Prologue:
The best of my talents was always reading.
Not Cask of Amontillado reading, but actual reading. People reading.
I realize things, much like any person should, but I picture in my mind why a person would do it, how they could do it in the easy manner, or how they screwed it up. Dialogue, and action.
It's just been proven that people usually reveal themselves in that way--nonverbal. Verbal is too hard to interpret, but action...
It's harder to lie with an action.
Twitching, shaking, or no movement at all. Berlin Wall stillness or shock stillness?
All those types of movements can tell an emotion, well-hidden or broadcast, if someone's hiding something, or if, like everyone would want to know, that someone was really that big of an idiot.
Reading was for me, and people who tried and hid, I found it later. If I wanted to. One thing to note about a talent is that you never master it until you can turn it off and on.
That is, until I found out about my greatest foe besides myself and butt fat: my mother.
Only one thing I can note about that woman... okay then, two: she made a mistake in marrying my art instructor, and mothers do more damage than earthquakes.
And yet, when I shouldn't care about her anymore, I need to. I've never missed marks, people I want to and don't want to observe.
Families not only suck, but they don't get excused.
Especially my mother.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,020 Literary Works • 672,861 Reviews
yeah same here
It's nice, I'm interested to see where you go with it and I think you should introduce more of the plot (or give us more to read
First off, let me welcome you to YWS. Hopefully you're making your way over to the welcome forum, where you can meet all the wonderful people here.
Here at YWS, we try to provide a community that strives to improve their writing.
And now, a critique.
On YWS, I'm sort of a prologue slayer, so keep that in mind as I go over this.
I read through the prologue. What I like is that you have some definite character giving you a narrative. This makes it so that the character is telling us the story, which is very good.
The way the narrative is written however, is riddled with problems. You use paragraphs way too frequently, the dialogue seems disjointed, like stop and go traffic. It also seemed like it could have been written much more efficently.
One instance:
This is better written as
Short and to the point, which seems like the type of narrator you have. You might also want to reconsider the Poe reference. Great poet that he is, you might want to consider something more general, like say "Not book reading but..."
Kudos for having read Poe.
I think what has happened is you are trying to write for a character which is short and to the point. The problem is in writing efficently: using grammar properly to create pauses; combining two fragmented sentences to form a single sentence; using the least words to form the image you want your reader to see; all this is needed to write efficently.
In addition to the Poe analogy, there were some others that confused me.
The first sentence is bad because it has no subject. The second also has no subject. This is where I come in: think of what you're trying to say, and say it. Is it simply: A person that made no movement wasn't just motionless; I could tell if he was shocked stiff or simply bored stiff."
This might not be what you wanted to say, but the current way isn't working.
I took the liberty of inserting a couple of comments in this passage.
The problem with this part is that it seems to nothing in common with the rest of the prologue. I've noted some contradictory statements and non-sequiters. It makes the writer look indecisive, or the character stupid.
At the very bottom of this is the kicker though: it's not a real prologue.
Prologues generally deal with some event that occured before the book began. Lord of the Rings, for instance, recounted the story of the ring, for those that had no idea what the big deal was. This is generally what the prologue is used for: giving people information that occurred much earlier in time.
You'll also note that the prologue is usually done in a different voice or narration than the main POV, even a completely different POV.
This passage is told by the main narrator. This is a problem because anything the narrator says here might as well be revealed over the course of the book.
This might as well be integrated into Chapter One, since it doesn't fill the job a prologue.