This War, Part One of Prologue

HI THERE. I probably should've told you guys this a long time ago, but I edited this up a storm and stuck it in 'Other Fiction' with the other two parts of the Prologue. It's under the title 'The Gangster Angel' right now (you'll see why). If you want to see what happens, check out the following link: topic50564.html
Bye-bye!

I want to say a few things.

For One, your Character Development was very good! i felt like i actully knew them.

. I was really beginning to regret that I had agreed to hang with my kid brother and his little punk girlfriend all day

I might as well rate it right now.
4.5 stars out of 5
The voice and narration of the story is extremely fluent and much easier to read than others. Though I still caught a bit of grammar misses and odd sentence structure (one example: when you're talking about Z you go off subject a bit to talk about Sweeney), it was a very decent piece of work. I do sorta believe that some names and street could be a bit more creative, but that's more of an opinion than anything else. It's an excellent piece of material for an urban story (kinda like the outsiders) so alls you need to do is to write more of it and keep up the good work.

Dam why couldn't you of written more. If their were any grammar mistakes I didn't notice them. The word went
together and made sense. I thought it had a strong story and a good cast of characters, some of the characters, Like the ones you had strung through the text needed more intel on them, maybe. I think maybe you should of said who Z and Marri were first time you mentioned them,

I was freezing my ass off on the wrong side of mainstream making sure my little brother Marri and his girlfriend Z didn't get jumped.

something like that just so you know who they are right from the beggining.

I liked it, i wanted their to be more to read. Their wasn't but oh well. I really hope you post more of the story. Since I'm awful at grammer I can't really do it. I can only give my opinion so thats the end of my short reveiw, please Pm when you post more of it. Just one more thing it said something about life after death do you mean after you die or after some one else dies so its like how deal with it?

Hi Adriana,

This is spectacular. You have a powerful voice, a strong situation/setting and some fascinating characterisation.

What I'm not seeing is the plot. Stuff that happens in this piece: Narrator talks to his brother and brother's girlfriend. That's all. It's >1300 words of setup.

Especially for the genre, I'm thinking that we need to cut straight to the plot here. Ideally, the first part of your novel (whether you call that the first chapter or a prologue) contains the inciting incident - the event that kicks off the plot, after which the narrator can never go back to the way things were. What's that inciting incident, and where have you put it?

I would hate to slash this, because it's a really cool piece, but it's still just setup. Put your finger on the inciting incident is and figure out how to cut the preceding part down to the bare minimum of setup necessary. Pace is important. Set the scene, kick off the inciting incident and crank the pace up to 60mph.

I think your writing style could also slim down a little. We need to fix the structure before we can tighten up the writing, but just a quick line edit to demonstrate redundancy ([s]strikeout[/s] for cuts, red for changes, blue for comments):

I was in Third Street [s]mainly[/s] by default, [s]just[/s] like Marri and Z [s]were[/s], since we'd all been born east of the Mainstream. I was in the gang deep enough [s]so[/s] that I'd pulled my [s]fair[/s] share of drug deals and [s]had[/s] beaten the shit out of some kids in rumbles, but I wasn’t in as far as guys like Carson Senior, his best friend Rodriguez, and his girlfriend An Linh. They answered directly to Johnny Marauder, [s]the man who ran the whole deal[/s] (implied). I'd only seen him [s]around town[/s] twice, but he'd scared the crap out of me each time. He [s]always seemed to be wearing[/s] wore black t-shirts [s]that[/s] advertising some death metal band, ripped-up baggy jeans [s]that were[/s] held up with a chain and padlock, a loose white tie with bloodstains [s]on it[/s], and a faded old-school Fedora (feel like four clothing details is too many, consider cutting). The way [s]that[/s] he dressed paled in comparison to the terror [s]that[/s] you felt when he looked you in the eye, [s]however[/s]; his left eye had been ripped to shreds when he and his friends started throwing stones at Old Tommy’s vicious guard dogs, a little over a decade ago. He would stare at you with one eye that had an iris so dark [s]that[/s] it was almost black, and a second eye that looked like [s]little more than[/s] a mass of [s]scarred[/s] white scar tissue (edit for clarity). The slogan ‘an eye for an eye’ comes to mind.

Hey. This is payback for reading one of my chapters for The Experiment. Thanks a lot for taking the time to do so.

And now, on to the review.

I had been freezing my ass off for the past five hours out in the snow on the wrong side of the Mainstream, making sure that Marri and Z didn’t get jumped by First Street while they smoked cigarettes and stared dismally at the colorless sky [This sentence is too long, especially since it's the first impression you're giving us readers as to what your story will be like. Shorten]. I was really beginning to regret that I had agreed to hang with my kid brother and his little [Cute the little here; it's too much along with the punk] punk girlfriend all day, instead of chilling with my band and working on the lyrics for that new song we were writing. The main highlight of my day had been when Sashay Carson stopped by the local music store around noon, and we hung out for a while talking about badass old rappers and heavy metal bands. I was just explaining to her what the old song ‘Inside the Fire’ by Disturbed was about when her gangster [I'm beginning to see that you have a habit of overexplaing things. You use too many adjectives. Cut back on those. While I like them, I also like to be left on my own to form mental images. Help the reader along, sure, but don't overdo it] older brother and his college friends dropped in, and Carson Senior threatened to slash my face up with his butterfly knife. I usually got along all right with Carson Senior, seeing as I respected him and he tolerated me, but he didn’t like guys even looking at his little sister, period. I figured that this was pretty much because there were a lot of First Street punks in her sophomore class, and he was a hard-core Third Street gangster with a reputation of killing anyone who crossed him.

