A little bit about me…
Well to start from the basics, my name is Ashlynn, I’m thirteen, and I’m in eighth grade. I have two dogs, a brother named Patrick and great friends. I play 8 instruments, I love to write, and I am the captain of my school’s winter color guard. Oh, and if I didn’t mention this before, life has been interesting lately. My parents are going through a terrible divorce and well, I’ve seen the true colors of the people in my life.
To start from the very beginning…
November 6, 2014, the day my dad moved out of our house. Now I want you to understand that it wasn’t a thought he had to suddenly move out one morning but rather because he had known that he had to leave. In October, my dad had gone to a work retreat for two weeks in Rhode Island and came back on the weekend between. During that time, my mom decided to sit down and have a family meeting because things were not going well between us all. Let me just explain that my dad always responds with “yeah”, “of course”, “obviously”, and “yep” when he’s not listening and that’s exactly what he did. At that moment I wanted to slap the man and that’s saying something considering at the time I was only eleven years old. So, I decided to just fall apart, run up in my room, scream at the top of my lungs, slam my door, and burry my face in a pillow. Now, you would expect any other father to run after me apologizing and feeling terrible inside, but my dad stayed downstairs for a few minutes while my mom came upstairs. As she held me tight whipping my tears from my cheeks, my dad approached my door and I yelled, “Get out of here, I hate you, I don’t want you to be here!” My dad obeyed my wishes and went back downstairs. But, before he left he knelt down at my brother’s feet, held onto them, cried for a bit, and left. So now we’re at November 6th and it’s definitely a night I will never forget. He starts by making a huge hm dinner for our family which seems nice and generous but he and my mom had not been talking to each other since that weekend in October. My dad had been sleeping in the spare bedroom and if they did speak it would be yelling and screaming. Anyway, he made this dinner and told my brother to go get my mom from upstairs for dinner. My mom said that she was not coming down and my dad had to ask her himself if he really wanted her there. So, my dad freaked out and got impulsive. When we finished dinner, he said, “I’m moving out but I still love you two very much.” Maybe we were supposed to cry and and get upset, but we said okay and let it happen. Then he was gone. The end. No, trust me I wish. He still came to our house everyday while we were at school and my mom taught at her school. He showered there, ate our leftovers, and watched our TV. Then he would proceed to leave five minutes before I got off the bus and arrived after I got home to make it look like he had just got there. The neighbors saw this happen and told us after the fact. Also, he would load up his car with our stuff to put in a storage unit when we were at school. He took our social security cards, our savings bonds, and birth certificates. He also gutted our bathroom three days before he moved out and left us with one working shower. Although he came everyday, he never fixed the bathroom.
I’m not finishing this before knowing if I should continue so please leave me a comment if I should or not :)
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125,021 Literary Works • 672,739 Reviews
Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),
Hi! I'm here to leave a quick review!!!
First Impression: Okayyy...well..this was interesting, looks like it needs a lot of polishing before it can be a really good story, but its certainly an interesting one.
Anyway let's get right to it,
Okay...kind of a pretty generic start there, almost seems like something that you would write for an introduction speech about yourself or something along those lines...but ehh...well, its not a terrible start, it does at least have that pretty interesting last line about seeing the true colors of people, that certainly seems like it could spell out some very interesting things for this story here, well let's see where this goes.
Okay....well I can certainly see that this here looks a little incomplete, so I suppose when you meant continuing, you've sort of broken something bigger into a smaller chunk judging from the looks of this at any rate. And well, this...this is an interesting little story, structure wise, like I think the other reviewers already pointed out, you really need to break up those paragraphs for this to be a bit easier to read and flow a little smoother. Talking solely about the content however, I would say this here is certainly interesting, its showing a decently convincing series of events that may lead upto something like a device and you can see tension build up before the big climax where the father moves out. After that though, it almost got a little cartoonish, I don't quite know if I can see that sort of thing happening in real life...hmm...I don't know..at any rate, it really does seem a little off that someone would keep coming back and do random vandalism like that and then steal important documents along with it. It just seems like someone whose plans are all over the place...sometimes sinister, sometimes something else, its a little confusing to try and imagine how someone might do that, but I suppose that does add an element of mystery to this and that's interesting...well...it was a pretty interesting little story here.
Aaaaand that's it for this one.
As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.
Stay Safe
Harry
Hi there, and happy Review Day! clogs here to get your work out of the Green Room!
