cowdrey before, which isn't surprising because I haven't read a lot of F&SF, which is the only magazine in which he has been published.

On first read, this story seems to break all the "rules" of writing that I've learned, yet the story works. Some of these "rules": POV switch mid-scene and never return to the opening POV, a story about writers, subplots in a short story, a POV charactar that mostly witnesses the events of the story, and it's almost a shaggy god ending. It also mentions F&SF and Gordon van Gelder, but given Cowdrey's publishing history, this is understandable. It also seems self-depreciating for F&SF, since it hints that a story written by one of the writers has a sophomoric ending, but F&SF might publish it anyway.

The characters are simple: One cynical creative writing professor, one drunk and cynical Freudian shrink, one black person who is lying about his roots, and one neurotic simpleton who doesn't get what creative writing is about, but he happens to know the truth.

I've broken the story up into nine scenes, based on scene breaks in the text, not by the hints the plot might provide, which is when I usually think of a scene break coming into play. The story opens in the point of view of the Freudian, who mentions that one of his patients thinks the world is an egg. Scene break. Now the Creative Writing professor's POV takes over for the rest of the story, though there's some omnipotent voice in some later scenes, the narrative follows the instructor.

There are two writing students, each with their own plot. One is wrapped us nicely, but it plays out in the other student's story, the prophetic one. The Freudian's sub plot doesn't seem to inform the story, but it gets that character out of the way when the crisis comes. As I said before, the narrator doesn't have much of a plot. He realizes a few things about himself, and he tries to act, but he doesn't really have the character arc that the "rules" say the main character should have.


Some things I learned from reading Revelation:

Time can pass

Time passes in stories (usually). One of my problems is trying to tell the whole story, to make the thing "real." I've written pages of stuff about what happens on some morning between important events because I felt that starting with "the next day..." was a cop out. This technique works. Days and weeks pass in scene breaks and even in the middle of one scene. They are summarized, but only to the point where the summary informs one sub plot.

Lesson: Move the narrative to the next point in time that it needs to get to without fuss.

Adverb-subject-verb structure is wierd

There are a couple of paragraphs that open "Involuntarily he raised his eyes..." and "Briefly he fantasized about having the two of them dipped in bronze...." This aren't choices I'd make. They're so rare in what I read that here they stand out like sore thumbs. It's all about voice, and that voice doesn't work for me. I wouldn't write it, and I wouldn't think it. Neither sentence uses these as introductory clauses, or as any other grammatical trick. They just are, and they read off to me.

Lesson: None, really, but voice is important, and consistency of voice is important unless the story calls for it.

Character descriptions can work to point to character...

...as long as the descriptions are concrete enough. "She looked in the mirror and ran a curling finger through her strawberry-blonde hair" doesn't tell me anything accept that this is a role for Darryl Hannah and not Angelina Jolie. Revelation uses character descriptions that tell us more about the two students than simply how they look. At the risk of breaking a copyright law:

One black guy displayed precise cornrows, a sculpted goatee, and little pale blue expensive-looking shades; he had a touch of the lean dark Malcolm X look, as if he'd started life as an AK-47. Farther down the scarred sminar table sat a white guy looking neat and earnest as a Mormon stockbroker. A Brooks Brother label was almost visible through the nubby cloth of his conservative jacketw and his well-scrubbed face shone limpidly fair, like and acolyte of some suburban preacher.

This works well, subtly hinting at the black student's façade, and is reinforced by referring to the character later as the AK-47. The second one is slightly misleading. It does a lot to point to the character of the person described, but "Mormon stockbroker" brings up very specific images of clean-cut, polite, neutral colors, etc. When we find out later on that this character is an ex-Catholic, I have to do some slight editing.

Lesson: Be concrete and emotional when describing one character from another character's POV

All in all, it's a good read. I studied the pacing, but I still have to go through it in more detail, since there are subplots being introduced and resolving throughout the piece.