Young Writers Society

So I made it to the end... I really like the story. I can really feel the emotion on it and the journey of the boy, but I think with a bit more focus on the old man's role in the story and some minor tweaks to how the interactions between the old man and the boy flow alongside events in the boys life, this would be incredible. I'm going to go broadly with how I see the story and what tweaks in that structure would make it all piece together so beautifully for me. There's a few ways I think you could get more out of the writing in different secto, but I think this parts most important...See what you think.

So the main thing I think you need to dig into is the old man's role in the story and motives. The old man is someone who has a wiser perspective of the world, he's lived a rich life. Within that he's seen the darkest part of the human brain, and the worst part of humanity, and yet he has found a way to come to peace with it.

The old man is the antagonist, he's there to oppose the boys way of thinking to help the boy change and resolve his struggles.

As the boy is growing, the boy becomes aware that his struggles are not just internal feelings, they're also his parents struggles such as his Dad's relationship with his Grandfather The boy realises that to find some more peace he must also help his Dad find peace.

To be an effective antagonist and to emphasise the focus on the boy's healing, then I feel like the old man and the grandfather have to be different people. There is no sense of growth or resolution if he is the grandfather and also passes away.... As it means the old man is adding more pain by not letting the issues with the boys dad be resolved.

To me I feel a better motive for the old man is to do with the love you described. The old man feels at peace and accepting of everything in the world, except for his extreme regret that he let his love down. He is silently wallowing, and when he sees the boy he sees something that matches to how she was and how the old man has let her down and feels a strong desire to help the boy so that the old man can heal and forgive himself for letting his love down.

I feel like for this to resolve the most elegantly then the old man cannot be the grandfather, but there's some uncertainty about whether he is. When confronted about if he is, the man reveals that he isn't but he knew the grandfather. He is able to either guide the boy to the grandfather's place, or place of rest, and the boy is then eager and excited to show his dad and misses an afternoon at the lake for the first time all summer.

When the boy returns the next day excited to tell the old man, the old man isn't there and that's when he senses the loss.

The old man has resolved his regrets and found peace to move on, and the boy has healed and grown and started to truly see and feel the world for the first time. Even the sadness of the loss of the old man is comforting to the boy because it isn't the hollow sadness he felt at the start. It's deep and passionate and shows that he can love.

Hi RandomTalks! This epilogue was really moving. For first impressions, I read the overall tone of this last scene as melancholy, but filled with a hopeful acceptance.

Spending those afternoons with his grandfather had changed him, had made him a better person and when they asked at school what he had done this summer, he knew just what to say - this summer, he had become friends with his grandfather; and even if he wasn't there, he would always remember.

Looking around, he realized he would always have this place. He would always have the lake and the memories to come back to.

But to him, it would always be the old man and the boy.

He would keep the old man to himself, and he would stay in his memories, separated and confined from the rest of the world.

Two days later there had been a funeral.

As he stood behind their bench now and looked at the water where the old man had always seen more than he could see, the boy realized that he was neither happy nor sad.

The leaves rustled again, and the ripples in the water shone golden under the sunlight; the gentle hum of the water hitting against the shore . . .

Hi RandomTalks,

Mailice back with another review!

The epilogue was a good conclusion to the story and I have to say that it is exactly what you expect from an epilogue; it is an addendum with some information about what happened after the story. I thought it was very good that you chose this short text here instead of inserting it in the last chapter.

Now that we have reached the end, I would like to say that I liked the whole story very much. I followed it from the beginning and saw how not only the boy and the old man changed, but also your writing style. You put a lot of effort over the chapters to come up with new ways to make the story more interesting and especially in the last 3 - 4 chapters it was clear to see that you were using completely new styles to make the story more lively.

I liked reading the short story. I liked that you kept the story vague in many ways, such as the names of the characters. I found this gave the reader the feeling of having a sort of "silent" protagonist in front of them, and it also made it easier to empathise with them. A really great point that I can only keep repeating is how you managed to portray this change in the boy so easily. You used the first few chapters to show him as he was and without realising it straight away, you created the transition to this new character.

I thought it was really well written and I feel like your focus is also to show that the boy has changed - as a kind of final gift from the old man. But he has changed too; he has spoken out and given voice to his soul. I strongly suspect that this was also a good plot element, not only for the boy but also for the old man.

What I didn't like so much was the relationship, that it was slowly but clearly apparent that the two were related. As I said, that's a stylistic element that you use, but I thought it took away a bit of that magic that was developing there at the beginning. I think you could have developed something like two storylines there, the first between the boy and the old man who are not related, and a separate storyline between the father and the boy's grandfather. Even though the latter is in second place, you could perhaps have always included some paragraphs at the end of a chapter where the father tells that his father is on his deathbed in hospital, and give some kind of self-reflection there as well.

Since this is only my suggestion, you don't have to adopt it, of course. In the end, even with this rather clichéd point, it was a wonderfully presented story that I really enjoyed reading.

Have fun writing!

Mailice

Heyyyyyyy! Forever here for a review!

What should I really say except that the story was so good and I am more than 200 percent honest in that. It's how you kept me hooked from the very first chapter till this epilogue.

The journey to which you took your readers too was quite exciting and yes, copying it from the boy, it was a break from the real and the busy World. The way the truth dawned was really very sad and he... He accepted it was quite courageous and yes, the old man has an immense contribution behind that too. He was the one who taught him how to accept things.

And this epilogue was beautiful. I loved how you didn't provide a long time span in between. His telling in the School was quite brave. To tell something about the old man would surely be a quite saddening task for him and he successfully did that. He got the nerve to speak about him. We can clearly see how affected he was by the fact that he didn't even cry at the day of the funeral.

That was a pretty little conclusion there.

Overall, I barely have words to express how great it actually was. Er... I know, it's not so good to say that in a review but when I read a great piece, I am left speechless.

Keep Writing!

~Forever