Invitation to the Autopsy: Specimen no. 2

A Developmental and Line Editorial Pass on a Flash Fiction from Will Foley

(source image lost to the internet, modified by Emil Ottoman for Cult of the Rainbow Rat, 2018)

Welcome To The Autopsy

The boilerplate introduction I’m probably going to always use minus the Chuck story: Some preface. I’m an editor. I’m bored. I like to share my knowledge and experience. It’s winter. I hate winter. I love reading. I love good writing. I love new voices. And I love to read new work. I also have a thing for seeing things other people haven’t, but it’s just a ME thing, probably.

Every Monday I will make a post in the morning. If you want an editorial pass, notes, a looksie; send me your best, your worst, your problem child, your precious darling, your abused stepchild, at emilottoman@gmail.com.

I will accept emails once a week, on Monday, from 6am CST to 6pm CST US, at that email address. Not in comments, not in DMs, not in any of my other email addresses, but only at emilottoman@gmail.com. Include AUTOPSY (all caps) in the subject line, please. For organization’s sake.

I WILL NEVER PAYWALL THESE POSTS! I AM DOING THIS FOR SUBSTACK, FOR THE WRITERS WHO SEND ME THEIR WORK IN GOOD FAITH, AND FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME!

BEHOLD THE FIRST AUTOPSY IN CASE YOU MISSED IT! LINKED BELOW!

WARNING THIS WEEK I AM INSANE

A winter storm dumped about a combined five million pounds of snow on my apartment’s roof, the ceiling and possibly the roof in the kitchen are caving in, probably going to go tonight when the snow melt hits the sweet spot and it sounds like they’re filming Ryan Gosling doing a remake of Singin’ In The Rain in my fucking kitchen.

My family is small, we’re half of us disabled in some way or sick, we’re neurotic, and at this point, fuckin’ post holiday poor. So I’m taking donations so we don’t end up homeless or in a shelter for more time than absolutely necessary. We’ve cut the electricity to the kitchen, we can’t cook in there, black mold is moving in, I have brain fog now, and DoorDashing one decent meal a day is STILL SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE, so here’s the copypasta if you want to help out:

buymeacoffee.com/Emil_Ottoman Venmo is @Emil-Ottoman, Substack is emilottoman.substack.com (that actually comes with interesting content) Cashapp is $EmilxOttoman Paypal is emilottoman@gmail.com because I can never find the paypal.me link. And there is always the option of buying a shirt (low return) or commissioning a shirt (higher return for me, but labor.)

Developmental and line editing for fiction has also been sliced. So if you're a writer and you want to know your chances of getting published from a freelance editor with 20 years experience, (15 paid) Rates are currently dirt cheap. (And if nothing else, subscribe to the Substack, it's actually entertaining and nothing is paywalled.)

Thank you so much for anything.

- Emil and family

There, now that the end stage capitalist rot misery begging Olympics portion of this embarrassment of a life is over with for the time being, we can proceed.

(I’m also taking bets on whether the ceiling comes down tonight or not! Odds are currently 90/10 for. Bet against and you make a MINT! (note, this is satire, I am not accepting bets and gambling may not be legal where you are.)…. DM me tho.)

THE AUTOPSY

I would like to thank everyone for reading last week. This week I am constrained of mental and emotional bandwidth so I have picked a story that was simple to work and widely applicable. Simply said, I wanted to get the most autopsy bang for my autopsy corpse.

I always enter into this endeavor wanting to help, educate, inspect, and elucidate. I’m neither a prescriptivist nor a traditionalist of any kind when the written word is concerned. My editorial style is holistic and I try to engage the work on its level. This week I have a slim 874 word piece from Will Foley (who I’m having trouble tagging but think… I got right inviting to the byline. If not I’ll edit it later) And I’d like to thank Will and everyone else who sent in pieces, and say that if this goes well we’ll do it again next week.

We’ll do it again next week regardless.

