Time is my playground. I get to toy with it; mess with it as much as I want. While the rest of you are controlled by time and its constant speed; I and only I can take it to my own hands and manipulate it to my own will. Well, not really but I can freeze it which is close enough. I guess. I also know a lot of other people who can do this too. So I’m not that special but it still pretty sweet.
I have heard many different names for people who can freeze time but the most popular one; I have heard is describing someone as time sensitive but I have heard a lot of different names for us. Some of my favorites are time stoppers, clock breakers, and time hitchhikers. One person referred when he freezes time to taking a time out. But my favorite will always be when one person referred to when time is frozen to “an infinite stop for hammer time” and another referred to it as second day. It was definitely a weird conversation.
There is kind of this weird unspoken rule among other other people who can also freeze time, to not really talk about it. It is not just with normal people it is just in general. If you met someone when time is frozen and you just see them by the side of the street you don’t really go up to them and talk and if you do you act like you just met even though you might see them everyday whenever you chose to freeze time. It is stupid and everybody does it. I don’t get why we don’t just tell people either it is not against any power or anything. It just I guess feels weird to explain it. I don’t really like explaining it either. But I guess the rule about it keeping it a secret probably is just a tradition that came from a rule that one made sense to follow but now is just like a zombie. It is dead but it is still limping forward.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I believe everyone has a right to know this type of stuff. I guess I just hate secrets of I just want to put all those stupid conspiracy theories about me to rest but I just had to tell someone so I am. I can tell you this whole story is true because it is and I can beg you to believe it but I won’t. I want to give you the chance to think for yourself, choose what you think is true and what you think is false for yourself. I am just going to give you the true facts from my perspective and you can decide what is true on your own.
It all started the day, I got hit by a car; well, I was supposed to. I was about six or seven. I was with my friend Andrew. We were inside lying back playing some video games. He usually beats me. But whenever I got lucky and finally win something, he was never really the best winner ever. He always got a little angry but he tried to always laugh it off as he demanded a rematch. He would say congrats and good job but it always had a bit of anger underneath it. It's like he wanted to win, but he did not want to show that he wanted to win because he wanted to be a nice friend.
But this day I did not win; Andrew did for the 5th time in a row. I was started to get a little frustrated but I did not really care; I just was happy to get sometime to be with a friend outside of school. I lived pretty far from the school, I went to at the time, and everyone who lives there so it was hard for my parents to have some time to drop me off anywhere or anyone to come to my house. My mom came down stairs to check up on us; she was working in her office upstairs. She noticed we were in the same exact positions we were last time she saw us. He was leaning against the armrest on the couch in such a position that both his back and his elbow was on the armrest. I was lying down across in the middle of the living room with my belly on on a pillow taken straight from the couch. My legs knee up were in the air and my head was in an upright position which is probably horrible for the neck. My mom suggested we go outside for a bit and she babbled about how nice of a day it is and how it is unhealthy to play videogames all day. Andrew and I decided instead of being over competitive playing video games; we can be over competitive playing basketball.
My mom was right. It was a cloudless day. The sun was hot but a nice breeze kept the heat at bay. There was a hoop right in front of my garage so we started to play. I forgot who through the ball but all I remember is that it bounced off the backboard and rolled into the street. That street was mostly quite empty of cars so I was quite used to just going into the street to get balls that rolled their. But that day was different, my mom was just coming out to check on us and she noticed a car speeding right towards me.
“JACKSON JACKSON,” my mom was screaming on the top of her lungs and that is the only time she ever called me by my full name. I looked behing me and noticd the car. I was still on the ground hetting the ball. I stoo up as fast as I could and started to move. My breathing quickened. The car got closer and closer and I was still not any closer to the saftey of the sidewalk. It got closer and closer and closer and then it stopped.
I did too. My mind was still racing and I looked straight ahead at Andrew staring at me with the look of pure terror on his face as he could possibly see one of his classmates die. My mother was running towards me but she wasn’t. She was stuck in one position. It was quiet, too quiet. “Is time just moving slower for me because I’m scarred or am I dead?” I thought to myself. I looked around looking for answers to what was going on. I didn’t understand until I looked up.