First things first: You've got to break up that paragraph at the bottom there. It's extremely off-putting to readers. A rule that must be followed when considering paragraph breaks is this: Whenever a new speaker says something, start a new paragraph. Since you don't have all that much dialogue, then a more general rule is to start a new paragraph whenever you wrap up an old idea and start a new one. An example of this in your story would be to have a paragraph break here:
Obviously leave out what's in asterisks, but you get the general idea.
I hope this helps you to organize your paragraphs, because people don't like reading huge walls of text!
Let's move onto content now. I agree with the previous reviewer- the introduction is a really awkward way to start the story. I'm sure there's a way to fit this information into the story somewhere else. It's much more natural, and it gives the readers a chance to get to know you. Remember, you're like a character in your own story, and what great novel begins with the main character saying, "Hi! My name is x and I'm x years old and have 5 sisters and 3 cats!"
So let's move onto the second part. I definitely agree that there's a bit of a "telling" issue here. This seems a bit like a memoir to me. I understand that it's crossing long periods of time and it's hard to tell every little bit of that, but something that you can do is zoom in on important scenes to either set up the characters or to tell an important development. For instance, instead of just saying that your dad usually responds with one-word grunts, show us in a scene where you ask him something and he gives an unsatisfactory reply! Now the reader knows this, and you didn't even have to tell them.
I feel like it would help the reader understand the story better if you were to set up the family life before the divorce. Was everyone happy? Did there seem to be tension? What was life normally like? This will help add contrast to the life after the divorce. You can also use this to develop characters-- for instance, the dad's replies that I mentioned earlier.
At times, it just feels like you're moving from event to event without telling us anything else. Like, "this happened, then this happened." This is fine when you're skipping over uneventful periods of time, but it just gets dull to read after awhile! Fit in specific scenes to tell us how you're feeling, what the dinner was like, how you felt about your dad coming home every day. It can especially help if you use dialogue. The dialogue doesn't have to be 100% faithful to what really happened, but it will help spice things up for readers.
You do have a knack for emotion in writing, so make sure you really use this to tell us about your feelings. Remember, this is your unique perspective on the situation, so really put readers into your shoes!
As for continuing it- go for it! Why not? You've got nothing to lose!
Hope this review helped!
Thank you so much. You have no idea how this made my day!
Er, just a heads up, it's smart not to give out places of living as you've given out your name in this story and it would be safer if you used a fake name and didn't give out too much personal information. That's all~
Thanks for looking out for me but I made sure I didn't include things like, where I live, my last name, the name of my parents, and any other personal information. I might've said Rhode Island but I don't live there.
Okay, yeah, you're good!
Continue it
Thanks I'm actually working on it now!
I think you should continue this! The more you write the better you get, so I say to keep going and if you finish this, then you get to know that you've accomplished a whole story. Now for the review!
Congrats and welcome to the website!
I thought that your introduction was a bit typical and needed something a bit more personal to identify this story as your story and not just another rant. Something else might have eased into the story in a smoother way. That said, I really loved your choice of the word "interesting". It set my expectations for this story a little bit taller than they would have been otherwise. The ending sentence of your introductory paragraph "I've seen the true colors of people in my life." Is very well phrased.
You could have used more of the "show don't tell" approach and there were a few grammatical errors. There weren't so many that I couldn't tell what was going on though. I also feel as though a lot went on in this chapter. Don't feel afraid of slowing down and taking your time to relive and retell an experience in something like a biography. This is your story, really tell it and indulge the audience. At first, it's a bit hard to do this because a) sometimes we're more interested in getting to the really juicy parts of the story and b) it can be hard to relive traumatic experiences and share them with the world. You know? I feel as though a few chapters could have been made with all of this information.
Your final sentence was strong, power and moving. It was crisp and short but concluded your first chapter very well.
Thank you so much for sharing. Rant pieces are often very raw and personal, so good on you for having the confidence to share. Please continue.
OMG thank you soooo much for this review. I love this site because everyone is so sweet and supportive. Your advice is really gonna help here. I didn't know when to move to another chapter and I guess you said it's best to end here. The reason I'm kind of rushing things along is because I have over 20 months to write about and the fast I get them on paper the more I remember and the more I can write about what happens now. If that made any sense at all. The grammar issues are from the fact that I wrote this when I was crying and you can check out my blog entitled "Dear Dad" to get more of the story too. Thanks again this topped off my week! Keep writing
-Audrey <3
Of course! I can't wait to read more of this and to read more of your other stuff! <3
I don't know if you have a busy life right now or not but I would if you'd like to help me on this. I totally understand if you don't want to. It's just a thought.
Ahh! Totally. You're very talented! I'd be more than honored.
yay thank you so much