THE TEXT

Short Story

Sometimes beauty brings horror.¹ One sunny afternoon they appeared, floating down from the sky.² A wondrous sight, bubbles with a light inside. The news dubbed them ‘Starlight Bubbles.’ Such an adorable sight to behold, a translucent bubble the size of softball with a small white light inside. They came from nowhere, one minute they were just there, no one knew why, slowly floating down towards the ground. In the first days, the bubbles popped high in the sky, looking like fireworks. Most were in awe of them, some curious, but a rare few saw an ominous sign.³

My boyfriend, Zach, was the latter. I wanted to get a closer look as they floated down closer to the ground, but he wouldn’t stand for it. “They’re evil, I tell ya, pure evil.” I still hear his words.⁴

Although they weren’t evil, in truth, but a weapon, sent to destroy. Most didn’t figure it out until it was too late. We were in our car when they struck. We watched what happened when those damn bubbles popped, coming in contact with a person. Like in the sky, the bubble popped and a bright flash exploded, but if they touched a person and popped, hell came. The flash of light transferred whatever was inside into the person.⁵

Watching the first victims convulse and contort as the bubble consumed was a harrowing sight. Bones cracked, muscles ripped, and they jumped around in a bizarre dance like demons possessed. The human body wasn’t designed to twist and turn like that. Once the twitches were done, the truly scary part happened. Their eyes, those evil, evil, evil eyes, eyes that glowed white and bright as the star inside. Hungry eyes.⁶

Once the bubble popped on a person, they became something inhuman, with an appetite for flesh. They roamed the land, hunger never satisfied. We were lucky; the car protected us, keeping that crazed person away from us that day. Zach drove us away from there, we tried warning people, shouting to stay away. None listened. Caught under the spell of the curious wonder.⁷

Turns out, avoiding bubbles was easy, just seek shelter, and you were safe. The people who got too close to the bubbles, that was a different story. I saw them rip people to shreds: young, old, and in between, even Zach, it didn’t matter who. They had no humanity left, crazed rabid animals to hunt the rest of us down.

Zach and I got separated leaving the city, people lost their damned minds and acted worse than those with the twitches. By the time I found Zach, it was too late.⁸

He saved a little girl from one of those monsters. I say he saved the girl, but it was minutes later she too succumbed to the twitches. He gave his life in hopes she might survive. I still hear her screams in my sleep some nights, but his last words I will never forget. “Just survive!”⁹

Zach was special like that, guess that part of him was what drew me to him when we met on campus. My friends teased me about him, calling him a crazy prepper fool. A downpour fell right before our date. He actually offered to carry me across a small puddle to cross the street. Zach listened to me talk, he remembered I was wearing my flashy new heels, bought especially for our first date.¹⁰

When he offered to carry me, well, I was skeptical at first. I thought he just wanted to cop a feel. He blushed when I said as much. You should’ve seen him, stuttering every word. He was just too damn cute. Being held in his arms, I felt safe. We were meant to be.¹¹

I miss my Zach.¹²

Anyway, dwelling on the past serves no purpose these days. I was so innocent and carefree back then, although it’s been about a year, it feels like a lifetime ago. No, I’m a different person now, I live off the land, far away from people. I found a rundown abandoned farmhouse. There’s an old orchard, grapevines, and so many trees nearby. This place looks like an old Rockwell painting, you’d never know the world fell apart living here.¹³

Zach and I went camping every weekend. Those were valuable lessons. I catch my fish. Even figured out how to catch rabbits and squirrels, critters as Zach called them. And a smelly skunk once, that wasn’t fun. But fruits and nuts are everywhere, so there’s plenty to eat. I surprised myself, Zach’s lessons stuck with me. I started a garden this spring, we’ll see if I have a green thumb.¹⁴

I never looked back when I got out of the city. Even out here, I avoid anyone that comes around. Just me and nature. Whoever sent those damn bubbles had a reason, I figure it’s just a matter of time before they come to claim their prize. Our world will be theirs I suspect. Haven’t seen a bubble in six months, but that doesn't mean the crazed ones aren’t still out there. No, I’ll wait and see. I have all I need out here: peace, fresh air, plenty to eat. Who would’ve thought a beautiful bubble could bring such terror.¹⁵

1. This is the beginning of a good first sentence. In a story this short (a subject I'll address at length in regards to this piece very soon) as a form, you have a sentence, maybe two to hook a reader. In minimalism sometimes it's called a flight sentence and the idea is for the entire story to flow logically from that first sentence.

