Mary Had Faith
Every person has something that they believe in. (’every person’ is singular. use he or she–or he or she if you want to be PC. Personally I say screw PC and just stick with one pronoun) For some it might be science. For others it might be religion. (iffy about the fragment use, but for the parallelism leading to the following sentence, i guess it works) For the people sitting in the Walker Baptist Church one Sunday afternoon, faith was something that they all had. Their faith came in varying degrees, of course. The pastor stood at the pulpit tediously reciting verses from the bible (Bible. there’s a difference between the two) which he had read front to back more than twelve (might as well use ‘a dozen.’ It’s such a common phrase that it’s almost cliche, which fits the vapid description of the pastor.) times already (extraneous) in his lifetime. Old women sat in the front row of seats struggling to make eye contact with him. Sitting in those seats every Sunday was a sort of twisted bid to secure a place in the heaven for them.
(it’s a very subjective call, but this opener felt a bit disjointed. you talk about faith in varying degrees and then jump to the pastor. i know that the following sentences are meant to show the degrees of faith, but the transition from the statement to the examples was not smooth. it’s my own opinion though and others may see it as perfectly fine, so ignore this if you see fit. )
For a ten year old girl, it seemed as though the altar were miles away from her. The haze in the crowded hall certainly did not help to counter this illusion that was cast upon her(extraneous). She couldn’t (contractions are generally frowned upon, even in creative writing pieces. if your professor doesn’t mind it, ignore this comment) help but watch a piece (i’d use speck. piece sounds awkward in this usage, but that’s probably just me. get other people to opine) of dust flutter in the wind created by the four ceiling fans which were attempting to fight the heat of that day away. She tried to pick that piece of dust out of the air several times but failed to catch her elusive prey each time(redundant). Are my eyes playing tricks on me? She began to think to herself before her mother quickly smacked her hand out of the air. (expressing thoughts in a narrative essay or creative story has various styles and i suggest consulting an english tutor or a random english prof you happen to see. italics may be used, or single quotes, or may even be as you have it. personally in a narrative i try to keep the point of view the same. also, i’m not sure about having two separate sentences. i suggest combining them. ex: She wondered if her eyes were playing tricks on her as she continued to reach out for that speck, until her mother quickly smacked her hand out of the air. hmm… not too happy about my own construction, so feel free to make up your own, or again, ignore my comments. stylistic opinions are more open to debate than basic grammar rules–which can also be argued over–so all of this boils down to what you want to change and what you don’t, depending on your own stylistic preferences)
“Mary, will you stop fidgeting? Sit still and pay attention like everyone else,” her mother hissed at her. She didn’t even notice that Mary had a slight cough that day. (choppy. fluid writing is usually preferred, so either combine into either a compound or complex sentence, or reword to make the transition smoother. i assume you’re trying to show the irony of her mother telling Mary to pay attention, so try to put that in one sentence to emphasize the relationship)
“Yes, Mama… Sorry,” she replied quietly. Mary gave her mother the same type of apology that her brother had invented years before. She learned to be respectful and humble, (remove the comma) when her mother would snap at her. If she wasn’t (are you using the subjunctive mood here? if so, you should change it to were not or weren’t. if you intend it as a conditional statement taken to be true–meaning Mary really isn’t respectful or humble–you can leave it as is) that way, her mother would be smacking Mary behind her head instead of fanning the sweat off of her own face. (i assume her own refers to the mother’s face? best not to have vague antecedents/pronouns unless you know what you’re doing stylistically.) Mary was a smart girl for her age. Unlike her brother, she never set the carpet in the living room on fire or got detention almost every week. Her father made sure that she knew better. She was his favorite and everyone knew it. He would always yell at her brother if he found out that he hadn’t been watching her like he was supposed to (vague pronouns. clarity is key, but you have to watch out for repetitive uses of your antecedents, too. reading “her father” and “her brother” over and over is dull, so you’ll have to strike a balance between fluidity and clarity by varying the nouns). He would say things to him like, “Bobby, you should know better than to go out to the park and leave Mary alone,” or, “You better not let her out of you sight! You understand me, Boy?” Mary couldn’t help but wish that her father was (were. Wishes definitely fall into the subjunctive mood) there with her mother and brother at church that day. At least that way, Mary thought to herself, she could sleep on his shoulder. The pastor up at the altar always seemed to put her to sleep.
When the mass finally came to an end almost a half hour later, the pastor ended with a question for the parishioners to think about (i’d add for here, although you can leave it as is. up to you) that week.“How strong is your faith?” he asked the crowd as they started to shuffle around, getting ready to leave.
