Remember "68 Wives"?

[hmpf]

I said it was almost ready for posting - many months ago. There were just some suggestions by my betas still to consider. Usually this doesn't take so long. However, in this case, one of the problems proved too difficult for me. I've thought about it for months now, yet I'm still no closer to a solution than I was at the beginning. So I've decided to give up on solving it on my own. Instead, I'm throwing it out here for you (the 3.5 people still reading this sadly inactive journal) to ponder. Maybe you can help me. Essentially, the problem is that I have played around with this one sentence so much that I can't "see" it anymore - I have lost all feeling of "right" and "wrong", "good" and "bad" concerning it. I can't tell anymore if it sucks, and if so, how, and where - and how it might be fixed.

(I don't even remember the original version anymore. It's still somewhere on my computer, but I'm at work, so I don't have access to my computer at the moment.)

Here's the sentence:

"Alexa should have, would have been wife #69, and he still remembers her every day, slowly coming to consciousness in the monrning, alone; surfacing from a flood of memory at breakfast - smells of fresh baguette and coffee; watching street performers, and tourists looking up at the Eiffel tower, and children feeding pigeons, alone."

Reactions?

The one thing I can't do to fix whatever's wrong with this is split it up into several sentences - one sentence per wife is the rule for this fic.

Comments

[loz]

Suggest 'the scent of fresh baguette and coffee', and an 'also' before the final 'alone', but apart from that, I like it.

Ah...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

the fact that you suggest sticking in an "also" there suggests to me that the sentence is screwed up even worse than I thought... because that's not what I meant.

Gah. What I really need, I think, is an entirely new beginning for this fic. I'm beginning to feel that nothing can save that sentence.

You're right about "scent" instead of "smell", of course. Classic non-native speaker oversight, that.

(Hi, btw. :-))

Re: Ah...

[loz]

Hi :)

I get that they're in two different time frames, hmpf, but the repetition of 'alone' doesn't scan very well and it should still make sense with an 'also' there. The children were alone, in that time they fed the pigeons and and he is alone, in the morning, thinking about them.

Re: Ah...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Err, no. That's not the issue. The fact is, the sentence apparently just doesn't make much sense at all in its present form. Or at least it doesn't make the sense I intended it to make. *g* And in addition to not bringing my point across, I suspect it reads odd, too.

(I've never been this stumped by a single sentence, I think...)

Re: Ah...

[loz]

You know what they say - keep it simple. Pare it back to one thought - what do you most want to convey?

Re: Ah...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

It *is* just one thought. Or at least it's supposed to be just one thought ("everything he sees, hears, smells reminds him of Alexa"). That it doesn't come across as one proves how screwed up the sentence is...

I'm horribly stuck on this; I just *can't* make myself think in another direction. Grr.

Re: Ah...

[loz]

What's wrong with, 'everything he sees, hears and smells reminds him of Alexa'?

[bistokids.livejournal.com]

It's a very powerful descriptive image - don't ditch it unless you really really have to. I agree it's a sentence with issues (!) but I don't think they're unmanageable. I agree with Loz that the 'alone' is a problem - for me, on initial reading, it was the first 'alone' that was the problem because it wasn't clear whether it referred to him or the wife (well, contextually it is, but gramatically less so, if you see what I mean).

The simplest way to make it read more clearly would be to replace 'slowly coming' with 'as he slowly comes', and then 'surfacing' with 'as he surfaces'. Not everyone likes using 'as', though, so ignore if this doesn't sit well with you. :)

[dorothy1901]

and he still remembers her every day, slowly coming to consciousness in the monrning

It's not clear whether "slowly coming to consciousness" refers to Methos or Alexa.

The rest of the sentence is not clear, period.

[dorothy1901]

Also: "morning," not "monrning."

[beccadg.livejournal.com]

I'll need to think about the sentence more before I feel comfortable offering suggestions, but I do have an immediate reaction. Having read The "Postcards from Alexa" stories some of the show writers did in An Evening at Joe's, I think of Methos as feeling he did marry Alexa.

[herdivineshadow]

I would make "memory" plural, so it's "memories" instead and spell morning with one less "n" :).

Otherwise I think it's the last part of the sentence, starting with "watching". Is he watching all three of those? Perhaps switch the order around so you can have fewer "and"s.... like

"watching children feeding pigeons, street performers and tourists looking up at the Eiffel tower"


and then maybe add a "still" before the alone or some other word with a similar meaning that you haven't just used in the first part of the sentence?

