The Dragon Knight Legacy Chapter 1 (Remake)

I agree with LynnLynn for the most part. I want to add that your channeling InuYasha in your characters background and appearance. You should watch that, because if it's too similar your book won't be published, and it really deserves to be.l

Wow that is a LOT! and it is good,too.

I'm critiquing as I go...

There are a lot of parallelism mistakes. Like this for instance:

“Thanks Mom.” Kai took a seat at the table and started eating. His house is an old, small building in the slums. When they first came here it was all they could afford. Kai got a job cleaning and mending weapons for the city guard and his mother works at a local flower shop.

Ok first off in the twentieth paragraph you said

Quote:
“Something felt out of place today around the palace. Kai couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong, and his senses in these matters are rarely wrong.”

This doesn’t flow well. It seems repetitive as a lot of words are repeated. Try bringing the sentences together. Maybe something like: ”Kai couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss in the palace today, and his senses in these matters were rarely wrong”.

Also at the start your dialogue was presented in the form of a stand-alone paragraph in its own right. This is fine except later on you started to show the dialogue as a part of the paragraph.
Egs.1:
“Morning, Mother.”
Egs.2
“Thanks Mom.” Kai took a seat at the table and started eating. His house is an old, small building in the slums. When they first came here it was all they could afford. Kai got a job cleaning and mending weapons for the city guard and his mother works at a local flower shop.

You then switched again to ‘Egs.1’.I think perhaps you should pick the style you wish you dialogue to be displayed in and Stick to it for the rest of your story.

All in all a very good start, Your wrighting has some very good aspects to it, and your dialogue is appealing and Charming.

*Thumbs up*

The Oshmiester

Looking back on this review that has somehow grown to a monstrous two pages in Word, I must apologize for the length. I haven’t done peer editing or revision for a good couple of months, and now that the sleeping dragon is awakened, I feel that I’ve gone a bit overboard. I’ve tried to shorten it a little.

The way I review is probably a little unconventional, and I’ll probably suggest a lot of things that you don’t feel you want to change - so you certainly don’t have to (and shouldn’t, really) take all of my advice to heart. I’m just telling you what I would revise.

While you definitely have a solid story and a cast that piqued my interest, I have three major nitpicks with this piece: your varying depth of description, your sentence/paragraph structure, and, most importantly (in my eyes) your frequent tense changes. Let me explain…

The first part of your piece is purely explanatory. Paragraphs two through six are written for the purpose of informing the audience – and, in my opinion, they’re a bit too informative. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “show, not tell” before. It has never been my personal maxim (I think it encourages ridiculously detailed descriptions of things – not what I like to write or read) but there’s definitely some truth to it. While these opening paragraphs do a good job of telling your audience who his character is and what he does, there’s not a lot of action going on. Kai gets out of bed, and suddenly readers are launched into a four-paragraph description of Kai, his parents Riana and Hikatsumi, Horagothien, et cetera…and while these names and places are all very familiar to you, they’re not very familiar to your readers. As a fantasy writer, you’ve spent a lot of time growing your own special world in your head, and filling it with your own lore. Unfortunately, your readers won’t appreciate your hard work unless it’s given to them in a form that they can digest. When you’re trying to give your readers information about anything – the country that your character lives in, the way someone looks, a relationship between two characters – do it a little bit at a time, or do it subtly. Large chunks of info might cause your readers to shut down and lose interest. Most authors tend to avoid massive block descriptions (with the exception of authors like Tolkien, along with some 19th century writers such as Melville & Hawthorne). These will distract the reader and draw them away from what you’re trying to convey: your story. However, there are definitely ways to cheat by working the information into the story in different ways.

The beginning of your story is the part that really needs to hook your readers. This is why I would advise against large chunks of information here. If I were you, I would cut the majority of the information from the middle of the second paragraph down to the sixth paragraph and scatter it through the rest of your story. If the information isn’t yet pertinent, the readers don’t need to know about it, and they’re likely to forget it before the time comes up when they need to remember that Kai might be a Dragon Knight. You can work this information in through many different methods. For example, maybe Kai passes the cliff that he fell off of and has a flashback to that moment, or maybe he puts on a red shirt that reminds him of his friend Karen – ah, yes, Karen, what a rebel! You see where I’m going with this? In my opinion, it’s not imperative that readers know absolutely everything about your characters’ appearances and personalities at the beginning of a story. In my opinion, it’s a little more fun when some details are left to the imagination. Instead of telling us that Kai and Mark “were never on good terms,” why don’t you show us by having them scowl at each other, or avoid looking at each other when they open the door? Little things like that can make a good story (such as yours) into a fantastic piece of fiction.

