Young Writers Society

It’s dark and cold, I could hear the snow crunching beneath my feet, and the hard cave wall brush against my hand as I searched for the path forward. I felt the occasional pain expand through my hand as my wife squeezed it in fear.
I tripped on a rock and pulled my wife with me, I heard her scurrying towards me and grab my arm.
“It’s ok, I’m here” I said trying to calm her.
“Promise you’ll never leave me” she said tears running down her cheeks.
“I promise”.
We got to our feet and found that the floor we trod on was crumbling.
We ran, ran until we saw beams of light coming through a hole big enough for us to fit through.
We ran faster as the floor in front of us cracked and shook. The heat from my wife’s hand vanished and I heard a blood curdling scream from the black abyss behind me. I let my legs buckle hoping I would fall too, but I was already outside with cool air blowing on my face.
My tears rolled down my cheek and froze as they hit the floor.
I rose to my feet to find a snow leopard preparing to pounce, I thought to myself that now is my time to be reunited with my wife, to see her deep blue eyes glisten in the sun, her soft pink lips curve into the perfect smile, her long black hair stand out from her pale white face.
The snow leopard pounced, it flew straight past my face and into a bear that was about to cut my head off in one clean slice. They both fell into the abyss that took my wife.
A turquoise coloured mist emerged from the hole, and formed a perfect silhouette of my wife. She looked into my eyes, and I looked into hers. They were the same deep blue eyes she had before.
She raised her hand to touch my cheek, and then she faded into a thousand tiny specs of dust. I had no idea what was going on, I was so confused. All I now is that the hole in my heart was gone, the pain of grieving had vanished and I new she was safe, no I could feel she was safe.
But I still don’t understand how, or why? Was I dead or alive, asleep or awake?
As I walked away from the hole, I left it all behind.
I didn’t stop until I came upon a lake so I could have a drink. The water was cool and refreshing as I let it trickle down my throat, I took one last mouthful and stood up with my eyes closed. I calmed myself down and opened my eyes.
There was a school of fish in the water, there fins touched the water leaving a turquoise mist behind.
And then I heard the soft gentle whisper of my wife’s voice say, “love never dies”

While this is exciting and interesting and will obviously develop into a good story, There's a few issues:

One: It's too short! Now we're left hanging as you unfolded this high-paced scene and then the reader is saying: 'Well, what now?"
Two: You overuse personal pronouns, like I or we. It's very distracting, so try using some other terms for those moments you need them.
Three: there's a lot of lack of punctuation, such as this:

“Promise you’ll never leave me”

You should use a comma if you're going to transition from a character's dialog to a description.
Other than those small issues, you've started an exciting story that I look forward to reading the rest of. Keep writing!

Hi there! First of all, welcome to YWS, and I hope you find everything here to your liking. The people are all pretty awesome, and there's lots of great things to read and review. Allow me to be one of your first reviewers (be warned, I can sometimes be brutally honest, so only read on if you're willing to hear my truthful thoughts!)....

I think this story has quite a bit of potential, but I think the sentence structure and language is a bit choppy in some places. For example, you begin most of your sentences with 'I,' 'the,' or 'me,' or something like that. Not only does it begin to sound repetitive after a bit, but it's also a bit of a drag to read through. It makes the sentences move slowly. So take a look at each paragraph on its own and see if you can't spice it up a bit. You know, really have fun with words!

In the first sentence, you have a tense-shift from present to recent past tense. Going from "it's" to "could" sounds awkward, and really throws off the momentum of the passage. Also, you should use a semicolon at the end of "it's dark and cold" instead of a comma, because those are two complete sentences next to each other. In fact, take a look at all of your commas and see if many of them can't become periods or semicolons (semicolons are used to connect two complete sentences by the way; both sentences must be able to stand alone without a comma - like in this phrase in the parentheses). And sometimes you need a comma and don't have one, so look at that too. I realize punctuation and grammar are testy subjects, and mastery will come with time. Just take a while to practice with it and you'll become more skilled quite quickly, I promise!

A turquoise coloured mist emerged from the hole, and formed a perfect silhouette of my wife. She looked into my eyes, and I looked into hers. They were the same deep blue eyes she had before.

This passage is far too much telling and not enough showing. As opposed to just saying what's going on, let the character speak for you. Use physical motions and expressions to convey what's happening as opposed to just saying what happened.
Example:

Caesar was surprised when he saw Brutus stab him with the other senators.
VS
At the moment Caesar looked up and laid his eyes upon the face of Brutus, his most honorable companion now among the dissenters, his arms fell limp and the blood drained from his face.

See the difference? The second one sounds much more convincing, and it's more fun to read. And look over the whole story with this idea too. Don't go into too much detail with physical things though. Keep it moving, but keep it interesting.

Give the narrator's wife A NAME! I cannot stress that enough. I felt absolutely no connection to her, and I didn't really feel sad about her loss because I didn't know anything about her. So develop her a bit more and then make it a tragedy to lose her. You can give her a name, describe what she looks like, make her say some more, a whole bunch of things. But flesh out all your characters more. It makes for a much better story.

Now, like I said at the beginning, I do thin you have a good idea here, and it could really go places. But use words like 'I,' 'there was/were,' and 'the' a lot less. There's way too many of 'em. So think about all that I said (I know it's a lot to digest!), and then go back and polish of the story until it shines with amazingness! Sorry if anything I said offended you, just offering my opinions and advice as a fellow author! If you ever need a review, or more advice, please feel free to drop me a line!
- SOCKS

oddly enough this story started out as a school project that I thought would be nice to carry on.
I appreciate your opinions and to be honest that is exactly what my teacher said to me when I handed it in! I will take your advice though and polish it a bit because now that I have re-read it I too think it could use some work.