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125,018 Literary Works • 672,857 Reviews
Hey QuoolQuo!
My name is Elinor, and I thought I'd drop by to give your short story a quick review. Thank you for sharing it! I enjoyed reading it, and thought the strongest part of the piece was the imagery that you used. I am curious as to what historical event this was inspired by, as I'm afraid I don't know Greek and Roman history enough to have pinpointed it. I did get the sense it was supposed to be around that time, but had to look up "nika" for confirmation.
While I understand the point of this story was moreso to paint a picture rather than follow a specific character, I did find myself wishing we had a clearer sense of who the baker and his wife were supposed to be. I wasn't sure if they were fictional or real, or who they were outside of what we see of them in this story.
My advice with this would be to use your already strong imagery to bring us to this specific place and time, so there are no doubts in the reader's mind. You do a good job describing the sky. What does this place smell like? What's the feeling in the air?
Great work so far! I hope this was helpful and please keep writing,
Elinor
Hello, QuoolQuo! I'm here to give you a review on your wonderful short story. First off, I absolutely love your use of repetition in your work. Repetition is one of my favourite literary devices because you can do so much with it when it's written well. And in your story, it is definitely written well. The setting sun you kept referencing is a fascinating choice because it's usually associated with endings. Darkness and nighttime are symbols of hardship and tragedy, so you almost foreshadowed the ending with that if I understand your ending correctly. One thing I must say is your ending is very vague. I'm not really sure what happened. Did all the people in the stadium die? Did they get what they want so they're no longer revolting? I have a gut feeling they died, but how would that happen? You didn't write a struggle or a fight. They go from marching to slump with no warning. However, the rest of your story is fantastic. Along with the setting sun, you have the repetition of the colours blue and green, which I found interesting. Your use of imagery is phenomenal; I can vividly picture what it is you're talking about, and I can feel myself standing next to the baker and his wife. All in all, your story is great, and if you tweaked the ending a smidge, it would be even better. I hope to see more of your writing. Cheers!
- Lorde
Hiya and thanks so much for the review,
I can see what you%u2019re saying about the ending being a bit vague (they did all die btw, it%u2019s really tragic) since what I was trying to aim for was to make the reader connect the dots themselves rather than explicitly stating what happened as way to make an impact - but clearly, that didn%u2019t go so well. Do you have any suggestions on how I could make this intention clearer?
Either way, thank you again for the review, it truly was helpful
To make this clearer, I would suggest adding a transition. Maybe saying that, the cheers turned into screams%u2014the blue and green stained with red. There%u2019s a lot of ways to describe death without saying death. The key is what happens between the cheers and the march and the scene with them all dead.