Introduction to the Park
I am Rapk, I know it’s a weird name and I'll tell you why it's a weird as it is. My grandfather named me, he has a weird name too, Grandpa Warmwater. Now you see my name is an anagram for park so… I'm named after my grandpa’s park, which isn't necessarily a bad thing I mean my grandpa was the smartest businessman of his time, I mean his park is MASSIVE and he has dinosaurs in it it’s a water park with dinosaurs! The only problem is his time was twenty years ago. He is now just an old grandpa that wants to eat all the dinos and sea creatures. He is the weirdest person I know, he yells at Asians and throws them into lakes. He also always grabs my mother’s(who is only his DIVORCED daughter in law) butt squeezes then says:”Oo Baby! Still got those baby soft buns.” Anyway the worst part it one time he was playing tug o’ war at a family reunion and he lost to my mom, so he picked her up and threw her off a cliff into the ocean...it was a nice funeral. Now don't think he just got off on murder, he was tried for murder in court, there was not enough evidence so he was let off the hook, even though he DID throw her off the cliff. So now I have to live with him.
So he owns the park and people scramble to be able to get in. So the park is called, Warmwater’s park. He named it that after his last name, which was not his birth name...ya know, I don't know what his birth name is. But he changed his last name after an experience in a pool. Anyway, the park is 500 acres of land. But because he’s getting old he is now sharing his park with the one and only, Pua! His Indian friend that always come to every show and yells stuff like,”EPIC!” and “WHAT THE GOAT!”. He also brings his kids which I have to take care of because he is too lazy to do it himself. But usually I pawn it off on one of the employees, because I have a job too, I take care of the dinos. Specifically the Psephodermas, which are practically very large turtles.
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,861 Reviews
Hi, Kimball! Pan here for a quick review.
Seeing as there are so many recurrent errors in this, I'm not going to go through it for nitpicks. I don't think that's helpful at this stage. Instead, I'm just going to give you a few general bits of advice as to how to improve the piece. Let's go.
Grammar
First things first: holy comma splices, Batman! Alongside run-on sentences (more about them later), comma splices are probably the most common mistake in this piece. 'What's a comma splice?', I hear you ask. In short, it's when two complete sentences are connected with a comma rather than the appropriate kind of punctuation. Like here:
In this instance, both 'I am Rapk' and 'I know it's a weird name are what we call main clauses, which is a fancy way of saying that they can make sense by themselves. Because they can make sense by themselves, it's inappropriate to connect them with just a comma.
The simplest way to correct a comma splice is to just swap the comma out for a full stop, like this:
I am Rapk. I know it's a weird name.
There's also another simple way to correct a comma splice, which I'll demonstrate with another example from the piece.
So here's our example. How could we fix this one? By adding some kind of conjunction - a word like 'and', 'but', 'as', or 'for', among many others. If we did that, we could have:
My grandfather named me and he has a weird name too.
It's maybe not the most dynamic sentence in the world, but it is grammatical. There are a few other ways to fix comma splices that you can read about here and here, but I didn't want to get too technical in this review. It's definitely, definitely worth reading those articles, though. They're only short, I promise!
The second glaring issue with this piece is run-on sentences, such as these:
Run-on sentences are similar to comma splices except they have no punctuation. Comma splices, by contrast, have incorrect punctuation. You can fix them in much the same way as comma splices, though. For instance, by inserting a full stop:
I mean, his park is massive and has dinosaurs in it. It’s a water park with dinosaurs.
Here, the run-on has been fixed by placing a full stop after 'it' and creating two separate sentences. You could also fix a run-on like this:
I'm named after my grandpa’s park, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, for my grandpa was the smartest businessman of his time.
Here I've fixed the run-on by adding in the conjunction 'for' after 'thing'.
I've been quite hasty with my summing up of the issue here, so I'd definitely suggest you check out this great article for a guide to how to spot and correct run-ons. I think you need to work a lot on recognising what does and doesn't constitute a full sentence, because that seems to be the root of a lot of your punctuation problems. I'd recommend searching the web for help with this. There are lots of grammar guides out there.
There's also more miscellaneous things to remember, too. Remember that the first-person pronoun 'I' should always be capitalised, and remember that you should put a space after commas and full stops. These types of errors are easily fixed, but you can't let them slide.
Story Content
It was definitely an entertaining read. Despite the sheer absurdity of this uncle's actions, I found myself drawn in by his eccentric (and admittedly horrible) personality. He sounds like a character that could be fun to read about. Nevertheless, the content of the story is let down by the fact that it is presented in such a haphazard, scatterbrained way. You flit from point to point without much cohesion. Reading it, I feel like I'm being yanked around on a chain.
Radrook is also right that it lacks realism. If you're going for complete surrealism, I actually think this piece could work pretty well, but it doesn't remotely work as something realistic. It's too random, too weird, too exaggerated. Still, you classified this piece as humour and it did actually amuse me, so you can't have gone too far wrong.
That said, the piece feels incomplete. There's not nearly enough here to constitute a proper opening chapter, and it just seems to drop off mid-idea like you couldn't be bothered to bring it to a proper conclusion. Too little has actually happened. Usually, opening chapters focus on some kind of change in the protagonist's life, but there's none of that here. It's just a very rushed, glossed-over backstory that fizzles out before it really gets started. It needs more substance.
Overall, I think this piece has a long way to go, but it did definitely get a chuckle out of me. Try to focus on your grammar, because it's going to be difficult to express your ideas properly until you've grasped how to organise and punctuate a narrative. You have to walk before you can run, in this case.
Keep writing!
~Pan
Thank you to both of you, I have made a few changes to make it better.
Also, I should have mentioned, the "book" so to speak it a compilation of a bunch of stories about the narrator and his grandfather.
Interesting story with a very enigmatic personality described. Thanks for sharing.
Suggestions:
Here are some things that as fiction writers we need to consider.
Reader suspension of disbelief:
It is vey important not to present the readers with things that they will find totally unbelievable. There are several things of this kind in the story. For example, a son whose mother is murdered doesn’t just glibly say. “Oh well, she had a nice funeral! By the way, I live and work for her father who murdered her.”
Also, her father is described as being too weak to win a tug of war with his daughter. Then suddenly he has the strength to overpower her, pick her up and hurl her over a cliff. He also has the strength to be hurling Asians, his paying customers, who visit his park into lakes.
The reader is also told that the speaker is forced to live with the grandfather after the grandfather murders the speaker’s mother. The reader assumes that the speaker is a minor who is now in the grandfather’s custody.
The problem with that is that murderers aren’t granted custody of children. Instead, they are put on trial and wind up either in an insane asylum or in prison.
Then the speaker is described having job at the park. So that messes up the previous idea of him being a minor under custody.
It’s as these things happen in some wonderland completely devoid of law and order or even cause and effect.
Also, you don't seem to care about proper punctuation and that makes reading difficult because thoughts run into each other without pausing or stopping. Periods provide stops and commas provide pauses for good reasons. It makes reading and understanding easier. So if we want to retain the reader interest, we will use them.
'Roids it's the roids. %uD83D%uDE02