by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
Dan: But I was not prepared for it.
Brandon: There is a mention on page two.
Dan: Well, obviously none of us saw it. If you feel the need to defend your story, that means it’s wrong. Okay, here’s my thing. Even more so than the ending, this is my biggest problem with the story.
Mary: Where is that on page two? That is so not on page two.
Brandon: Search for “the Ones Above.”
Mary: Oh, please.
Dan: Sixth gives away so much information for no reason that I could discern. He focuses so heavily on the fact that he doesn’t like talking, that this woman talks too much. And then he just cannot stop himself from spilling every secret he knows, and he doesn’t get anything out of it. He’s not trying to get anything from her. It felt very weird to me, like the plot engine would take over—“We need to know another secret now, so he’s just going to tell us.”
Mary: I had some issues with that. I felt like a lot of his motivation for why he was telling her was that people already know this and it’s going to come out. I felt like usually there was motivation behind that and I could accept it, but there were a couple of places where I thought, “Why are you telling her this?”
Dan: See, if that’s his motivation, I think it would need to be accompanied by his reaction. Not just an acceptance, but some form of guilt or betrayal or whatever. That was there a little bit, but not enough to sell it.
Mary: Yeah. Also I think that if he was doing some of that in the beginning, when I was talking about needing some form of him being dissatisfied with life, before he even meets her. If they’ve got steam they’ve got probably newspapers or something, and maybe some article had been published and he thinks, “People are starting to talk about stuff that has traditionally been kept between us.” And also, “Ones Above” is not until page twenty-two. So there.
Dan: The seeds are there to have this “letting go of the past” aspect. You plant early on that he’s wearing more modern clothes. He has a compass. He has the scuba mask that he talks about. But he completely accepts that, whereas . . . Brandon knows what I mean at this point.
Howard: Brandon, what does Dan mean?
Brandon: I try to avoid talking too much when my submission is being critiqued, but Dan is talking about that Sixth is accepting all of these things, but is there any regret? Is there any sense of loss? I mean, he’s just moving along with it, and is that a wasted opportunity there or not?
Mary: I completely agree with that. I think that if you can give us hints of that in the beginning, that will inform a lot of the decisions that he makes later.
Dan: The other thing that I wanted say, the other seed that is being sown there is that he, by bringing in mainland birds, has already started to corrupt the island. That was never brought up, and never addressed. If that’s a direction you decide to go, he could solve some of this problem, that he’s already party to the corruption of the island.
Mary: I thought that you dealt with that a little when he said, “Let’s kill all of the nightmaws.” I thought that the bird he had, Sak, was a mainland bird that had been blown off course, and he just got lucky with that one. But you’re right, he is bringing chicks in now, because he’s saying there will be more of these. That may be one of those things where he’s not aware of the ecosystem issues that he’s going to cause by doing that. That’s something Vathi could bring up, and have him make those connections.
Howard: That is a neat piece of symmetry. The groundwork is already laid for that, where he is worried about change. He recognizes himself as an agent of change. His name means he is an agent of change. But he does not recognize the extent of the change that would occur if he does what he wants. Whereas Vathi is definitely an agent of change. She’s there as part of changing things. But her mission is to change things while at the same time protecting them, in a way that hasn’t occurred to him. There’s a neat symmetry there. That’s the sort of thing which, Brandon, you do a great job with in your other works that I’ve read where you’ve had a chance to tighten up the prose. Those are the things that just naturally flow out. As you’re tightening up these words, you realize, “Oh, I need to use this word here, and then this word again here,” and the reader grabs that symmetry without you having to throw down a whole paragraph that says, “This is what he believed.” That’s one of the reasons why I spend so much time drilling down on my prose so early in a project, because my editor is an idiot.
Brandon: Well, let’s continue to thrash my story, everyone. What are your medium-level problems? Just things that occurred to you that may not require a big revision, but that bothered you.
