TITLE: Graffiti Dome
GENRE: YA Dystopian
In Graffiti Dome, My YA Dystopian novel, Silver fights to free artists kept in captivity. Gabe, her best friend, tries to keep her and her gang from putting their lives in danger. A heated conversation ensues.
I pushed a cracked nail on his chest. “You’re asking me to stop the fight.”
“No. I’m not telling you to do anything, I’m just watching your back.” He looked around the room nervously. “And it’s a good idea to tell them to go home too.”
“You want me to tell them to go home?” I repeated. “You do know everyone here follows their own convictions. Right. Not mine.”
“It’s an emergency.”
“No way! They know the stakes. They’ve decided.”
“They will die tonight.”
“No, but people like us will be sealed off the main barge if we stay home. We can’t let that happen.”
Gabe grabbed both of my arms and gently shook me. “This is not the time to be stubborn, Silv. I only came here to warn you. You save them. You’re good at it.”
The tone of his voice put the jiffies inside me. If they died, it was on me. Not fair.
I screamed at the top of my voice, forgetting where I was, “So what. We piss off some people in the government and you ask us to lay low. Since when?”
People turned around to look at us.
He whispered, his voice croaking, “You think I don’t care?”
I pushed his hands gently away. “I don’t know you anymore.”
His fingers closed up on me. “Yes, you do. I… um…”
He tried to articulate something, hacking up deep feelings he kept bottled up inside.
I shrugged him off. “Stop, you’re acting weird.”
There's good tension here, and a sense of danger. Good!
ReplyDeleteThe dialogue itself needs a little work.
In the first half, you have no tags at all, so it's a bit choppy and hard to follow. Then, at the end of the excerpt, you have a row of dialogue-with-beats-up-front, and it has a repetitive feel. Vary the order in which you do things to give your writing a more natural flow.
"I repeated." -- There is no need to tell us (ever) when a character repeats something, because we can SEE that it has just been repeated (show, don't tell).
"Gabe grabbed both of my arms and gently shook me." This sentence wars with itself, in that "grabbed" and "gently shook" evoke two different emotions. There is nothing gentle about grabbing someone.
"I screamed at the top of my voice, forgetting where I was," You can't scream dialogue, and "at the top of my voice" is a cliché. In all, the sentence is overwritten, and I don't think she needs to scream here at all, as screaming doesn't feel right here. (Also, the sentence needs a period, not a comma.)
Maybe something as simple as:
I was yelling now. "So what? We piss off some people in the government and you ask us to lay low. Since when?”
"He tried to articulate something, hacking up deep feelings he kept bottled up inside." This is a bit convoluted, and it also smacks of slipping into his head, his feelings. I would rewrite this.
This is good!
ReplyDeleteGabe gets a little wordy. For example: "No, I'm not telling..." I would delete the "No" and just say "I'm not telling"
And "It's a good idea.." could be shortened to "Tell them to go home"
And "this is not the time to be stubborn.." can be "Don't be stubborn."
I would like a little more movement. I know this is for dialogue only but sound can't be the only sense used. Just imho.
ReplyDeleteI would like a little more movement. I know this is for dialogue only but sound can't be the only sense used. Just imho.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the comments above.
ReplyDeleteI pushed a cracked nail on his chest. Threw me, I was thinking a nail used with a hammer, but I thinking it's a fingernail. :) It might be clearer to say I pushed MY cracked nail. On his chest doesn't sound right either—to his chest, in his chest. I dunno.
Still over all, this is nice. I like the subtly of the true motivations in the first part.
Great tension here. However, I agree with Sylvia's observations. I think also that you need to offer a better image of the cracked nail because it made me think of the type of nail that's hammered. If that's not what you meant, you should probably reword that. And the last bit from Gabe, how he's trying to articulate something, you've shifted POV here. You need to come from the MC's perspective and describe how his hacking up of deep feelings looks to her or him. How does she know what he's feeling?
ReplyDeleteBest of luck with this! :)