“What kind of dumb question is that? If we didn’t have any faith, we wouldn’t be spending our Sundays here right, Mama (i read this several times. i’d put the comma after here because that is where the pause naturally falls for me. read this aloud and see where the pause lies for you)?” Mary’s older (does she have a younger one? when you introduced Bobby, you just mentioned him as Mary’s brother. I would have put the word older in that earlier sentence, because adding this piece of information so late seems odd) brother asked as he started to stretch out his long arms and legs. Mary’s mother stood up to leave along with the rest of the church goers in the hall and smacked Bobby on the top of his head. “He asked how strong your faith was Boy, not if you had it or not.” (generally another speaker warrants a new paragraph, but again, stylistic preferences) She looked down at the old watch that hung on her thinning wrist and started for the doors. Bobby and Mary followed suit. Their mother had to be at work in less than an hour. She always had to rush to get there on time. The pair of siblings wouldn’t see her again until a quarter past nine that night. Managing a diner took up a lot of their mother’s time.
The small family went their separate ways on the corner of the block that the church was located on. She reminded the two about the chores that they had to do that afternoon and walked briskly across the street towards the diner. Mary coughed. Bobby nodded along. It was a typical Sunday afternoon for the family. Bobby walked ahead of Mary on the way back home. He would look over his shoulder every now and then to tell Mary to hurry up. Mary would always wish that she had longer legs like her brother when he did that.
When the two finally made it back to their home, Mary Instinctively (instinctively. remove the capital) went for the mailbox as Bobby unlocked the front door. Mary had to get on her tip toes (common slang is tippy toes. if you wrote tip toes to be a bit more formal, you may as well write on the tips of her toes; otherwise just leave it as tippy toes. however, you can reword this to use the verb tiptoe–Mary tiptoed to open… how you want to do this is up to you) to open the box and look inside. There was nothing new inside the box except for a dead leaf. How do leaves always get in here? Mary asked herself. (same as before. ask what style is used for expressing thought)
“There’s no mail on Sundays, butthead.” (it’s fallen out of use with many writers, but generally it’s best to state the speaker. you don’t have to keep writing “Bobby said” or “she said,” because there are other ways to add details to dialogues, which i’d suggest you look up to add variation in your writing)
“I know… but I like to check just in case, you know?”
“Dad’s not going to be sending us anything. All we ever get from him are bills that he owes people. So stop being stupid and get inside. I’m going out with some friends for a bit” He opened the door to let her in and walked down the street and around the corner past the Jewish deli.
Mary could have argued with her brother that he wasn’t supposed to go out, but she knew that he would go out anyway. He always did. Their mother wouldn’t even notice that their chores weren’t done. The next week, she would tell them to do the same chores all over again. She felt too sick to argue anyways (anyway. anyways is nonstandard and should be avoided unless you know why you’re breaking the rules).
When Mary tried to get out of bed the following Monday, she woke up with a cold sweat and a high fever. Her mother diagnosed her with a cold and decided that she should spend the day in bed. Her mother only did this, of course, after yelling at Mary to get out of bed and go to school before she ended up late for work. (same as earlier comment: one usually starts a new paragraph for dialogue) “You’re going to have to take some cold medicine and rest up. Here’s some money for food. The number for the Chinese place is on the fridge. I’ll be back late so you’re going to have to take care of yourself today okay, girl? Rest up, ” her mother told Mary in less than a minute as she rushed to get out of the door on time. (is there a reason why Boy is capitalized when Bobby is addressed, and girl is not when referring to Mary? subconscious sexism? rofl. anway, keep your writing consistent. either capitalize both or leave both of them in lowercase) Bobby left for school without saying a word to anyone. Mary was going to miss school that day. Her perfect attendance record would be broken by a cold. She would be half a chapter behind in her classes. She wouldn’t get to see her friends. She was home alone. There wasn’t anything on television except for boring soap operas that didn’t make any sense to her.
The only good thing about that day, Mary thought, was that she would at least be able to check the mail before anyone else. That was always the high point of her day. She would check (checked. generally it’s good to keep verbs active and tenses parallel) the mail almost religiously. She had to be the first one to get to the mailbox; otherwise, her mother or brother would throw away all of the junk mail. (i think the two sentences are so closely linked that they should be in one sentence, hence the semicolon) Their definition of junk mail was different from the one that Mary had. To the other two members of Mary’s family, junk mail consisted of flyers, phony letters telling them that they had won a cruise, and solicitations from credit card companies. Mary thought that junk mail was like that too, except that any letter with the name Joseph Scott was a treasure.
