literature

Day of Stones

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Literature Text

I polished the stone on the inside of my sleeve.  It was plain, and flat.  I slung it at the river – plink plink plink.  Perfectly executed, just like my father had taught me years before.

"You want to skim it across the water, son," he had told me.

"Like skim milk?"

My father just laughed, ruffling my hair.  "No, like skimming on the surface.  It'll glide if you do it right."

He loved to skip stones on the river.  Ironic that now his representation was glossy marble.

Clouds loomed ahead. I just picked up another stone.
From here: [link]

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UPDATE 1/14/12: Got it from 166 to 100 words and cleaned it up. Much nicer now.
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HaveTales-WillTell's avatar
:star::star::star::star-empty: Overall
:star::star::star::star-empty::star-empty: Vision
:star::star::star::star-half::star-empty: Originality
:star::star::star::star-empty::star-empty: Technique
:star::star::star::star-half::star-empty: Impact

Thank you for presenting this to #CRLiterature's critique chat. And for reworking it once already, based upon my comments there.

This tightened-up version works much better; you've already eliminated a lot of the redundancy of the original draft. This is one reason I enjoy writing to an artificial constraint, such as '100 words exactly'.

So what's left to be done? One suggestion would be to further distinguish the past from the present; and one way to do this is to use the past perfect tense (the word 'had') rather than the simple past tense. Example: ("I'd polished the stone...")

Of course, if you do so, you'll need to do so throughout, which could affect the word count and force another rewrite; so it's your call.

I like the new ending as well; as I said in chat, it implies a continuation that wasn't there before: to remember is well and good, but life goes on. My only quibble is with the word 'just': again, I find it redundant. Perhaps something like I went searching for another stone. instead?

My last nit to pick is with the placement of the word 'now' in the next-to-last paragraph. I personally think it works better following the word 'representation': Ironic that his representation now was glossy marble. By moving it to a place that's unusual (while still grammatically correct) you add just enough emphasis to drive home the point that the narrator's father has passed on, and everything up to that point was all a memory.

Whether or not you choose to work on this some more, it's a good story with an uplifting message. Thank you once again for sharing it.