There is something magical about these washed out summer days, Regan thought. The army green of the trees racing past the car, the faded blue expanse above, as if bleached from the months of summer. The broken road stretched out in front of them, dirty white lines meeting at the hazy horizon. Regan hung his elbow out the back window, nodding his Raybans onto his nose, and leant his head back to stare up at the sky. In the car, he could hear Lisa arguing with Jay over the music, debating the merits of Triple J versus Jay’s Kooks CD.
Wispy white clouds hung close to the horizon, where the sky paled even further. Regan could see the sun glinting off cars in the distance ahead of them, and the glare reflecting off a lake to the left.
“I spy with my little eye, something beginning with an L,” he said to the car at large.
Tom rolled his head over to glance at him, before returning to the view out of his window. Lisa turned around in her seat and cocked her head, narrowing her eyes in thought. Jay took his opportunity to switch back to his CD.
“Lines?” Lisa tilted her head the other way as she said this.
Regan shook his head. “Nup.”
Tom remained looking out the window, saying “Lake” to no one in particular, in a bored tone.
“Yeah, well, it’s not like the scenery exactly lends itself to a challenging game of eye spy”, Regan retorted.
Lisa rolled her eyes and turned back to the front. “Oh, this is the turn!”
Jay turned in, slowing down as the bitumen road turned to gravel. Regan perked up, taking in the expansive white sand beach coming into view, and the sparkling blue beyond. Jay stopped the car facing the beach, and Tom was already halfway to the water, shirt striped off, with Lisa further behind, dress caught in her hair as she raced to follow. Regan got out of the car, leaning against the door, and smiled at how empty the beach was despite the heat of the day. He raises his eyebrows at Jay, who had now locked up the car, and they both turned and ran across the scorching sand, passing Lisa on her towel, and splashing into the water at the same time.
Short, but I liked it, or primarily his ability to turn the drama around with an I-spy game.
ReplyDeleteI think that one more guess would have let the game feel better delivered for how prominent it was to the overall scene, and maybe cutting the bored tone mention, and perhaps even the eye rolling (if anything, only because for her, I feel like her beef was with the other guy, and from this scene, it hasn't been established why it would be with the POV character, so she begins to just feel randomly bitchy). Some advice I've seen has suggested cutting down the density of between-dialogue descriptors like this, as they halt the smooth reading of the dialogue, where text between should be almost invisible (sticking to lots of "said" etc), and the character actions & volume should be obvious through the dialogue choices (without even needing exclamation marks, which sounds hard). I do find my own dialogue looks better and reads snappier once I cut out some of the fluffy interruptions.
I was a bit confused about there being a fourth person at the end, and where they were relative to the others (The guy appeared on the sand too quickly I think, possibly because it was in the same sentence as the car moving, so it felt like an impossible joined action?)
The first paragraph was maybe a bit too wordy for me, but I'm not sure what I'd cut. Maybe some of the more obscure names for wearables / stations / technology / etc, to give it a more timeless feel (since I struggled with these, not being super involved with that stuff in any decade, but would be able to get more involved in the looser more-timeless conceptual versions of them). Depends on who you audience is though. I'm sure I've read commercial work with that same sort of descriptor paragraph, and it's a hard thing for anybody to get right I think. Neal Stephenson for example does that sort of stuff great. I'd rate the first paragraph otherwise at something like 75% - I'll keep reading for the stuff around it, and am fine with it, and think it sets the scene well, but there's some better way that it can be done which isn't so opaque to me as writing (the stained glass writing concept I think), but I'm not sure what it is, or who does it well for an example.
Bit of a muckup in my last paragraph there. I meant Neal Stephenson does name-dropping great. And I've seen published authors write with the same sort of screen descriptor. Good, but also still feels a bit like flowery writing, rather than an imagination portal. It's fine to get to the better stuff, but at the same time, I feel like there's some authors who are exceptional at it, and now I'm curious about which ones they are.
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