My father is a retired college professor and an aspiring writer. He and I like a lot of the same writers–from Jane Austen to Anne Tyler to James Lee Burke. I’ve been sending him some queries to get his take lately, and boy is he a tough critic. His responses have been extremely helpful because he’s great at spotting writerly “tics”–bad habits most writers have that are so ingrained they don’t realize they have them.
In that spirit, he sent me the following e-mail last night:
After reading too many literary fiction queries, I rewrote a
sentence from Anne Tyler:
“The car wallowed back through the slush, with ribbons of bright water trickling down the windshield from the roof” (Anne Tyler).
“With torrents of incandescent water cascading down the besieged windshield from the roiled roof like a towering majestic falls in a lost dystopian wilderness, the swamped car careened through the raging flood of turbulent water and freezing ice.” (dad’s version).
Tee hee.
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