Mary: This is a tiny thing. It’s actually just an order of information flow issue. On page seven when you introduce Sak, it says, “The Aviar usually waited until they’d landed before bestowing her blessing.” It made me think, the corpse is a vision? Because I wasn’t completely clear. Why is that a blessing? Why is the vision of the corpse a blessing? You answer it two sentences later. But because the two sentences are “The black-feathered bird just watched the waves, and Sixth continued—” You’re right, Dan, that is hard to say. “Sixth continued his work.”
Howard: We have an audiobook problem here.
Mary: I thought you were done, and I thought that I wasn’t going to get the answer, so I was confused. I really think that just moving the body he saw, moving that little section somewhere, just so there’s not quite that tiny buffer between, would have fixed that for me. It’s a small thing.
Howard: A medium-level thing for me—I guess it’s a mixture of things—was the mechanic of the foretelling. We never get, at any point, a vision from Sak that tells us something that then comes true. So yes, he’s been very careful and he’s survived all of this time as a result of stuff from Sak, but I’ve never seen Sak foretell something, and then see that thing actually happen. Which I know wouldn’t work, because we’re only getting his corpse.
Mary: Yeah, but what we do see is Sak give the warning and Sixth looks closer, and says—
Howard: Oh yes, there’s a thing there.
Dan: Like with the vines coming out of the trees.
Howard: See, that’s why I’m saying it’s a medium-level problem. If I could see one of those prophecies come true, I would be much more satisfied with the bird’s ability. The other thing that was a little weird is the concatenation of his corpse everywhere, which—
Dan: Was awesome.
Mary: Intense.
Howard: No, I liked it. It was powerful. It was awesome. But to my mind, it was never explained. I didn’t understand why.
Dan: I was bothered as well by the fact that we never find out what this mapping machine is, or what it’s going to do to the island. But I was not super bothered by it. I don’t know if I would have even brought it up, had Howard not mentioned it. It’s a hole in the story, but it feels like it’s an excusable hole because that’s not what the story is focusing on.
Mary: See, I was okay with that. I thought, “Well, why would mapping machinery do that? That doesn’t make any sense.” But then Sixth says, “Hey, I think it’s because this is a trap and it’s not actually mapping machinery. It’s designed to cause this disruption.”
Howard: I liked that reveal a lot. That was cool.
Mary: I did too. But where my problem lay was that I didn’t see his logical steps to get to that. We’re in his POV, but we didn’t see him putting those pieces together. We just saw him say, “And here, let me give you this piece of exposition.”
Dan: Yes. That exposition came out of nowhere. If he arrives there by the same process you just did, that would solve two whole different problems for me at the same time. Now, here’s another problem that maybe didn’t bug anybody else. The gun that she has, I couldn’t figure out why it was a harpoon gun. That was weird enough to me that I thought, “Oh, it’s going to be important later that it’s a harpoon gun.” And it is, because you can’t tie a flower onto a bullet, so therefore it had to be a harpoon
. That, as far as I could see, was the only reason for it to be a harpoon. I’m cool with other cultures having other kinds of guns. But this was never used in a way that would make a harpoon more valuable than a bullet.
Howard: They had the “shadow” sea creatures that they were up against sometimes. If you’re going to shoot something like that, you do need a heavier projectile than a bullet, because a bullet won’t go very far in the water. But she tried shooting at one, and it didn’t work.
Dan: But I never got the sense that this was an underwater weapon.
Mary: She does say that it was specifically something that they had for the shadow, and that she grabbed it when she was fleeing. But that maybe needs to be brought out a little more. Along these lines, since we’re talking about shadow and nightmaw and all of these things, oddly, when it mentioned a shark-toothed club I thought, “They have sharks on this world?” I don’t know why that bothered me. Because birds didn’t bother me; horses wouldn’t have bothered me. But when we have all of these other cool flora and fauna that are clearly indigenous to the world, for some reason I thought, “Why would anyone import sharks?” I can understand importing birds. But why would anyone import sharks?
