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Young Writers Society


12+

The Noble Peasant

by DarkPirate101


Hello my name is Jin Sun and welcome to my humble kingdom in China during 712 CE . This is a happy story about a king who learns something throughout the story. Oh wait. No it isn’t. It’s a sad story about a peasant that doesn’t learn anything through the story. Now let me begin. All my life I was a peasant working in the gardens growing turnips and other things like that. I wore ragged clothes and I was very skinny and always craving food because I gave all of it to the noble that comes to the land owner’s house. So already it seems bad but trust me it gets worse. I am very poor because I give the landowner the money.Also each time a noble thought I didn’t give a sufficient amount of fruits and vegetables he beats me until I am barely living. It was like this until I was twenty seven. I had finally had enough of it so I hatched a plan to knock him out from behind the door so I could catch him off guard when he walks in.

The next day I heard the footsteps in the field so I got behind the door and I thought it would go perfectly, but it didn’t. He was so strong, I had no chance so I ran up stairs and took a leap of faith right on his head. It was surprisingly cushiony. I took most of his clothes he would at least be decent when the landowner found him and I headed off to the palace on the horse carriage that had brought the noble.

It was very bumpy and so I threw up outside of the carriage. I finally got there and threw up again then I walked in looking at the statues and stained glass. The drawings were so vibrant and colorful. I walked on a pathway inside the palace taking a tour of the place. There were so many great things in the palace, but there were also bad things as well. I saw peasants being worked to death and I was right in the midst of an execution of a serf who just didn’t make one type of food. I looked at the person screaming and wondering if I could have been that person. Another noble saw me and slowly walked toward me. I was ready to give myself up but he just asked, “Why are you not hunting?”

“I was just laughing at the execution of that peasant.”

“Good, but it is your turn.”

I said fine and walked towards the stables. It took me an hour to find it though. I climbed the animal and fell off four times but it was fun. The horse knew what to do and sprinted towards the forest.

The tree’s leaves were beautiful since it was fall. There was red, orange and some faint green still. The sun beamed down and hit me in the face I averted my eyes to see a cave. I hopped off the horse and got a spear to slay a great beast. I heard a growl and a snarl and so I ran onto the horse and went farther into the forest for two hours and rode back only catching a rabbit that walked up to me. Apparently another noble got the beast inside of that cave . He showed me. I can not read minds. A noble walked in the stables and I think he knew I wasn’t a real noble because he pulled his bloody spear out at me. So out comes my spear but it was the wrong way around so I just bonked him on the head and pressed down for a short time. Then I put him in a supply room.

I stayed in the palace for two months walking, hunting, and feeding the other noble a turnip and rotten goat milk that I locked in the supplies room. New peasants had come in to serve the emperor and my friend was one of them, Sami. I decide to meet him in the middle of the night. There was a guard though, next to the rooms.

“I’m here to beat up one of the peasants for pleasure.”

He let me come in for ten minutes and it didn’t really surprise him that I was here. It was like he was pretending to be surprised. I still pretended to beat him to a pulp and tell him my plan. I could here the guard laughing to himself. It was sick. I knocked out the guard and told Sami to go to the stables while I get a gun from the guard and some gold made from the peasants. As I was walking to the stables I was already missing all of the perks of being a noble like all of the banquets I got to go to and I actually was appreciated for catching the food for them. Also, the silk robe was more comfortable than the animal skin clothes that were very itchy. But friends come first. I know the forest inside and out from all of my trips out hunting in the forest. He barely even left the garden that he worked at. I got to the stables and saw Sami already failing to climb a horse and I opened the door to the supply room to say goodbye to the noble. When I did I saw a giant smirk on his face and so I thought he went insane of hunger so I left him in there and ran into the forest with Sami.

“We have a lot of catching up to do,” he said.

We talked all the way to the cave and slept for hours and hours. Two days later we were out picking berries and we heard a noise. The sound was people talking, so we climbed tall branches until we saw the bandits . They were talking about killing me. I think they heard Sami because they looked straight at us in the trees. We climbed down as fast as we could but Sami fell down to their feet in horror. I ran as fast as I could to the cave.

It was a whole week until Sami actually came back, but he was beaten. He couldn’t talk from being paralyzed of fear. I hatched a plan in the middle of the night, keeping watch. I gave the gun to Sami for backup if something were to go wrong. I saw them sleeping and so I intentionally stepped on a fallen branch and almost just ran up the tree instead of climb it. I waited until they were grouped together and then I dropped the gold on two of their heads. Then I jumped on another guy and took his gun. He was out cold. The last bandit was a woman who fell over because of her bound feet. I was right above her holding the gun to her forehead and I averted my eyes as I started to pull the trigger. A gunshot went off but it was not from my gun. I looked down to see a hole in my gut spewing out blood and so I looked behind me to see Sami with the gun I gave him smiling. Another gunshot went off from my gun this time piercing right through his small, backstabbing heart. I fell on my back laying on the grass for hours while the bandit got away. Everything went cold until all I saw was blackness. Then I woke up to see myself dead, pale, and cold to the touch

I started flying so I flew to the palace to still see the noble flying past my old house as a peasant. The noble still wasn’t found and two horses were still missing. I flew back to the old house laughing to myself about the whole thing. I knew how death worked. If you accept your death then you go to heaven but if you don’t then you still have a chance. A whisper told me I could go back and I smiled and I said, “ No I have made my peace.”

