Young Writers Society

This is terrifying... and I love it. It's detailed and interesting and creates an absolutely horrifying image in my head. The only issue I have is the inconsistency with the ellipsis. Sometimes there are two dots, sometimes three or four and as a personal opinion, I found it a little distracting while reading. Other then that, this is a really well written piece and I'd absolutely love to see where you would take it if you were to ever continue it. Awesome job!

~Mack

Hey there BCensored! Tuck here with a review for #RevMo . Let's jump right into it!

So, first things first, I loved the ending here. It was a powerful ending that added some finality to the poem, and it felt almost as if the entire work was based around that premise of colorless blood. I like the way it shows the life slowly ebbing from her, the color fading from her life in a tangible way.

I wasn't really a fan of the ellipses, especially if you're looking for more of a prose approach towards this. It made the poem seem disjointed and disconnected, and they were so overused that it made the poem seem rather bland and unvaried. In most cases, it would be more effective and less distracting if you used periods, commas, or other more conventional grammar markings.

A more minor detail, but the line where you said "She had never experienced something as mundane as hemorrhaging" didn't really make sense to me. It doesn't have a clear literary interpretation, but literally speaking, it's illogical. I spent several minutes pondering it and came up with nothing, so I would encourage you to clear that up through context or by being more direct.

And finally, I think you could have added some more character description here. It's hard to feel sad about someone dying when you don't have an emotional connection to them. If you fleshed her character out a little bit more through something that the reader could connect to, then her death would be more hard-hitting and impactful than it currently is. However, the brevity of the piece was also part of what made it powerful, so it's a tricky balance to find. I think you would still have the impact of a flash-fiction-esque story even with a few more details slipped in to help bring this character to life.

Hopefully this review was helpful to you and you didn't find it overly critical! This was a short, fun read, and I hope to read more from you someday! If you have any questions just let me know and I'd be happy to answer them! Happy RevMo!

This was a rather interesting piece. Good work! I quite liked it, although I do have a few nitpicks that I feel like I should point out (please note that I don't review that often, so some of this may just be completely in my head:)).

First of all, is the format. Some pieces just feel better when they're in a certain format. Like poems are separated into stanzas and then lines to give the reader a steady rhythm to read along to. Your format, for some reason, made me feel like I had to rush to finish it? Not sure, but I think a poem format would suit this piece well if you get what I'm saying.

Another nitpick would be the ellipsis you used. They're very distracting. Kind of like how you don't want too many ""partial quotes" in a "newspaper" because it messes up the reader's "rhythm". I say you should just leave them as periods and let the reader figure out how they want to read it.

That's really all I have. Again, I'm not very experienced when it comes to reviewing, so I'm sorry if some of this didn't make sense or if I just repeated someone else (I don't read the other reviews ^^). But still, I think this was clever, and your style is interesting. Keep writing! I'd be thrilled to read another one of your works. Have a good day! <3

Hi BCensored,

this is a vivid piece you've written - I do have a few suggestions for improvement -

Formatting
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a scene or a poem, but if its a poem I would strongly suggest breaking the piece up into divided lines. This isn't essential for poetry, but does let the reader dwell on each line a bit more, rather than reading it in a more formulaic way as in prose. If you need a bit of help formatting the piece in the YWS editor - here's an article with a few helpful tips: How to Format Poetry

I would also strongly advise against the use of ellipses (...) ellipses are really hardly ever effective grammatical marks, because they can communicate a pause - but without showing whether the pause it because the speaker is thinking, uncomfortable, pausing for dramatic tension, or coughing, or breathing, or because they forgot to continue. It also is extremely distracting visually and totally disrupts the flow of what is being said. Especially when ellipses is over-used or used multiple times in a single piece.

If you must use ellipses, please remember the proper form is just to use 4 dots - not two, not four, and there has to be a space after the final dot. Or else it just looks completely random like you,,'re,,, jus,,,t,,, throwing,,, random punctuation,,,?? marks,,.... into...,,, you're,,, poetry,,, <- do you see what I'm saying there?

Content
As far as content - you've got good imagery, but there is no plot or developed content, and although you're describing an injured person, it's hard to have full empathy with them because the reader knows nothing about them. If you added a few personal details about them, it'd be more impactful, and it does feel like we're missing half the story.

Also for such dark imagery I'd strongly suggest bumping up the rating of this piece to 12+ or 16+ because there are quite a few very young writers on the site, and also people who have trouble with violent imagery because they find it disturbing or triggering, so I find any time there's a mention of blood, it's honestly an okay practice to bump up the rating a notch, just in case anyone is really sensitive to that sort of thing.

That being said, I think the premise of someone who is bleeding but the blood is colourless is quite interesting, although by the end, I'm quite curious if the subject is actually just crying - which is a strange twist by the end there that I quite like.

I hope this review helped out! Keep on writing and practicing!

- alliyah