Dear Diary, December 29 Monday, 2014
Today, we arrived in unfamiliar territory. The new house doesn't look too bad. It's not great, but it's not horrible. The bedroom my parents and I agreed would be for me has a pretty big window; a decent way to find inspiration for my art, without having to leave the house. Although, part of me wants to be outside. This place isn't like my old home. There's a forest nearby. A promising one. Promising what, you ask? Inspiration. Inspiration is like food, to me. I need it, or I feel weird, and whine at my parents to help me. Were you expecting me to go somewhere more drastic with that? Sorry to disappoint. As for what I did today, I did nothing. Well, I kind of started to try to help my parents unpack, but I couldn't focus. I wanted to just sit on an uncomfortable cardboard box, stare out of my window, and doodle. So that's exactly what I did. I drew flowers, and insects, and whatever sprung to mind. I also drew a pokemon at some point. It wasn't even one you'd find in a forest area. I just wanted to draw a pokemon. It didn't turn out very well. I think I'll try again tomorrow, more seriously.
(Please tell me what you think! And I'm bad at titles, so if you have any ideas for what could be a potential title for this, please leave suggestions~ Thanks much <3)
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
125,008 Literary Works • 672,827 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....looks like we have a bit of diary entry style story here...and well those are always a fun way to bring out a story. Let's see how this particular one gets going here. It seems from the start this is starting off right when the person writing in the diary here has moved to a new location. The one thing that sticks out to me a little here is the fact that it appears this diary entry is being written for someone to be read almost...it doesn't feel like something being written just to the diary itself cause the tone just doesn't seem to fit with someone writing just to gather their thoughts or something along those lines which is how most diary entries tend to go. Its not exactly bad, its just a unique thing I spotted and I mention it here in case maybe that was not the vibe that you were going for here.
Hmm...at any rate moving on from that to the content here, I do love that...its talking of this person's love for art, and the way that they look for inspiration and that you can tell has quite a bit of emotions embedded into the writing there. Now that is the main factor that does ground this as something someone would write for themselves and it appears to be of them just sort of describing how their hobby has to had to adapt to the change in place and well, that was quite interesting to read here. At any rate, this was a pretty decent little diary entry here.
Aaaaand that's it for this one.
As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.
Stay Safe
Harry
Hello Hana, welcome to YWS! Flite here for a review!
This is pretty short for a chapter, but here goes. Hm, I wouldn't worry about the title at the moment. One will probably come to you as you write this, however judging by what you have here. Into the woods doesn't seem like a bad one.
Alright, so this is written in diary form about a girl who's moved houses and outside the house. There is a forest. In my opinion, I think you can write about better things than just talking about how the girl feels. A lot of what you've described here is pretty mundane things we come across every day. I know you're writing this in a diary, but you're also writing a novel to attract out attention.
See that paragraph, we didn't need it. We didn't need to know those things because they're boring to the reader, you're trying to grab us in. Not literally talk about what she did. You should have talked about what the house looked like, what it felt like, give us some insight into her personality and her thoughts on this house. Is this new house haunted, or is it just normal? She could also have described what the forest looked like, how it might be inspiring to her.
I also find it odd that she didn't reminiscent about her old house, seeing that she misses it so. Wouldn't it have made more sense for her to talk a bit about her old house and the reason why she moved here.
You've also told us what she felt, basic show don't tell rule here. You should have started with a description of the house, work your way into the house and add in some reflection on the MC's part about how she feels about this all and then move onto the forest. Your tone here is very factual, creating a monotonous-voice. 'I did this', 'this happened' and then 'that happened'. They are all very sequential conjugations, you need to vary your word choices a bit.
The idea overall, could work as the forest seems to be something intriguing. However, be selective about what you write about and work on your showing skills. If you have any questions, please feel free to PM me.
-Flite
Yo!
This is an interesting concept, and I personally like diary style stories, so this is a plus for me! I know you just started out and it's the first part and all, but there wasn't any plot, I guess. Character development maybe, because I got that the main character (male or female? It said 'Dear diary' but I'm not discriminating) is very arty and it's a very major part of their life. I really liked the line
"Inspiration is like food, to me. I need it, or I feel weird, and whine at my parents to help me."
This shows the protagonist's character. A typical teenager.
(Oh and by the way, the comma between 'food' and 'to' is unnecessary. That's the only grammatical thing I saw though)
There could be a bit more description with the setting as well. You said there was a forest, but, what kind of forest? Like one of those dark mysterious ones that lead to bad situations, or one with oaks and cute woodland animals and stuff?
And with the title, I'm not sure about that either. Maybe wait until you post a few more parts and you get a feel for the story. That could help.
Thanks for the input! I do tend to go a little bit crazy when it comes to commas. Character wise, I'm just thinking of how I would go about getting her personality across. As for the forest, I intend to go into detail about that in a later entry.