Defeating Fear

/ prettyflyforawhitemom

Looming above them, 20-steps, a leviathan in the 4-year old’s eyes.

“I’ve got you,” I reassured.

Hesitating steps up, nervous smile at the top, then the rush.

Eyes wild, “Big slide again, Mommy.”

8 thoughts on “Defeating Fear”

  1. Cool! I really like the story you’re telling, and especially the dialogue you include. The last quote is great, both as a cute moment and to reveal the “what was so scary” bit 🙂

    On the structural side, the third sentence has a lot of gerunds/nominalizations (nouns made out of action words, like “looming”, “hesitating”, and even “smile” and “the rush”.) These kinds of words tend to make writing less intuitive to understand. I’ve been told to try to turn these kinds of words back into verbs whenever I can. For example, instead of “Hesitating steps up, nervous smile at the top, then the rush”, you can say, “S/He climbs hesitantly, smiles nervously at the top, then rushes down” — and still have the same word count!

    Again, I think this is a really cute story! And you picked some good specific words: looming, hesitate, reassure.

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  4. Cute story and you captured the glee of the four-year-old well in the end.

    I had similar thoughts as Krentner re the third sentence. Also, I wonder if you got the voice confused a bit — the first sentence appears to be an omniscient narrator – ‘Looming above them’ and then the second sentence is in first person. It was a bit jarring and I had to re-read it.

    On the whole though, it’s a cute story! Great effort!

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