Dan: On a related note—this is actually a good thing that I thought was a neat little minor touch—is how you described the shadows, the big monsters. You never actually say that they look like krakens, or cthulhus, or whatever. But that’s what I imagined in my head. But he had literally no idea how to describe it, or maybe it was the girl. Then in the next sentence, they talk about octopuses. I’m like, well if they know what an octopus is, and they still don’t know how to describe what I assumed was a kraken, it must be even weirder than I thought it was. I thought that was a really neat moment.
Howard: I assumed it was a really big shark.
Mary: I just thought it was something bad.
Dan: You guys don’t like to imagine tentacles as much as I do.
Mary: All right. This is again in that medium level. This is one of the places where I felt like there was an inconsistency. “If you had been another trapper, I would have killed you directly, rather than leaving you to revenge yourself upon me.” But I thought that they didn’t kill each other directly. Then I wondered, “Well, is that because she’s at the safecamp?” Because there was an allusion to the only time that they fought was at the safecamp.
Dan: Not an allusion, but a direct reference. “We don’t hurt each other. We let the island kill each other. We just help it.”
Mary: Yeah. It was very close to this, so I was confused. Either cut or clarify. Let’s see. What else did I have?
Dan: The little meekers were awesome.
Mary: Loved the meekers.
Dan: But I was sad that they didn’t show up later. Essentially, I imagined him assaulting this enemy fortress, and I thought he was going to rouse his little band of nasty little bitey mice. Instead, he just scared some panthers in the woods, and then we jump-cut.
Mary: There were a lot of things in here that were really cool, that I love, but that I think you could cut to make this a tighter story. The meekers represent one of those, because you’re not using them. So use it or lose it. I have no idea where you would insert them. But since you write long, this is something that you could cut and shorten it.
Brandon: Originally, they actually were going to kill Vathi. Offhandedly, because his paranoia was too—
Mary: I’m glad you didn’t go there.
Brandon: I decided when I got there that it was the wrong emotional beat for this, but that’s why they were there originally.
Mary: You can cut them now, and use them in a different story, because they’re great. Except I will say that one thing they do—if you are emphasizing this theme of him disrupting island ecology—it is an example of him interfering with the way things naturally work on the island.
Howard: The other thing they do is that they help reinforce this idea that there is telepathy happening in nature everywhere. It’s a broader sort of effect.
Mary: Yes. One of the ways you could use them is that maybe she was not the only person who escaped, and she had a companion who was killed by the meekers. Now, getting back to something that Dan had said earlier about how Sixth just seemed to be spouting information. There was a point where he says, “Coming here was obviously a disaster.” But in the rest of the story, he is so annoyed with her saying all of these obvious things. So, the fact that he is actually using the word “obviously”—
Dan: That was a minor thing, but it stood out to me as well.
Mary: Yeah. I guess it’s minor, but I’m just—
Dan: Not just the word choice, but just how verbose he became in those two sentences. Very wordy.
Mary: Yeah. Ooh, this is actually something I should have mentioned in the cool stuff. There is a point where he has been using her name for a while, and he gets angry at her, and for two paragraphs he only refers to her as “the woman,” which was a really nice way of showing that he was thinking, “She is not a person to me.”
Brandon: We are out of time, so I’m just going to let you send me the rest of your notes. Because the whole point of this was so that the readers can see what a writing group is like for us. Hopefully, the whole process of this, with us brainstorming it, writing it, and then polishing it, will help you as writers to see how this is going.
EDITS: SIXTH OF THE DUSK
BRANDON SANDERSON
Death hunted beneath the waves. SixthDusk saw it approach, though its details were hidden by the waters. A shadow wider than six narrowboats tied together, an enormous deep blackness within the deep blue, a shadowed form as wide as six narrowboats tied together. SixthDusk’s hands tensed on his paddle, his heartbeat racing as he immediately sought out Kokerlii.
