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 Review #4800995 |
 | Helena (Chapter One)  [13+] On news of his mother’s death, finding solace in routine, and life's quiet indifference  |
| (4.0)| Hello, I found your writing while browsing the read and review section and I'd like to offer you my thoughts. I noticed that you joined only last month, so please allow me to extend my warmest welcome to you, I hope you find this community as helpful as I have these many years. I'd like to preface this review with this: I take a pretty in-depth approach to reviewing, as such it might come across that I pick apart the writing pretty hard. This may seem negative or mean-spirited but it is not intended as such. I only wish to offer what help I can coming from a reader. I'll also mention you might see some words with a dotted underline like this. This is a particular area of a sentence that I marked for your attention. I have packed a comment in there that you can read by simply mousing over the dotted underlined word. I hope I've explained that well enough. With all that out of the way, let's get this review going. *** Opening *** I really like the tone you're setting with the opening hook. Very nice. There's only one thing in it that I would like to mention. This isn't a big deal but you've used a double hyphen as an emdash. You can accomplish a proper — by simply typing {emdash} *** Style and Voice *** The style of your writing is pretty natural and well executed. I'd like to mention that perhaps consider spacing your dialogue and paragraphs a little bit. I'm not quite at the age where I squint to read, but I'm getting there. This is more for comfort of your readers. Really there's not a lot of fault in your narrative but there's a couple things I'd like to point out:  The kettle began to whistle1 , its sharp, grating tone pulling2 me from whatever limbo I had been in. This may seem a bit knit picky because really, thus far the writing style is quite solid and melancholy. That is why I marked this sentence, as there's two issues I have with it. The first issue is that the opening of the sentence is telling the reader the kettle is whistling rather than showing. The sound you describe right after is decent but the start of the sentence diminishes what could be my own imagination doing the work. The second issue is that something that ought to be snapping the character out of the stupor is written in a passive voice like a doctor is going over a list of symptoms rather than someone telling a story at a campfire. Because of this, I don't feel any of the shock that I should feel. Something more direct would better deliver this sentence:  The sharp, grating whistle of the kettle pulled me from my limbo.This gets the point across a little quicker, as well as still marks that the sound snapped the character out of it, but it does so without so much indirect verbiage. "Hey, mate. You're up early," he said, his voice carrying forced brightness. I get what you're saying here, but it's worded kind of odd. Perhaps it's the gerund phrase but I won't blame that. I think there needs to be a bit more exploration of the main character's senses here or even something a bit reflective to describe his roommate's voice better. The house falls quiet, punctuated only by the distant hum of the boiler.Thus far the entire narrative has been in past tense, this kind of stuck out here, most likely just a mistake but I marked it for your attention. ...as if proximity to the dead was enough to bind us together.Stylistically, I really like this ending to the sentence. Puts a lot of depth to the reflections of this character. Well done! The thought made my chest feel tight...This is another case of telling rather than showing. First person is hard to write without avoiding telling, but sometimes some of it really comes through more than others. This line for example, any time a first person narrative tells me the character felt something. That stands out as unexplored areas for the senses. Choking up is something that should come with a lot of symptoms that you could explore. Yes there's the tightness in the chest, and strange numbness in the fingers, things like this can better assist the reader in feeling what the character is feeling more than the character telling me their chest was tight. ...succumbing to gravity and landing with a soft, anticlimactic plink in the puddle below.It's a little verbose, but this is a great example of showing rather than telling. I had no trouble at all imagining this image due to the way in which you wrote it. Very nice. *** Typos *** its tyres hissing against the wet ground... I might be wrong about this. I noticed you mentioned tea, and 'mate.' in your story so I think it's fair to assume you or at least your character is metric, like my wife. Is this the metric spelling of tires? If so, then ignore this. *** Ending *** Very nice ending. *** Summary *** The character was relatable and very somber. The whole story was a shade of gray. In a good way I mean, written in a method that it changed from one shade to another but never lost the edge of melancholy and stupefying reflection. It seemed there was going to be a lot of tell vs. show comments made, but at the end of the story, you really started shining with imagery. I would have linked an article speaking on this, but you have a clear grasp of what to do to guide the reader's thoughts. I'm wondering if this was perhaps mildly deliberate. If it was, very neat, if a little overbearing. I will say overall, it was a very well written piece, worthy of praise. I enjoyed it very much, thank you for sharing it. Again, welcome to writing.com, and I look forward to seeing more of your work.     My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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You responded to this review 02/19/2025 @ 5:08am EST