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 Review #4544927 |
 | Emberidion  [13+] The Prologue to a story I am writing ...  |
| (3.0)  Welcome to WdC from the "Newbie Welcome Wagon" Good morning, Pepper , and welcome to WdC. For the record, my real name is Jack Tyler, and I am a retired steampunk and horror writer who tries to review in a wide variety of styles and genres. While I have a few books in print, I am neither a famous author nor a renowned critic. I'm just a guy with an opinion that I'm here to share, and if you disagree with anything I say here, remember that the only opinion that matters is yours. I should explain that I use this review template in which I discuss my views on the important areas of quality storytelling, then compare your work to my own beliefs on the matter. As I said, I'm no authority, but hopefully my comments will give you some ideas to take your writing in directions you hadn't previously considered. Before I pitch in, allow me to offer a suggestion: Put a little of yourself into your bio sections. You will receive much more tailored reviews if your reviewer knows a little about your background and experience level. Let me just drop a warning here, and we'll get started. THIRD-PARTY READERS TAKE NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD PRESENTATION: This aspect deals with the first impression your story makes when a reader clicks on the title. Call it the cosmetics. I'll be looking at abstract items from text density to scene dividers in a effort to ferret out any unfortunate habits that might cause a reader to move on without actually reading anything; before you can dazzle him with your show, you have to get him into the tent!  There isn't much to say here. The paragraphs are well-defined, and the text is clean. You have used WdC's default layout, and I won't penalize you for that, but I will offer a suggestion. The default is bland and boring, and in a long piece like this it forms an intimidating wall of fine print that has the potential to drive many reviewers, especially those with less than perfect vision, away. My suggestion is that you copy this line of code -- {font:verdana}{size:3.5}{linespace:1.4} -- and paste it in front of the first word of your story. It will open up the print and put it into a clean, attractive font. It will look like this review, in fact. If you try it and don't like it, just remove the code and it will revert to its original form.STORY: This is really the basic element, isn't it? If you can't tell an engaging story, it doesn't matter what else you can do, because nobody's going to read it anyway. You should note that if you're reading this review, it means you've garnered decent to high marks in this category, or I would have moved on to something more engaging. I will try to explain aspects from characters to grammar, but I don't know how to teach someone to have an imagination, so congratulations; you've done something well already. Now let's examine the individual parts of the whole and see what makes it successful. We'll begin with the story itself, the theme, the flow, the impact, to see what made me stay instead of clicking on to the next one. I'm torn over what kind of rating to give here. You do set up a decent story, that of a Chosen One in the far future, but I question whether your story needs a prologue at all, and especially not this one. What you have offered here is the material that should be your story notes. You've set up this draconian post-modern society with all its warts and wrinkles, introduced the Chosen One with much of his backstory laid out for us, and... Well, there's no way to sugar-coat this. This is a boring information dump about a world we readers know nothing about yet. We have no grounding, no entry point to become involved in what's being presented here. It's like going to sleep one evening and waking up in a foreign country. We don't know the language, the customs, the government, the people; we're stumbling around blind trying to make sense of something, and it's incredibly hard and frustrating.My suggestion would be to keep this by your keyboard for a reference and begin with Chapter One. Plunge your reader into the action from the first word. Have Jesco making his way to a meeting, averting his eyes so the ever-present sentries he passes can't read the guilt there. Impart his reasons gradually. Let your reader learn the world a step at a time through experience; jamming it down his throat almost never works. Look to Lord of the Rings for an example. A huge, sprawling tale of epic fantasy that begins with a simple birthday party. We as readers are brought along a step at a time until we're riding a war horse across the Pellinor Fields, but we're never lost or confused, because the story has been built gradually within our minds, point by point, as needed. When bringing your reader along, less is generally better. Don't answer all his questions right away. Keep him curious... and reading! CHARACTERS: This section discusses all aspects of the characters, the way they look, act, and talk, as well as the development and presentation of backstory. Allow me to present "Tyler's Axiom:" Characters are fiction. Rich, multifaceted characters with compelling backstories will seize the reader in a grip that will not be denied, and drag him into their narrative, because he can't abide the thought of not knowing what will happen to them. Conversely, lazy, shallow stereotypes will ruin any story regardless of its other qualities, because the reader will be unable to answer the second question of fiction: Why do I care? Jesco seems like a strong and nuanced character well-suited to carry a grand, sweeping story. It's difficult to say from what I see here, but you've given him plenty of issues to be expanded and developed, and if you can pull that off skillfully, he has the potential to be