Young Writers Society

Hi there Slowtime!

Altamash here for an honest review!

First of all welcome to the site. I hope you enjoy a lot here. Feel free to ask anything.

Coming to the story, I thought that as this was a prologue, this chapter/extract should have had a title or more like a chapter name. The extract itself was very well written and I loved your writing style. I simple loved the imagery and the description of the battlefield. A nice thrilling touch and very captivating extract. Can be a short story as RagingLive mentioned, but no problem with that.

Coming to the problems in there, no proper punctuation, ( missing commas, errors in capitalization,etc) and I thought that there were some sentences that provided unnecessary information to the reader. But its up to you anyway.

One problem though, How the hell is a single soldier supposed to simply walk away from a battle??? He can die any moment! He could be hit by the canonfire or simply by the bullets which are ricocheting everywhere. That was the only odd thing that I found. But other than that it was a very nice read. I would love to read the book if you complete it. Hope to see much of your works in the future. Thank you.

Happy Writing!!!

Hello and welcome to YWS! I hope you like it here as much as I do and that you find it beneficiary to your writing journey!
Let's get started.

What I Liked About This

You wrote a very compelling prologue, not too long, not too short. Even if you just wanted to leave this as a short story, I don't think anyone would have a problem with it. Even as I read, I could feel this out as almost an old proverb or fable. Very nice work.
However, because I do like it, I naturally have some nitpicks with this.

Things You Could Work On

Your title is 'Prologue' and it is at the top of the page in a much larger font than anything else is. This is why I'm going to suggest that you remove the space leading up to the title you placed in the main body as well as the second 'prologue' title and the gap leading up to the story. This will make it appear more professional and also cut down on all the time your readers will do scrolling for the story.

Now I'm going to do with you what I don't normally do. I'm going to take you almost line by line as I see fit so that you understand exactly what I'm saying. Underlined words are words I have added, crossed out lines are ones I am suggesting you remove and bolded are ones are where I have replaced word for word. If this turns out longer than either of us expected, I'm sorry!

A solider stared out on what would soon to be a battle ground, he watched patiently and silently unmoving. “just a little longer.” he thought to himself.

He waited, and for that moment so did the world no one moved no sound was heard. it was misleading, and almost peaceful. They quickly had a reminder what was bound to happen. the first cannon was fired. battle cries rang out, and men charged to their ultimate if not instantaneous doom. With that the solider turned.

Walking away from the first of many conflicts, his eyes stayed glued to one place. It was far enough to be untouched by the raging battle below. Here stood a mountain, one of many in the Andes chain. At the base of this stood a rather large foothill, with an unencumbered view of the blood bath bellow, despite the massive forest upon it.

He began his trek up the hill, never resting despite its steep and treacherous terrain. His eye blazed with an unyielding force, never looking back. It took around half an hour to reach the agreed-upon point.

“Well?” He inquired. the solider stood still looking out over the battlefield. after a long pause his declared “The only way out… is forward”.

Hello! racket here to review this short story!
Well, I really enjoyed the vocabulary and imagery used here! It's excellent, and really does make you feel as if you were on the battle field with this soldier.
There are two main problems in here that I would like to point out; lack of punctuation, and lack of capitalization. Based off the fact that these are your only main problems, pat yourself on the back, 'cause the story itself is fantastic the way it is! You just need a little help in interpreting it in a way that helps the reader understand.
One of the main issues I see with your punctuation; commas. Lack of commas! Commas are very, very helpful in writing, as they create moods of suspense and drama, help the reader accurately visualize the setting and characters, and are just generally extremely useful and wonderful pieces of literature. You have some run-on sentences that could be fixed with just a comma or two. See, when you're reading, you want to pause in the spaces where, if someone were telling the story verbally, the speaker would pause.

he watched patiently and silently unmoving.

Bonjour! I'm the Chirave Canicthus and I guess I'm here to review your work!

The first thing I have to say about this is your title and description is it's very bland. Give me something to be interested about with your story. I should be wondering what's going to happen in this. You might give me a quote from the chapter that stands out to you and might do so to other readers -- That's what I do. Sometimes, people put a small summary about what happens in the chapter. That's the most common one. Sometimes, it's simply an author's note. That's what you've got. This isn't recommended for a prologue as it doesn't grab one and pull it into the story.

For the title, I'd put the title, or at least the working title of the book in it. Titles actually have more power than you think. For example: (Book title) - Prologue

But onto the actual content, which is something that is actually pretty cool. Grammar errors abound, but I think we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

There's actually a surprising amount of description in this small tidbit of writing. It's pretty cool, as it's short and sweet, gives my brain enough room to make its own idea, but it leaves me so that I don't have to get glued to it word for word so it'll work. It just works like that. So in other words, I really like that.

Your main problem is that some sentences don't have capitalization in them, and some parts after the dialogue do have capitalization. To put it simply, sentences start with caps.

One of the few exceptions is dialogue, where you would say something like, "This." Now, you can start with a capital, provided the next words aren't part of a dialogue tag. For example, ' "This," the creature said.' That's what you do. If there's a dialogue tag at the end of the dialogue, then the sequence is comma, quotation mark, tag without capitalization.
Otherwise it's the simple sentence structure.

So, yeah. That's all I wanted to say. I'm sorry I sounded harsh. I swear I didn't mean to.

Keep writing!
*Chiravian flies away*

Hello Tuesday here for a review! Welcome to YWS!

To begin, I liked this beginning. Seems like a war story and this prologue is a good way to start it out. I like the movement throughout this, with the battle starting and the soldier having his mind set on that place with the tree.

You don't need that big of a space for the beginning (but since you are new, it is fine.) Try back spacing some to have all of the lines together instead of having one giant blank space that seems to have writing unless it is in some invisible ink. Makes it easier to read and not to waste a whole bunch of space- to make it look longer.

A solider stared out on what would soon to be a battle ground, he watched patiently and silently unmoving. “just a little longer.” he thought to himself. He waited, and for that moment so did the world no one moved no sound was heard. it was misleading, and almost peaceful. the first cannon was fired. battle cries rang out, and men charged to their ultimate if not instantaneous doom. With that the solider turned.

He waited, and for that moment so did the world no one moved no sound was heard. it was misleading, and almost peaceful.

the first cannon was fired. battle cries rang out, and men charged to their ultimate if not instantaneous doom. With that the solider turned.

At the base of this stood a rather large foothill, with an unencumbered view of the blood bath bellow, despite the massive forest upon it.

He began his trek up the hill, never resting despite its steep and treacherous terrain. His eye blazed with an unyielding force, never looking back. It took around half an hour to reach the agreed-upon point.