Is it the scent of breakfast that reminds him of watching those things?

[loz]

The problem with that is that it seems like he's watching children feed street performers and tourists.

[jinxed-wood.livejournal.com]

I'm useless at trying to explain what I mean, when it comes to sentence composition, so I'm just going to put here what I'd write myself if I was in your position, hopefully it is helpful :-)

"Alexa should have, would have, been wife #69, and he still remembers her every day; each morning, as he slowly awakes, the memories flood in, flavouring the day before him - the smell of fresh baguettes and coffee at the breakfast table, the street performers as he passes them by, the tourists looking up at the Eiffel tower in awe, while children feed the gathering pigeons...he remembers her."

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

I think that this is much clearer that its previous incarnations if that helps? I don't actually have too much of a problem with it's present form.

One place I probably differ from some others here is that I don't mind the awkwardness of the two alones because that seems like a deliberate break when the reader would expect one or three, but then again, this could be because I previously bugged you to get rid of a third? (Or am I misremembering?) Hmm.

Here's a suggestion - I have made as few changes as possible because it still needs to sound like you:

Alexa should have, would have been wife #69 and he remembers her every morning as he comes to consciousness slowly, alone; surfacing from a flood of memory at breakfast - smells of fresh baguette and coffee; watching street performers and tourists looking up at the Eiffel tower, and children feeding pigeons - alone.

What I've done is cut the "still" because it's implicit in the idea of the sentence and I've rearranged the phraseing of the 'coming to consciousness' section. I'm not thrilled with what I've done there because it's perhaps a little less the disjointed, lyrical melange of images you're shooting for, but most seem to be in agreement that there's a lack of clarity and I think the lack of clarity on what's coming to consciousness may be part of that. So...yeah. Specified it was him waking up. Then, I put the stimuli for his memories and the memories in their own subsection between dashes to more clearly delineate it as a...well it's a trick to make it look like you've got two sentences without really having to use to two sentences. I think it tidies? Gives the reader a natural break?

Finally, putting the last alone on the other side of a dash (even if it was originally supposed to refer to the children and thus be part of the memories section) helps give the section between the dashes the illusion of a pseudo-sentence and also gives it its own stress and importance. Hopefully that makes it scan as a more deliberate repetition rather than laziness leading to overuse of a word?

Um...anyway. Those are my thoughts.

(Oh - other thought, if you were happier being blunter, perhaps a add more clarity to what's a memory and what's causing it? i.e.

Alexa should have, would have been wife #69 and he remembers her every morning as he comes to consciousness slowly, alone; surfacing from a flood of memory at breakfast - he does not smell fresh baguette and coffee; he's watching street performers and tourists looking up at the Eiffel tower, and children feeding pigeons - alone.

[amonitrate.livejournal.com]

OH, don't give up on it. It's a great, lyrical piece.

oddly, i think the punctuation is what confuses me. I feel like there needs to be separation between the initial idea (Methos remembering Alexa every day) and the examples of when he does this (waking, breakfast, outside). The third comma in the third part also create confusion which I think people have addressed above. I may just be confusing the issue further. But what if (and I've changed nothing but punctuation):

"Alexa should have, would have, been wife #69 - and he still remembers her every day: slowly coming to consciousness in the monrning, alone; surfacing from a flood of memory at breakfast - smells of fresh baguette and coffee; watching street performers, and tourists looking up at the Eiffel tower, and children feeding pigeons - alone."

I do think some of the confusion comes from the fact that the reader is unclear who is doing the waking, who is surfacing, who is watching... the reader might assume it's Alexa, as she's the object of the first part of the sentence: it feels like Methos is remembering Alexa as she wakes, and eats, and watches. so the comments about clarifying this might be useful. Adding even the first "as he" and an "or" or two might clarify it enough:

...as he slowly comes to consciousness in the monrning, alone; or surfacing from a flood of memory at breakfast - smells of fresh baguette and coffee; or watching street performers, and tourists looking up at the Eiffel tower, and children feeding pigeons, alone.

[jazzymegster.livejournal.com]

I remember 68 Wives! Sadly all I remember is that one of them was (possibly) going to have been a ninja.

I was about to suggest splitting the sentence until I read that you're doing one sentence per wife. And, off the top of my head, I can't think of a way to change it. Personally I have no problem with it, but I like writing horribly long sentences that are probably violations of the rules of grammar. But as I say, I don't feel anything's wrong with it myself. But you're the writer, so...um...I dunno. Sorry.