Young Writers Society

Kinda new to this, but please I want your opinion!

She was in intense pain. She doubled over as it spread through her body. Her heart felt as if it were about to burst straight out of her chest. She fell to her knees and clutched at her chest with claw-like hands as if trying to contain her heart. Her chest heaved as another wave of pain courses through her tired body. She collapses and screams at her heart races and sends another wave of pain through her convulsing body. She clutches as the grass floor and raises her head to stare at the forest canopy. The leaves on the trees begin to lose focus and her clutches become weaker and weaker. Suddenly, the pain becomes unbearable and a feeling like a knife to the heart and stomach stab at her and she screams in agony as her body convulses once and then she blacks out.
I watch her from my perch above in the canopy. She’s been having these “fits” ever since her boyfriend broke up with her. I noticed her “fits” first when she came into my forest a couple weeks earlier. She had been crying and she came shakily under the branches of my tree. I peered down at her, wondering who she was and how she came into my forest. All of a sudden, her body began to shake and twitch. She started to whimper as the pain slowly started. Soon the whimpers became screams as she thrashed around on the forest floor. I was alarmed of course, but I don’t mess in the lives of mortals. Soon her convulsions became weaker and weaker as did her screams. Her body stopped shaking and I couldn’t hear her breath anymore. I slowly made my way down the tree and over to her body. I noticed her chest wasn’t rising or falling the way mortal’s chests do when they breathe. I put my hand over her heart and to my surprise she didn’t have a heartbeat. I stared in confusion, her “fit” had only lasted about two minutes. Surely that wasn’t enough to kill her.

Hey there! I'm Trish, and I'll be reviewing your story tonight! Just beware that I'm a grammar freak, so there may be a lot of nit-picks. But let's begin, shall we?

Nit-Picks

She was in intense pain. She doubled over as it spread through her body.

Okay, not a very good way to begin your story. You want to hook us, not bore us right away by saying something like 'She was in intense pain.' You need to show us that, not tell us.

Also, I right away noticed that you have both the sentences starting with 'she'. That's a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Not only is it boring, it also shows that you didn't take the time to try and be creative with your word choice. Thesauruses: a writer's best friend! I'll talk more about this later on though.

Her heart felt as if it were about to burst straight out of her chest. She fell to her knees and clutched at her chest with claw-like hands as if trying to contain her heart. Her chest heaved as another wave of pain courses through her tired body. She collapses and screams at her heart races and sends another wave of pain through her convulsing body. She clutches as the grass floor and raises her head to stare at the forest canopy. The leaves on the trees begin to lose focus and her clutches become weaker and weaker. Suddenly, the pain becomes unbearable and a feeling like a knife to the heart and stomach stab at her and she screams in agony as her body convulses once and then she blacks out.

The rest of the paragraph is also sort of awkward and telly. Maybe reword a bit, and remember to SHOW not TELL.

The next paragraph is also a bit awkward and telly, but maybe not quite as much. As with the first one, I think that a bit of rewording is in order.

But that's it for the nit-picks. So now let's move on.

Plot

I'm not quite sure what the plot is going to be right now, but that's a bit common in beginnings of stories. Maybe work on developing it a bit better in future chapters.

Characters

Right now, you don't have very developed characters. That's mostly because of the lack of description though. There are a few ways in which you can develop your characters extremely well, and those are through dialogue, description, feelings, and actions. For more tips on developing characters, here are some good tips that I found right here on the site:

topic18786.html
topic23997.html
topic53682.html

Remember, you want your characters to be realistic, relatable, and you want them to have depth. We want to know why your characters do the things they do, say the things they say, etc. and without that, your story just falls flat.

Misc.

Remember at the very beginning of the post when I was talking about SHOWING not TELLING and stuff like that? Well, here's an example of how you could fix those two first sentences so that they are more showy, and they don't have repeating sentence starters:

The searing pain was almost too much for her to bear. Doubling over, she cringed as it spread through her entire body.

This effectively takes care of both of those problems. (And we get to picture what she's going through!) Maybe go through your whole story and add some more description etc. so it's more interesting.

And lastly, I noticed that you have both the characters' viewpoints in just one big clump of a paragraph. Normally, people don't like to read big clumpy paragraphs. Maybe just make sure you don't have that after you've edited. Remember the two rules for separating paragraphs. You need a new one whenever:

~ The time/subject switches
~ The speaker changes

Just remember that when editing.

And that's about all I have to say! I do love stories like this, fantasy romance I mean. Make sure you let me know when you edit it/post a continuation!

Good luck with your writing, and I hope to see more of your stories on the site! See you around! Bye bye for now.

~ Trish

Hi, I'm turity! Here are some suggestions:

Too much description of her suffering in the beginning. It doesn't hook right away. Try to find a better starting sentence and move the description to come in after. Also get rid of some of it as it seems overkill. It would be more interesting to read if we had already sympathized with the protagonist and could feel her pain.

You changed tenses all of the sudden. Why? I didn't see the need.

Her chest heaved as another wave of pain courses through her tired body.

You go from past to present from here on.

Sounds like it was from 'her' POV first and suddenly it switches over to the watcher's. If that's the case you should make a clear distinction by starting a new paragraph.

I liked the watcher's POV because I'm curious as to why he's there in the first place, spying on her. Since this is such a short piece I can't complain about character development and dialogue. Hopefully you have more of that coming up?

Good job, and keep writing!

This is good, there are just some key elements you need to fix to make it great

1. You need to chose which tense you're writing in. Right in the beginning you're writing in the past tense, but half way through the first paragraph you switch to the present tense. There are only certain times when you can jump from one tense to another, and it's disconcerting otherwise. No worries though, it can easily be fixed

2. To be a great writer, you need to show what's happening rather than tell. If you have to spell something out for the reader, then you aren't doing your job of creating imagery. By telling a story, you aren't setting a mood, just merely describing a series of happenings. Rather make the reader feel the emotion by something the person does. Take this for example.

Telling:
The girl's mom told her she couldn't go to the party. She was very angry.

Showing:
The girl slammed her fist on the table and groaned, as her mom told her she couldn't go to the party.
^
You can tell she's angry, right? But nowhere have I specifically said she is angry, I've shown it.

3. Characters, characters, characters. I understand this piece is meant to be vague in who its about, but you need to differentiate between the person on the balcony (whose gender we don't know by the way) and the woman on the ground. They have no separate personality traits to speak of, and so it's very hard to grow fond of either, or to have any sort of familiarity with them.

I know this is your first time, and this is good Just take in consideration what I've said, and you'll be on your way in no time.

Always keep writing

~^~Chelsea~^~