Their were some birds who were in the air. They were black and small but looked powerful and determined when they soared. There was around eight of them fling together in a pack but they were not flying. They were just hanging there in the sky, motionless and trapped in a moment.At that moment I understood what was going on.
Time was frozen and I need to move when I have this chance. I took a step forward. It had a certain weight to the movement. It was not like it was hard to move but I felt drained every little bit that I moved from an energy I never noticed, I had but once I spotted it, it felt like it was always their. I continued to move away from the car. I felt weaker and weaker but I continued moving as the weight was getting worse and worse.
The second I was out of the way; I dropped hold I got on time as the car rushed by me. My mom and Andrew ran towards me.
“It was so close,” my mom said looking at me. She went up to me and hugged me.
“I’m fine; I’m fine,” I said to my mom as I started to push away from the hug. I looked back at the street, confused at what just happened. Simultaneously happy what happened but still confused. I wanted to start looking for answers right then and there but it was not the time to that yet.
“Want to go inside and play some more video games,” I asked looking at Andrew. He nodded quietly and we walked back inside ditching the perfect sunny day.
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,798 Reviews
I will start by saying, the problem is not your story, but then again, the problem is hardly ever the story. Your character is stiff, unrelatable. He sounds too stiff, robotic, to be a real person. The scene with the car feels forced, and, if this were a film, it would be like you put a thick veil over the camera so you could hardly see what was going on. I couldn't feel the emotion of the moment, I couldn't see the car, you didn't put me in the characters shoes. My heart should have been racing, I should have felt the terror of the moment and understood just how scared he must have been in that moment. Instead, I'm stuck watching a plain, disconnected scene in which your character runs out to the street to retrieve his ball, his mother screams, he sees a car, then there's an unclear and rather awkward description of time stopping, then all is well. Your character reads like a brick is what I'm saying. This could be a wonderful story, just give your character some personality, maybe take some English classes (I recommend YouTube Academy, there are lots of great videos to check out on writing there, I recommend Jenna Moreci, Trope Talks (overlysarcasticproductions), and any other channels made by people who are either avid readers or experienced writers, DO NOT take advice from amateurs! Seriously, even I fit that second catagory, so go to youtube and find someone who has the experience to back their advice.
I will start by saying, the problem is not your story, but then again, the problem is hardly ever the story. Your character is stiff, unrelatable. He sounds too stiff, robotic, to be a real person. The scene with the car feels forced, and, if this were a film, it would be like you put a thick veil over the camera so you could hardly see what was going on. I couldn't feel the emotion of the moment, I couldn't see the car, you didn't put me in the characters shoes. My heart should have been racing, I should have felt the terror of the moment and understood just how scared he must have been in that moment. Instead, I'm stuck watching a plain, disconnected scene in which your character runs out to the street to retrieve his ball, his mother screams, he sees a car, then there's an unclear and rather awkward description of time stopping, then all is well. Your character reads like a brick is what I'm saying. This could be a wonderful story, just give your character some personality, maybe take some English classes (I recommend YouTube Academy, there are lots of great videos to check out on writing there, I recommend Jenna Moreci, Trope Talks (overlysarcasticproductions), and any other channels made by people who are either avid readers or experienced writers, DO NOT take advice from amateurs! Seriously, even I fit that second catagory, so go to youtube and find someone who has the experience to back their advice.
Thanks for the review. I am still quite new to writting and I have a very big problem with making characters likable. I once had to scrap a whole really interesting mystery book I was writing because I hated the characters so much. I have been trying to improve my character writing though and I am going to try to get into the creative writing class at my school to help me improve but I heard it is hard to get in. So wish me luck.
Also I have been watching both Jena Morcei and Overly Sarcastic Productions for a while. Aren't they great. If you want to watch something really funny I recommend the channel Terrible Writing advice. It makes fun of tropes and cliches in books, movies and tv. It's both really funny and if you do the opposite of everything he says you can get a pretty sweet story. Thanks for reading the story and I hope you have a chance to check out his channel if you have not yet.
