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 Review #4649101 |
 Welcome to WdC from the "Newbie Welcome Wagon" Good day to you, Benjamin Black Now, I am certainly no one to be telling anyone how to write, having myself managed to successfully avoid fame and fortune for over sixty years, but I flatter myself that I have learned a thing or two in my decades of chasing the dream. Given that it is alleged to be understood by all that reviewing is a major part of the WdC experience, I'm taking that as my license to offer my opinion. And make no mistake, it is nothing but an opinion for you to use or discard as you wish. My reviews are thorough and honest, and while I hope we can be friends afterward, my greater hope is that you become a better writer as a result of our having crossed paths. For the record, I am an occasional hobbyist writer of fantasy, horror, and steampunk (hence my handle) who tries to review in a wide variety of styles and genres; I have, in fact, been recently nominated for a Quill Award for reviewing. 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. 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'm removing a whole star here because the presentation is frankly terrible. I almost didn't bother to read this, and the only reason I did is that it's carrying a 4½-star review average, and I had to see what other reviewers were seeing to make it that high. And there are things that I'll get to, but presentation first.In a word, paragraphs. There are none, obviously, and in conjunction with the tiny Arial that is the default font, this resembles nothing so much as the fine print in a used car contract. There are many ways that you'll learn to perk up your print – this review is in 3.5 Verdana with a 1.4 line space setting, for example – but the easiest way to bring Arial to life is to add the command {size:3.5} to the beginning of the text. Your scenes are divided properly as you move from one viewpoint to another, but I have some issues with the dividers themselves that I'll cover in the section on Mechanics below. Finally, I would suggest that a 10,000-word story, as you've described in your review request, doesn't need chapters. Ten thousand words doesn't even come up to the length of a novella, and those don't have chapters. Just put the title in the big banner at the top of your story, and launch right in. STORY: 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 try to explain aspects from characters to grammar, but I don't know how to teach someone to have an imagination. The fact that I'm here writing a review is proof that you've done a pretty good job with the story. Let's examine the individual parts of the whole and see what works to make it successful. What you lose in presentation you gain right here. This is eerie, chilling, mysterious. You list Stephen King among your favorite writers, and you can see the influence in the waking dream, the people who walk through and disappear, the hanging ghost, a lot of details to delight the horror buff. This is the diamond in the rough that will keep your audience turning pages. The story is just getting started, and the quality is already beginning to show. You just need to polish it to a high luster. Suggestions for this are coming up...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.  Let's begin with your scene dividers, since I've mentioned them already. They are all in the right places, that is, every time that narrator, time, or location change, you mark it clearly for the reader with an introductory term. That term is my issue. By pointing out "this scene is about Emily and the bar; this scene is about Jay," etc., you are presenting yourself as that guy who's already seen a movie you're trying to enjoy, who's always saying, "now watch what happens here, this is gonna be so cool," and so on. Trust your reader to understand his chosen genre. He doesn't want his hand held, he wants to be set loose in a compelling world that he can explore in his own way and draw his own conclusions.I've already discussed paragraphs, and won't penalize again. I'll just point out that they are a basic concept of literature, and are as necessary to a reader as water is to a fish. Suggestions on these: The basic scene divider is a centered asterisk. WdC offers over a thousand emote-icons that can be centered as scene dividers to make your story "pop." {center}{e:ghost}{/center}, for example, yields:  So, on to the little nitpicking details. In this passage: They didn't try to delve too deep into the root causes and underlying traumas and issues of what may have been a factor in said nightmares, it was hard enough dealing with their own problems and, he would also write about them, a literal purging onto the pages of the demons of the deceased. This sounds like he would write about his friends, and I had to stop and reread it a couple of times to work out what he was writing about. I would suggest this be made into three sentences, thus: They didn't try to delve too deep into the root causes and underlying traumas and issues of what may have been a factor in said nightmares. It was hard enough for them to deal with their own problems. he would also write about them, a literal purging onto the pages of the demons of the deceased. There are a number of lines of internal dialogue, the first being How could he know that? Like seriously what the fuck. If you place internal dialogue in italics, it is greatly helpful to the reader in figuring out which is being thought vs. which is being spoken. There are several lines throughout, and several that are in italics. Consistency is also very important to a reader. It helps him to follow your story wherever it leads. On to some really small stuff now. This sentence: The guitar wailed like the dead, the cries of the restless echoed through these walls, bring Jay to tears has a tense issue. It should read bringing Jay to tears. Himself and his best friend Daniel were the only ones who didn't chicken out before they reached the end of those subsurface adventures. Use of he, him, himself, me, I, and so on can be a bit confusing. Here's a rule of thumb: When talking about multiple people (Jay and Daniel in this case), take out the extra people and read the sentence without them. That is how it should read. In this case, leaving out Daniel you would write, "He was the only one..." The sentence should thus read, "He and Daniel..." Finally, a simple missing word: Spilt beer and human excrement that somehow stank as if it had been locked in for years poured out over him. I realize that this must look pretty bad, but take heart. Almost everything I review, and this is number 629, generates a laundry list of needed corrections, most of them longer than this. Given that this is not yet finished, I can understand if it isn't yet proofread, either. I hammered this hard because you stated that you have aspirations of becoming a published novelist, and it doesn't do you any favors to pretend that I don't see them. Bottom line: The theme of your story makes a very good foundation to build on. It just needs polish, and that's what I'm trying to help you with here. 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? Jay is deeply flawed, haunted by something in his childhood that we don't yet see. Working out what it was is likely to be the main theme of the story. Emily is less flawed, at least from what we've seen so far. She is plainly a main character as we already have a scene from her viewpoint, and with what we have so far, she seems likely to be a catalyst to help Jay get to the bottom of his torment. Time will tell, but they're both off to a good start.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? There are many strange scenes here, and they are well-described in the sense that I had no difficulty following what was presented. I must tip my begoggled patrol cap to you for a most excellent body of work in this regard.SUMMARY: And there you have my words of "wisdom." 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. I thank you for sharing and exposing your work to the whims of public opinion, and I wish you a thrilling journey to wherever your writing takes you.** Image ID #2234711 Unavailable ** The curious may follow my antics at "Invalid Item" — Serious writers may visit a group that comes with occasional deep conversation, and a spiffy contest featuring unusual and valuable prizes. Our forum, linked below, is open access, and if you like what you see, contact me, Richard ~ Merry, Merry  , or Sumojo  to be welcomed to the fold.
 My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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You responded to this review 02/26/2022 @ 4:50am EST