First Line Frenzy™ No.525

Adult mystery

Concealing his intentions behind a smile, he knelt beside her bathtub where she reclined in serenity, this woman he’d once loved.

This line gives major creep vibes, but…murdery? And while I’m totally here for that, I suspect we can turn the volume way up on the degree to which this line is disconcerting.

The first step I’d take here is to name names. Our female…erm…soon-to-be victim (?) is defined by “this woman he’d once loved” — a fascinating way to categorize a person, and worth unpacking in detail when we finally get our hands on the published work. For now, though, I wonder what it might do to this sentence if we replaced “woman” with “wife”? If we’re looking at a married couple, does it not add a certain potency to say “the wife he’d once loved”? If they’re not married, this is a moot point — but as FLF die-hards know, we love to get as specific as possible in line 1.

Now we can turn our attention to the male…erm…soon-to-be perpetrator (??). Defining him with a first name will accentuate the disparate agency between himself and “this woman/the wife he’d once loved”. The other language choices in this sentence are clearly asking us to recognize a distinctly uneven power dynamic between these two characters: her, vulnerable and presumably naked, reclined and serene, versus him, predatory and hiding stuff and also probably clothed. If we can underscore this dynamic by giving him a name and leaving her defined only by her relationship to him, all the better.

Next I’d like us to consider the awkwardness of “her bathtub”. Is the tub exclusively for her use? Or is it just the bathtub she’s currently occupying? Using a possessive pronoun here, when we have four other pronouns in the sentence, puts me in Pronoun Overload. This is similar to Preposition Overload, when a sentence asks us to look in too many directions at once. My brain always conjures this gif during such trying times:

Pronoun Overload makes me want to shake the book until a name falls out. So far, this has been ineffective.

EDIT 1: Patrick concealed his intentions behind a smile as he knelt beside the tub.

EDIT 2: Patrick concealed his intentions behind a smile as knelt silently, loathe to disturb the wife he’d once loved while she soaked serenely in a claw-footed tub.

The first edit totally disregards everything I said about power dynamics, and focuses exclusively on Patrick’s powerful shadiness.

The second edit brings the power dynamics back into play, and does a bit more scene-setting too.

Both options are functional; they eliminate Pronoun Overload and underscore the Real Bad Vibes™ we get from the male MC. What do you think? Which edit would you choose?

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