a/n I'm not looking for any more reviews on this prologue. In fact, this is just a place card for when I figure out what I'm actually going to write for the prologue. So, just read and enjoy (or don't :3) so you can have some background for the first chapter.
The door to the comms room exploded against the wall. Mr. Eller had every eye on him as he stalked to the wall of screens. “Play it,” he barked at the closest person. The boy’s hand shook as he pressed a combination of buttons. The screens blinked to life with static. A few moments later, the picture cleared.
It was a young girl, black ponytail bouncing off her back. Although she seemed to be no more than ten years old, she was fast and agile. The video feed showed her dashing down streets and turning corners so sharp her pursuers couldn’t keep up. Mr. Eller recognized the pursuers immediately, but the girl's identity escaped him. He recognized some features, but he couldn’t place a name.
“Patterson.” Mr. Eller turned to see Jackson, his second in command, standing a few steps behind. “She’s a Patterson,” Jackson continued. “Their youngest. We found her on the surveillance cameras and figured we’d follow her. She’s been training.”
“I can tell,” Mr. Eller muttered as he faced the screen again. As smart as the girl seemed, she ended up getting herself trapped in an open alleyway. Her pursuers crept closer from behind while more advanced from in front of her. They were quite large – full grown men. One was pointing a gun at the girl’s chest. “You brought me here to watch the girl die?”
Jackson chuckled. “Just watch.” Mr. Eller could imagine his colleague standing there, arms crossed, smirk on his face. Jackson always took pleasure in knowing more than Mr. Eller. Of course, that was rarely much.
Mr. Eller watched uncomfortably as the goons got closer to the girl. Come on. You should be moving. Either this girl was stupid or she was holding on to some kind of leverage. He assumed it was the latter.
Then she jumped into action. The movements were hard to comprehend. Mr. Eller watched her kick the gun out of the one man’s hand before whipping around to punch another in the nose. He staggered just enough for her to land a kick to his stomach. The other two men rushed her. They were too close, going too fast. There was no way she would get out of this one. But just as quickly the girl dropped from the frame, leaving the men looking just as confused as Mr. Eller.
He turned back to Jackson, who only smiled and said, “Keep watching.” Mr. Eller turned back to the screen just in time to see the two goons fall flat on their faces and the girl to jump over the bodies and hurry from the alleyway. She had left four incapacitated men in her wake.
Mr. Eller didn’t take his eyes off the screen. He couldn't miss more footage they had found. “Where is she now?”
"Don’t know,” Jackson responded. “Lost her after this.”
“Find her.”
“Excuse me? Do you know how hard it was to even get this?”
Mr. Eller turned. “I said find her. And get her to the school. I don't care how you do it, just get it done.”
“But what about her family? Won’t they—"
“I’ll take care of that.”
Jackson threw him a suspicious look. “Why not just take her out? God knows she’s dangerous enough. She’ll rip our operation apart from the inside.”
“You gonna throw out any more idiotic ideas or are you gonna follow orders? Don't push me."
“To the school then,” Jackson muttered. Without another word he trudged out of the room.
When Jackson was gone, Mr. Eller turned back to the tape. He watched it again and again, studying the girl’s form. It was good, years ahead of where she was expected to be. There were still more mistakes than would be advised though. They'd have to break her. From the looks of her it wouldn't be too hard. Once that happened, the real work could begin.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,006 Literary Works • 672,809 Reviews
Hello, Noelle! KatyaElefant here for another review! Let's see what we have right here...
I'M SORRY NOELLE! PLEASE FORGIVE MEH!)
I wish you had all of this a little bit more dramatically written. Like I think you should have the boy realize his fatal flaw and leave not what you wrote there. It just makes the prologue more dramatic because prologues are typically more dramatic than the rest of the novel. Use more dramatic words and drawn attention to things that you usually wouldn't draw attention to.
