Published October 19, 2008
Prologue: Initiation
They say I was born to set fires.
Though I denied it, I could feel the fire inside of me cause catastrophic damage to my morals. All that I was taught about forgiveness was destroyed in the wildfire within. The crackling and burning of my inner blaze was physically painful, and my good intentions deteriorated and curled at the edges. The screams and cries of the tenants were slowly lost with every sentence they spoke. They would have no idea that my inferno was feeding on their words.
I watched the building collapse from the inside by the arson that I started. The firefighters were trying to quench the thirst of the beast. They were entering the apartment complex to retrieve as many people as they could. Fortunately, or unfortunately, they were too late.
My brother and I watched from the roof of the building across the street. My brother, codename Blaze, smirked as the smoke billowed into the sky. He was a malicious adolescent of sorts, and a pledged arsonist.
Blaze got up from his spot on the roof and he lit up a cigarette, the same light that would bring hundreds to their deaths. The beast that licked the heavens reflected in my brother’s eyes.
He whispered in my ear, his breath warm and smelling of alcohol.
“You’re ready.”
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140,280 Literary Works • 673,071 Reviews
Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),
Hi! I'm here to leave a quick review!!
Anyway let's get right to it,
OKay well judging by that title and then that first line, it seems we're in the very rare position of seeing the start of the story of an aspiring villain as opposed to the much more common aspiring hero. Well this is certainly something different if nothing else so I am thoroughly excited to see where this will take us here and well I do mostly how you're going to sell this character here.
Well the sort of indifference tone there makes things interesting. On one hand it doesn't seem like someone setup to have some sort of redemption arc of sorts down the line but it also doesn't seem like a person headed towards the depths of just being a horrible person either, well they are already quite a horrible person for not doing anything, but its an interesting sort of stalemate here and now I'm very curious to see where this is going.
Aaand well it is quite clear there that this brother figure seems like someone whose very much in deep with this side of things and also that there is an odd sort of tension here between the two. It seems almost as if this main character isn't their brother's biggest fan but well this is quite hard to judge with the very limited information here. What I will say though is that you've got yourself a very strong piece right here and I find myself definitely wanting to know more.
Aaaaand that's it for this one.
As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.
Stay Safe
Harry
Wow, thank you so much for this! I really appreciate your constructive criticism and I will get right to editing. Thanks again!
-Ember
Hello, Ember!
Welcome to the YWS, as I’ve not yet met you. ^^ Hope you’re liking it here.
Now, onto the piece itself. Even as a prologue, this is rather short, with very little happening. I’d like to have seen something a bit longer, letting your reader become interested in your story. From what you have right now, I’m not interested, at all.
“They say I was born to set fires” isn’t a terrible first line, though feels a little tired, I’ve seen plenty of variations on that line a lot of times. You might consider making this a little more interesting, with some major impact. This does have some impact, but not a huge amount.
It pretty much goes downhill from that line, actually, to be picked up again at “my brother”. Your next paragraph is a confusion of emotions, what is later identified as event and his internal understanding of the event. You need to lengthen this and give us some actual description and explanation. If you’re going to bother with all this internal battling, and understanding, you need to make it clear to your reader. As it is, I had no idea what was going on in this paragraph until I read on, and even then I needed to read it three times to gain a real understanding of what was going on.
You also need to look at your wording at times, this is where you’re mostly going wrong, in some places – that you ought to see plain as day if you read through this again – need re-wording because of how awkward they make reading this.
Your concept isn’t horrible, it’s rather interesting, but you need to develop it more here, if you’re going to introduce it this way we need to know a little more. You could easily expand the scene by describing the events of the fire, going through the stages or something similar. This will help a lot. Your imagery is nice but is bogged down in the space you’ve written this in. It needs to be longer and you need to work on the wording.
But you end it well, and overall, it’s fairly interesting.
*Hearts* Le Penguin.