%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 Review #4600863 |
 Welcome to WdC from the "Newbie Welcome Wagon" Good morning, e-memes, and I hope it finds you well. In the immortal words of Jim Bishop, "A good writer is not per se, a good book critic any more than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender," but bear with me; I'm going to take a shot anyway (see what I did there?)  .For the record, my real name is Jack Tyler, and I am a retired mystery, 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. 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. I saw your item on the Please Review list, and after a quick look, decided to step in because I think I can offer you some useful tips. Like this one: 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 an 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!   I deducted half a star here for one reason. The item that is demonstrably wrong is the paragraphs, or rather the lack of them. Readers need paragraphs to follow the flow and progression of ideas as well as to delineate who is speaking in a dramatic narrative. The more professional-looking of your choices, and my personal preference, is to indent each paragraph. You can do this by adding {indent} to the beginning of each paragraph. Sounds like a hassle, but there is a shortcut key at the top of the creation box that places one wherever the cursor is.The other method that is widely accepted here on WdC is to double-space between them. I've used both in this review for easy comparison. Two other things that aren't "wrong" in the grammatical sense, but that could be dramatically improved on are the font and the scene dividers. I am told that WdC's default font is Arial. I only half-jokingly call it Times New Eyestrain, as I often have to stack two pairs of reading glasses to make it hold still. Arial is not unattractive, but at the size provided, it's like reading the fine print in a legal document. You can make this exponentially more attractive by simply adding {size:3.5} to the front of your text. There are other ways to tweak the text that you'll discover as you play with the buttons, for example, this review is in 3.5 Verdana with a line-space setting of 1.4, but the biggest single thing you can do to make your text more reader-friendly is to increase the size. You've used a scene-divider (--------) which certainly helps the reader spot the scene change, and is not incorrect as you've done it. The more traditional method is to center it, using {center}{/center}, but did you know that WdC offers over a thousand emoticons (accessed in the WdC Tools tab in the left sidebar) that can be centered to really make your story "pop?" For example, {center}{e:alien}{/center} Yields:  STORY: But those are things that can be fixed with a few mouse clicks. Now we come to the heart of the issue. 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. I will try to explain aspects from characters to grammar, but I don't know how to teach someone to have an imagination. Let's examine the individual parts of the whole and see what works to make it successful. The basic premise of the story is quite good. You have a mysterious occurrence and a character who wants information that is not forthcoming, but who has a job that will allow him to stick his oar in deeper than the average citizen. With the FBI involved, he's probably going to have a lot of pushback to deal with, and that's just more tension for the story. All well and good.But I deducted a half-star from the score. Why? It was for your laundry-list description of Andy's apartment. There is what is considered a "cheap trick" in writing in which you have a character describe him- or herself while looking in a mirror. This is closely akin. How do you enter your apartment? Do you stand in the doorway and take inventory of the rooms, or do you walk in and start doing something? Andy should act the same way as we see him enter the living room, turn on the news, then head for the kitchen to see what might be for dinner. Maybe he notes the time, but show us how he lives rather than telling us where he lives by having us experience his homecoming as he does himself. I didn't deduct anything for the ending scene, as this is part two of a story I haven't read. But unless there has been some reference to the possibility in the first part, there is absolutely no reason for Jamie or the reader to think he's going to prison for seeing a ghost. Other than those easily fixable points, you have a solid premise here that can take the reader on a long, enjoyable ride. 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. This is my 522nd review, and this is where most stories take their biggest hit. This one has quite a few issues, and is in desperate need of proofreading and editing. There is nothing big to point at and criticize, but there are a lot of little things that add up to a tough read. I'm just going to give a few examples, as I don't want this to degenerate into a case of "piling on."The first thing I want to point out is your use of ellipses (...) in speech. The ellipsis is used to indicate someone's voice trailing off in indecision, so it possibly fits in the opening sentence, "I-I still can't believe what happened..." The second time it's used, "What a wild day...", is in a spot where there is no reason for him to trail off, and this should end in a hard period. Andy seems to talk to himself a lot, and if this is his character, that's fine, but I would recommend having him think these things instead. If you decide to go that route, put what he's thinking in italics without quotation marks: What a wild day, Andy thought. Avoid the cliche of "...he thought to himself;" unless your story is about a telepath, he can hardly think to anyone else. The problem with having him talk to himself will arise when he begins to interact with the other characters, and the reader will then have to figure out whether he's speaking aloud or muttering so no one else can hear. In several sentences, you end with a hyphen. What you want here is an em-dash (—) which you can place by typing {emdash}. This indicates that the speaker has been interrupted by an event, or another speaker talking over him, and you have used these correctly here. Just change them to em-dashes for grammatical correctness and you'll be fine. There are a lot of minor issues, some of which could be caught by thorough proofreading. Several times you write 7-Mile in the text. Conventional use is to type out small numbers such as "seven" or "twenty-one," but never inflict something like "nine thousand, two hundred, and sixty seven" on your reader; your "19-9-0" is proper in this case. "...their nice and they live nearby." This should read they're nice... Spell check is a good tool, but it will not help you with these homonyms. The only tool that works all the time is the Mark I Eyeball applied in thorough proofreading. Use it liberally. "So, 1 one of Troopers... See it? It looks like you decided to change "1" to "one," but forget to remove the numeral. Also, you left out "the." Proofreading. Here is a truism: Writing is hard work. If it wasn't, we'd all be on the best-seller lists. If you want to be known as a quality writer, whether you make it to Stephen King's level or not, you have to be ready do the work. My suggestion is to get yourself a style guide. This is a book that lays out all those little details of the writing Craft in easily searchable form. The pricier ones are for professional editors, and are more than a fiction writer needs for his daily work. The one I use that is never out of reach of my keyboard is The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. It's well-organized and is at least as readable as a textbook; it will improve your writing exponentially if you take it to heart. $5.00 or thereabouts on Amazon. 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? We don't have much on the characters yet, but we're early into a long story, and that's the way it should be. You want to leave some mysteries intact for a while. That gives you room to surprise the reader with unexpected motives, as opposed to opening with the other extreme of "Andy was the bravest, most loyal trooper that Wisconsin had ever seen." Doesn't leave you many places to go with him after that. This is a good start, and we'll get to know these people the way we would get to know anyone coming into our lives. Excellent work here.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? What I said about the characters pretty much applies to the settings as well. We have an apartment, an arcade, and a lonely stretch of highway that is home to a big mystery. Keep them low key like this, and let us gradually discover them through the characters' eyes, and you can't go too far wrong. Good job so far.SUMMARY: Well, now that I'm on your Worst Enemies list, let me just say that 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. 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. All of the comments I've presented here are my opinions on ways to make your writing better, and I hope you accept them in that spirit and look further into them to see whether you want to follow up on any of them. In any case, I applaud your courage in exposing your work to public commentary, and wish you a wonderful journey to wherever your writing takes you!** Image ID #2234711 Unavailable ** As a member with some experience here, allow me to offer you some links you may find helpful. First and foremost has to be
Second is
The third place I'm going to recommend is, of course, my blog,
Finally, I don't operate a group, but I'm a member of a good one, and I recommend a visit soon.
Looking forward to seeing you around the site!  Jack "Blimprider" Tyler My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
|
||||||||||||||||||
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
You have not yet responded to this review.