Obviously this wouldn't be the case in this story. I'm just adding context, and as always, spreading more my knowledge around.

With an agent or acquiring editor you have almost exactly this sentence. This one would maybe get you another line of goodwill.

2. This is where it fails. The leading clause includes vague language, the sentence uses a passive verb construct that doesn't lend well to what I feel like your aims are.

3. rom "A wondrous sight..." to the end of the paragraph.

This story is written in first person perspective, past tense, with an unnamed narrator (I believe, I may have to double check.)

The primary advantage of first person POV is the interiority and the chance to develop a voice for the narrator. In a story where you use this mode, or any mode, but especially in this mode, one thing you have to do, as I said in my first Autopsy, is you must establish authority. The storyteller must exert some sort of authority as being fit to recount a story that is worth reading. You can do this so many different ways. I could spend days writing a document and never list them all.

Fundamentally things that help to establish authority are facts (whether they are true doesn't matter, as long as they are stated as facts by the narrator) details, voice, action, thought, dialogue, something must happen at the beginning of the story to establish that 1. this story is worth listening to. 2. This story is worth telling. and 3. Now let me emotionally dogwalk your sorry readin' ass through this story.

A hook sentence works. Another thing that works is opening in media res. This means starting in the middle of something already going on. Starting in action is good.

It's also always a good idea to give the narrator a distinct voice. Your narrator throughout this piece is vague, an abstraction, I somehow skipped that the narrator was even a "she" until the last sections of the story.

Details are important, in short works they should be precise and applied surgically. Vague or abstract language is nearly (this is a heuristic, there are also always outliers. HOWEVER, I can't bullshit you, this story in its current form is not one of those outliers,) always a quick way to lose your reader.

Think of stories you've read. Emulate them. Take them apart. Cut them apart and see how they tick.

4. In first person POV, and in general, the less exposition you have, the more the story is going to resonate or hit the reader.

Work on dialogue. This dialogue is cliche. People don't talk like this. Unless you're going for a very certain vibe, anachronistic, campy (camp is hard to pull of on purpose, otherwise works people meant to be either serious or entertaining wouldn't be labeled as camp.) No one aims for corniness of this level unless it is incredibly specific because it is VERY hard to pull off.

You're not looking to capture how people talk perfectly, formal experimentalists have tried, and sort of like Finnegan's Wake, it's a very specific flavor of surreal when you try to divest it perfectly to the page.

You're looking to create voices and use those voices to create a simulacrum of how we PERCIEVE authentic speech. This is to say, you want to trick the reader into thinking this is how people talk when you write dialogue.

We have a fantastic weapon at our disposal for this problem though. Visual and print media has trained all of us from birth to have a unique and very strange ineffable understanding between us and the media we consume (the medium doesn't matter, only the message, just the signal) and that is an implicit agreement that if you present a simulation of dialogue near close to matching what we expect from our previous experiences with other media of the same kind, it usually gets labeled as acceptable.

Having said this, dialogue, effective dialogue, how to write it, how to use it, when and where to employ it, and how to format and present it in fiction is an art. There are libraries dedicated to it. Some books are better than others, but maybe check out or look into resources connected to the theory of dialogue in fiction.

I'm big on theory. It's taught me near everything I've ever learned. (Aside from everything it hasn't.) I wish I had some examples close at hand, but everyone is going to give you a completely different list of authors whose dialogue you should dissect.

So I say, choose your own adventure.

5. Your story has good thematic elements. But now we're going to get to the gritty part.

None of this narrative adds up to a coherent story with a beginning middle and end.

The majority of your story is exposition and reportage. There are events that happen, they are told in order, but that order does not cohere into a compelling whole.

