Overall impression: This chapter promises to be the opening of a very intriguing story. Hera is a compelling protagonist.One question about her: what is her motivation for learning magic? Thanks for the opportunity to review this chapter.
Strengths:This chapter does a nice job of drawing a reader into Hera's world. The descriptions of both character and setting are vivid and help a reader create images in his mind, without stalling the action.
Suggestions for improvement: I have two favorite pieces of advice for revision work. First, read your chapter out loud. This gives you a better idea of how your writing sounds in a reader's head.It will bring to light any awkward areas, typos, continuity errors. Second, read your chapter backwards, one sentence at at time. Anything you missed while reading it out loud will be caught this way because your brain is focused on each individual sentence rather than the paragraph or chapter as a whole. Three areas caught my attention and might warrant your attention when you revise: dialogue tags, conciseness, and adverbs.
Dialogue tags: To punctuate them, it should look like "Evening, Odrich," she said. There should be a comma before the quotation marks, and the name or pronoun should not be capitalized. I was reading up on dialogue, and one piece of advice that resonated with me was how using tags actually takes a reader out of the story. I guess the "she said" stuff pulls a reader out of the story. So, you may consider limiting your use of tags or eliminating them altogether.
Conciseness: Sometimes in an effort to provide a detailed description of things or characters, writers will use more words to express themselves than is absolutely necessary. I'm guilty of this at times. For example, the sentence "Her thick woolen cloak, with its heavy hood and length coming down passed[past] her knees..." is a little wordy. Perhaps it could be shortened to "Her thick woolen, ankle length cloak" ? Again, reading it out loud will probably help you pinpoint wordy passages more so than my advice
Adverbs: Somebody once said using adverbs means you used the wrong verb, or words to that effect. I like adverbs, and when I revise, I realize just how much I like them. Having someone else call me on my adverbs has made me uber-conscious of them, so I did notice a fair number of them in your chapter. Most of the adverbs you used, however, didn't seem to be used to modify verbs. Rather, they were used to modify adjectives.Such as, "slightly frightened." So maybe instead of the wrong verb, this is the wrong adjective? Perhaps wary is a better adjective? Something to ponder, anyway. Also, I did notice sometimes your adverbs are used repeatedly in close proximity. Suddenly, desperately, exactly- were three I noticed.
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Thanks again, and best of luck to you! |
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