Young Writers Society

[deleted]

Hello Furball.

I think I had a pretty good idea of what you were trying to do with this piece (though I'm not entirely certain). Your first chapter read like a cross between historical fiction and fantasy (from its olden day setting and similarities with fantasy conventions, such as young, spirited children as characters and the use of a fairytale book to foreshadow future events). I think the reason why I wasn't fully decisive on this would be the fact that there wasn't really much happening in this chapter, despite the use of certain conventions.

Let's start with the playground scene. I think you did a pretty fair job in portraying them as happy young children, but that was all I got from that. None of the characters really stood out for me nor did I got any sort of message or theme from it since what you've written was a pretty generic playground scene. Maybe you should consider showing key actions or imagery to bring more meaning to this. Was one of them sitting by themselves on the swing with no one to push him/her? How about a main character that's a bully? Or if we were to use your current situation, how did both these ran? What else can you say about this besides using it to show that they were happy children?

I liked the second part more than the first as there was actually some imagery here and I had a better sense of the setting. But again, nothing really was happening here. Wasn't there any sort of conflict or discussion happening at the dinner table besides things like "Oh man, can you help me set up the table?" Couldn't you show some of the character's actions while they were at the dinner table. If anything, the dinner table is a pretty ideal place for characterization. You can many different actions such as someone pouting and thinking about things as they wait for the meal to come to some person stuffing their dinner down like a pig. A good place for you to build on this would be the aroma description. What did the narrator think of it?

Your last scene interested me, as I was wondering why you decided to include some sort of fairytale into this. The story seemed to represent a type of "overcoming adversary type of story" but it seems like it's just randomly placed there. What happened before this scene has little to no relation with this. Is this going to be one of your main theme? If so, you should really consider integrating this throughout your prose instead of having mundane and redundant events.

But overall, this was decent, even if there was no distinct voice to it. I hope this review helped.

Andy.

Thanks for the tips Squallies ^^ I appreciate it.

Hi Kammie!

So, I really liked this. It was compelling, and I liked the cross between fantasy and historical fiction that this piece seemed to have. Your characters were wonderful, and it's paced so that the reader really has time to take in the characters, setting and story. You've strapped us in so that we'll stay for the ride in the second and third parts.

One thing that I didn't like was that the first two chapters were really boring. You don't really do much, just give us insight into what Krissy's character is like. It kind of reminded me of the video game Fable. Although that's cool, it reads like a generic historical/fantasy. I didn't really like it until she came back to her dying father. A little restructuring might work. Maybe you could start with the father's death and have Krissy tell the story in broken flashbacks.

Another thing that bothered me was your sentence structure. You start of almost every sentence with a pronoun, and, or the. While you may not think about this when you're writing, you can always look over it and try to kick the habit. An exercise I've like is highlighting the first word of every sentence and reading it out loud see how repetitive you get.

It isn't perfect, but first drafts usually never are. I really did like this, and if play around first two chapters a bit more and focus on the other things Andy and I talked about, you'll have gold on your hands.

Rating: 9/10


PM me if you have questions!

-Elinor