The second thing that I think would help you is to switch up your sentence structure a little bit. This is a pretty minor point, but it’s something that I think would help you a lot if you learn to master it. Look at the first six or seven sentences of your second paragraph. With the exception of the fourth one (“he brushed…”) which has a couple of different verbs, most of them have the simplest possible sentence structure. This is a really exaggerated example, but instead of “Bob went to the store. He went to the refrigerated section and found milk. He bought it. The milk was cold,” try to add a little bit of variety by using some different punctuation or conjunctions. “Bob went to the store to buy some milk. Upon his arrival, he headed to the refrigerated section. He picked up a jug, carried it to the counter, and paid for it. The milk was cold.” Little changes like that can add some spice to prose.

This piece has a lot of strengths – I like your characters, and your setting is interesting. However, your grammar suffers many minor problems, and one not-quite-as-minor issue. Both need to be addressed – your writing deserves it. For the former, I’d suggest a proof-reader (mom, brother, or random guy on bus). As for the latter…

If you’ve ever studied a language besides English – or, heck, if you’ve studied English in depth – I’m sure you’ve run into tenses. (I hope for your own sake that you never had to diagram sentences like I did.) It’s the difference between “I kicked the dog” and “I am kicking the dog.” One has already happened, and one is still happening. Your story changes tenses – frequently. One minute the characters are finished kicking the dog, and the next minute they’re kicking it again. So, for the sake of your story, and the dog, let’s take a look at this.

Take a look at the paragraph just after “morning, mother” where Kai’s mummy gives him a big smile.

First, she GAVE him a big smile. This happened in the past.
Then, she IS 42 years old. This is happening now.
And yet, these two instances are juxtaposed. There are several instances of this in your story.

With rare exceptions, novels are primarily written in past tense. The only works I can think of that aren’t are adventure stories where you choose your own destiny (you are walking through a dark corridor. Turn to page 46 to turn around… et cetera). Therefore, you should probably change “is” to “was” although it might seem awkward. In theory, what you’re writing about has already happened, therefore you want to use forms like “he watched watched” or “had been visiting each day” rather than “he is watching” or “he visits every day.” The only time you really should use present tense in a fiction piece like this is if you’re writing an expository paragraph - for example, I don’t know if you’re a Tolkien fan, but the first few paragraphs of The Fellowship of the Rings are all written in present tense because they brief the reader on hobbit-lore. This is general background information. However, as soon as Tolkien actually begins telling the story, everything has happened in the past. There is no “is” or “are” unless it’s within dialogue. Do you see what I’m saying?

You have a really, really good start here, and I would really like to see where you’re going with this, because this piece has potential. You’ve already done the hardest part – getting this down on paper – and now, all you need to do it make a few minor adjustments. My suggestions to you would be these:

1. Ask someone to proofread your work before you post it to catch minor things like “an” instead of “and,” or missing punctuation. If you have any other buddies who write, maybe you could swap stories and check for typos. It’s tough to catch mistakes like this in your own writing, but it’s much easier to find them when you’re reading someone else’s piece.

2. Read your piece to the mirror, or imagine someone else reading your piece in your head. (I hate reading my writing out loud, so instead I usually imagine my English teacher reading my writing aloud instead.) Even better, have someone else read your work out loud. This helps because you’ll notice that some sentences sound wordy or awkward when spoken.

3. I think it would really help you to get out some of your favourite books and look at the way they’re written – the amount of white space, the way the dialogue is phrased, use of tenses, punctuation, et cetera. Also take a good look at the way the books begin. Does the author start with action, or with a quiet scene? Do they use a lot of semicolons and hyphens, or do they stick to commas and full stops?

I think that with a little revision, this piece could really sparkle. It looks like you know where you’re headed with it and I can’t wait to see where it goes next. I hope I didn’t bore you too much, and good luck with your future projects. Cheers!

I really need some sort of critic with this, people.