Hey there Holiday30,
Myjaspercat here to leave you a review on this fine of review days
Line-by-Line/Nit-picks
Spoiler! :
Overview
Ok, so I had to stop there because it was just getting to become to much. Right now you have a lot of inconsistencies throughout your piece and it's honestly really boring to read. The prose is pretty much all telling, the action lacks -well action and the dialogue is very stiff. That said let's look at a few notes:
1. Exclamation marks
! - This is an exclamation mark. It is used to show emphasis and--surprise--exclamation.
Bob bought a cat? I can't believe it!
However, use this sparingly, if at all. Overusing exclamation marks--especially more than one in succession ("!!!")--is about the easiest way you can indicate to your reader that you're an amateur, and possibly a thirteen year old texting about their crush.
Think of it this way: If an exclamation mark is used for emphasis, to draw a reader's attention to something out of all the rest of the story, then you're not really doing that if every other sentence has an exclamation mark. This practice can be very self-indulgent.
Exclamation marks are commonly frowned upon in prose writing. Avoid whenever possible.
***You used exclamation marks quite often throughout your piece. Every once and a while is fine, but too many will just drag down your story as a whole. There are many different ways (better and more engaging ways) of showing your readers that one character is yelling or loudly exclaiming (in one form or another.) Try to discover those ways and use them.
2. Perspectives
If middle school taught you anything about writing, you'll know that there are three perspectives:
-First Person
-Second Person
-Third Person
And that's it. Pick one and go, right?
Well, not exactly.
Since Second Person perspective is so hard to pull off, and Third Person perspective is a bit more expansive, writing in prose will be more like choosing from one of these:
-First Person
-Third Person Limited
-Third Person Ominscient
And even then it gets a little more complicated. But first, let's just do a quick overview of the basic perspectives:
First Person
First Person perspective is a common perspective that relies on a character in the text doing the narration, usually communicating directly to the reader. This is your "I walked into the bar" and "I laughed at Bob" perspective. 1st Person doesn't have to be a character in the text itself, but usually it's better when you're writing in 1st Person to be writing as a persona rather than as the author actually telling a story. Think A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is narrated by Lemony Snicket, a fictional narrator who plays virtually no role in the main plot of the story he is telling.
1st is useful in that it allows you to really get attached to the main character who, theoretically, the reader will be following through the whole book (there are, of course, examples of books that use multiple 1st person narrators and combinations of 1st and 3rd person narrators). Anything written in 1st person has to be at least somewhat character-driven by an interesting 1st person narrator, or else the reader will get bored.
However, 1st person also has a challenge of distance from the reader. Self-descriptions can be very awkward. For example, if a narrator turns around and says:
"I have brown hair and dark eyes"
Then we can be reminded that we're in a story and not being immersed in one, and it can be jarring and awkward. It reeks of author intervening rather than something a character would naturally do. You can find ways to work this kind of description in, but often it seems unreasonable that a character would stop to describe what they look like.
1st Person also has the advantage/disadvantage of unreliable narrators, which are narrators which cast doubt into the reader's mind of how certain we are what we're reading is the truth. This can either be worked to great effect, or can be the downfall of a book.
Second Person
Second Person is the direct address to the reader. This is where the narrator explains everything as "you."
You enter the room. You look around and feel the temperature drop.
It's a very direct form of address, and can be used very powerfully. However, there's a reason it's the least common form of perspective in prose fiction, and that's largely because it's tiring to read.
For one thing, it feels unnatural to most modern readers. We're used to reading in "He, she, it" and "I, me, we" but "You, yours," is strange to us, and it works our minds harder to read something in this form, especially in longer works.
However, it's because it's such a powerful address that it's tiring. It involves the reader in a way without a distance that first and third person perspectives provide, and that can leave a reader feeling exposed and overwhelmed.
Subject matter also needs to be taken into account. If you're writing a graphic murder scene, a reader might be turned off by the second person perspective (whether they're the victim or the murderer). 2nd can also be tricky to pull of without feeling gimmicky. I also, personally, always feel like challenging 2nd person perspective. If a story tells me:
You start feeling scared
I think "no I don't" and close the book.
2nd person can be done, and there are great books out there that use it, but if you're using this guide to tell you what 2nd person perspective is, you're probably not skilled or mature enough to be able to wield it effectively yet.
