Sanctuary Reviews

In Love and Diplomacy by BritishGravity

In Love and Diplomacy

by BritishGravity

This is a really unique story to find on Wattpad and the protagonist is a breath of fresh air. Avery is a wickedly intelligent woman who is leaving her job at the California attorney general's office to pursue a robust career in politics. She's determined, headstrong, and willing to sacrifice everything to attain her dream. I love the main theme of this story: the value of independence and why holding to it fiercely results in success despite immense challenges. This line got a laugh out of me: "I was an independent, ambitious woman and I did not need a goddamn man or child in my life to my me whole. I had Rolo. I had my job. I had myself. Because it was such a millennial thing to say. "I have my dog, and I have a job that pays enough for me to take care of that dog. That is all I need." I assume that many of your readers will deeply relate.

This story also has a really great sense of humor, from the opening dialogue to the banter between characters like the bit where Kenndy calls Rolo Cujo. "His name is whatever comes to mind." I like that these characters are vibrant, funny, and serious when they need to be. They are realistic.

In terms of the writing, it's mostly solid but the most glaring issue for me was the way exposition was handled. Oftentimes Avery will pause the story a lot to give a speech straight to the camera about her background or how she thinks about things, and since it's not oftentimes written using narrative summary or internal dialogue, it interrupts the flow of the story. Take this for example:

"Cruz has headed home for the day, so I'm heading home as well. It's a little bittersweet to leave." I gave a faint smile, emotions surging through me.

It wasn't lost on me that since it was my last day working here, there wouldn't be another time I walked through the glass doors as part of the team. The next time I saw my coworkers would be as I made my final goodbyes to the team I had worked closely with for four years.

These infodumps are written like story notes copied and pasted into the prose from an outline. There are times when you do use narrative summary and internal dialogue really well to deliver exposition and to show the reader Avery's mental state, like the beginning of chapter two for example:

Because that's what this was: a chance to start over. To move forward. I was moving one step closer to becoming a diplomat. I had cried, I had bled, I had stayed up all night studying foreign policy for this dream. I had sacrificed friends for internships, Saturday nights at the bar for tears over textbooks, and years of my prime for this.

^ That's perfect. It accomplishes so much: it shows the reader what she's working for, it gives some of her back story, it shows her drive, and it helps us get to know her better on an emotional level. It works well in terms of prose because it's written in a narrative summary style–rather than a list of events disjointed from the prose such as the info dumps from the first chapter. I feel the edits required here are minor: simply cutting out the info dumps and keeping Avery's emotional voice active through narrative summary, accomplishing exposition with moments like this one that demonstrate her motivation and what she did to get to where she is now. That's great exposition design and it's really powerful for the reader. But later in the second chapter, you slip back into info-dumping exposition:

Oliver had quickly become like a brother to me. Ken was my ride of die, but Oliver seemed to be along for the ride...

This paragraph could be eliminated by showing the reader the nature of their relationship through an actual scene and allowing the reader to pick up this information through subtext. The dialogue you wrote between Oliver and Avery throughout accomplishes on its own and therefore, this paragraph could be eliminated already without changing the story much at all. My point is, sometimes you nail exposition, and sometimes it's not quite there yet...but for an early draft, I'd say the way it is now is completely acceptable. Sometimes you need to write data dumps in order to design proper exposition later...this is a genuine method of drafting and I really shouldn't criticize it unless this draft is being presented as a final one ready for publication.