This is by a special request – I on deadline and wouldn’t do this normally.
I did drop the ball on paragraphs, so once EDGE 2 is turned in at the end of the month, I’ll reopen to resubmissions and submissions again and we’ll run the paragraph thing through the month of December.
Let’s see, there we are.
There is nothing quite like the smell of blood. Most people don’t notice it. If they get a cut or a more invasive injury, they are more concerned with other issues. Cleaning the blood off the wound, covering it, dealing with the pain that an injury may cause; those are the things they notice. Some are concerned also with cleaning up any blood that has fallen on another surface. Those folks may notice the smell of blood but only after a few days, when it has started to congeal and rot. It is only us special people who notice the smell right away: the rich, burned iron smell, with an underlying hint of copper. Other scents depend on the person bleeding. Like a good wine, there may be hints of peach, strawberry or caramel. After all, the blood reflects the bleeder. It is their life – in part or in whole – that has drained away.
Okays.
There is nothing quite like the smell of blood. Most people don’t notice it
Just a personal observation – I typically notice the scent of blood right away.
Cleaning the blood off the wound, covering it, dealing with the pain that an injury may cause; those are the things they notice.
Those are the things they are doing. The author here confused the stimulus and reaction. We touch a candle. We don’t notice that we pull our hand away. What do we notice? Ow, ow, ow, hot – the pain. So let’s break this sequence of reactions down to stimuli.
Cleaning the blood off the wound – what would prompt one to do this? Well, bright red blood. We notice the color and amount. Blood bad. A lot of blood – very bad.
covering it – we don’t cover blood, we cover the wound, right? Because we already cleaned the blood in the previous part of the sentence
dealing with the pain that an injury may cause – this is a simple one – we don’t notice dealing with pain, we notice the pain itself.
There are two ways to go here – we can go either with stimuli or with reactions.
Stimuli
The vivid red color of the blood, the severity of the wound, the pain of an injury; those are the things they notice.
Reactions – the paragraph is very focused on the blood itself, so a modifier is needed to keep the reader’s attention on the blood again here.
Blood makes people act. Cleaning the blood off the wound, covering it, dealing with the pain that an injury may cause; those are the things they do.
I would probably stick with stimuli – easier to keep the reader focused.
Moving on.
Some are concerned also with cleaning up any blood that has fallen on another surface.
This sentence is neither here nor there. I don’t believe it’s needed – it doesn’t really add anything to the narrative. We already established that people concern themselves with other things.
Those folks may notice the smell of blood but only after a few days, when it has started to congeal and rot.
We have a bit of an issue here. The author did not do her research or isn’t quite sure what they’re trying to say. Using “congeal and rot” makes these two words appear synonymous; they are not.
To congeal means to solidify or to coagulate, meaning to change from a liquid to a semisolid mass.
To rot means to undergo organic decomposition, to decay.
The smell of rotting blood is not actually a blood smell; it’s the scent of waste product emitted by bacteria which digest said blood. So now our protagonist appears incompetent. Here he/she is going on and on about blood and how spiffy it is and he doesn’t even know what he smells.
Another issue: so far we’ve been discussing personal injury. Blood on an average healthy adult with a minor injury clots within a couple of minutes. Blood pool will start coagulate within ten minutes. When a person bleeds to death, it’s not because the blood is not coagulating, it’s because their heart is actively pumping it out. Now our protagonist is a complete dufus. He doesn’t know the difference between rot and coagulation and he is expecting the second to take an unreasonably long time.
Blood also tends to dry more than rot.
You must do your research. If you don’t know something, your characters won’t know it either. They are not separate independent entities – they can’t google by themselves. You made them and your mind is their limit.
I do not see a way to fix this sentence without adding an awful a lot of my own words and research into it, so we will omit this for now.
It is only us special people who notice the smell right away: the rich, burned iron smell, with an underlying hint of copper. Other scents depend on the person bleeding. Like a good wine, there may be hints of peach, strawberry or caramel. After all, the blood reflects the bleeder. It is their life – in part or in whole – that has drained away.