Third Person Limited
It can help to think of perspectives in the same way as movie cameras or, more accurately, video game cameras. Certain video games, like Call of Duty or Bioshock, are played in the first-person-perspective, where you see the world through the character's eyes. Others are played in what's referred to as Over-The-Shoulder Third Person. These are games like Uncharted or Gears of War where you still follow the same character around, but there's a distance between you and that character.
This is Third Person Limited, which sticks to one character (in any given scene) and doesn't hop to others. Here, we're tethered to that character but we have more room to see the bigger picture, learn things that that character hasn't figured out, while still enjoying the depth and attachment to a single figure. So it largely comes with a lot of the benefits of the first person perspective, but isn't as constrained. This does mean you sacrifice some of the more personal connection to the reader, but that can be worth it.
It can also be tricky to avoid head-hopping in this perspective, as you might be tempted to move freely from each character's thoughts. However, if you're in Third Person Limited, you have to stick with the character whose perspective you've established for that scene. The Harry Potter books did not swap to tell us what Ron Weasley was thinking--that was something J.K.Rowling had to show us through Harry's perspective.
To head-hop is to confuse the reader and lose control of your own prose. Both are book-killers.
Third Person Omniscient
If this was a video game, this would be a top-down strategy game where you have control over a number of characters. An omniscient narrator is a completely impartial objective narrator that has access to the thoughts of every single character.
In this perspective, you are allowed and expected to head-hop, since the reader knows what they're getting into. If Harry Potter was Third Person Omniscient, we would have seen what Ron Weasley was thinking. However, we also would have seen what Hermione Granger was thinking, and Albus Dumbledore, and Voldemort.
Maybe you see the problems of Omniscient here.
For one thing, it can be tedious. If you don't show us the thoughts of most characters as they do things, a reader can feel cheated. If a character suddenly reveals at the end of the book that they've known all along Harry Potter was a Horcrux (Er... spoilers, by the way, I guess) then the reader is going to feel cheated, because we've been in that character's head. That's the author purposely withholding information from the reader for a literary payoff, which is a form of author intrusion, which is a good way to ruin the immersion of the book.
So you have to make sure you cover important details and not cheat, which can mean you'll have to take up time to cover several character's thoughts (you obviously don't have to do a role call of every character in the room whenever they think of something new). This can also kill tension--imagine if we really did know what Dumbledore and Voldemort were thinking in the Harry Potter books, or if in Chamber of Secrets we'd wandered over to Ginny's perspective just as she thought to herself "Oh man, I hope they don't discover that I'm the one writing all these messages" (Er... spoilers). But to not do so would be to cheat, and cheating is bad.
However, you can see that there's some use for omniscient. Yes, Chamber of Secrets would lose all mystery if we knew it was Ginny operating under Tom Riddle's command that was responsible for everything, but on the other hand can you think about how awesome the dramatic irony of the book would have been? While Harry and Ron are worried about catching Draco Malfoy, we the reader are wondering when they'll figure out it's really the quiet sister sitting across from them.
Like second person, it's tricky to pull off, but there are major benefits to writing in this form.
*
After you decide which perspective you write from, you have another question to ask yourself: Whose perspective will you write from? I mean, depending on how you planned your book you'll know who the protagonist is before you know which perspective you'll write in, but bear with me.
What you should look for in a perspective character is who has access to the most interesting perspective on a scene itself. Usually this means your protagonist, because theoretically they're an active character the reader is attached to. But sometimes you'll want to show something the protagonist might not see. It's perfectly okay, depending on your writing, to switch to another perspective to show a different scene. Perhaps you have multiple perspectives like many epic fantasy novels. Maybe you just want a quick one-off scene from the antagonist's POV. It's okay, as long as you make it clear what's happening, whose perspective we're switching to, and it works in the novel.
Note: Perspective changes like this can be tricky in first-person perspective, as there's a sort of understanding that the first-person narrator is telling you the story. It can feel cheap to suddenly switch to somebody else's perspective, especially if it's a one-off, as if you couldn't find a better way to establish information to the reader. It can be done, of course, as there are books with multiple first-person-perspective narrators, and books that mix first and third-person.
If you are writing outside of omniscient, it is a good idea to indicate a perspective change, either by putting a space between paragraphs when the shift happens, or some kind of symbol (like a * or a #). Generally speaking, it's a better idea to stick to one perspective for a scene and avoid hopping back and forth like this, as it can become confusing. But again, if it works it works.
***To be honest, I couldn't really pin-point a perspective for your story. I know that may sound a little stupid, but your writing so stiff and bland that it didn't really hit me. I would have really loved to have seen more.
