Young Writers Society

This is my first story and I have been writing this a few months before I joined
Hope you enjoy (I did writing this)

Interesting plot. I think you might want to put space in between your paragraphs but I could be wrong. I just joined today and don't understand this site yet.

Hi there Rite. Lavvi in to review as requested. Sorry it took so long, I've been rather busy...

Anyway, let's get on to the substance of the review

A) Elaborate. I can hardly read this as a chapter: to me, it feels like it's more like an excerpt. It's so short. And because of its shortness, you have so little information for the audience to acquire. There's so much you can tell us. First, who are the speakers in the beginning? You need to be specific. How was the comet falling? What's this person's surroundings like? Who is the MC (main character)? This garden you speak about, what's it like? Is it full of dead, overgrown weeds and plants? Or it lush and green? There are so many questions that you can ask, but you aren't giving us readers the answers. Sometimes, the author lets the audience infer, but you have technically no information here at all and so it's pretty much impossible for us to infer or else we'd be making up our story, really. It's very, very important that you elaborate. You have the space to and it would also make the story all the more interesting. Don't rush.

B) WANTED: A protagonist. Really, I know nothing about your MC. I'm clueless to what their gender is (male or female?), what they look like, their personality, where they live et cetera. If you intend for the MC to be a mystery for the time being, we still need basics. It really can annoy your audience when they know virtually nothing about any of the characters, especially really important ones, like the protagonist. Who is your protagonist? We really are wanting to know more, so don't keep us hanging. It's important to have a developed protagonist so the audience can get attached and then in future adventures, can sympathize with the MC. This is extremely important.

C) Do away with talking nobodies. This also can tie in with the above points I've expanded on, but I'm talking about this more specifically. In the beginning, the dialogue, you don't specify who's talking. When you start off a chapter with dialogue, it's fine to do it with talking heads, but then after you should specify who the speaker is, perhaps their actions and/or facial expressions. These actions and expressions can give us, the readers, hints to how this character carries their self, their personality and maybe even how they might look. This again ties in with elaboration and character development.



I've noticed that you have some words that may not make sense in their context, but perhaps that might be due to the lack of description

For example, you have used the word "maelstrom" but it doesn't really seem to make total sense in the way you have used it. A maelstrom is a vortex (of water) or the very confused state of something. It could work, but maybe it would work better with more description. I'm not really understanding the way you've used it here.

Secondly:

Dumbfounded and scared I froze in place for a second then when I regained my senses I tried to run downstairs then to the garden to escape the comet but, alas, it was too late the comet caught me.

The sentence as a whole is nearing on run-on. You need some punctuation in there, perhaps chop it into one or two more sentences or insert a few commas (,) and/or semi-colons (;). Now, look at the part I bolded.You should have "had" in front of the word "caught".

Overall, I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems rather scattered and I can't even see any inkling of a plot in here. I don't understand it really and I think that's strongly attributed to your lack of description and characters/protagonist. It's good to expand and you definitely have room. It's quite short for a first chapter and really, really hard to comprehend.

Yours,
Lavvi

*whoot* A'ighty, review time!

First off, two things that are more formatting than anything else, but are hugely important:

1) Space your paragraphs. I can see where they are supposed to be, but because YWS formatting sometimes ignores a program's spaces, you need to go through and manually do it. As is, it's a huge wall of text that is hard on the eyes on a screen and so sort of puts a reader at a disadvantage.

2) No center! I mean it, centering the text makes the paragraphs and lines go all wonky and really takes away from the ease of the read. Go head and put it all on left-align. It makes it much easier on your readers.

Story-wise:

So fast! This goes by so quickly that I barely have any time to grab hold of anything. Who's your main character? Guy or girl? Who are they talking to? What's going on?

For as little as there is here, not a lot happens either. The character's in the garden and they see a comet. But they ignore the comet. But the comet does something wonky. Comet catches character. It's all very "he did this" "she did this". Spice it up a little. Throw in some description, some emotion. Give us some background on this character. What did they think and feel when they saw this comet hurtling towards them? Why did they decide to take a walk in the first place? So many questions and none of them answered!

Give us a little more "oomph". We need to get to know this character a bit more so that we care about him/her when the time comes. Right now, we're all like "who is this person and why is a comet trying to eat them?" rather than "oh no! Jimmy! I hope he's all right!"

Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions! I'm on to the next part.

~GryphonFledgling