Published April 19, 2016
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139,593 Literary Works • 672,612 Reviews
Salutations!
For today, I've decided to tackle all novel chapters I review in the format of a spot-check, so while I shall read the entire work, I shall only be quoting a few parts and then point out what about needs improvement. The purpose of this is to focus less on your story and more on your writing.
A Star Wars fanfiction is an interesting idea, and I wish you luck, being a fan myself, so I wanted to point that out. On to (Onto?) the matter at hand, your writing in general is very crisp and clear, but there are minor details on which you can work.
♦ A phrase like "care much" is fixed, as far as I know, so the two words cannot be moved around and must stay in that order.
♦ Ah, the semi-colon, one of my two favourite punctuation marks. Sadly, it is often used incorrectly, as is the case here. Fortunately, it is a simple matter - one that is easily corrected. A semi-colon is ordinarily only used in conjunction with a conjunction (I couldn't resist, my apologies) if that conjunction is "however", though there might be one or two others I can't remember. If the concerned conjunction is "but" or "and", the semi-colon replaces it. In the same way, a semi-colon must be replaceable by by such conjunctions. In this case, it cannot, so it was incorrectly used. Replacing it with a comma is all that's required to fix the error, but if you wanted to emphasise the Stormtroopers' incomprehension, a dash would have sufficed. For the most past, the comma is the best solution.
if you take that to a publisher, you will likely be asked to change it to something like three centred asterisks or indicate the time jump in a sentence starting with "an hour later" or the like. If you keep it anyway, I recommend you centre it.
I know I'm not supposed to point out the same thing more than once, but note how this should also be a comma instead of a semi-colon. If the semi-colon can't be replaced with "and", "but", "so", "for", "although", etc., it shouldn't be there.
The fact that I'm only pointing out incorrectly used punctuation marks and not anything else should indicate how well-written this actually is. I just thought I should mention that. Anyway, an ellipsis, to me, indicates a pause or a sentence trailing off. It's not wrong, per se, but a colon or dash would be better, in my opinion - the former because colons indicate that an explanation will follow, and the latter because dashes are more lax than semi-colons and can be used for emphasis, suspense, replacing brackets, etc.
That's all I have. I am impressed with the quality of your writing and urge you to proceed with the story. A pleasant Review Day to you!
~ Hunter
Thank you so much. I'm re-writing some of this, and will fix all the mess-ups. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE SEMI-COLON ADVICE.
You are most welcome! It took me a while to understand the rules regarding the use of semi-colons myself, so I am glad to provide some clarity on that topic. ^_^
YES. I got so mixed up on those.
Hello and happy review day!
I apologize that I haven't read the previous installments (and I'm also not very familiar with Star Wars *hides* :p), but this is has been in the green room far too long!
I have a couple of big picture ideas that might help you out though.
) but I think you were really able to show each of their personalities through the dialogue. I appreciated that you put in some more descriptive dialogue tags and action within the dialogue to help it all feel more real.
I don't think this is as sloppy as you're afraid it is
First of all, I don't think you need that first paragraph. It feels like a bit of an info dump because you're recapping everything that has happened to this MC and where they're going from here. Now, a couple of situations were this might be okay, considering this is chapter 3. If the first two chapters take place well before this and now we're skipping forward in time, I would understand having a big of a recap. Or, if you're trying to acquaint your reader with where we are in the cannon it might be useful. Beyond that, I'm not sure it's necessary. I'm sure the MC's backstory is important, but it's usually more interesting to weave that into the plot more rather than give it to us in a blob at the beginning.
I thought the dialogue was pretty good. I only have a general understanding of these Star Wars characters (because I've been too busy hanging out on the Harry Potter boat the last 15 years or so and missed all the other boats
I'm typically not a big fan of chapter breaks like this. The chapter already isn't super long (which is fine) but including a chapter break cuts up the scenes so you have two short scenes together in a chapter. I'd personally rather have a more descriptive transition to merge these two scenes together. If they're a different day, or a totally different place with different characters, then maybe have a chapter break, but I don't think that's the case here.
In terms of the language stuff, I think adding in these other languages adds a nice flair and makes everything seem more authentic because you're using their culture. But, I guarantee your reader is going to skip over the language stuff because they're nonsense words that don't make sense. I really appreciate that you included the translations, but I think I would just use the translated version and mention that it's in the other language.
So here it would be: I answered him in Huttese. "No thanks."
Lots of little things seemed to happen in this chapter and I wasn't sure where we were going with it or what the most important thing was. I would think about what you want the main focus of this chapter to be and the focus on developing that. How is the plot going to move forward in this chapter? What are the characters doing that will get them closer to their goal, present a new obstacle to their goal, or raise the stakes for reaching their goal? Each of these little events are fine as long as we center back to the main goal of the chapter. Use description and your good writing skills to transition between smaller events and to show exactly what is happening.
Overall though, you have the mechanics down and the writing itself is solid. Even though I'm not a Star Wars person, I think there's a cool story here, and fanfictions are fun, so I really hope you keep working in it! Please let me know if you have any questions or if anything I said was confusing!
Hey there, yihongt here to leave a review. Let me just say that as a Star Wars fan, I'm always happy to read stories set inside the Star Wars universe. Even though I have not read the previous chapters, I don't feel lost. I liked the characters you've introduced so far. The usage of Huttese and Manda'o in the story is to me, awesome. Its nice to see the other languages besides Basic being used. I felt the story flowed very well. Now, onto a few small corrections.
{Still trying to recover from that, we were on our way to Tatooine to get some info on the Empire.}
I think it would be good if you put and 'I was...' in front of still. I also think you should put full-stop after that. It flows slightly better.
{Because that outer-rim only obeys the Empire when they have to.}
Correction: Because the outer-rim only obeys the Empire when they have to.
{If this “resource” wanted to meet up with me to trade over some information, he’d better pick somewhere else besides the Cantina next time.}
I think you should replace the word 'resource' with 'contact'. Since the word 'contact' is more synonymous with the espionage world.
All in all, I can't wait for the next chapter. I really want to see what happens next. Good job and keep writing!
Thanks for the review. The previous chapters are published so read those. They're a bit...worse. XD
Will do, will do. Feel free to check out the sci-fi book I'm writing. I would love some feedback from a fellow Star Wars fan.
Starlight: Chapter 1 (Part I)