Young Writers Society

Hey guys ^_^

I've never posted anything in advanced critiques before, so I thought I'd give it a go! This is a pretty short novella. It's humorous fiction, (Well, supposed to be anyway) I'll let you be the judge of that!

It's a pretty rough draft to be honest. Knowing me, there are probably loads of mistakes in it. I was thinking of making it a bit longer, but I wanted to know if you think it has any potential whatsoever?

Thanks,

xoxo Skins

Yo,
I just read your novella. I never nitpick, I usually comment on the sentence structure, internal consistency and stuff like that, but here... I feel out of my depth. It was a nice peek into the world of a puberty-maddened girl, and it was very witty in places. In other places it was on the verge of making me blush like a guilty adult in denial, and in such moments I had to remind myself what a dirty mind I had as a puberty-maddened boy.

It was very pleasant to read, you use the diary format quite successfully, and this reminded me of an old book called 'The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole'. It is a diary of a teenage boy written by an adult woman. Weird, but it worked out perfectly. Come to think of it, so did Harry Potter. What is it with adult women and boys? Haha

Anyway, to recap - I sniggered in all the places made for sniggering, except the cat urine and perv lesbo teacher bits, which I recognized should be snigger-inducing, but passed me by. I thought the story was well structured, and that the story arc seems to be not that of something with a definite begining, crisis, and end, and rather a TV series.

Good luck

As far as humor goes, this was definitely entertaining. It had me chuckling throughout. Pretty much everyting Napalmerski has said, I'm inclined to agree with. It also kinda reminds me a bit of Charles Bukowski, in his rambling madness in novels like Post Office or Pulp.

Very nicely done.

AHHHHH! When I realized it ended when it did, I like screamed. ADD MORE! THIS IS PERFECTION. It's funny and cute and the only mistakes were a couple of spelling mistakes. YOu have to continue this. Have to. HAVE TO.

Very very nice. It was cool to read a story set in England, where I live. I could totally tell right away, too. Also, I live next to an Oceana, so I could picture everything pretty well.

I enjoyed this because you really captured the mindset of a teenage girl. I laughed a lot too, but the cat thing did get old. So did the whole "my brother is really gay" thing. My little brother wears my mother's boots, but that's just brothers for you.

Also, I am hurt. I am 19 and I still play pokemon. It's awesome.

One more thing, I think this story had a nice ending. A similar thing happened to me two days ago so I could totally relate. xD


Thanks for your story,

Evil.

You need to continue this. I loved this! You had me laughing, and that's hard to do, cuz I'm in a bad mood today! Anyways, great job, great way to end. I think you need to post more, though. Soon, very soon.
Also, great job with the diary format, as well as capturing the teenage girl voice. Quite simply, this story is brilliant.
Keep it up...keep finding "The Beauty in Ugly"!
Snuggles,
Mizz

I couldn't stop laughing. I mean, some parts were less funny, but the majority had me cracking up. Wow, your character is very original - not a lot of writers are willing to write such a 'random' character. Of course she's not random, really, but her thoughts wonder constantly - which I found to be the best part about this. She probably has ADD - don't you think? Spelling and grammar mistakes were thrown in now and then, but I still it's still okay. I'm not that into nitpicks, so I can't really help you there. I think you should definitely continue. It is great! I love the friend characters too - though I found it a bit troubling that your MC talks about Claire a lot, and yet we never see her, we just see Sophie. But that can be part of the plot.
Good job!
Ofir

I just started reading it, but so far it's great. It kind of reminds me of Georgia Nicholson. That's great, we need more light hearted hilarious stories like hers. As for the humor, it is definately on a high level, so a job well done with that

OMFG. I just spent like an hour editing and writing comments in your story, and my computer ate the file. WTF.

RAAAAAAGE.

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE.

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE.

I am so angry right now.

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Okay. Thank God I'm computer literate and I was able to recover it. Retarded stupid... gah.

Anyway, on to the review.

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Plot
As it is, there's no plot, but that's not a bad thing. It's a rambling diary story, and it's great. I do hope you're planning on having some sort of... event to happen to make the story more cohesive, and a sense of direction. As it is, the style is lofty and carefree, so plot isn't really needed. I assume the whole story won't revolve around Tory being lovestruck over Oliver?

Characters
Tory is crazy, and funny, she's a real fun character to read about. She's the only developed character really, but I liked Jack's description. I expect more plot etc around the Almighty and Tory's mother - it'd be funny to read about Tory having to endure a salsa lesson in town, or have to go shopping with her mum or something. There are a lot of things that could evolve from this base story, and it'd be awesome to read

Grammar
You missed some really simple spelling mistakes and apostrophises in words like "brother's". Other than that, and the lack of capitalisation of titles, like the Almighty, Angel of Hotness etc, I found nothing else really noticable about your use of grammar. Of course Tory is absolutely insane, so any mistakes you make can be passed off to her insanity :3

Oh, you abused the use of adverbs too. Too many "ly" words that just tangled up your otherwise flowing sentences.

Overall
I really enjoyed reading this, and the parts I found hilarious I read out loud to my housemates, and they loved it too (they're boys as well, so props to you). The trail mix and lawnmower parts were the best, they were just pure awesome. You should probably mention what Tory is writing in, and why she started the diary at that particular time, as that'd add some backstory and get rid of the confusion regarding the medium she's using to record her thoughts (she could have been reciting them into a recorder for all I knew).

I encourage you to continue, but don't feel disheartened if you give up - diaries are a hard medium to write in, but they are always fun

- Jai

Thanks for all of the critiques, guys.

I actually wrote this ages ago... well, when I was twelve. I used to think that I was so cool when I was writing it... Such a naive child, aye. It's really interesting seeing what you guys think of it even though I wrote it a while ago; I'm surprised that people actually like it. I had no idea about plot, character development, or anything like that. I think I might try rewriting this and see what I can come up with... Could be interesting, I guess.

Yeah, I only realized this wasn't new when I checked out your portfolio and saw posts of chapters of this. You received a whole heap of reviews with those previous posts (average of 6.5 each for the 6 posts), and a lot here, so I do hope you fix up the mistakes and follow through with it. I noticed that many of the comments on the Diary of a Teenage Disaster posts were similar to mine, pointing out the same mistakes and/or flaws, such as the "I couldn't find a pen so I couldn't write a suicide note" thing. I recommend going over all those previous comments and actually implementing the suggestions so the mistakes aren't present two years down the track.

May I ask - if you're only thinking about rewriting it *after* the comments, why did you post this up again under a different forum and title? The way you phrased your sentence above makes me think that you weren't going to continue this until you read the comments.

-Jai

I just wanted overall opinions on the entire story, I guess, not just the chapters as individual chapters If that makes sense...