Young Writers Society

Hello, it's me again for Chapter 2! I'll get straight into it.

First, grammar. I don't want to give a whole grammar lesson so I'll keep this short. It's just that grammar is pretty important if you want to send your ideas to the readers in an understandable, coherent way.

This article seems like it'll be of great help to you since punctuation and dialogue can be quite hard to grasp for a lot of people. I also suggest opening up a published novel and paying attention to - really studying - the punctuation in their dialogue.

There are also a few comma splices that need tidying up. In short, a comma splice is when you use a comma where there should be pretty much any other punctuation - a period/fullstop, a hyphen, semi-colon, etc. A quick Google search brought up this pretty concise article but if that doesn't help, you can probably find many others like it.

With the grammar out of the way, I have to say that I'd love to be shown how Chelsie is stuck up and petty. I can see that the ideas are there - Chelsie does indeed seem like a... beach if she's badmouthing the main characters. However, since I'm just told this via Mason's dialogue and not shown exactly how bad she is, I feel the plan to get back at Chelsie is pretty over the top.

That being said, "get off me you big glob of grease," is a pretty darn mean thing to say and it's a great start to showing off how how bad of a person Chelsie is. I just wish there was a little more.

Other than that, I feel that this chapter could use some more description with the dialogue. If you could describe their facial expressions and body language, it could spice up the dialogue a bit more and give the reader a better idea of what's happening. Currently this chapter is pretty short - under 1000 words, where most published works have over 2000 words for each chapter, at least - which isn't necessarily bad, but it's an obvious sign that everything happens a bit too quickly. If you just put a bit more detail into it, it can slow things down and allow the reader to really take in what you're writing.

And that's all I have to say, currently! If anything I said was confusing or just plain wrong, please send me a PM with anything you want to discuss - it'll be a learning experience for us both. I look forward to the next chapters, since this story is pretty interesting and just plain fun to read. My bias toward realistic teen fiction also helps, probably. xD

Good luck, and thanks for the good read!

Hi, Jurelixranoanad, it’s tgirly again!

I like the way you begin the chapter, but I feel like “afar off” doesn’t really match up with the more casual tone you established in the first chapter.

You have to be careful when you say that a character is unlikeable and hated by most of the other characters, especially when you’re trying to set up that character as the antagonist. Readers, unlike people in real life, are quick to fall on the side of the unlikeable character, who can really easily garner sympathy. I know you say this Chelsie is stuck up and petty, but if you want the reader to really believe that, I’d suggest adding an anecdote of a time when she did something petty or stuck up. Just adding in a one or two sentence story about a character’s personality allows the reader to make the conclusion for themselves, which makes them believe it more and makes them more likely to remember what type of person she is. If you didn’t want to do this, you could just hold off mentioning what kind of personality she had and how much everyone hated her, and let her reveal her personality and the way the other characters interact with her in the actual scene, which you’re already starting to do.

At the end of the chapter, I think dialogue tags would be really helpful, since it’s not always completely clear whose talking when it’s not the main character.
Referring to the new girl as “arm candy” and “blondie” doesn’t seem to me like something a girl would do, unless she had a reason for disliking the girl. It seemed like an odd choice, but maybe that’ll get revealed in later chapters.

I like how the conflict is really starting to be amped up in this chapter. Making them a little less sure of their plan at the end would help make the conflict seem a bit more relevant, but the story’s shaping up to be something interesting and unique. Writing from the perspective of these rebellious home-schoolers is interesting.

Since they all live in the same neighborhood, it seems like the setting’s going to be very important to this novel. I wish you’d do just a bit more to describe it. Are they in a suburb or a small town or the middle of the city? The Midwest, the coast, Texas? It’s hard to tell, and I think showing the overall setting a bit more would help give the story a bit of texture and make it easier for the reader to picture the different scenes presented so far, like the fight in the street and the Pit.

Hope this review helped! Hope I get a chance to read the next chapter.

-tgirly

Hello! DragonNoir here for a review!

Overall, I'd say you improved with your punctuation since the last chapter, of which I am proud You still made a few minor mistakes, nearly all of them to do with punctuation. You mostly missed out places for commas, which you can identify by reading the piece aloud. Where would the reader need to take a breath before carrying on reading? As well as this, you could also see where a comma would make the writing simply look neater, like in dialogue:
"Great, you and Fox head over there..."
Moving on, you did miss out apostrophes in words like "it's", just make sure you know whether you're using it as 'it is' or as a possessive pronoun. Onto the next subject, at the beginning you say:
"I heard afar off..." If it was really far, then you probably would struggle to hear what they exactly said, wouldn't you? It would be best you heard some incomprehensible yelling or something along those lines.

On a more positive note, you build up tension in two ways: firstly, by the top line, which reads "156 days before", and secondly, because of ending before the action of stealing the toy from the pastor's daughter. I'd say this is effectively written Teen Fiction, both because of the language choices and the themes used. Personally, I actually can't wait how this story will unfold.

Overall, a great piece of writing. You could still work on punctuation, but you've improved greatly since last time. Keep writing, I'm sure you'll be able to get everything right soon!

I hope my review helped!