This plot that I'm seeing so far is a little bit unoriginal. Unlike your Across Worlds novel, it doesn't seem to draw my attention that much. There needs to be something that stands out to me and the rest of the readers to show that this story is something out of the ordinary. So far, all I see is a tough girl that is on top of her athletic game. I mean, that's cool and all but it's something that is ordinary. Now if you had some plot twist in here, then I would be much more interesting to me. I like the set up but the plot is a bit meh. (I'm being so cruel right now
Also this prologue may be a little bit unnecessary. Many people just skip to the first chapter and they don't even care about the prologue. I mean you could shoved all this into the first chapter and it would be a great story. Nothing much happened except that this guy gets a report about this girl. I mean I just summed it up in one sentence, do you really need this prologue? It is really hard to review this because it is so short. I mean it helps to create a dramatic effect but it's fine.
Keep calm and keep writing
KatyaElefant
Heya Noelle, I saw the first chapter so I decided to write this review, darling, just because you are so special,
and I also make it a rule to never jump into the middle of novels-I always start at the beginningOkay so let's start the review, shall we?
Throughout this whole prologue, I was wondering, what kind of agency is this? Maybe you could give the readers a title of it or any vital information about the type.I understand that this all might be explained in Chapter 1 but I would like this to be clear.
Mr.Eller He seems like a very demanding boss, that doesn't like to get close to anyone. You really showed that here, because he does get what he wants.
Really?
Show me, how is the boy looking uncomfortable. Maybe he has one leg crossed over the other. Maybe he is hunching under the door frame, or staring at the ceiling, etc.
Dearie, I don't think that a computer nerd is a job
Wait a second, if Mr.Eller knows Quinton's name then why is he calling him boy? That is the same thing like if I knew that your name was Noelle, but then when you came into my bedroom I called you girl. Hmm, isn't that a little bit odd?
This is very cliche phrase: wouldn't let him hear the end of it. This loses it's meaning and isn't really original at all. I was thinking that here would be a great place to insert a little glance of Jackson's character, what would really Jackson do? I am curiously wondering, and you can only answer this question since you are the writer of it.
I wanted to know, what threat? There are so many possibilities of threats here, countless actually, but I would really like to know which specific one it is(unless or course you are going to explain this in the first chapter then
disregard this comment)Okay,dearie, how does Mr.Eller know that she looks like twelve years old? That is very specific, usually people have a wider range of age that they see on a person. But anyways, maybe describe why she looks like twelve. Is she short, does she have pimples,etc.
How does she fight for herself? To steady herself? That just doesn't make sense really, in my mind.
I personally like the last sentence, it's like there is some hope and promised in it. Overall of to sum up:
-You could really work on making this prologue stronger and more descriptive. And of course and least consider all of those points that I gave you above.
-What about Jackson? Because right now I don't really know anything about him except what he is wearing. If he is such a almost friend of Mr.Eller he must be important. So what is he really made of?
I hope that this review helps you improve your writing and keep on writing darling! <3
Here's my review for your prologue: It's a bit unoriginal. A girl runs into an agency, there's guys with guns, she begins fighting them. I'm afraid that similar story lines have popped up often. This doesn't mean the story doesn't have potential. I just believe that maybe the beginning could be a bit different. The writing style may need to be altered to give a more unique voice to the story--weave it up with a unique writing style (some examples: maybe take after Dickens or Markus Zusak, who wrote The Book Thief). Or give it a strange or unexpected turn. Do something great with the characters. Even though it's not my favorite genre, I really do hope you have good luck with constructing this story.
Heyo Noelle, happy review day! Flite here for a review!
I think this is the first time I've reviewed your work.Anyways, let's get to it.
I have a habit of picking at first paragraphs, don't ask me why. Alright, so what strikes me off is that the Mr.Eller is referring to himself as Mr.Eller when the story is written in his POV. They're referred to on a first name basis, but it is a stylistic choice so I'll that there.
Small grammatical error, 'doesn't -> 'didn't.
There is also some redundancy in the paragraph itself. The third and fourth sentence has basically the same idea, I'd shortened it and actually elaborate more on Mr.Eller's demeanour as he looked at the document to illustrate this point. Because I'm on this tangent, I noticed that there isn't much description of either the setting or the characters themselves. An old case of show and tell, use descriptions to add more emotions into your scenes. Convey what your character is feeling through action.
