starspinner.

Your grandmother embroiders diamond rosettes into velvet with shaking but impossibly exact fingers. Three days later you are outside, stargazing on the roof, and you see stars winking from the fabric of the sky, identical to her silver stitches in that dark velvet. 

Three more nights pass and your grandmother calls you to her side, dark eyes twinkling with a thousand secrets, and whispers to you: have you realised my threads have no colour? They’re as transparent as the glass rose your grandfather gave me for our very first engagement anniversary. Velvet hides the secrets of the stars and only diamond wire can bring them out of hiding. Do not forget this when I am gone, jugnoo. 

And you blink at her with your firefly eyes but your grandmother remains smiling, crows’ feet at the corner of her eyes. Perhaps she senses you understand more than what the night veils tell us. After all, she was the same.

Velvet, makhmal, cloth spun of night and moonshine and reflections where they should be none. Thick and soft and oh-so-mysterious--and wouldn't a velvet mask hide the most, cover the secrets within the beauty outside? Your grandmother surely thinks so--she loves silk and brocade and cashmere but she's always said velvet makes the best veils, makes her heart skip with something unworldly and breathless. 

Three months fly and the nights spin with a million constellations like silver speckled skirts whirling, faster and faster and glimmering with stolen light. We see the stars glittering against the sky but only you and your grandmother see the stitches connecting them, weaving a tapestry of mystery none of us are allowed to read. Sometimes the sharper-eyed of us catch a new twinkle in the sky that matches your clumsy, new attempts at embroidery--but that's neither here nor there. No one can really keep track of the stars except for you and your grandmother. 

It isn’t rare to catch you on the rooftops you’ve always frequented, but more and more you can be found on the obsidian floor of the tailorshop, glass-coloured threads threaded through the silver needle your father gifted you. More often than not you’re surrounded by swathes of fabric in all shades of the universe, but when the sun sets you only work on shades of moonshine and night. Your grandmother was unparalleled at weaving, but now no one, not even she, can spark a candle to your embroidery. 

Three years pass. Your family orbits around you and your grandmother; the two of you are twin stars, bonded, but one is a predecessor and the other is her legacy. You grow your hair out like all the other girls in the village but the only one who braids silver ribbons in is you. Strange travellers visit the tailorshop like clockwork, shiny-skinned and white-robed and oddly dishevelled--they have the same dark eyes as you and your grandmother, but not the same eerie magnetism. They call your grandmother seamstress, spellspinner, silverblessed; ours. They call you starchild, and starchild only. 

Three decades tick-tick-tick down. Your grandmother is still alive and your father is not, and she may have more wrinkles but her hands fly with as much life as ever. You don't have any daughters but you do have sons--neither have your eyes and both have your hair. 

The shop is yours now, and you are the one who makes all the wedding outfits now. Everyone knows that if you favour someone, you slip something special into a pocket sewn along a hidden seam and those marriages always stay the happiest. But you still dance in the same speckled velvet skirts every time any wedding takes place. Your hands twist and your ankles chime with bells, and tiny fires twinkle against the night in your eyes, your hair, your clothes. 

You leave smudges of silver wherever your hands brush. The village hums and so does the sky, and you stay bright with it. 

Author's Note

I don't mind direct/heavy criticism; I'm aiming to improve! Thank you for reading.

Reviews

[Lathen Griffiths]

I really enjoyed this, especially all the descriptions of the night sky, spellspinner etc, also the way you described the passing of various time scales in differing ways, ‘tick, tick, tick down’ etc. A gorgeous title also.

Best wishes,

Lathen

[JayG]

Well, you did ask, so you have no one but yourself to blame. 😆

But before anything else, let me say that nothing I’m about to say relates to your writing skill, or talent. There are some things that are invisible to the author, though, that are getting in the way. And since they are invisible, I thought you’d want to know.

First, you need to do your editing from the chair of the reader, not the author. You begin reading with full context: you know every character’s backstory, their immediate goal, situation, and, what’s about to happen. So if there's something missing, as you read, you'll fill in what's missing as you read. The reader, though, is a blank slate. Look at the opening, not as the all-knowing author, but as that blank slate.

ª Your grandmother embroiders diamond rosettes into velvet with shaking but impossibly exact fingers.

No she doesn’t. She’s been dead for years, and never embroidered. I suppose you’re trying to place the story in present tense to make it seem more immediate. But does the reader know that? No. So they take the meaning the words suggest to them, based on their background, not your intent. And since there's no second first-impression...