So that is my story. By the way I have been dead for more than a thousand years taking english lessons from other dead people and that is why I can tell you my story in english. Hopefully this story taught you something because I still have yet to find a morale to this story.


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Points: 607
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Tue Mar 15, 2016 2:10 am
hailpanda3 wrote a review...



Hai!

Ok so I don't think I can top @Aley 's review but I mean, I might as well review. XD

I really liked your story line. I was just like waiting for the next line to come into view. I could feel the emotion in it, which a lot of stories lack. It's also not very easy. It was like an audio biography of someone's life, when you just just feel what was happening and what they were feeling. I liked this short story a lot.

There are some places that you could have put comas, but that's not the biggest issue for me. Also some spaces after periods. Just check it over and you'll find it.

Before I get to my biggest issue, there is also some paragraphs that could be shortened and sentences that could be a little less confusing on what you were trying to say.

I didn't really like this part "This is a happy story about a king who learns something throughout the story." It's not a great start to an great short story. Perhaps remove it.

My biggest issue: It didn't flow that well and it was more of a list of what happened. You could have described what happened, you were skipping some of the story that I wanted to read. For example,

Like aley said, protagonists in stories usually win or survive. I like how you changed it a bit and gave us a surprise. Even though I thought it wasn't fair as all he did was work for nothing, it was a nice ending.

I particularly liked this sentence: "Also, the silk robe was more comfortable than the animal skin clothes that were very itchy. But friends come first." You could really see your character's personality there.

Overall, It needs some reviewing/editing and some sentences to be added. It has a really great story line, but it's a big one. You could turn this into a novel, that's how big the idea is.

Good job,
hailpanda3




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Mon Mar 14, 2016 11:44 pm
OvrweghtNarwhal says...



I like the main story it's funny and historical the same time but one thing to change is it kind of sounded like a this after that story but otherwise good job




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Thu Mar 03, 2016 3:03 pm
Aley wrote a review...



Hello DarkPirate101!

Welcome to Young Writers Society. I'm Aley and I'm here to give you a review. This review will go over what I liked, what I didn't like, and how to improve what I didn't like. I'll also explain why I didn't like what I didn't like. Let's get to it.

I liked how the story ended. I think it was a good ending because despite everything, this main character was blinded by their friendship with Sami, and it wasn't some dramatic, unrealistic way to end the story where the main character gets through the story completely unscathed. It's nice to read a story where the author is willing to end it quickly by killing the main character.

I didn't like the tone you used to write the story though. The tone was very "This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened," which isn't really the best for telling a story. It keeps the reader too separated from the story itself to be able to see what is going on. It reminded me of a fairy tale because of the tone.

To fix that, I'd suggest showing the audience what's going on like you're living these moments with your character, and only using that tone of voice when you are switching scenes. Think about it like your short story is supposed to take one or two scenes, and in those scenes capture all of the stress, anxiety, and life that goes through a person's head in just a matter of moments through internal dialogue, and showing what's going on. How you show what's going on is language like "I could feel the blood trickling down my legs, soaking into my pants as I searched the dark, gloomy cave for the smoking gun. The pain set in, digging behind my eyes as I saw the two feet of the man who shot me. I had to rebalance myself as my energy drained from my limbs, but I recognized those feet. Dragging my eyes up, my neck weakening, begging me to let go, I locked eyes with Sami."

The difference is I'm taking a lot more time with events, adding in descriptive words, and describing things that I know people have experienced in ways that they will believe they've experienced it. You're just stating what happened, like you're summarizing it.

We don't need a summary, we need a story. Spend time with just one or two scenes, important scenes, like the scene of his death, and only those scenes. The rest can all be filled in through thoughts about the past. For instance, if you used what I wrote in the quotation marks as the first paragraph, your second could be all about a memory of Sami and Jin Sun when they were children. That not only fills in what's happening, but provides a past and character development for both characters. You would have to go somewhat in detail with that too. Such as "I remember when we were cowering together in the corner of our shacks back in Peasantville, watching the noble play 'Echo Game' with a brick and my parent's heads. It was Sami who stopped me from joining the game, Sami who comforted me when the next week, the noble forced a hoe back into my hands, and stole the last of my food."

This is going to be a much more interesting way to read what you're writing. Think about it, you don't tell a ghost story by saying "And then they jumped in the car, and drove to the cliffs, and then they were scared by a ghost," you tell a ghost story by saying "There they were, sitting in the seats of a van, listening to the wind howl and pitch, driving along a switch-back road, when suddenly, they heard a thump, thump, thump," so you do the same thing here.

Overall, I think you have some improving to do, but I think you've got a good start on suspenseful endings. If you improve the tone of your writing, you'll be able to make the rest of the short story suspenseful as well.

I hope this helps!
Aley





Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
— George Eliot