[gmw]

Originally Posted by Graham

I also read Annie the Dreamer this morning; as you say, quite a disturbing tale, but I was drawn through the story nicely and it's memorable. I was thinking about it for quite a while after reading it as with a little rework I think it could pack even more 'punch'.[...]

This gets a little awkward to do neatly, but I thought I'd add some comments to your comments...

Spoiler:

Graham said: "It jarred that Annie would leave the younger children behind and go off at the end.[...]"

I didn't have too much trouble with that. A combination of things. While the story is not explicit about Annie's age, my assumption is that she is still quite young, so this sort of reaction didn't seem unreasonable given the violence that had just happened.


Graham said: "First, I wasn't immediately sure who was making the phone call, i.e. whether the opening sentence was spoken by the person on the other end of the call or the person putting down the phone. We don't find that out until the third paragraph."

I did have trouble with the early paragraphs, but for me it wasn't so much the "who" and much as the way the sentences flowed (or didn't).


Graham said: "Secondly, I didn’t know what 'kraft pulp' was, so again I took a beat out of reading the story. Do you need to mention that the cargo is kraft pulp? Would Annie necessarily know? Could you just say 'a ship that was taking on cargo'?"

"kraft pulp" made me pause too, but (this is going to sound silly) for me it was cheese. In my head, Kraft make cheese (in my family we call Kraft cheese "plastic cheese"). It took my mind a moment to review the sentence and realise we definitely weren't talking about cheese.


Graham said: "Annie's silver rings are mentioned in the very first paragraph, and again later on. As a reader, I immediately assumed that the rings were going to be important to the story, [...]"

I was mostly happy with them as a character defining element. This story is something I would probably call a "mood piece", and I thought the rings were part of that.

Originally Posted by Graham

In Annie the Dreamer, there is one paragraph where the point of view shifts from being in Annie's head to being inside someone else's:[...]
Did this bother anyone else? How do you feel about point of view switches like this, generally?

Third person omniscient is allowed to switch points of view, it's allowed to peek into different characters heads and see what they're thinking. Where you run into difficulty is something like this story were we've been with just one character, carefully reviewing who she is and what she's thinking, for long enough that the reader feels as if the character is the only point of view. In which case the introduction of another character makes the switch feel inappropriate.

I think this story perhaps exaggerates the problem because only the first two paragraphs feel omniscient, after that it does seem that Annie is the only POV for a long time. In such a short story it will probably be better to either keep Annie as the only POV, or to give the reader more regular reminders that the narrator is omniscient.