Young Writers Society

Hello. Welcome to YWS~! I'm reviewing this from my phone so I'll make this quick.

You begin with a run-on sentence. This is never a good thing. Too many things are happening all at the same time and this generally leaves the reader struggling to make sense out of what's going on. Too-long sentences also result in a weaker sentence structure; the probability of making mistakes is greater than it is with concrete sentences. This isn't to say that all good sentences are short, but that every sentence has a purpose to fulfil; if you're not breaking up several actions into two or more sentences, the confusion whirlpools. I've also noticed that you have a case of dangling modifiers which you might want to correct. Don't want your readers thinking it was the man's trepidation which was burning, do you?

Another thing that messed with my reading this was your overuse of adjectives and such. While it's always good to give your reader clear visuals of their surroundings, sometimes your prose gets over-saturated with description and this makes it hard for the reader to navigate the plot/characters. Your description supports your story. You can have a brilliant story with sucky description, or amazing description with a lack of story--but neither of those will attract the audience they are supposed to. I know it's always appealing to showcase your vast vocabulary to the reader, but sometimes you just need to cut the clingy description and get the ball, A.K.A the plot, moving.

While you have a lot of descriptive words, also, your pacing is sluggish and there's a lot of 'telling' as opposed to 'showing'. This does not entrance your reader and, like Arctic said, it's always vital to have some variation in how you write. And because I can't resist inserting this quote here...



Besides that, I don't really see much character development here, and of course there was no dialogue. While you don't really need dialogue when you have just one character to play with, at this point, I think this man needs more of an inner voice and less of a philosophical monologue to guide him. You also need to get rid of the passive voice.

In short, get the ball rolling, yo! Imagery is always lovely, as are descriptive sentences, but so is keeping the attention and interest of the reader. It's a tragic reality, but a writer caters to several people in their audience, and it's important to reach a dynamic equilibrium that makes your writer fluid and colourful (but not too colourful, since that can get monotonous!).

Hope this review helped. PM me if you need anything~

Keep it up! Keep writing!

~Pomp

Hi BoyVsInternet!

Well you certainly know your way around creating beautiful imagery and descriptions. Everything was so vividly explained and, although a bit too much at times, was a nice touch. I like the build up, how you made the whole thing seem so tranquil until the man fell. Generally, the idea of the story is quite interesting, I've never really seen it before. Well done!

I do have quite a few points of critique. Firstly, I agree with the below reviewer that as lovely as the descriptions are, there's just too much. Chunky paragraphs of this description aren't the most exciting to read and after a while it becomes a bit tedious. You should try and distribute them throughout the whole piece, rather than just having it all in one place. It kind of ruins them to be honest, in the sense that the overuse of them makes them less special, and you don't want that.

So on that note, how could you vary it out a bit? One suggestion I have is focusing more on the man. I think having a first bit just on the setting is lovely, but when he falls it's a bit like, oh there's a person in all of this? You could talk about the effort it was for him to clime up there. How he embraced this beautiful scenery. Maybe even a bit on him back story and family and stuff. Right now he's very two-dimensional and I feel nothing towards him, so just try and add a bit more to his character.

Also, I think you could make the fall way more dramatic. I'll talk about how later, but it'd make the story quite exciting if you made the drop happen more suddenly.

In the last section you have a brief paragraph on his memories. It'd be great if you could expand on it a bit. Similar to one of my other points, but just add a bit more to this character because it's make the story a lot more interesting, and make him more of an empathetic character.

If you look at your last paragraph, you'll notice that almost all of the sentences start with 'he', a bit contrast to the beginning! But yeah, like the beginning where it's all description, this isn't very engaging. In fact, it's a bit confusing. I think you need to explain more what you mean by the fact it wasn't his first time dying. Is he in a constant loop of replaying his memories?

Another way to make your writing more engaging is varying the lengths of your sentences. Right now, they're all very long, especially at the beginning, but really just throughout. Remember that shorter sentences can be very effective. Generally, you use longer sentences for description, but I think even then that some of your describing sentences could be broken down a bit. But back on the fall, after having lots of long sentences on the setting to have a short sentence on his fall would be great. It'd really change the pace, keep the reader excited, so it's worth considering.

That's all from me. I think you are very good at descriptions, but your writing needs to be a bit more varied. It's all very focused on the scenery. I hope this helps, feel free to ask me any questions or if you'd like another review on anything. Keep writing,

~ArcticMonkey x

This is a very interesting story, one that I might like to read again, if I ever had the time, and that comment is a compliment, just so you know.

Okay, first off, I think this is the first time that I ever had to advise against too much description. For example:
"He had made a small camp on the shore of a white river that drank gluttonously from the ominous waterfall looming high above and crashing on the razor sharp rocks below."
The descriptions are great, but all in one sentence they're a little too much. You might want to consider cutting this down a little.
This happens throughout the entire story. I'd go over it and see what you can break down and what you can separate and make into two sentences.

I didn't see any grammar mistakes, which is a good things, but don't take my word for it that you had none. I might have missed something, so yeah.

This story is really good and interesting. I think that this is perfect they way that it is. You did a great job, keep writing!