great.SETTINGS: This section deals with the locations you've established for your action, the ways in which they affect that action, and your ability to describe them clearly and concisely. You could say that this aspect answers (or fails to answer) the first question of fiction, What's going on here? Setting can be used to challenge a character, to highlight a skill or quality, to set the mood of a scene without overtly saying a single thing about it, and a host of lesser impacts too numerous to mention. You might think of it as a print artist's equivalent of a movie's "mood music," always important yet never intrusive. All in all, a pretty big deal, then. So how did you do? You've set up your dystopian world quite well. Again, don't just hand it to the reader, make him discover it. Perhaps something he discovers at the three-quarter mark will give the reader that "Ah ha!" moment, the realization that this one event that no one thinks was important was the turning point that brought us to this. You've set out a good world. Now it's up to you to make it mysterious and attractive (not "pretty;" attractive to a reader).MECHANICS: Whether you're writing fact or fiction, prose or poetry, the "holy grail" that you're striving for is immersion. This is an area that no author, myself included, ever wants to talk about: I've done all this work, and you want to argue over a comma?" But those commas are important. What you're really doing as a writer is weaving a magic spell around your reader, and your reader wants you to succeed. He wants to escape his mundane world for a period, and lose himself in your creation. Errors in spelling and grammar, typos, "there" vs. "their" issues, use of words inconsistent with their actual meanings, all yank him out of his immersion while he backtracks to re-read and puzzle out what you meant to say. This is never good, and this is the section that deals with that. I'm not going to use any derogatory words here, that is the province of trolls, but your mechanics overall are less than stellar. There are far too many errors to list individually, but I'm going to offer some samples, and some suggestions for improvement. I'll go more or less in order through the story.Its not his deprovision of a voice box... It's in this case is a contraction of It is, and so needs the apostrophe. There are several examples throughout. Also, I was unable to find deprovision in any of my dictionaries. Oddly, Spellcheck isn't flagging it, so maybe I need a better dictionary. Check it though, just to be sure. ...once entitled to - before the collapse... That hyphen should be an em-dash (—). It isn't on your keyboard. My suggestion is that when you need odd characters like ©, ®, °, etc, you Google them, and copy and paste them to a holding file where they'll be waiting for you the next time you need them. ...can't bare to look at you... Can't bear to look at you. ...frigid as an un-bendable bar of iron. I suspect you mean rigid here. Some make it too the Transition. Some make it to the Transition. ...but many loose their lives in agony. Many lose their lives... perplexed by an imminant beauty. Again, I can find no such word as imminant. Imminent means impending, but I suspect you might be looking for eminent, meaning Conspicuous or Noteworthy. I'm going to stop here. This is so riddled with these minor errors that it would take more hours than I have to list them all. I'm instead going to offer a couple of suggestions that may help you get this under control. First, don't rely on Spellcheck. It's a very good tool that should always be on, but it won't help you with to/too/two issues and the like. The only tool that will sort those out is the Mark I Eyeball. Proofread until you're sick of your own work, then do it again. Proofreading is your friend and the greatest ally of any writer. If you have difficulty sorting out all the little details of grammar and punctuation, get yourself a style guide and keep it within arm's reach of your keyboard. These are inexpensive paperbacks that show you where to put the commas, lay out often-confused words, and a host of other things vital to serious writers. The one I use is The Elements of Style by Strunk & White, but there are dozens of them, many for less than five dollars on Amazon. Writing is hard work; if it wasn't, we'd all be on the best-seller lists. As Vince Lombardi once said, the only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary. SUMMARY: Well, I've delivered quite a hatchet job here, and you probably hate this random stranger who falls out of the sky to list all of these problems, but the things I'm telling you will work to your advantage as you go deeper into your story. So, three stars for now may lead to a larger constellation in the future.I hope that I have presented my opinions in a way that is constructive and that you will find helpful to your endeavors going forward, and this may be a good time to remind you that I'm nobody special and this is just one reader's opinion. It is never my intention to belittle anyone's efforts or discourage them from following the dream that I have found so fulfilling for the last six decades. In any case, if I can leave you with one thought to take with you, let it be this: Don't forget to have the fun! So many young and/or beginning writers get so caught up in the daily word count, the quest for publication, and the often conflicting advice of other writers that they forget to enjoy the journey. You may or may not become the next Big Celebrity Author, but you will always have the experience. Make sure it's a good one! Read well, and write better,  JackIf you find any value to my opinions, there are many more to had on my blogs, "Invalid Item" and "Invalid Item" . Hope to see you around the site! My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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