3. Show don't tell
Continuing with the most basic of advice, the one piece that everyone hears when they start writing, and even professional authors struggle with. This is the benchmark piece of writing advice that, if followed, will improve your writing tenfold. But what exactly does it mean?
Showing versus Telling has always seemed to me to be a matter of how you establish information. At it's basest level, you've shown information if the reader is able to interpret it themselves, but you've told information if you've established that information yourself by addressing the reader or through exposition.
Now, telling has it's place; the rule would be better titled "When to Show, When to Tell" since both are valid forms of information establishment and, as I'm about to argue, it's impossible to not tell at all.
But why is showing better than telling? Basically, it's more engaging. If the reader is coming to conclusions on their own, they are more involved with the text, which means they'll be more immersed. Telling, conversely, has about the same level of engagement that a history or science textbook might, and is half as interesting.
Another way of looking at it is the difference between visual and oral storytelling. A visual story, one that you read, relies moreso on showing to be good. There's time and room to let the reader come to their own conclusions, and that's part of the fun. An oral tale, on the other hand, will be shorter and more direct--whether it's a fable or a joke you're telling at school--so you have to tell a few things. That's why fairy tales, their origins in oral tradition and emerging from an era where telling was the preferred mode, tend to tell more than show--we're told someone is a virtuous beautiful princess because there's no time to show us through other actions, and that'd be boring anyway.
So how do you go about showing over telling? Well, let's look at an example.
Bob was angry.
This is telling. This is the narrator telling us that Bob is angry. Compare that to the following:
Bob kicked open the door and punched the wall, growling as he did so, his face turning a deep shade of red.
Here, the reader can figure out that Bob is angry from the actions he takes. That means this is showing. By expanding on the information, and writing it as part of the scene, I've turned telling into showing. Here's another example:
Bob was not good at hitting on women.
Compared to:
"Hey hot stuff," Bob said, winking at Susan. "How'd you like to go to my room and see what happens?"
In this example, I've used dialogue to show the reader just how bad Bob is at hitting on women, rather than directly telling them he's bad at it. Note, however, that I didn't just go this route:
[/quote]"Bob is so bad at hitting on women," Susan said.
This technically could work, but it risks getting into As You Know territory, which is where one character delivers exposition to another character that both characters are obviously already aware of, and its only purpose is to fill the reader in on that exposition. This is clumsy writing, and looks rather ridiculous. There's also just less engagement to turning the telling into an exact dialogue quote, rather than something more interesting like the first example, so you should try and be a bit more creative with it.
However, you'll notice that these examples still have telling. The narrator is telling the reader what Bob is doing. It's telling us Bob kicked open the door, and that he punched a wall. That is why I see showing not so much as an alternative to telling, but a way of using telling to create an illusion of showing. Therefore, telling is unavoidable, which means you shouldn't beat yourself up too much over it, and you should be careful in critiques when you accuse people of telling.
It also means it's quite tricky to decide when you're telling too much, which is why so many authors have a problem with it. If everything is telling, it becomes less a matter of identify the telling and changing it to showing, and instead grows into figuring out where in the telling you could be showing more strongly.
There are some things you'll want to tell. Maybe it's a passage of time you want to skip over, or an unimportant detail that would only kill the pacing of your story if you included it. In these moments, it's perfectly fine to go into telling.Telling is okay, if you know why you're using it.
So, on a scene level, you need to decide what you're going to show as a scene and what you can just skip over, with exposition or not. This is where you have to have skill--you need to decide what you want to accomplish in a scene, and what you can accomplish in a scene, and what you can cram in there to keep the story moving, develop character, and keep the reader hooked all at the same time.
On a sentence-by-sentence level, you should probably be aiming for showing any time you can. One helpful tip is to look for the word "was" if you're writing in past tense, or "is" if you're writing in present tense. These, such as with the example above, often lead to instances of telling, so keep an eye out.
Really, the only way to catch all instances of telling is to comb your writing line-by-line, word-by-word and deciding how exactly you're going about establishing information. It is, unfortunately, one of those problems that you can only really solve with awareness. Learn how to distinguish showing against telling, and then recognize that in your own writing.
***Basically, your entire piece was told rather then showed. That's not good. You should really work on this.
Final Thoughts
I think that's all I'm going to leave you with. If you have any questions please feel free to ask. Good luck and continue writing.
Points: 16
Reviews: 265
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