Young Writers Society

(Author's Notes: It has actually been a long time since I have managed to write a proper piece of short fiction like I used to, and it was quite tough. This is the result, and I'm not sure how well it turned out...I need 3 critiques before I can enter this into the 'Symphony of Colors' contest, and any feedback is much appreciated! :] )


The Sun beats down on your tender skin, relentless. The sharp stones scattered across the dusty surface scratch and scrape your rough soles.
Your journey has begun.

The road is long and the terrain is treacherous, but this is your path,
And you alone must conquer it.

The howling winds and pouring rains,
The mountain tops and rolling plains.
The rocky roads, the aching feet,
The arctic cold and desert heat.
There'll be times you'll laugh, and times you'll cry,
You'll face the world and want to die.

You fall to your knees, and pray to the skies.
Begging for help; but no one replies.

I am the gentle breeze that cools you down, whispering encouragement, and urging you on.
The oasis for you to drink and rest your tired feet, its water soothing your parched lips.
I am the thunder guiding you through the fog,
and the gale that blows away the storms.
I am with you every step of the way.
Whatever you think, you are never alone.

The moon will rise and Sun descend,
Shadows swarm, you've reached the end.
An eery white light floats close at hand,
I'll guide you to the promised land.

Alright, first off, I shall put this into poetic structure since the entry is supposed to be a poem. (Please forgive any incorrect line-breaks. I'm going on what commas and what I think sounds best)

Also, what is the picture you're using?

The Sun beats down on your tender skin, relentless.
The sharp stones scattered across the dusty surface
scratch and scrape your rough soles.
Your journey has begun.

The road is long
and the terrain is treacherous,
but this is your path
and you alone must conquer it.

The howling winds and pouring rains,
the mountain tops and rolling plains.
The arctic cold and desert heat.
The ups, the downs, the ins the outs.
You'll face them all without a doubt;
and once you feel you can take no more,
you'll be forced to brave almighty storms.
There'll be times you'll laugh, and times you'll cry,
you'll face the world and want to die.
You fall to your knees, and pray to the skies.
Begging for help; no one replies.

I was the gentle breeze that cooled you down,
whispered encouragement, and urged you on.
The oasis for you to drink and rest your tired feet,
its water soothing your parched lips.
I was the thunder that guided you through the fog,
and the gale that blew away the storms.
I was with you every step of the way,
you were never alone.

The moon will rise and Sun descend,
shadows swarm, you're near the end.
A single light is close at hand,
I'll guide you to the promised land.

And I will now critique the above poem. (With work switched amazingly well to a poem. Nice work! Not all fiction can be reformatted so easily)

*

The sharp stones scattered across the dusty surface
scratch and scrape your rough soles.

I'm not one for the alliteration here. It feels a bit choppy and broken up because of all the words that don't start with S. It also makes these lines rather hard to read. ^_^

The road is long
and the terrain is treacherous,
but this is your path
and you alone must conquer it.

I like the way this acts as a bridge between two stanzas. You've explained it in the stanza above and bellow, so I find the "telling" nature here fits.

The howling winds and pouring rains,
the mountain tops and rolling plains.

Okay, things are starting to rhyme. A bit random, since you had set this up as a free-verse poem before, but nothing really major.

The arctic cold and desert heat.

This line has none to rhyme to, while this stanza seems to be set-up in couplets (Every two lines rhyme. The above two lines (The howling winds and pouring rains,/the mountain tops and rolling plains.) are a couplet)

The ups, the downs, the ins the outs.
You'll face them all without a doubt;

I find this wording a bit cliche. You could come up with a more original way to present these ideas, or you can nix these lines all together.

and once you feel you can take no more,
you'll be forced to brave almighty storms.

Since this poem seems to be in a flash-back, this idea doesn't feel long enough. Yes, you've just told us all the stuff the character has been thrown in, but with no emotion around those events, I find "and once you feel you can take no more" is a bit random.

There'll be times you'll laugh, and times you'll cry,
you'll face the world and want to die.

Pretty much the same note as above. There isn't any emotion before this line, and now we're being told how the character is feeling.

I think it comes from the second-person in most of the poem. Since the character is "you" (Ie- the reader), we'd need more deep emotion and imagery to really feel emotion.

You fall to your knees, and pray to the skies.
Begging for help; no one replies.

~ Grammatically, I find these lines a bit choppy. I'd replace the period at the end of line one with a comma or semicolon. (Comma would be more grammatically correct)

~ The last line seems to be contradicted in the following stanzas. If no one replies, how can the storm get pushed away?

I was the gentle breeze that cooled you down,
whispered encouragement, and urged you on.

~ Since we've grown used to perfectly-rhymed couplets, these partically-rhymed lines are a slightly jarring.

~ With no mention of breezes, urging on or whispered encouragement, these lines can be a bit confusing.

The oasis for you to drink and rest your tired feet,
its water soothing your parched lips.

I find these lines don't flow well together. "Lips" is far, sound-wise, from "feet," and because the reader is still used to rhyming lines the flow is really interrupted.

I was the thunder that guided you through the fog,
and the gale that blew away the storms.

No mention of fog or thunder before. ^_^

I was with you every step of the way,
you were never alone.