There are few identifiable discreet scenes, no characters that are interesting or worth the reader's investment in, and the mystery is left unsolved. (I would say this is an external sci-fi genre with an arch plot mystery and connected disaster story and a romantic subplot. The inner plot of loss to acceptance of change for the protagonist is also important, possibly in first person narrative THE MOST IMPORTANT. But this is DEEP STORY NERDERY.)

Unfortunately since this falls under the umbrella of two of the big external plot forms (sci-fi, and mystery) even if it has literary aspirations, which I can tell it does, it fails to deliver on any of the expectations of the genre forms including crossover literary.

People have expectations based on what you set out in the beginning of a story that you must resolve satisfactorily by the end of the story. Some of these are explicitly stated, some come with the genre, and working in a combined genre with as much as you have going on here is very, very hard to do.

It is impossible to do as expository reportage, which is essentially dead prose.

I would expect that this is a first draft. Use this as an outline. This is one step up from an outline, but it also hasn't been explored thoroughly enough to work as a story.

6. As an example. You could call this a scene in the discrete sense that it describes an event or happening within the text and in the context of the greater theme and subject of the story, however since it is written as exposition, it isn't a scene, it's reportage.

There is no interiority.

There is no sense of place (this goes for nearly the entirety of your story.)

Think of this as a scene that is happening, that the protagonist either took part in or witnessed. Write that scene. A short story is most often composed of between one and three parts that you can discreetly break it into.

While you exhibit core competencies with the language and I believe that with enough time you can become a much better writer, at the structural level of storytelling and narrative cohesion, right now you're not where you want to be.

That's OK though. Everyone who has ever written has been where you are. Immerse yourself in writing, narrative, or theory. Dissect the story of an episode of your favorite television show.

But the building second order building block of all units of fiction is the scene. Without discreet scenes or a tacit understanding that you are playing with form in a formalist way, the expectations for there to be discreet scenes, characterization, voice, and interiority, are going to be there in the mind of the reader while reading your work.

Thank you for submitting your story though, because showing our guts like this is hard. I very much appreciate you for it. And I want you to understand, none of this is personal. I WANT to see this story as you envision it in your head. As long as you're open, curious, and keep writing, you'll get there. (I have one novel that I've been trying and failing to write for a decade. I've written multiple others to completion but not pub in the time since I started that white whale of a narrative. I'm just not there yet, and I know it.)

7. Good concept, some good bits in your prose, now make it a scene.

8. This turn is a subversion of convention. It's a variant of the War of the World's trope. Well's covered that. Open your mind, avoid cliche, be more inventive. And of paragraph, avoid cliches.

9. This could work if written as a scene. In this form it is cliche riddled and has no emotional impact. I don't know who Zach is really, so I don't care that he died.

10. Characterization like this as expository reporting doesn't work after the fact of the event unless very, very carefully done, often by very seasoned writers. I don't know that I would try it. I would suggest moving characterization and details about characters upwards. Other options include cutting details up as authority and sprinkling them among the prose (this is deep minimalist theory, it works, but it's still midline advanced and if you don't do it right, it comes out very wrong. Chuck Palahniuk is a master of this shit, but if you do it and don't do it immaculately, the comparison between him and what you've written will stand out.) Or just start the story with this.

Use a hook sentence, then move backwards.

In first person past you also control time.

You can say "sometimes beauty falls out of the sky and kills you" and then let it hang and move onto "So my boyfriend Zach. Some people say he's a crazy prepper. Well, they're all dead now." (examples, examples, examples, there are a billion ways to fuck a chicken.)

11. Cliche. Make it a scene. Not reportage or exposition.

12. Stating things like this to the reader directly (which is essentially what the narrator is doing, because you're telling a story, they're telling a story) is a very effective way to establish authority early on. Especially if you combine it with sensory detail (think your five senses, but only one or two details is ever really necessary. This is minimalist theory, but it's all over works that aren't even close to minimalist too.) and a distinct voice (I want to know MORE about who is telling this story.)