I have actually watched that channel, and you're right, it's hilarious. I hope you get into the creative writing class, but, just from my experience, public school classes on ANYTHING are unhelpful at best, destructive at worst. So, if it's a public school class, you may just want to stick with youtube and other online sources. (I'm American BTW, so I only know the public school system here, which is eerily similar in the way it's run to our prisons (I wish I was joking or exaggerating) and if you live elsewhere that may now apply)
Heya, pinkrose.
Gonna try and get that last review in here, for my KoTGR sword. How about it?
So this should be “While the rest of you are controlled by time” and “I, and only I, can take it”. The trick with the latter is to take the pronoun (me) and see if it works without the extra stuff (“and only me”), so it'd be “me cant take”, but that's not grammatically correct. Hence changing it to “I”. As for the first thing, “you is controlled” isn't proper, so it should be changed to “are”.
Also, I notice you say “take it to my own hands” rather than “into my own hands”, or something similar. You might wanna touch that up a bit.
My understanding of semicolons is that they serve as a sort of fusion between two independent sentences. So if you had two sentences that stood just fine on their own, but you didn't want to pause with a period, you could slap a semicolon between them instead. In this case, the semicolon is used incorrectly, and a comma would be more appropriate. The previous instances of semicolon usage in this chapter seemed alright to me? But even if they're proper, I'd recommend not using semicolons too often, because it can make your writing look winding and messy when they're used incorrectly.
Also, the “well” here sort of takes me out of the story, and it goes from this semi-dramatic “I can control time, yo” to “well, actually, that's not right” which isn't great? You don't want your character second-guessing themselves in the exposition like this. It jumbles up the flow and, when the language gets more personal like this, it can remove readers from the story, unless the whole thing had been written in such a way.
These last two sentences of the first paragraph feel pretty fast-paced. They're fired off quickly and then we're dumped into the next paragraph, and this isn't a very strong addition to your hook (though hooks should be within the first couple sentences, I consider the entire first paragraph a hook).
“So I'm not that special but it still pretty sweet” definitely needs a comma somewhere, and I noticed you said “it” instead of “it's”, so that should be fixed. It could also probably stand to be fused with the previous sentence? Not via semicolon though. And for the first sentence, I'd recommend dropping either “also” or “too”, because using both feels redundant.
Fused sentences example:
Hopefully that makes sense.
So this is a mess of a sentence, but I'm gonna try to help tidy it up. You let us know that there's many different names, okay, that's good. The semicolon, though, dang. That semicolon is definitely unnecessary-- even improper, I'd say. So we can drop the semicolon.
Let's try slapping a comma after “freeze time”, too. So now the first half is pretty evened out. Then moving beyond what was the semicolon we've got “I have heard is describing someone as time sensitive”. This is alright, but you start off saying there's many different names and then giving us a description that isn't delivered quite like a name. It's not a huge thing, but maybe you could drop a majority of the sentence beyond the semicolon and say “the most popular I've heard is Time Sensitive”-- something like that.
Then there's the ending “but I have heard alot of different names for us.” This just whips us back around to where we started, making the sentences a kind of loop. We already know there are a lot, and you gave us a taste of one, so there's no need to reinstate that there are multiple. We can probably infer that anyway. So I'd recommend chopping all of this off, then doing the comma thing and removing the semicolon. Sentence should be much cleaner and flow better then.
I'll also point out real quick that “alot” isn't a word, and it should be “a lot”. Unless you're talking about this guy, you should never say “alot”:
This is a hefty chunk of, sort of, just rambling? I get that you want to fill readers in on these other names for Time Stoppers, but it would incredibly benefit your flow and story-telling to introduce them in a more organic way. Start the story off and have your character do something that alerts others to them having this ability, then have someone shout one of these names at them. Boom, organic introduction of one of the names. You also don't even need to give us all the names? If you really want to, organically introducing them through the story would be the best way to go.
This chunk as a whole mainly employs language that pulls me from the story. It's like someone struggling to hold a conversation, rather than a story being told. This isn't meant to be harsh or a wrecking ball through your work-- I'm just here trying to help!
