Sanctuary Reviews

Kingdom Come by poison-kills-poison

Kingdom Come

By poison-kills-poison

Judging from your blurb, I think that this story is based on a really good concept. This story reminds me a lot of Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler because the premise is in the same vein. Climate change and the continued disparity between the wealthy and the poor have resulted in a complete socio-economic collapse. Now, our heroes must survive a bleak, dystopian world that operates on the Darwinian principle of "survival of the fittest." Emir and London represent two sides of the "noble class." The first, a journalist who wants to shed light on the conflict that her society wants to stifle in order to continue lining their pockets. The second, a politician who isn't quite sure who he's fighting for yet...and while he's bold at heart and wants to contest the government to make a change, struggles to see his motivations through for the sake of his own survival. This theme drives everything in the story. It creates duality, conflict, and change in your characters. This is a really difficult storytelling technique to master and it's where your work succeeds.

Unfortunately, this story is very, very difficult to understand. Your writing is strong and your prose is solid. But you leave the reader in the dark. Oftentimes when we're writing our stories for the first time, we must tell them to ourselves before we communicate them to the reader. This draft reads as if it's in that earlier stage where you understand the story well and you can picture it perfectly in your imagination, but you haven't rewritten it for your reader yet. And the reader can't see or understand it the way you can, because we don't have access to your imagination. You just haven't had the chance to make it accessible to us yet. And that's okay. This is a necessary and useful place for our early drafts to be. It's simply a part of the process.

I want to revisit chapter one and tell you where I'm lost.

Your opening is absolutely fantastic. You would run, desperate and dogged if you looked outside your window and found a horizon of trees on fire...what a gripping opening sentence. Then things get a little murky. Who could say if it were better or worse to be taken prisoner in a foreign land and to be considered guilty of bending to the most human instinct–survival?  What foreign land? Why is the main character a prisoner? I understand that figurative language can be powerful, but when it's too vague, it doesn't have the impact you may be looking for. This is why the next paragraph is also confusing. It's so far from anything I've ever known. Every elected member of our government should admit the same...but they refuse to. Admit what? I'm guessing to admit that they are responsible for the ruin of their country but this isn't implicitly stated and the reader can't really pick up exactly what you mean through subtext. A lot of this opening is written assuming the reader knows the setting and the world building already when actually, they don't. For example: when our nation's lower house passed a bill to tighten the regulations regarding refuge and asylum, I wasn't surprised. I'm not naive."  This assumes that the reader knows why the house passed this bill or what happened to create so many refugees...when the reader has no idea. We can assume that it's climate change, but all we have to support that hypothesis is the "burning trees" line from the beginning. Is there something in particular that caused this collapse? What is the inciting event? I get that this line is supposed to spark empathy for the character and outrage against the government, but it doesn't achieve this goal because the reader isn't really sure why any of this is happening.

The next part tells and doesn't show, providing background about the "lower house' using a narrative summary. This keeps the reader from engaging in the active scene since there isn't an active scene to engage in. The story could actually begin with the scene itself: Warm sunlight is shining down on the rugged land around the detainment quarters. In a couple of hours, the sun will be unrelenting. The summary beforehand, which explains a little bit of how the government works but nothing about why it works that way, isn't necessary when you can show the state of the country through an active scene.

The confusion continues to build when London interviews the councilman. The reader doesn't know who she is or what her motivations are. We can gather that from "I'm a reporter at the Reverent." But this simply comes too late. Rather than using the opening paragraphs to introduce the reader to the main character, her place in the world, what she thinks of the world, what she is doing, why she is doing, and her theme (the emotional conflict that will become the B plot and drive the story as well as her arc), the first few paragraphs give a very vague idea of a dystopian world and its government without ever answering why things are this way and how it got to be this way. Why are there refugees? Why is the forest burning? Why is London there? What is she doing? These questions should have been answered by now. I have the same questions about Emir when he enters the scene. Who is he? What is London's relationship with him? What does he look like? What does he want? The conversation between them is confusing because we don't know enough about this world to understand what they are talking about. The AFD. The petitions. The water regulations. Since the reader cannot pin down what the main conflict is (what happened?) this feels like a conversation that we're not a part of and simply observing from the sidelines. When the chapter comes to a climax at the end–protesters arrive and the main character is shot–it's difficult to understand what is happening because we do not know why people are protesting. As I continued to read, I didn't find any answers, and the story continued assuming that I knew the inciting event when it was never shown to me.

It all comes down to answering the Reporter's Six Questions (who, what, when, where, why, and how) which are foundational to any kind of writing. It can be particularly difficult to do this in fiction because you must show instead of tell, you must avoid info-dumping, and you must choose the right opening scene that can communicate exposition without boring the reader. I think that you're on the right track, and with a new draft, you will find the opportunity to add this information into the story without it being too "on the nose." Hooked by Les Edgerton is a great resource for writing opening chapters that keep the reader informed on the important things without boring them with summaries, exposition dumps, etc. I also recommend the methods outlined in Jessica Brody's Save the Cat or Lawrence Block's essay Don't Start your Story at the Beginning.

Really there's a lot that this story has to offer and I think that it has some fantastic themes that are sure to connect with your reader. It's just an early draft and it is lacking in focus and clarity at the moment...which is how we all start out. I know that it will be an incredible story later and I encourage you to keep working on it and to take it throughout the entire writing process. Please don't be discouraged by this review. Trust the process. It'll get you there if you stick with it, I promise.

See you, space cowboy