I was in Third Street mainly by default, just like Marri and Z were, since we had all been born east of the Mainstream. I was in the gang deep enough so that I had pulled my fair share of drug deals and had beaten the shit out of some kids in rumbles, but I wasn’t in as far as guys like Carson Senior, his best friend Rodriguez, and his girlfriend An Linh. They answered directly to Johnny Marauder, the man who ran the whole deal. I had only seen him around town twice, but he had scared the crap out of me each time. He always seemed to be wearing black t-shirts that advertised some death metal band, ripped-up baggy jeans that were held up with a chain and padlock, a loose white tie with bloodstains on it, and a faded old-school Fedora. The way that he dressed paled in comparison to the terror that you felt when he looked you in the eye, however; his left eye had been ripped to shreds when he and his friends started throwing stones at Old Tommy’s vicious guard dogs, a little over a decade ago. He would stare at you with one eye that had an iris so dark that it was almost black, and a second eye that looked like little more than a mass of scarred white tissue [Isn't that what it is?]. The slogan ‘an eye for an eye’ comes to mind.

“What’re you thinking about, Marshall?” asked Marri, cigarette smoke escaping his lips as he talked. He ran a hand over his crew-cut blond hair as he waited for an answer. He had always seemed to have a gift for knowing what people were thinking off of their body language and the looks on their faces, so I knew that he was truly stumped when he needed to actually ask me what was going around in my head. He never seemed to realize it when I was annoyed at him, however.

“I’m thinking of that homeless kid on 34th and 2nd Street,” I answered.

Z glanced up at me as I said that, and Marri probed, “Why?”

“I’m thinking that the next time that I see him, I’m going to hand him a damn jacket. I’m going to take the hike back home without you two punks if you don’t pack it up soon.”

“Fuck off, Marshall,” said Z dully, looking at the sky again.

“That’s Mr. Marshall to you, kid.” I still wasn’t sure how the whole ‘Mr. Marshall’ thing had begun, but I hadn’t let Z stop calling me that since she started. It was beginning to annoy her now, which was exactly my intention.

“You know that you wouldn’t leave us alone in enemy territory,” said Marri, in that brutally honest way that he had. “You’d regret it if we got jumped.”

Damn him.

“True,” I responded. “But that’s only because I wouldn’t let some punks from First Street have all the fun of putting you two in the hospital.” I gave him a menacing glare. “I would have no qualms about putting you and your demon of a girlfriend in St. Phillips for two weeks, Marri. Never doubt that.”

He went kind of white when I said that. Did he actually believe me? “We’re going to be packing up soon, Marshall. Chill out.”

I sighed with impatience, exasperation, and coldness, kicking back against the brick wall of a building with a third cigarette. Marri and Z had already cleaned out two entire packs by themselves; I was probably going to die of nicotine poisoning or something from all the second-hand smoke sometime soon [But your MC smokes, too, so wouldn't he die from actual smoking?]. I cast a curious glance at Z as I blew out a smoke ring, wondering why she hadn’t sworn at me when I called her a demon. I would never understand why Marri was going out with a chick like Z, as long as I lived.

Marri was a sweet kid. He had an amazing amount of street smarts and a fair amount of common sense, but his grades in school couldn’t suck any more without them being in the teens. He was roughly five-feet-six-inches tall and about as wiry as a fifth grader, but what he lacked in muscle he made up for in the fact that he could outrun anybody. This simple fact had eventually gotten to his head and made him think that if he couldn’t talk or fight his way out of a situation, he could run away from it. This logic often didn’t work out in his favor, seeing as he liked to pick fights, mostly with people who were quicker with their guns than he was with his feet. I usually ended up as the one to bail Marri out of the shitty situations that he got into, even though I always told him that he had to finish what he started. I’ve never understood why he listened avidly to every piece of advice that I gave him, except for the whole vital ‘people-in-this-town-will-kill-you-if-you-cross-them’ spiel. [This, here, I'm having a problem with. You're slowing down the story, and while I do like these little explanations of your characters, I'd either like to figure it out on my own, or be told later in the story when I'm actually into it. You're telling too much, showing too little]

Z fell into a category all her own. She talked like the guys in my grade and swore worse than mi amigo [Italics] Sweeney. It was practically a rule in my high school to add the mi amigo before you said his name, just as a reminder of how he cussed out his foreign language teacher in eighth grade when she gave him a failing grade on his final. Z was the kind of kid who shoplifted from thrift stores, wouldn’t take off her baseball hat in school, and got drunk at homecoming. She was always right there next to Marri when he picked fights with high school kids, even though she was only five-feet-two-inches and one hundred pounds. I knew that there had to be something sweet under her stolen guy’s clothes and swearing-every-other-word attitude, otherwise Marri wouldn’t date her, but this one good thing had yet to be revealed to the general public.

I was pretty sure that neither of them had seen Johnny Marauder around town. I sometimes thought that if they saw that freaky-looking motherfucker, they might think twice about picking random fights with people they didn’t know. It could quite possibly be a quite… educational… experience for the two of them.

Then again, I was sometimes glad that they had never seen the man who ran Third Street. There was a rumor that when Johnny Marauder laid his eyes- the black one and the white one- on kids east of the Mainstream, he would never let them get away from joining Third Street. I knew that my affiliation with the gang had never seriously impacted my life [I would say that any gang involvement would seriously impact soemone's life], but I also knew that some kids got pulled in too deep for them to handle, and by then, it was too late for them to get out.