A dream. This is what it is. Only a dream. This can’t be real. So why do I feel so cold? I open my eyes. A room. A cold, empty room. Grey walls and grey floors. I'm sitting in a chair, waiting. What am I waiting for? I’m not sure. For a person. A person who may never come. There are no doors. There are no windows. There is only grey. A single, solid grey. I rest my head on the plain, wooden table and close my eyes. Minutes, hours, days. For some reason, it feels warmer now. I open my eyes. The sunlight's radiating throughout the clear blue sky. It takes time to adjust to the new brightness. This feels all too real. Am I still dreaming? I look around. There’s someone here. A girl. We stand there, face to face. I feel like I know this girl. I can’t remember her name. She holds out her hands. She’s urging me to take something. A lollipop. It's in my hands now. I stare at its head, and it stares back. The swirls keep on swirling. It's like in the movies, a hypnosis of swirls. The light fades away. Darkness engulfs my sight. Where am I? Where did I go? I can hear something. The rustle of leaves. The pitter-patter of feet. The growls in the distance. I know that sound. It’s a cautious sound. Moonlight slowly illuminates the darkness. It reveals an endless surroundment of trees, full of lush greenery. A slight gust rustles the bushels of leaves. It sounds almost like a chime. Wind starts to roar at me. I'm flying now. Not because I want to. Because the wind carries me. It picks me up, and I'm carried away, staring at the distant flora that once surrounded me. The sea of leaves sway together in a single motion. What a beautiful forest. Serene and peaceful, even in darkness. I close my eyes again. I can feel the pattern. Light. Dark. Warmth. Cold. A pattern consisting of completely opposite attributes. I wonder when this will stop. I wonder if I'll be looping like this forever, in an endless cycle of opposites. I can hear something. Crackling. Snapping. I can feel heat envelop my body once again. Where am I going? More heat covers my body. Fire. Everything's burning. The houses, the cars, the streets. Everywhere I turn, there is only more and more fire. Screaming. I can hear people screaming. Where are they? Where is the screaming coming from? Pleas for help. Cries for safety. I don't want this. I don't want to be here anymore. I close my eyes again. The fire begins to die down. A sense of coolness fills the air once more. I can feel it now. This isn't a dream. This is real. This is reality. My reality. This is the world I live in.
Slowly, I open my eyes one last time.
All I see is the ruins of the city I once called home.
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Canary word: Present
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,861 Reviews
hello philip,
good to read. i see that you have chosen present tense. that is really challenging because it always disturbs our sentence structure. if properly not explained, it even misleads the perception of the reader.
i see some mistakes in this piece of writing. hope you have read the other reviews on this work.
"Pleas for help."
and there some contradictions too. do see to it..!
i liked it.. keep writing..!
Hello.
The first thing I noticed here was the fact you chose first person, present tense. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this perspective, it can come with some bad habits you need to be aware of.
Unfortunately, you've fallen into those bad habits. I'll go over them one by one, in order that I noticed them:
1- Sentence structure.
Reread this work. Notice how the sentences are? They're all short and simple. There is no variety. Most are under ten words long. This makes the work boring to read. Using the same sentence structure is also boring.
Now, if you add variety to the sentences, things get more interesting. You intersperse short sentences with long ones. That brings variety. Even just a few sentences being complex help a work stand out, because there is visual interest. Despite this not being poetry, which relies a lot more heavily on the words looking pretty, prose can still have pretty sentences.
Notice how I had very simple an uniform sentences in the first paragraph, then mixed things up a lot in the second? The second paragraph was probably easier to read. That's what you want to try and do with your work. Mix it up, make it so sentences don't always start with the subject, have compound sentences everywhere.
2- Contradictions.
In an attempt to give us information as it happens, you neglect to actually tell us when anything changes besides suddenly changing things. First, everything is grey. Then, there is a wood table (which would be some tone other than grey). A sentence or two later, there is a blue sky. You don't mention standing to see the girl, the fact the roof is open, or any mention of the table being there/going away.
Yes, this style reflects things tumbling out as they happen. But it also leaves readers pretty confused at what in the world is going on. This bites you hard when you attempt to transition to the burning and fire, because we get no description of it happening at all. Just sudden changes. I lost all trace of the surroundings at that point, which was rather detrimental to any emotional punch I would've gotten.
In that case, you did not create a sense of confusion by withholding information. Only a sense of frustration. If you gave a little bit more information about the sensations, eyes opening/closing, and generally built a clearer picture between the description and the narrator's reaction, you'd have a much stronger ending.
3- Transitions, or lack there of.
I touched on this in the previous point, but it's important enough to make it its own. Try and smooth out all the random switches by breaking them up in paragraphs (long paragraphs are hard to read and follow along with) and giving us more time to actually absorb each scene. By giving us smoother transitions, mentioning things appearing and disappearing, you immerse us into the world you're trying to create and give us a bigger punch at the end. The choppiness does nothing but leave me confused.
If you clean up those three issues, you should have a somewhat interesting piece. I found there were some problems such as a lack of emotional connection to the narrator (I couldn't feel what they were feeling because it wasn't explained), but if you clean up the very structure of the piece that should be better already. Since, right now, the structure and style are big problems.
Hope this helps. PM me if you have any questions/comments.
~Rosey
Hey Phillip!
I can see your fairly new, so I'm just going to extend a word of welcome and you may imagine my virtual hand shaking your virtual hand if you wish. That's what I'm doing.
So, I'm going to get down to business.
You have a very nice voice here. I think you have a great handle on tone, even for a short piece like this that doesn't have that much of a storyline. From what I can tell, you're writing in a stream of consciousness style which can be very challenging, but I think you pulled it off fairly nicely.
I only have a few things to point out.
The first would be that your first paragraph is too long. Long paragraphs, especially in the beginning scare people off. Break it up into smaller chunks, so the reader can digest it better.
I'm a nitpicker, so bear with me.
There's nothing really WRONG with sunlight's, it's just a little hard to pronounce.
Try it.
And it's hard to think. It also doesn't fit with the rest of your diction. It's a rock in the smooth path that is your tone that made me stumble for a moment.
Just break the contraction up into sunlight is to fix it.
I like this part, for one, but I have an issue with the swirls, a two, actually.
Number one: we didn't know about the swirls, so they can't keep on swirling. Either mention the swirls earlier (which is what I would do) or tell us about the swirls in a different fashion where you have the keep on swirling because it doesn't quite mesh well.
Number two: If you're going to describe something, make it your own. The description you have with the 'like in the movies' is fairly vague, and some people may not know what you mean.
That's it for me. Fairly painless, right? I'd like to see what else you've got because this little nugget doesn't tell me that much. I do like what I've seen though.
Feel free the PM me with any questions
Megsug