~ Comma should be replaced with semicolon.

~ An okay return to the poem's theme and a pretty nice tie-in to the plot of Angels Symphony (I have read some of it so I am rather familiar with the plot). However, there isn't any mention of another presence along the path before.

The moon will rise and Sun descend,
shadows swarm, you're near the end.

~ Back to rhymes. A bit odd, again, after a free-verse stanza.

~ At first I wondered why "sun" was capitalized while "moon" wasn't. It could be an allusion to Sun of God, but why would the sun set then you're near the end? Wouldn't you have been traveling in darkness for the journey and would end up in the light?

A single light is close at hand,
I'll guide you to the promised land.

It is unclear what "a single light" means here. Is it an allusion to the pillar of fire that led Moses through the desert at night?

*

Flow: A bit choppy, I find. You go from a couple of stanzas that are free-verse to couplet rhyme, back to free-verse and back to rhyme. Shifts in rhyme-scheme like that are alright, even beneficial, if they are consistent/have a pattern. If this was two stanzas free-verse and one couplet stanza, and the same pattern was repeated, things would have better flow. ^_^

Imagery/themes: I find it simplistic. At first, it works. It makes it a short and sweet poem with a nice little meaning. But, as the poem progresses, you put in more allusions and deeper meanings. Since these weren't mentioned before, it can be hard to swallow. Make sure that you mention, at least in passing, what the themes are early on in the poem so things are more coherent.

I would actually scrap a lot of the different mentions of imagery (the mountains, the desert, the plains, the storm) and just focus on a few of them, really making them come to life. It would help with your slight theme problem later on in the poem.

Emotion: I find the emotions could really be played-up here. Since the character is "you" for most of it, readers want to feel things in the whole bodies. And the contest does say to use the five-senses. ^_^ That would help convey emotion as well as make this a much richer poem.

Overall: I liked the first three stanzas, but you started to lose me come the fourth. You started to tie things deeper into the plot of Angels Symphony, and since that was missing before, readers are left a bit lost.

I'd read over the guidelines for the contest again, and edit this accordingly. Let me know when the edited version is up! You have the seed for something really, really beautiful here. ^_^

~Rosey.

Okay, so I really have no experience with poetry or lyrics but I'm going to give this my best shot.
It felt as though the beat was sometimes uneven, and the imageries were not specific which means it gives you an overall vision of the scene, of the emotions, but nothing too specific. I liked it. It was... I'm not sure how to describe it. Like when you feel the wind, or stare at the edge of a cliff. It had a liberating feeling to it. While reading it, I really did think about the promise land. Huh. Because during the walk to the promise land, god stayed with the people and protected them with clouds during the day and the pole of fire to keep them warm at night. Just something that came to my mind.
Overall, I state again that I liked it very much.
ofir

Hey there, lily here as requested. Sorry I’m a little late, I forgot to check my Will Review Thread.

Well, Rosey seems to have done a major review so I won’t get too deep into things because well, I have to agree with her opinions. Not only that, but this would probably be better suited in the Other Forum strictly for the fact that this would have definitely been better suited.

First off, the imagery at the beginning is good. It’s basic and bare boned which is nice when dealt with properly and you did that, for the first half any way. There were no hidden mysteries or metaphors in what you were telling us. Then, near the end, you start to give us all of these meaning and questions that are very out of step with the beginning and began to weigh it down gravely.

But that’s all I can really say as this is a form of poetry that I’m not too familiar with. (I’ve only begun recently to take on poetry reviews.) But what Rosey has said throughout is good advice to take.


I did promise cookies. Oh hold on.*hands a cookie to Plus-One* Enjoy!

~lilymoore

Hello,
Boy am I glad to be your reviewer for today. . Before you requested a review I had read these many times, over and over. I loved this piece, but could find nothing that the in-depth review before me had already said, so I never gave you a review. I enjoyed it ever time I read it.

On with the review:
I am so happy you changed it to a poem style. With all the rhyming it just didn't fit well as a story block. It flows much better. Disagreeing with the reviewer above me I think the bare imagery complements the meaning in the second half. It just gives you a sense of something important when you walk away reading it.

You did an awesome job with this! I enjoyed very very much.
Thanks for requesting a review, I hope it helped.
Great work
-Tiffany

Loved the imagery, though I felt I've heard it before, a lot of poems seem to want to use certain extremes in nature as metaphors for hardship and inspiration but your's rolled nicely off the tongue at first. The rhymes were tight, not too complex but they didn't need to be to get your point across. I guess I didn't really understand the shift in narrator or poem-type midway through, it was working nicely before without it. The rhyming is something that you seem good at so stick with that line of thought and you should come up with some pretty clever and honestly heartfelt poetry. Keep it up.

Haha, thanks for the reviews!

I am still a bit torn about what to do with this, part of me wants to take out the middle section and replace it with more free verse, part of me wants to keep it rhyming but change the imagery, but a big part of me wants to keep it the same! I am reassured that some people agree that the bare start --> deep end works, but concerned that the opinion seems split 50/50 with the people that I've asked...

...I have a lot of hard thinking to do on this! But thanks for giving me the points to think over!

~Plus