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Lee wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hands. His throat was dry and each breath required more effort. On any other day Lee would have been thrilled to drive the new soviet imported M37 “Red Star” tank. Today it felt like a cage.
Lee peeked out the view port in front of him. God damn it, he still won’t move. He wore a white shirt and black pants and in his left hand he carried a brown duffel bag with the words Tsinghua university stitched in red letters across the flap.
He’s probably my age…
Lee had tried to move around him a few minutes earlier but the kid kept stepping in front of his tank like a suicidal gazelle confronting a pride of lions.
Even with the growl of the tank engine, Lee could still hear him shouting.
“You crush your own countrymen? The people you swore to protect! Are you a soldier or a murderer?”
Chhhhhht “Sergent” Lee dreaded what was coming next, “what is your command?”
How the fuck should I know? Lee stared at the communications intercom unit. It was more frustration than rage. Lee knew there were three men sitting behind him in three tanks as confused as he was. But he was the Sergent and they looked to him for command. That’s how it works in the military, you get told what to do and you do it. Lee was told to “clear out” the “traitors” and “anti-revolutionaries” and that had occupied The People’s Square. Lee actually felt excited when he his unit got the order. Growing up he had loved listening to grandpa tell old army stories of how he fought off the evil devils that invaded their homeland. How through sheer bravery they were able to win against odds that seemed too fantastical to be true. How grandpa’s friend Niu Bi bayoneted three foreign devils by himself when he ran out of bullets. Now was his chance to protect his country.
*Clank, clank, clank.*
Lee flinched and jerked his head back. What the hell! Did he just climb onto the tank?
*Thud, thud ,thud* “Come out you coward! Look at what you have done!”
Lee tilted his head upwards and tried to picture this skinny student standing outside this 67 tonne death machine demanding to speak to the man inside as if he were knocking on the door of a neighbour that was too loud with their music. He would have made a good soldier.
“Talk to me! I know you can hear me.” *Thud* “Come out and talk to me! You want to kill me, show me your face! You’re –
“Get off the tank and move. You’re putting yourself in danger.” Lee replied as calmly as he could.
“I will not! I want justice. Are you just a murderer?”
“I am not a murder…..”
Lee closed and eyes and bit his lips. Last night didn’t feel right at all. When they entered the city there was a sea of people. He saw students waving signs with crudely written slogans on them, professors with megaphones standing on makeshift platforms made out of crates and cardboard, foreign journalists, tourists posing with protesters for photos, even children sitting on top of their father’s shoulders wondering what all the fuss was about. There was no mob trying to overthrow the party and take over. There weren’t any thugs throwing Molotov cocktails. There weren’t any comrades disembowelled and hung on trees. There was no violence. Everything was peaceful. And then we started shooting.
*clank, clank, clank.*
“Hey what are you doing! Don’t drag me I’m-”
Lee leaned forward and pushed open the view port. Two men in green army uniforms had the kid by the arms and legs and were dragging him away into a nearby alleyway. Lee raised his right hand to push the lever that opened the entry hatch door and stood up. He felt the warm sunshine on his cheeks. Weather wise it was a typical beautiful summer’s day in Beijing. Typical, except for the smell of burnt rubber, the thousands of abandoned bicycles, the bullet holes, the dead bodies and black smoke coming from burnt out buses.
Chhhht . “Sergent? I believe the obstruction has been removed. What is your order?”
Lee turned around and looked at the tank right behind him. The giant phallic cannon of death stared at him. He turned back and gazed out at the empty stretch of road in front and him and sighed.
“I’m sorry.” he said to no one in particular and then lowered himself back into the hole and closed the hatch.
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Does anybody have any tips on improving imagery and description in writing? I'm new to writing in general and I find it hard to get the image I have in my head down on the page without sounding retarded  Any critique would be greatly appreciate 
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I always encourage people to write more, and I always read just about any sort of creative writing if I see it and I have the time, so thank you for posting.
One of the things that I think you might be able to improve in your writing is to use your descriptions of things as if they were modifiers, and continuing the sentence from there - usually combining the next part of what you have written about.
"His throat was dry and each breath required more effort. On any other day Lee would have been thrilled to drive the new soviet imported M37 “Red Star” tank. Today it felt like a cage."
You can say that his throat was dry and he had trouble breathing, but just using that as a sentence in itself sounds a little choppy. If you combined it with parts of the next sentence or two, it might sound more descriptive and flowy whilst still having the same details as before.
"His dry throat only increased the difficulty with each waking breath while Lee waited in his new Soviet Imported M37 "Red Star" tank. On any other day, Lee would have been thrilled to drive it. Today, it felt like a cage."
Something like that anyways.