It is only us, special people, - let’s start with that.
the rich, burned iron smell, with an underlying hint of copper – very nice.
Other scents depend on the person bleeding – This sentence is a little vague. What other scents? Are those shades of the blood scent or are those scents of a person? Because if you wound someone enough, you will smell all sorts of body liquids, none of them pleasant.
Like a good wine, there may be hints of peach, strawberry or caramel. - Most good wines smells of grape and sometimes wood it’s been aged in. Occasionally a hint of sulfur or barnyard. If it’s Sauvignon Blanc, it smells like cat’s pee on gooseberry bush. As a reader, I do not associate good wine with the smell of peach or caramel. Fruit-based schnapps might smell of peach.
(Charlene pointed out that good wine may smell of those things. I do not dispute this fact. I simply state here that I found an issue with this as a reader, based on my experience.)
http://www.aromadictionary.com/articles/winearomas_article.html
Also, and I hate to say it, but comparing blood to wine is bit cliche.
If we go back to the last paragraph, it actually gives us a lovely way out of this conudrum of funky smelling blood: After all, the blood reflects the bleeder. It is their life – in part or in whole – that has drained away.
That is very good.
So when you taste someone’s life, what do you taste? Is it Sunday morning and lazy coffee? Is it sunshine filled afternoons? Is it hope or dead dreams? What scents are floating to a vampire as he sits there crouching above the body. Is it cinnamon and nutmeg of a robust life or faint lavender of a shy quiet soul? There are ways that we can move this away from the wine into other scents by tying scents to emotions or behaviors.
There is not a lot of wrong with this paragraph writing-wise. But there must be a lot of work done on research before it shapes up.
I recommend extensive research of perfume websites and medical websites. The author will be in a much better position if they familiarize themselves with the terminology of the scent sampling and blood properties. I am not going to do the final fixed paragraph, because most of it would be my words, unfortunately.
“If you don’t know something, your characters won’t know it either. They are not separate independent entities – they can’t google by themselves. You made them and your mind is their limit.”
I love this! One thing that has always bothered me is when authors talk about their characters as if they were separate entities. Saying that at times their characters simply refused to talk to them or do things the author wanted them to do. Sometimes I would be so confused how some authors claimed to be sitting back seat while the characters held the reins and told them what to write. I mean you being the author create the story and the characters do you not? Being just a reader and not a writer I wasn’t sure if this was something that I was making a complete naive assumption about. This also reminded me of a interview I read of Patricia Briggs, she said
“It really bugs me when authors say they don’t control their characters; that the character chose to do this or refused to do that. They’re not real people after all. However, once you’ve given a character enough history and set their personalities in stone, you sometimes find that the character you’ve created isn’t pliable enough to easily bend into doing your bidding.”
Anywho Thankyou for the post! Are these paragraphs from readers that they send into you to edit?
Some people use this as shorthand for creative process. That’s the way they see their writing occur. Some people become infatuated with a particular character, which is dangerous, because when an author loves a character that much, they concentrate on writing that character to detriment to others.
And some people are simply being pretentious. ::shrug::
To each their own
Love, pretention, psychosis….
Just my two cents:
“You being the author, create the story and the characters do you not? ”
You being the mother/father, you create the child’s life, don’t you?
To some authors, controlling a character’s behavior sometimes feels just as difficult (read: impossible) as controlling the behavior of a determined toddler. It’s not so much a question of “laziness” in writing the story as a question of how it FEELS to the author.
Put in more realistic terms (i.e., that child is real, the character is not), there is a difference between the conscious process of developing characters and controlling their behavior and the subconscious process of doing the same.
When a character does something outside of the author’s control, one can interpret that as meaning there is a conflict between what the subconscious mind is doing and what the conscious mind is doing.
Sometimes you need to insist upon the conscious side of things; sometimes you’ll find that the subconscious ideas work better.
Depends on the situation.
Anything else could be attributed to Brigg’s quote (as provide by the first commenter) about the history and personality of the character.
By the way, the conscious mind and the subconscious are sometimes VERY different people.