I just discovered your thread and I've started looking at what you have so far.
Reactions as I go -- I'm starting with Chapter 1, so I'm a little behind.
There's a whole lot of exposition in this chapter, a lot of it I don't think you need. Something I encourage my students to do is try to take a sample like this and cut it in half (based on word count) without losing anything important. You can go a long way tightening up the language, but at a certain point you start looking at what's on the page and thinking about what you might really need.
So, you've got this kid, Artemis. That's originally a girl's name (greek goddess), and that throws a whole gender-bending thing into the story I'm not sure you intend.
Then there's stuff like: "he set down the buckets- perhaps a bit too forcefully- and fell to his knees, weeping into the dirt." -- weeping like this is either childish or girlish, traditionally -- and it might just be an odd note, but when you have that on top of the name thing, it starts to feel like a pattern.
Back to the "too much exposition" thing. Make a list of the things that actually happen in this chapter:
1- boy walks to get water
2- boy has a flashback to Orin's departure
3- boy weeps because life isn't fair
4- boy breaks a stick
5- boy returns to the house to find the place destroyed and his master & wife dead
6- boy finds special shirt in the burned ruins of the house
7- boy hits the road.
Okay, so that's what happens. Anything else that's in the chapter can probably be cut out.
- How bad does his master have to be? If they're just going to be dead on the next page? How much do we need to invest there?
- Do we really need two expressions of how unhappy the kid is? weeping AND beating a stump with a stick?
- If there's something else you feel like the chapter needs to have, can you do something other than just tell the reader about it?
Something else to keep in mind: Your reader will engage better if you leave them a little work to do.
Take, for example, one of the more concrete sections of the first chapter -- the description of the destroyed farm house:
The building was not simply on fire- it was destroyed. The door had been torn clean from its hinges, the windows shattered inward. A section of wall on the side of the homestead was torn apart as if a mighty battering ram had tried to knock the entire building down.
The first sentence is
telling. It says "this is what you need to think about what you're seeing" to the reader.
The sentences after that describe real, visible, tangible details. I think the details could be stronger, but they're still concrete details. (When I say they could be stronger: you've got a broken wall, but what kind of wall is it? That matters, because you could say a lot with the broken bits of wall remaining -- if it's an adobe house, then maybe cracked mud is scattered everywhere and ground in deep, heavy footprints, while the lathe beneath sticks up like broken ribs, and so on -- if it's a sod house, or a log cabin, or a cut board house, or plaster, or stone -- each of those will look different if it's "destroyed")
This example in particular stands out to me because what you show with the sentences that follow the first doesn't really live up to what you've told us in the first sentence. If there's enough wall left to see windows have been blown in, it's hard to see it as completely destroyed (my initial response to "completely destroyed" is to imagine a wreck with no standing walls, just a pile of burning rubble, etc.)
moving on in the same paragraph -- there's a passage about thousands of bootprints around the destroyed home, and then this:
Artemis stood, no longer aware of the aching pain in his arms from carrying buckets of water all day long. Without even realizing it, he let the buckets fall, and they hit the ground, spilled their contents, and rolled away down the hill, never to be seen or even thought of again.
That's a lot to make someone read just to finish off saying that you're never going to need to think about it again, or remember it.
And then
He slumped to his knees, staring at the diminished hulk of a structure that was all he had ever known.
Which feels, again, like a feminine reaction to me, but I'm fixated now thanks to the name thing......
And first he stands, then drops to his knees right away? It's like his response to the destruction of the only home he has ever known is to do squat thrusts?
What if those two sections were rewritten like this:
Artemis stood, no longer aware of the ache in his arms. He let the buckets fall, staring at the wreckage of the only home he had ever known.
So, I'm conveying the same basic feel and content for that moment, with far fewer words (about 1/3 the word count, I think). It's tighter, it covers what matters.
That's why the word count game -- and it really is a game -- can work so well to improve your writing. It also cuts against everything you've been taught in school, where your writing assignments were always first judged on word count and length, and you were therefore rewarded for writing frothy, whipped-up text rather than tight, precise, lean prose. If you set an arbitrary goal like cutting the word count in half -- and then go back to your text and look long and hard at what you can remove without losing what "matters" you can't help but make the writing better.
-rg
