Clover's Curse

Sorry! I've re-edited Clover's Curse because it was originally in the third-person, which didn't work out very well. So I've changed it to first-person. So if you'd like to see it, just click on Clover's Curse - Redone. Thank you!

First off, great theme, not making wizardry look so serious all the time, but there were a few mistakes that should be pointed out, because many people make them but are rarely told. You use "he" and "clover" a lot, and never transition into their actions, you usually just start with "he did this" or "clover likes this," etc, and its not very appealing to a reader when you do that.

hello,


Okay, here is what I noticed right off the bat.

In a small and simple village called Shelton, there lived a sixteen year old boy named Clover. Clover was somewhat special, and not in a good way. He was clumsy and unpurposely caused trouble wherever he went. Clover always had the idea that he was somehow burdened, cursed. When Clover was born, his mother and father gave him up for adoption. He always wondered why they abandoned him. The orphanage Clover lived in didn’t feel much like a home. Whenever he sought to make friends with the other children, something always happened to make them hate him.

Seems a bit excessive doesn't it? When you hear the name so much in one paragraph is makes it hard for the reader to focus and in the end all we hear is Clover, clover, clover, clover....

One time, he gathered the courage to approach a pretty girl he had his eye on. But as he drew near her, he didn’t see the banana peel in front of him. He tripped and the next thing he knew, he was on top of the pretty girl, staring at her shocked eyes. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they weren’t outside, and if the ground wasn’t muddy, and if she wasn’t wearing a new dress. The girl shrieked at him to get off of her and fussed over her ruined dress. Clover desperately tried to apologize but all she did was yell at him.

This seems like a small and rather...pathetic excuse for the kids to find him wierd and for him to become an outcast. Also, you're doing a lot of 'telling' and not enough 'showing'. (don't worry, it happens to us all at times).

'Clover was known for being clumsy and prone having embarassing accidents. he was always tripping over his feet, slipping on something, walking in to walls or generally making a fool out of himself in front of others. None had been more humiliating then the time he'd fallen on top of Samantha Mathers...he shuddered at the memory. To this day there wasn't someone who didn't tease him over the incident. It had been three weeks before he'd been able to show his face at school again, but Samantha - who had been wearing a lovely, brand new dress that morning which he sullied by knocking them both bodily into the mud, had never forgiven him.'

“I don’t know what they were so scared of,” he muttered, remembering how the girls squealed in fright when they saw the little hamster, “You don’t even look dangerous.”

You were missing 'know'.

There were a lot of redundancies with word usage so becareful with that as well (just like how I pointed out with the name, if you read the same word in a paragraph twice, ie: munch/munch/munchie, etc. it gets irritating for the reader. If you get stuck, use a thesaurus. (It's my new bestfriend lolol).

I hope this helps