Young Writers Society

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,

A glint of silver. A flash of gold. Vibrant red dimmed from violence.

Gleaming eyes. Pearly teeth. Palest skin, stranger to the soaring sun.

And the heart of their focus is an angel, rare and radiant, illumed to beauty with light from within. She sits on bowed knees, her spirit almost broken, helpless and fragile and tantalizingly vulnerable. It would be so easy to extinguish that inner light, the darkness carelessly muses, so very easy. Only the barest hinting remains of the blazing that was.

And yet, the shadows tenderly caress the angel’s form like an artist caresses the figures he paints with pigments and kisses of brushes. They do not encroach upon the light’s waning domain; instead they dance quietly on the border, enhancing by contrast the beauty of the paling in a perpetual dusk.

And it is lovely.

The darkness broke her - the loneliness, the lack of life. The darkness could unmake her, change her into more of its kind, lightless, lifeless, lonely. But the darkness will not. The light, faint and fragmented as it is, is beautiful. And that light belongs to the darkness now.

Just as the angel does.

Hey Kyllorac ^^ Shina here for a review

A glint of silver. A flash of gold. Vibrant red dimmed from violence.

Gleaming eyes. Pearly teeth. Palest skin, stranger to the soaring sun.

She sits on bowed knees, her spirit almost broken, helpless and fragile and tantalizingly vulnerable.

It would be so easy to extinguish that inner light, the darkness carelessly muses, so very easy.

Only the barest hinting remains of the blazing that was.

And it is lovely.

The darkness broke her - the loneliness, the lack of life.

The darkness could unmake her, change her into more of its kind, lightless, lifeless, lonely.

But the darkness will not. The light, faint and fragmented as it is, is beautiful. And that light belongs to the darkness now.

Just as the angel does.

Nice. I like this a lot. It gives me a grey-silver-black colour. To me, also says mysterious to me. Like, when I was reading it, my mind was all silvery grey black with fog steaming up everywhere. I love dark stories. ^^

And the heart of their focus is an angel, rare and radiant, illumed to beauty with light from within.

This was written under the assumption that most of the people would not be looking at the picture. The site the prompt/contest is on does not allow linking at all and even breaks urls if you try and include them in an author's note. And it kind of is... >.>

Haughty was not what I was going for. Oh dear. I was going for poetically pretty. I'm hoping this was just your annoyance speaking. >.>

Illumed actually is a word and is basically a shorter form of the word "illuminated." Firefox is lovely and all, but any automated spellchecker should never be fully trusted as they only contain the most common words in a language. I've lost count of the number of times Word's autocorrect has switched scientific terms I've written into some other word. -_-

I didn't think of it that way. Personally, I'm fond of the repetition. If enough people bring it up, though, I'll change it.

Thanks you three, especially you, Hannah, for the reviews.

@Hannah - My ego took a pretty hard blow, but it will live, and I can see where you're coming from.

From reading this through one time and visiting the picture that you said inspired you, I feel like this is a weak attempt at sticking a story behind the picture, and that you spend too much time describing the physical situation which is already set out in the picture.

Why not, instead of copying exactly what the picture shows into writing, expand away from that and really create your own characters that are based in personality rather than what they look like?

For example: The word 'illumed' here is not even a real word {well, Firefox doesn't think it is}, and I know it was just used for that haughty effect.

we can see she's vulnerable already from 'helpless and fragile', so maybe take out one or more of those word to avoid redundancy.

I love this sort of Wordsworthian description, existing somewhere between the Gods and the eyes of a painter. Forget all the punctuation pedants, this piece, especially at the beginning, sparkles with hints of alliteration and consonance and the simple aesthetic pleasure of phrases such as 'illumed to beauty' and 'tantalizingly vulnerable'.

I would only say that the final larger paragraph pales into a more one-dimensional feel, losing some of the contrasting subject matter that harmonises so well in the first two.

Still, Crackalacking.

Hallo! ^_^ I'm Hannah. I saw this pop up and thought I'd pop in and offer a few comments.

From reading this through one time and visiting the picture that you said inspired you, I feel like this is a weak attempt at sticking a story behind the picture, and that you spend too much time describing the physical situation which is already set out in the picture. Why not, instead of copying exactly what the picture shows into writing, expand away from that and really create your own characters that are based in personality rather than what they look like?

Inspiration doesn't mean you have to stick to what is shown.

As for the writing, it comes off as stiflingly poetic. It's pretty at first, but then it just gets kind of annoying. I don't mean to be harsh or anything, but there are a lot of words/phrases you use that are only used when you're trying to make the writing sound prettier and more poetic. I think that if you put the effort into it, you could make a beautiful, inspired piece without using these crutches.

And the heart of their focus is an angel, rare and radiant, illumed to beauty with light from within. She sits on bowed knees, her spirit almost broken, helpless and fragile and tantalizingly vulnerable.

Only the barest hinting remains of the blazing that was.

Thanks, you two. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

@delphi - The "and"s are there for the sake of rhythm and overall flow. If you remove them, the sentence does not sound the same and the overall flow of the piece changes. As for the other punctuation bit, I honestly had no real clue how to punctuate that one properly. XD I've been abusing semicolons lately (they have invaded my writing, they have), so I'll probably substitute an m-dash. :3 M-dashes also look prettier.

I have to agree. That was a really great piece of writing. I'm in World Lit. in school right now, and I kind of analyzed your piece. I liked how it made me feel like that "the shadows tenderly caress the angel’s form" made me think of balance in life. This piece has definitely made me feel like that balance is the most important thing in life. I enjoyed reading your work.

This was good. So far as your description of the image goes, you did an amazing job. You also did a wonderful job of creating a sort of story behind the image. The imagery and poeticness of this piece was great. I did, however, have a few little problems with some of your punctuation. It was good for the most part, it just caught my attention in some places.

She sits on bowed knees, her spirit almost broken, helpless and fragile and tantalizingly vulnerable.

The darkness broke her, the loneliness, the lack of life.