Fortunately, the colorful bird sat in his customary place on the prow of the boat, idly biting at one clawed foot raised to his beak. The colorful birdKokerlii lowered his foot and puffed out his feathers, as if completely unmindful of the enormous shadow that approacheddanger beneath.
SixthDusk held his breath. He always did, even still, when unfortunate enough to run across one of these things in the open ocean. He did not know what they looked like beneath those waves. He hoped to never find out.
The shadow drew closer, almost to the boat now. A school of thslinmfish passing nearby, jumped into the air in a silvery wave, spooked by the shadow’s approach. The terrified fish showered back to the water with a sound like rain. The shadow did not deviate. The thslinmfish were too small a meal to interest it.
A boat’s occupants, however . . .
It passed directly underneath. Sak chirped quietly from SixthDusk’s shoulder; the second bird seemed to have some sense of the danger. Creatures like the shadow did not hunt by smell or sight, but by sensing the minds of prey. SixthDusk glanced at Kokerlii again, his only protection against a danger that could swallow his ship whole. There was a reason most sailorsHe had never clipped their AviarKokerlii’s wings, or at least tied them down. Sixth spurned such practices. Bbut at times like this, with a shadow passing directly beneath—so large that it could have swallowed his boat whole—he wondered he understood why many sailors preferred Aviar that could not fly away.
The boat rocked softly,; the jumping slimfish stilled. Waves lapped against the sides of the vessel. Had the shadow stopped? Hesitated? Did it sense them? Kokerlii’s protective aura had always been enough before, but . . .
The shadow slowly vanished beneath. It had turned to swim downward, SixthDusk realized. In moments, he could make out nothing through the waters. Just that endless deep. He hesitated, then forced himself to get out his new mask. It was a newmodern device he had acquired only two supply trips back: a glass faceplate with some kind of leather—perhaps a sheep’s bladder or stomach—on at the sides. He placed it on the water’s topsurface and leaned down, looking into the wate
rsdepths. They became as clear to him as the water of an undisturbed lagoon.
Nothing. Just the bluethat endless deep. Fool man, he thought, tucking away the mask and getting out his paddle. Didn’t you just think to yourself that you never wanted to see one of those?
Still, as he started paddling again, he knew that he’d spend the rest of this trip feeling as if the shadow were down there, following him. Lurking in those endless depths. That was the nature of the waters. You never knew what lurked there. You probably didn’t want tobelow.
He continued on his journey, paddling his outrigger canoe and reading the lapping of the waves to judge his position. Those waves were as good as a compass for any trained in wayfinding. him—oOnce, they would have been good enough for any of the Eelakin, his people. AnymoreThese days, just the trappers learned the old arts. TAdmittedly, t,hough, even he did carryied one of the newest compasses, wrapped up in his pack with a set of the new sea charts—maps fromgiven as gifts by the Ones Above during their visit earlier in the year. They were said to be more accurate than even the latest surveys, so he’d purchased a set just in case. You could not stop times from changing, his mother said, anyno more than you could stop the surf from rolling.
It was not long, after the accounting of tides, before he caught sight of the first island. Sori was a small island in the pPantheon, and the most commonly visited. ItsHer name meant child; SixthDusk vividly remembered well training on her shores with his uncle.
It had been long since he’d burned an offering to Sori, despite how well she had treated him during his youth. Perhaps a small offering would not be out of line. Patji would not grow jealous. One could not be jealous of Sori, the least of the islands. Just as every trapper was welcome on Sori, every other island in the pPantheon was said to be affectionate of her.
Be that as it may, Sori did not contain much in the way of valuable game. SixthDusk continued rowing, moving down one leg of the archipelago his people knew as the pPantheon. From a distance, this archipelago was not so different from the home isleands of the Eelakin, now a three -week trip behind him.