Another thing is sometimes you seem to include a lot of unnecessary specific detail that isn't all that important to the reader. Just one I skimmed back through and caught was this one:
"Lee raised his right hand to push the lever that opened the entry hatch door and stood up. He felt the warm sunshine on his cheeks."
The reader doesn't really need to know that Lee needed to raise his right hand to push a lever to open the entry hatch door. Including details that are too specific and unimportant often seem out of place. Readers don't really care all that much about how Lee would have opened the hatch, just that he opened it. And then the 'He felt the warm sunshine on his cheeks' is another example of the kind of sentence that I used in my first example; one that you could combine with another sentence to give sensory detail that way, instead of just using that as a sentence itself. I'd probably rewrite this part to get rid of unnecessary details and to combine that second sentence, something like this:
"Lee felt the sunshine warming his cheeks as he pushed open the entry hatch door and stood up to look at the scene before him."
And this was my favorite part.
"The giant phallic cannon of death stared at him."
I have no idea why you wanted to relate a tank cannon to a penis, but that made my day lol.
So basically, I'd mainly suggest using details like "modifiers" instead of just including them in a short sentence like that. Instead of saying that "X was happy/sad/tired" or "X did verb", change the sentence around or combine it with the sentence before or after to make it flow better. Short and choppy adjective or verb sentences don't seem to flow very well, and I often avoid that as much as I can in my own writing.
Hope I could help.
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Thanks for the reply Epishade. I will try to not make my sentences so choppy in the future. With the specific details I was trying to do the whole "show not tell" thing which is like the thing everyone says to a noob but I guess it's a lot harder to do in practice. In my mind that means saying the specific thing that the characters are doing but I guess that just gives too much useless information.
As for the tank penis thing, the story was ment to be about the Tiananmen Square Massacare that happened twenty five years ago in China. I just saw the image splashed all over the news a few days ago and I thought how ridiculous the tank looked in front of the man.
![[image loading]](http://0.tqn.com/d/asianhistory/1/0/1/1/-/-/030.JPG)
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if you want to improve almost any aspect of your writing (such as description, or imagery, etc.) the way that i feel is best and most effective is to read (carefully) a lot, and to write a lot. if you read a lot and read a wide variety of things, and pay attention to it, both as a reader and as a writer, you will pick up on what you think is good, what you think is effective, etc. and you can try to think about why and how it works the way it does. writing a lot will help you put these things into practice, to test things, to experiment, etc.
there's a lot here to work with, but there are some places where i feel like you might lose a little bit of control. specifically i think you have the tendency here to reach for metaphor/simile in places where you don't really have, and also in ways that i think might detract from the story.
i would say something like a student standing in front of a tank is a much stronger and better image than "a suicidal gazelle confronting a pride of lions" - i think here though that your impulse to go away from this image is alright, in that the student standing in front of a tank is an image that everybody knows and probably not very exciting or whatever. my two thoughts here are that if you do decide that you need to detach here from the reality of the thing, if you need to deflect towards another image, then it needs to be good and it needs to complement and add to the kind of understanding that you want us to reach; and if you decide, instead, to not look away from the concrete reality of the story that you should be aware of what you the image/situation you are conjuring and play with it in a way that is interesting and adds a different understanding to it. i hope im being clear enough here. it applies to a lot of the other uses of figurative language throughout the story (this kind of thinking).
there's a lot of things here that i think you could develop and explore: things i'm interested in the most is the mirroring between Lee and the student (this realization that they are the same age), the absurdity/unreality of what seems to be happening (even more interesting to me, because of the historical nature of the events). there's a line where you say something like "It was a beautiful summer day in Beijing" and also "He felt the sunshine on his face" which I thought were really great. in your iterations of the sentence you take away from the sentences, i thought, by adding in a little bit too much ( "Weather wise it was a typical beautiful summer’s day in Beijing" is what you originally wrote, and then go on to write "typical, except" : i think the reason I like the sentence so much is that it is so surprising, [refreshing, almost] and such a contrast to the story so far, i understand the desire, and maybe even necessity to go back to the contrasting image of war etc. but in this moment, right now in this story, my first impulse would be to cut down as much as you can so as not to distract from how great these lines really are/can be.)
something that i dont like and haven't seen used with very much effectiveness in my own reading is when you sort of devolve into onomatopoeia (ie " *thud* " or "clank clank clank"). i've thought about playing with it a little bit, but i think here, in this story, that it's not necessary, that it probably won't add anything or be particularly effective at doing something that you would want it to do in this story, so you should just revert back to a regular kind of narration or whatever.
this is an interesting place to start, to add to, to develop, etc. i think there's something missing, so my suggestion (besides what i wrote above about reading a lot and writing a lot) is to write a lot, play around with what you have, develop things etc. (even if you are writing/developing something that you won't include in your story) and see where it takes you.
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EPT