This is an interesting idea regarding the time stopper peeps, but it could be explained more eloquently and even more briefly. You could try something like “There's an unspoken rule [no need for “kind of” or “weird”] among those who can freeze time, to not speak of it, with normal people or each other.”
That's just an example, but hopefully it gives you ideas for how you could revise this to a briefer explanation?
Reading on, the paragraph sort of just keeps going at this idea, and suddenly we're confirmed to be in the MC's head, whereas the first paragraph didn't seem like it'd be that personal. That's fine, though. Just, usually when readers see the MC's thoughts in a first-person story, the thoughts are between the MC and, well, their head. Or it's their thoughts on something in the world being shown to us. This paragraph, however, feels strongly like the MC talking to us, and that's kind of weird.
The MC says they don't like explaining the rules, but to them, they shouldn't be explaining it. Just glimpsing over it in their mind? Exposition in a first-person story is difficult, I understand, so I won't dwell on this much, but you might want to look over this paragraph and try to work out what could be removed and what can stay. See what's important to the plot, whether now or later, and see what progresses it. Other things can be chopped.
This kind of thing seems to be rampant through the chapter, so you'll have your work cut out for you when you get around to editing, but I'm sure you'll do good.
So this is the kind of thing one character might say to another, but having your MC say it to the reader is kind of cheesy and doesn't bring me into the story as much as you might hope. You could rewrite a bit of this work to have your MC speaking to someone else, and that'd give you a lot more wiggle room for exposition-type things, since first-person POV is hard on exposition. It could also bring up some other plot-point of, like, the MC getting in trouble for sharing Time Stopper business with an outsider. But that's just an idea! So far, I don't know what the plot of this chapter is, so my mind is all over the place searching for one.
So this isn't how, uh, punctuation should work. Oh no, lel. The comma is completely unnecessary and has us pause for no reason. The semicolon is also unnecessary. It could be two separate sentences, or one sentence separated by a dash (in place of the semicolon) for that dramatic effect.
There's a few issues with erratic tense here. This portion should be in the past tense, since it happened when the MC was a child, but you say “He usually beats me” which is present tense. Easy fix.
“But whenever I got lucky and finally win something” – there's two different tenses here: “got” is past, and “win” is present/future. You should swap “win” out for “won”.
“whenever I got lucky and finally win something, he was never really the best winner ever.” This is contradictory to you previously saying that Andrew usually won, but it also just doesn't really make sense. It's like, “on the few occasions that I won, he [suddenly] was no longer the best winner ever”. Like his chances of winning diminished with each game the MC won?
Few minor fixes, but yeah--
This should be “starting”, and the rest is kind of contradictory. They were starting to get frustrated, but they didn't care? You've gotta decide which emotion they're feeling, they can't feel both together. The paragraph I took this from also has a few unnecessary semicolons.
I'm going to try and just hit general things now, because this review is getting way too long and I don't wanna keep you any longer than necessary.
Okay, so, you use a lot of semicolons. A lot. And a couple instances were alright? But for the most part they were completely incorrect. Misused semicolons make your work look messy, especially when misused in such abundance.
You've got a few word tense issues throughout, but those are easily fixed if you give it a good proofread There were a number of misspelled words in the later half, but nothing that proofread can't help.
Overall, the flow wasn't that great, what with the semicolons and the rambling sort of feel to it. You handled the frozen time bit at the end relatively well, and we weren't stuck too long, but your descriptions were repetitive (“closer and closer and closer”) and bordered on grating?
Pacing was decent once we got out of the exposition of the world in the first half. Characters? We didn't really see much of the characters, and what we did see was kind of hard to read through, so I'd say they're still pretty rough, but it's also a first chapter, and expecting a perfect character right off the bat is unrealistic.
I'm not sure if your character is named Jackson, or Jackson Jackson, because when his mom calls at him, there's no comma, and you say it's his full name.
Anyway, I hope this review didn't come across too harshly! Hope it helps ya out! Keep on writing--
- Hatt