13. Scenes. How'd she get there. There's a lot more story here than you've written. Write all of that. You can cut it down later.

14. good glimmers of good, but still reportage.

15. Expand on this. This does not satisfy as an ending except that it technically reaches a stopping point. I feel nothing. I want you to make me feel something. I'm a professional reader, basically, if I feel nothing, your average reader will have quit reading by now.

This embryonic draft lacks variation in sentence length and structure.

You should brush up on your grammar. I'm almost never a prescriptivist or proscriptivist, but I have noticed something I heard ALL THE TIME coming up as a little baby writer in the late '90s is severely lacking in any discourse or advice I've seen anywhere lately. I don't even remember the last time I saw it written.

"Learn the rules so that you know what rules to break."

Shit, there, learn the rules, the foundations of story, grammar, etc. Then break the fuck out of them. But first you have to exert domain competence and ideally domain mastery over these things. That's what it means. Shit, there are probably people on Substack that have this one sentence behind a paywall.

Learn the rules so that you can break them better.

Glue words: "Most were in awe of them, some curious, but a rare few saw an ominous sign." 10 of the 16 words in this sentence are glue. Glue is ironically both what holds writing together, and in most good fiction, something you want to eliminate as much of as possible depending on style. As your style and voice is not yet developed, start now with good habits. The glue words in this sentence are "most, were, in, of, some, but, a, few, saw, an." How could you write this differently, eliminate the expository tone, and make it a sentence that carries the same weight with more precision and economy of wording? Or do you want to cut it and write something else? Do you want to expand it?

Interrogate your text. The most important thing that I do as an editor is ask questions. How? Why? What? When? Where? I am in conversation with you through the text and I have questions.

Is there pedagogy involved? Yes, but I try to go light on it and keep it as a take it or leave it proposition. Can I be didactic? Yes. But do I want to impose on your voice or your story unless absolutely necessary? No.

You're starting out or you're stuck. That's fine.

You abuse the word just in this story to the tune of like, 8 times.

That's far too much justing. Justing of that nature deserves justification, but is probably a side effect of the narrative mode of exposition that the story is written in.

Use this as an outline, play around with it, maybe cut it up and find a better order. Hook me. Give me details. There's a story here that developed right would speak to a larger theme involving the human condition (how existentialist of me.)

But in this form, I'd suggest using this as a rough outline of sorts for another draft. any time you fall into a reporting mode instead of the mode of telling a story through scenes, take a break.

Personal issues I will always have as an editor, take it or leave it stuff, but usually good praxis: You have ten instances of the word "that" in this piece. There's almost always a better word in fiction to use than "that" which is both abstract and vague if you're using it in a variety of the ways you use it. It does have its places, but few of them are appropriate here.

And finally, from Dreyer's English (Google it, fantastic book), I have this tacked up in front of my desk and have for YEARS now. It's a list of words to get rid of and doing so almost always tightens up your prose at the surface level. You'll find these words in my fiction very rarely unless I'm using them for formal reason, in which case I will gladly justify them being where they are.

1. very
2. rather
3. really
4. quite
5. in fact
6. just
7. so
8. pretty (as in pretty tedious)
9. of course, surely, that said (a triple)
10. actually

Take 'em out behind the shed and shoot these words in the head early and often, your prose will immediately be tighter. The head copyeditor of the New York Times knows his shit. (He's also fucking hilarious.)

Keep writing, and rewriting, and trying new things. Develop a voice for the characters. Create scenes instead of dumping the story on me in exposition. And don't stop. If you stop you never get better. Write bad stories, write a lot of them. It takes a lot of bad stories to get to your first good one.

Thank you for letting me go over your work. I hope that you keep writing. And if you have any simple questions or want recommendations on books or essays about craft or anything discussed in the autopsy, please email me.

Go home. Show's over. I’m gonna Doordash dinner, wait for drips, and pray.

I meant, THE END. GO HOME.

But come back next week and we’ll do it ALL OVER AGAIN! (or maybe a surprise on Monday?)