Same thing goes with your dialogue, it's not bad, but it's not great either. It's very stiff, and comes across as unrealistic. The tagging is a part of it, I've noticed that you avoid the tag of 'said' but has a lot of other action tags which at times, doesn't actually bring out your character's emotions that much.
There is more about tagging here and also a great article on writing good dialogue.
My main critics for this chapter comes down to two:
1) There isn't enough character development in either of the characters due to the lack of description and context. We don't see who Eller and Jackson is, we get the feeling that they're in an agency and they're probably something along the lines of CIA. But so far what we've seen of them are very superficial emotions, I'd like to know more. Especially Eller's reaction when he saw the girl, because that scene went by super-fast.
Describe more of the setting too, that sets the atmosphere for us.
2) Not enough details.
I feel that not enough details has been put into the characters here to explain things, the pace moved too fast towards the end. Eller's emotions was so quick that I barely had time to register it in my mind. One minute he saw the girl, next minute he's just going 'quick quick quick'. And you mentioned a 'Patterson' I'm guessing, she's someone from the rival gang (from the summary). I'd think that Jackson would have objected more to that matter, and one again, I'd really like to see more intimate thoughts on Eller's part in that scene.
And the girl seemed so random, where was she? Where did they get the feed? From what Jackson was saying before, I thought it was all a set-up. So more details on that would be awesome.
^ I have my qualms on that ending. xD, Because it's really cliche, sounds like a classic super-villain line. Just something to think about.
Anyways, that brings me to the end of this review. I think you've got a good plot here, there is definitely potential, there is a healthy amount of suspense and mystery happening. Though the character are slightly undeveloped, but they hold the promise to become intriguing characters. I look forward to reading more.
-Flite
Hey, Noelle!
Whoa. That ending though. Though there's so many thing going on in this that I have no idea what they are, just they way you convey them, give us just enough context to somewhat understand, makes me crave more. If this were a book, then I'd surely instantly turn to the next page. I'm definitely hooked.
But...
This is a prologue. Now, I don't have an issue with it being a prologue, since it was executed wonderfully (for the most part, but I'll get into that later), just you have such a great hook here, and I'll tell you what so many people have told me; reader's usually will just skip the prologue. They're kind of the added info that won't work anywhere else, but I will say this felt good as a prologue, and I assume you'll pick up in the future when she is more grown.
Onto this actual work, I will say this took me a while to get into. Only the last bit of dialogue did I get fully immersed into your world of writing, and the rest of the time was alright. I say this because this feels really choppy in places. The descriptions don't feel as flowy, since there isn't much transition between them. One part in particular was going from a hallway in the back of a building to not having much light. Just seems rather odd jump. Maybe some reorganizing of it may make more sense?
Then comes the fight scene with the girl. Alright, so she kicks these giant guy's butts. And back track a little further to the point they first see the girl on the screen. It's not super huge, but it really stood out to me. Almost every sentence in that paragraph started with a pronoun. That's alright to have one back to back, but when you do that, it can sometimes render what's inside the sentence useless. Just thing about those things.
Back to the fight scene, it seemed a little bit detached, since at one point I had to backtrack to take it all in, while sentence diction (I believe that's what it's called, starting every sentence what the same thing...) just repeats itself over and over. He did this. She did that. Well, that's still sort of telling us what happened over painting the scene, you know?
Now, more onto content, I'm really interested in what's going on. Why does being a Patterson matter? What are they so famous for? What kind of guy is this, wanting this power? Since this is just the prologue, we obviously don't know much about the world, but I am left craving more. Nice job on that.
One last comment, I totally noticed the present tense, which shocked me for a second, because this is kind of a prologue. It's bound to be the past right? But I won't complain, since I totally don't see enough present tense on this site. (Now all you need is first person ^^) Anywhosers, I totally won our competition and I will be begging you to see more! Happy Review Day and Keep on Writing,
~Wolfare~