Chapter 1
Coming of age - Part 1
“Miya, Miya, earth to Miya, we trying to make contact. Do you copy, I repeat do you copy?”
I snapped out of the daze I was in when I heard these words. Shortly after they were uttered came an all too familiar chuckle.
“Hey Ian, sorry I like completely zoned out there for a minute” I said with a little smile on my face.
“Yea I can see that, I thought I would’ve had to push you out of the chair or something” Ian said with a smirk oh his face.
“Knowing you I’m surprised you didn’t already ha-ha-ha-ha.”
“Yea, yea, but what where you day dreaming about anyway?”
“I’m not really sure to be honest with you. There was this random guy and something happened to his hand. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, I felt like I was dying and just before my whole life slipped away a shadow appeared and I blacked out.”
I said with a puzzled look on my face trying to make sense of what I guess was… a day dream as Ian had put it.
“It was just weird that’s all I know, but the strangest thing of all was that it felt so real like it was actually happening at this exact moment.” I said looking up at Ian, who had an almost concerning look on his face.
“What’s with the look mister?”
“Oh nothing, nothing. It was just little a day dream, no big deal.” Ian said waving his hand, as if he was shoeing away a cloud of smoke.
I had known Ian forever, we’ve been friends for longer than I could remember and through all that time I’ve never seen him look worried ever. So to see him show even a little worry freaked me out but I forced myself to put it out of my mind. Upon me starting to think straight again I noticed that Ian and myself were the only ones left in the classroom. I looked around with a confused look on my face wondering what I was missing.
“Hey Ian, ummm… where is everyone?” I asked slowly.
“Oh yea that, schools been over for like 20 minutes. I saw you zoned out and decided to bring you back to earth.” Ian said to me laughing.
“WHAT! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?”
“Nope, welcome back to reality.” Ian said laughing at me continuously, as he got up and headed to the door. Before he left the room he turned to me with a smile.
“Wow people start to lose it when they get older.” He said with a laugh and with that he was gone.
“Huh.” I thought to myself and then it hit me. I somehow had forgotten that it was Friday, that I was in school and most importantly of all, today was my 18th birthday.
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Canary word: Present
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125,008 Literary Works • 672,827 Reviews
Hi! Cricket here for a review!
Since this is a shorter chapter, this will most likely not be that long of a review. I will see how long I can drag this out for, though.
I was going to ask why this is all in italics, but your reply to the previous review saved me the trouble. When you're publishing it, make sure where you put the text of the actual work, doesn't have the italics button down. That might be it. Just a thought. ^^
Whoaaah, I snapped, I was, I heard... Those just mess up the flow of your sentence and make it seem blocky. Avoid sentences that have these type of compound verbs (?) as they are extremely confusing for the reader, and also just plain hard to read.
Okay, this is something that you will have to apply to your writing very soon. Your punctuation dialogue is a bit messed up at the moment. Instead of periods put commas. After reality you would have a comma instead of a period. See, when going into a dialogue tag you always have that comma instead of a period. Here's a link that should help you out with this. That article was written by Demeter and is extremely informative on dialogue punctuation. Hope it helps.
Okay, what's the point here? This chunk of dialogue I pulled out for mainly one reason. And that reason is because it's lazy sounding. Where's its rooting? I know that you're trying to get across to us that he felt like he was dying and was fading out (sorta, I suppose), but seriously, if I hadn't studied this out I wouldn't have gotten the point. It's too random sounding the entire thing. This goes for most of the dialogue here, actually. Now, don't get me wrong. There are good spots all throughout and you have the potential to have some amazing dialogue and characterization, but the way it's put across right now is in a very lazy way. Like the guy is just slurring out his words without really caring. There's nothing to it.
What you need to do to fix this is put some tension in it. Pull apart the wording and figure out what words you need and what words are most important. Eh? You want your whole meaning to come across in the most clear and precise fashion. Hope this makes sense. If it doesn't, feel free to tell me and I'll try to explain further.
When using numbers, always write them out. So this would be twenty.
Okay, and I think that's all for now! Sorry, that is short but there isn't much to critique in such a short chapter.
Keep writing!
~Cricket
Thank you for the feedback. I really appreciate it. To be honest I'm still new to this whole writing for other people and following the "rules" ha-ha. So thank you.
Hello! Flash here for a quick review.
First of all, I will admit that I haven't yet read the prologue to this (but I will soon). So I'm going off of what I've read here in chapter one.
Okay! Let's get down to it. My first question is: is there a particular reason this work is in italics? I've seen some authors use all italics for flashbacks, but I'm not seeing how this is a flashback. I would consider removing the italics because it is distracting to the reader.
I also noticed that there are a lot of "said" here. A thesaurus works wonders when looking for alternatives to "said." These synonyms will enhance your dialogue immensely!
After a character ends a like of dialogue, use a comma instead of a period (unless it's an exclamatory or interrogative sentence).
And last but not least, there are a couple run on sentences here. The last sentence in particular is a comma splice.
Well, that's everything I could find! With some improvement, this piece could be awesome! Keep Writing!
~Flash
Thanks for the feed back I appreciate it. To answer your question no there isn't a reason why it is italic. I don't even know why it looks like it is ha-ha, I wrote it times and posted in in times. One of my biggest flaws is that I do use words multiple times because I'm so use to it. Also if you could point out the sentences that you think need fixing that would be a big help. Thanks again for the feed back.
No problem! And yeah sometimes it messes up when you post it.