Whether it was a bill that he wouldn’t be around to pay or a newsletter from Caesar’s Palace, Mary always sorted out her father’s letters. She picked up this habit when her father tried to teach her how to read names using the mail. When Mary was still small, her father would tell her to look for his name on the envelopes. Little Mary would look for the J in her father’s name and pile his letters into a neat stack. She paid little attention to the steady flow of bills that her father would always get. It didn’t matter to Mary. She was just happy to be able to spend time with someone who actually paid attention to her.
Mary’s mother and brother would simply throw out whatever mail came in for the fourth member of their family now. “I should just go down to that damn post office and tell them to stop sending his bills here. That man doesn’t even live here anymore.” Mary’s mother would mutter to herself whenever she would see his letters in the mail (choppy. trim and reword into one fluid sentence). During the first month after her husband left, Mary’s mother went on a witch hunt for anything that the man had left behind- which wasn’t very much(most American writing guides call for em dashes if you want to add parenthetical information, and that em dashes are to be closed (no spaces between the words. so it should be like so: behind—which. or maybe you prefer en dashes? some writers don’t like the length of an em dash and so they purposely disobey conventional usage. ask a tutor or a prof. about what is permissible). She wanted nothing to do with them. His letters all went into the trash. She made Bobby and Mary follow suit. (no she didn’t… tried to, yes. made one of them, yes. made of both of them, no.) Bobby obeyed without question. It wasn’t much of a loss for him. Mary managed to save most of the letters that came in for him since then. She reasoned that whenever her father came back, he would want to know what came in for him. It’s (avoid tense shift. “It had.” since you’re writing has predominantly been in the past tense, keep it so) been almost two years since her father left.
Mary had just called in for some Chinese food. Sweet and sour chicken with pork fried rice was her favorite. She looked at the clock hanging in the kitchen. It was twelve forty-three. The mailman would be at the door in a couple of minutes. Mary was so excited about getting the mail three full hours before she usually did. She sat at the kitchen table wondering what type of letters her father would get that day. Mary would get excited whenever he got new mail from a place that had never sent him anything before. His usual correspondents included the likes of casino resorts, collection agencies, life insurance companies, and various universities telling him that he can get a degree in less than four months. A footstep onto the small porch of the house snapped Mary out of her daze. She rushed towards the front door, coughing slightly along the way. The doorbell rang. Mary slowed down and took her time getting to the door. It was the Chinese food.
Jimmy Wong stood in the doorway with Mary’s lunch. Mary was a little surprised to see him standing there. She usually saw him whenever they ordered for dinner. He was about the same age as her brother but stood several inches shorter than him. Shouldn’t he be in school? Mary thought to herself.
“Didn’t think you’d be home at this time of day. That’ll be eight fifty,” Jimmy said as he handed Mary her lunch. Mary traded him a ten dollar bill for the food. The smell of greasy chicken and rice made her stomach rumble.
“Shouldn’t you be in school or something?” Mary asked.
“Chinese holiday. My parents made me work. Go figure,” Jimmy quickly answered.
Mary started to reply that she was home sick to the delivery boy. She wanted to talk to him a little bit more. She hadn’t talked to anyone all day. But she forgot to finish her explanation as she saw the mailman walk up to the house, though. “All right the mail’s here. Keep the change, Jimmy.”
“Uhh… okay thanks.” (Uh, okay. Thanks. <–standard punctuation. stylistic preference which can be ignored)
“I’ll see you later, Jimmy. Thanks for the food.”
“Yeah… See you later Mary, (Yeah. See you later, Mary)” Jimmy replied a little confused at the sudden cold-shoulder from the customer he thought was becoming an actual friend (wordy). He walked back to his bike and rode away. Just another person that was too preoccupied with their obsessions to care about other people.
The mailman walked up to the house and deposited the letters for the address that day. He didn’t bother to give the letters to Mary, who was standing right next to the box. He just opened the black plastic lid like he always did and dropped the bunch of envelopes and papers inside. He was barely paying attention to anything at all. This was the same mail route he had taken for the past four years. He just went on with his business and listened to the walkman in his pocket the way he always had. Unlike her mother, Mary didn’t mind this type of treatment at all. She was too preoccupied with what mail might have come in for her father. It really was the best part of her day. Was he pre-approved for another credit card perhaps? Was Bernie Mac performing at the Bellagio again? As she held the envelopes in her hands, it was the closest that Mary had felt to her father in months. The special offer from Camel cigarettes reminded Mary just how much her father liked to smoke. He once got a silver cigarette case from the company with his initials engraved on the metal casing. He always carried it with him whether it was full of cigarettes or not. She could have sworn the envelope from the Camel Company smelled like him.
