Thorn: Prologue

P R O L O G U E
§

The city burns behind me.
“You need to get yourself out!”
Mother’s words echo in my memory, and the minutes that passed since they were spoken felt like centuries. We were the first ones to see the massive ships pulling into the docks. We knew something was wrong when massive, inhuman men emerged, carrying torches.
“Go, I will follow.”
I had been hesitant to follow Mother’s first order. I was afraid the strange attackers would kill her, and my father.
“Go!”
I could not argue any more. I ran out the door, into the black night. I was horrified at what I saw. The streets were littered with corpses, maimed and tossed aside.
I see one of them.
He threw his torch upon a building, setting it ablaze. Screams of those still alive came from all corners of the town.
I tried to remember my lessons in stealth to escape the village alive. I wanted to go back to find my parents, but it was too late. I could only save myself.

I am still running now. The city is nothing more than a mass of bright orange flames. My legs ache. I am not safe, not yet.
Would there be any survivors of this terrible night?

Hi Elinor!

First of all, you keep on changing tense. You slip in and out of past and present tense, and it makes it really strange! So fix that up!

Next, the speaker seems really young! She relies on her mother's direction, doesn't seem to be able to creatively solve problems (she didn't seem to try and help anything, nor think about helping anything), and didn't really react very strongly to the gore around her. When she says, "I was horrified at what I saw" she has no other emotional response to the scene, besides the simple description that there were corpses littering the place. Plus, she was trying to remember stealth lessons, which shows me that the lessons are still fairly new and they haven't been ingrained in her head yet. For ages go, I would place her at 11 or 12. I don't know if this is what you want. I just figured I would mention it.

Hey Ellie! Ready for Caddie's first review in, like, forever? (:

Nitpicks

§

Um... is there a real reason that you need this? Symbols are okay, but this symbol is used in things like legal and financial reports... just saying.

when massive, inhuman men emerged

Well that's a bit vague. Something tells me that these inhuman men are rather important. The least you could do is describe them a bit. I realise that this is a prologue and vaguness is acceptable, but this is just lack of description, dear. You could teast us a bit and sprinkle some in there:
"Massive men, emerging from boat, armed with cruel fire in their green tentacles, screeching out their strange language of avian screams."
You see? It's a teaser... I want to know more.
"Inhuman men" just leaves too much to the imagination.

So this was short... most of the nitpicks I saw could actually fit into an...

Overall

-- Tense issues
Ah, le dreaded present tense. Quite artful when employed well, awful when used incorrectly. Right now, you are switching tenses like crazy:
You start off in present tense, then dissolve into this random past tense paragraph, and then return to present.
Did you mean for the large past tense portion to be a flashback? You need to say that, either explicitally or by italicising the writing. Something like that.

--Sentence Structure
This is just one of the biggest reasons I disliked this piece of writing. It did not vary at all; ergo, it became choppy and monotonous.
This particular prologue has 24 sentences.
10 start with I and are of siple sentence contstruction.
Most of the others follow the same sentence construction: One independ clause of one subject and one verb.
*yawn*
Vary the structure. Add dependent clauses, make the sentences complex, compound, compound-complex!
In a fantasy story like this, minimalism is not encouraged. What makes fantasy writing is the variety of language. Add prepositional phrases, subordinate conjunctions, have some fun!
Don't limit your writing to the style of Hemingway unless you are writng minimilistic fiction. (:

-- Lack of Descrption
This is what killed this for me. There was none. It was entirely too vague, and reads a bit like an outline.
Your character is running, sure, but any old MC can run. Are her thighs chaffing from the sweat? Does her nose burn from the smoke? Do the tears make little tracks down her ash-streaken face?
This is what makes a fantasy story come to life.

-- Time Lapse
Dude. This all happens so fast. People come, and the town randomly burns? Try to make the flashback just a bit more detailed.

Hope this helps,
Antigone

“Go, I will follow.”

I ran out off the door, and into the black night.

Adding these would make the sentence structure better.

The streets were littered with corpses; maimed and tossed aside.

There should be a semicolon instead of a comma.

My legs ache.

This seems to stick out from the rest of the paragraph like a sore thump, and it throws off the tenses.

Overall:
This isn't necessarily bad, but you do need a lot to work on. Your tenses tend to go off, which can easily be fixed. I think that you should also be a lot more descriptive. I'm not even sure whether the main character is male or female, let alone what they look like, and I don't know what the surroundings look like too much.

So, Antigone has already given you a pretty awesome review.

I think I should just emphasize the tense and lack of description issues.

Compared with when you first joined YWS, you're writing like a new person. Your narration has gone from rather bad to pretty solid, and overall I think you're doing great.

Now, a couple of tips:
On connecting with your reader:
The one thing that you'll notice about human kind is that we are rather selfish beings. Before we can empathize with someone, we actually need to care. It's your job as a writer to facilitate this relationship between writer and reader.

The first and most vital step in doing this is showing us the heart of your character. Not the sight or the thoughts, but the heart. Describe what it is that your character thinks about as she leaves. The feelings about the fear of losing her mother, and the feelings about her home burning. Her friends who have or might perish, and her hearts response. She is not apathetic, and if you want us to care, you need to show us her feelings.

There are other pretty important although sometimes avoidable steps:
Give us a reason to want your character's victory. This can be done by showing why your character is good. Show us her doing something good, or trying to do something heroic. It doesn't need to be anything big, but it's something that should make us like her.

Tell us who the perpetrators are. Make us despise them. Even if you don't give us their reasons at this stage, it's sometimes a good idea to establish the antagonist at an early stage.

Make your character interact. The more real your character is, the more we will believe her as human. The more she interacts, the more we get to know her.

Acknowledge that you are a narrator. Sometimes you'll find that to acknowledge that you are a narrator helps to deal with those awkward lines like:

Would there be any survivors of this terrible night?

. If you realize that you're a narrator, it's far easier to ask this question in a way that flows with the piece. You could say, "I wondered whether any would survive the night of slaughter." There is no point to switching to something more omniscient. Just describe whatever the character would see and become the character. This is the most important part of first person narration.

To conclude, I suggest reading Ursula K Le Guin's Lavinia which I incidentally just picked up and have not yet finished. She writes a first person narration from the perspective of a girl that is not only believable, but is also poetic. You might like it.

Have a great one!