See how your own pre-knowledge gets in the way? And this continues. And because you’re writing this from what I call an outside-in perspective, you’re going to assign dialog and attitudes dictated by the needs of the plot, not reason, or logic, or what a person with that personality would do were they living the scene. For example:

Three days later you are outside, stargazing on the roof, and you see stars winking from the fabric of the sky, identical to her silver stitches in that dark velvet.


On the roof? The roof of what? Where are we? When are we? Who are we? You know, so it works for you. But for the reader, the protagonist could be 6 or 60. He, or she, could be alone or with others. For the reader the possibilities are endless, which means they lack context to make the words meaningful—while for you, it’s a living scene.

And…The stars match the diamond shaped stitching on fabric? Out of the city, where light pollution, that would mean the cloth is huge, and the protagonist too dumb to recognize a map of the heavens before then, when he or she is someone enjoys stargazing, and should recognize that starmap.

Using the“tell the reader a story,” approach, the narrator reports events in a voice the reader can neither hear nor duplicate, rendering it dispassionate.

Yes, you’re trying to liven up the narrative with poetic language and present tense, but neither work. Is there really a difference between:
- - - - -
Three more nights pass and your grandmother calls you to her side, dark eyes twinkling with a thousand secrets, and whispers to you: have you realised my threads have no colour?
And:
Three more nights pass and his grandmother calls him to her side, dark eyes twinkling with a thousand secrets, and whispers to you: have you realised my threads have no colour?
- - - - - -
Does replacement of two personal pronouns spoken by someone neither in the story nor on the scene change anything? The same grandmother spoke the same words to whoever this unknown protagonist is.

In fiction, only the narrator talks ABOUT the protagonist, so who cares what tense they use? It's not happening as we read. For someone living the events it’s always first person present tense. But we’re not with that person. Instead we’re with a narrator, hearing summation and overview—a history, not a story. So it can't be more exciting than any other history. And who reads history books for fun?

Sol Stein hit it right, when he said, “In sum, if you want to improve your chances of publication, keep your story visible on stage and yourself mum.” But did our teachers mention that, or explain how to do that? No, of course not. They were assigning us reports and essays, to prepare us for the kind of writing employers need from us: nonfiction.

So, we wrote lots of essays and reports, and got pretty good at writing nonfiction. We wrote a few stories, but used those nonfiction skills for them, because they also didn’t tell us the goal of fiction (or know them, given they weren't taught those skills, either.). As E. L. Doctorow put it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” And we cannot do that with nonfiction skills, because its goal is to clearly and concisely explain.

What we all forget is that professions—and ours is one—are acquired IN ADDITION to the set of general skills of our school days. Or as Mark Twain put it: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

But that’s fixable. And given that pretty much everyone falls into that trap, you have a LOT of company. So it’s no big deal.

You’ve also noticed that on the page there isn’t the excitement the story had in your head, and just after you recorded it. so you took an approach that many do, transcribing the narrator telling the story, as if to an audience. Unfortunately, verbal storytelling is a performance art, where HOW you tell the story—your performance—counts as much as do the words. But how much of that performance makes it to the page? Not a trace. That’s why we can’t use the techniques of one medium in another.

But…when YOU read it, the entire performance is there, which is why you didn’t notice a problem. So, the solution? Simplicity itself: Add the tricks the pros take for granted and there you are. Sure, there’s study and practice involved…lots of it. But that’s true of any skill, and if you’re learning something you want to know more about it’s far from hard labor. More like going backstage at the theater for the first time. And of more importance, it’s filled with, “So THAT’S how they do it?

A good place to begin is with a few books on technique. There’s no pressure, you work when you have to, at your own pace, and, no tests. What’s not to love?

The library’s fiction-writing section can be a huge resource. Personally? I’d suggest Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer, which recently came out of copyright protection. It's the best I've found, to date, at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader. The address of an archive site where you can read or download it free is just below. Copy/paste the address into the URL window of any Internet page and hit Return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

I know this was pretty far from what you hoped to hear, given how hard you’ve been working in this, and how much of an emotional commitment that requires. But since we’ll not fix what we don’t see as a problem, I thought you’d want to know. And, for what it might be worth as an overview of the professional skills you'll be learning, the writing articles in my WordPress blog are meant to give a taste of the major differences between what we learned and the tricks of fiction.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/