Saving her father’s letters from a disgusting fate in the trash was no easy task. Mary had tried several places to hide her father’s mail before settling on the old filing cabinet in the attic. Hiding letters underneath her bed worked at first. She stashed her father’s mail there for about a month and a half before her mother finally found the time to clean the house. Mary frantically stuffed the letters into a shoebox in her closet to hide them from her. Before long the shoebox was not enough for all of her father’s letters, though. She spent an entire weekend searching the house for a better hiding spot after that incident. She found the filing cabinet under a veil of dust and webs. It had been sitting in the attic holding empty folders since before a happy family of four moved in six years ago (awkward. needs revision or possibly deletion). Mary deposited the day’s letters in an envelope labeled September in the bottom drawer. Mary had faith that her father would come back to her and the family one day.
Mary believed that her father would come back for her throughout grammar school (awk). She believed that he would patch things up with her mother and that they could be a family again. She believed that he was a good man that simply fell into some bad circumstances. He couldn’t help his tendency to gamble and owe the wrong things to the wrong people. It wasn’t his fault. By the time she was in junior high, she figured that her father was in some far off town working off his debt. That’s what she told her friends. She didn’t have many to tell that to. She was too busy studying. Bobby just said that he was dead. Throughout all that time, she kept her father’s mail. There were four filing cabinets in the attic now (where did the three extra cabinets come from?).
She believed that her father would be back any day until her second week of high school. (awk.) Mary had been accepted into St. Patricia’s All Girls High School (is that really the name of the school? i laughed a little when i read “all girl high school.” probably because of Jimmy, but it sounds like it was founded by a chinese person. xDD). She was a smart girl after all. She was able to go there for a fraction of the actual tuition. Mary’s first week of orientation at the school warned her about the homeless men who regularly passed by the school to stare at the school girls. They were ungodly perverts according to the nuns. On her way to algebra class one Tuesday afternoon, Mary overheard a nun talking with a teacher.
“Those bums are good-for-nothing oafs that have nothing better to do than sit on a public bench, drink liquor, and stare at young girls all day. It’s disgusting really.” (wow. that’s some nun. i never imagined nuns calling other people good-for-nothing oafs. then again, i probably have a naive view of religious servants.)
“It’s a shame. Some of those men could have done something good with their lives. Now they’re just drinking them away.”
Mary agreed with them. She thought that people like that should at least try to improve their situations. She thought that they should have strived (strived and strove are considered acceptable, though I usually use the latter because it’s conventionally an irregular verb. but as linguistic conventions change, what was once unacceptable may be regarded more favorably. this is probably a minor issue which you can ignore, but ask around to see what they think. EDIT: i realized you were using past perfect, so you’d use the past participle striven. but i think strived may be considered acceptable in this form as well) to do something with their lives. She was glad that her father wasn’t the type of person to end up living on the streets. She believed in him.
Despite the fifty-five pounds (damn! crazy ass school! my mcnair backpack didn’t even push thirty) worth of books on her back, she walked home from school in an excited pace. Mary didn’t bother to say much to any of her new classmates. She just wanted to get home and check the mail. Those girls were too busy chatting about the boys in the prep school uptown to notice a girl as small as Mary walk past the boundaries of their clique. Today wasn’t just any Tuesday for Mary. It was the second Tuesday of the month, the day that her father would be getting the monthly newsletter from the Camel cigarette company. There was a special offer that month on filtered menthols. She thought to herself how much her father would’ve loved the deal.
As she turned the second corner from school, Mary walked into the mangy trench coat of one of the drunks that would hang around the school. The sudden stench of urine and liquor in her nostrils made Mary want to drop her bags and run back home.
“Sorry,” she quickly apologized and started to continue walking. (redundant. either remove the “Sorry” or change the description.) It was the usual reply for bumping into someone, homeless or not.
“Shtuupid galshs… watch where… you goun’,” The man grumbled loudly through yellow teeth and a gnarled beard. (remove the capital. also, i think this sentence is sort of awkward to read, but you can ignore my grumblings. lol)
The man looked like he hadn’t bathed in weeks. Mary decided to brush off the drunk (i know what you meant, but i still got the mental image of Mary actually brushing and patting the drunk. rofl). A man like that was nothing but trouble, so she continued to walk back home. Her father’s mail was waiting for her.
“Haha… Thas’ right keep walkin’! Shtuupid gurl. Go run on back to yo fuckin papa!”
Mary clenched her teeth at this and continued to walk away faster. The smelly steps of the drunken man started to follow her across a busy intersection. (was this line break intentional? it’s hard to tell whether it was an accident or you were starting a new paragraph since web formats can be confusing)
“You lishinin to me gurlie? Hey! You lishinin!?” The (lowercase) man yelled at Mary as he stood in the middle of the street. (double punctuations aren’t accepted by many professors. because you already stated the man was yelling, just use the question mark) She tried her best to ignore the man. He was obviously a no good drunk.
“Shtupid gurls, I’m glad I don’t have a shtupid kid like you!” The man barked at Mary again. He took in a deep breath as he prepared to send another volley of insults at Mary, before he was run over by a speeding truck. (LMFAO!! mad random, but oh man, this was just win. not sure how your prof would react to this, but i found this sentence very entertaining. yeah, i’m cracked in the brain… x__x ) Trying to make the yellow light before it turns red is never a good idea. Mary turned around after hearing the crash and thud that came from behind her. She was left speechless as the man laid (lay. yeah, the lie/lay difference can get confusing, but the verb you’re using is lie, and the past tense for that is lay) dead on the asphalt. His blood spilled into a nearby sewer drain. A silver cigarette case fell out of the man’s jacket. Its faded glimmer numbed her (i’d use Mary’s name here to avoid too many pronouns) entire body. She slowly edged her way toward the shiny metal case.
“Papa?”
Notes:
forgive my use of the dreaded red. overall it was a good read. my main quibbles, however, include the following:
~ your writing is sort of choppy. it is effective in several parts because the pauses provided emphasis, but other times it makes the reading awkward because there little fluidity from one sentence to the next, or from one paragraph to the next. with that said, the way you added new details felt sort of tangential, sort of like “oops. i forgot to mention this, so let me just add it here.” if that is your style, then all the power to you, but i think what you put up just lacked a lot of editing and revision.
~ i will assume that you purposely left out the phys. desc. of the characters, so i will ignore the lack of details in that area. But no phys. desc. also stunts your description of movement. Usually more details are preferred, because readers are trying to visualize the story. but the thing to keep in mind is the “show, don’t tell” policy most teachers want. that’s not to say you have need to be like Charles Dickens. There are some writers who have written amazing stories with just spartan dialogue and reactions. I would suggest reading Hemingway’s “The Hills Like White Elephants” if you want to use that style.
~ however, with those aside, i think what is seriously lacking is tone. either the description is flat or nonexistent. for the ones you do have, you need a bit more variety in describing the tone of your characters’ voices. Instead of “said quietly” use “whispered.” one less word to use.
~ speaking of less words, there are many phrases and sentences that can be revised or removed to streamline your narrative. with the words you remove, you can balance that by adding details to smooth out the flow from one idea to the next.
~ your writing is quite casual. maybe a bit too much? i don’t know what this story is for, but even creative stories given for submission tend to limit contractions to dialogue. also, you have conventional phrases peppered about that makes this story read like an rpg post or a fanfiction. i compared this to fanfiction because most fanfic authors write like they talk, which does not always translate well to text. i’m not trying to be insulting by any means, but i think this just needs more polishing to let your writing ability shine.
many think editing and revision are just fixing the grammatical errors, but obviously there’s a lot more to it. sometimes you need to move things around, reduce, embellish, or in a student’s worst case scenario, redo entire paragraphs or even the entire thing. I don’t think your story needs to go to that extreme, but there are definitely things to work on. I’ll have to give you mad props on this though. Creative writing is very difficult to do and I’m not so keen on it myself. hopefully my notes can help you see that writing is a laborious task that can require several draftings. i’m not sure how much work you want to put in, but if you are committed to tightening your writing, the end is result is so worth it!
as for general input about the story as a whole, i will abstain from making such comments. i avoid creative writing like the plague because i suck at it, so i can’t help you in that regard, and other people can give better creative input.
Read Comments
Post Comments
XHTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
* Required. Your email will never be displayed in public.
Posted by Hans on 11.25.08 1:22 pm
Wow this is just what I was looking for. The story was for my creative writing class and is still in its second draft. Most of the people who do peer editing just check for grammatical stuff. This was a big help. Thanks a lot George
Posted by Hans on 11.25.08 1:32 pm
on another note: Soo much red @_@
Posted by Hans on 12.03.08 3:34 am
what do you think is a better ending?
The homeless guy gets run over and Mary finds out that it’s her father.
or a more subtle
The homeless guy shouts some more insults and walks away. Mary then passes by a pawnshop with the cigarette case in the window sill. She doesn’t notice and just goes home and continues her crappy belief.