I sleepily open my eyes to see utter darkness in my room. Morning already? No, it’s too early. Jesus, what time is it anyways.? I shift my head over to my clock on my desk. It says that it’s 2:00 in the morning. Another noise blasts its way through my ears. I’m only now aware that there was an original noise in the first place. The original noise is the one that woke me up. This new sound is a noise related to the first one. The original noise was a thud, a collision of two forces in a heavy manner. The second was a cry for help. These noises appeared to be coming from outside my bedroom. Now, that I had been thinking about these two bursts of sounds, I was no longer worried about it being 2:00 in the morning. I shifted my blankets to the side as I moved my legs across my bed. I planted them on the floor as I walked over to my window. Before that though, I had to have a good look around my room. Ever since I was little I was always paranoid of some mysterious creepy figure lurking behind my closet or under my bed. I quickly shoved that small little though out of my head as I walked over to the window.
I shifted the curtains to their respective sides. Through the glass window I saw a human figure lying on the ground. I scanned over him seeing if their was anything wrong. The first thing that wasn’t right was the fact that he was dressed in rather dark clothing. A pair of dark blue jeans along with some shirt that was a simple black with some logo on it. The second thing that wasn’t right was the fact that it was 2:00 in the morning. If it were to be any time where people were active, then I’d have been concerned for his safety. However, if he was active during a time when most people weren’t active, then he had motives of doing something that he didn’t want others to find out about. The third thing that wasn’t right was the fact his leg was bleeding profoundly. Even beneath the darkness of the night and jeans, I could still the blood oozing out of his body.
It was easy to tell from the facts I had examined that he was indeed a thief who had slipped and broke his leg. However, it seemed out that the thief would be attempting to go through a window on the second floor of a home. What was he doing attempting to brake in through a dangerous area rather than a safe area such as a door. I then remembered that I had locked the doors of the house securely. Therefore, the thief needed a new entranceway. The windows were clearly the next best bet in invading my home.
However, this aroused yet another question: Why didn’t the thief just pick another house to rob? The answer was simple, and it was: He needed something that only this household had. I lived in a rather nice neighborhood for Ohio, and it had low crime ratings. The man clearly had something personal against me. My mind led itself back to the original noises. If he had been wanting to personally attack me, then why did he call for help after falling? Was it an act of surrendering? Maybe there’s some unknown motive to this thief that could explain his reasoning for attempting to enter my household.
I exited my bedroom through a doorway, and I descended a flight of stairs. I grabbed my black leather jacket and I exited the front door it. It was about 40 degrees out on this autumn night. I felt the wind give a chilling blow down my spine as if to warn me. I had my cell phone in my pocket just in case this thief had some trick up his sleeve. I walked around my house until I arrived at the fallen criminal. He looked at me with an odd look in his face. It was a look of anger combined with hopelessness.
“Who are you, and what are you doing here?”
“My name is Nathan Alpert, and I’m not your enemy here,” he claimed.
“Oh, and who is?” I said with a hint of sarcasm lurking in my tone of voice.
“The real thief here is a member of a gang, I climbed up his ladder trying to stop him, but I was unsuccessful as I fell down this ladder. He’s still inside,”
In most situations, I would have found this story to be a lie, but this situation was different. I had joined a gang in my teen years not knowing what I was getting into. It just seemed appealing to be able to safely rob someplace for something I needed. I had no sense of right and wrong at the age. I had grown up in a run-down neighborhood before moving from Indiana. I couldn’t afford what I wanted, and I felt like I was down in the world. Then, I joined the gang. I had gotten tattoos and guns. The gang seemed like a tough life for me, but there was always a part of me that didn’t want to really hurt anybody. I was basically tough on the outside, but I was really soft on the inside. A girl named Amber showed that to me. Amber was a nice, quiet type of girl who listened more than they talked. She enjoyed me a lot as she found herself knowing me better than I knew myself. I wanted to go move in with Amber after our relationship developed a bit. I wasn’t exactly the tough gangster that I used to be. In fact, I can’t even remember what kind of mentality I had back then. It seems like I didn’t even think about things before I met Amber.
“So, why’d you try to randomly stop this gang member?” I asked ignoring the fact that he was still inside.
“It’s the right thing to do, besides the police should be arriving shortly. I called them before I chased after him.
It was then that I heard a noise from up in my bedroom. It was the voice of the original thief, a member of the gang I had left years back. The man was unable to see me face due to the angle, and he couldn’t see Nathan’s due to the angle and the darkness.
“Eh Nate, you kill that punk, Ryan Stones?” he asked from above.
I gave Nate a daring look. He was lying to me with some fake story after all. Nathan’s face seemed to be wishing to explain something, however, he didn’t want to give away his identity. From the thief’s point of view, I was Nathan Alpert and he was Ryan Stones. Using a tough guy voice that I had developed from my years with the gang, I spoke.
“Yeah, I butchered him up just fine, kid thought he could leave us. We have a blood pact,” I said pounding my chest.
I pounded my chest with a fist that looked to be holding something. I also gave emphasis on the word ‘butchered’. Nathan understood what I meant as he secretly slid his knife over to my foot. The thief, who I now recognized as Daniel Brooks, jumped down from the window landing smoothly. He crouched down to examine the body which obviously wasn’t dead. I crouched down alongside him to quickly put the knife behind my back. My heart was pacing rapidly as I knew that the gang was after me. I left because that gang was blind, and Amber showed me the light.
“Yeah, showed him and his wife not to abandon us,” Dan said turning over Nathan to discover he was alive.
Dan took a moment to take in what he saw. During this moment, I decided to make my move. Within seconds I rose the blade up behind Daniel, and with a quick motion, I stabbed it into his neck. With every ounce of paranoia running through me I jutted the blade into Dan’s neck. Why did I have to join that stupid gang? Now they took Amber away from me. Her image rested in my head as I repeatedly stabbed Daniel’s corpse.
Then, I looked over to Nathan to see fear in his face. He wanted to run, but his leg was injured. He saw that I had gone mad in a rage. There had to have been at least twenty wounds graved into Daniel’s body.
“I know you, you’re that soft-hearted gang member who’s in way over his head. Let me tell you from experience, you’ve dug your own grave,”
Nathan looked at me with complete fear in his eyes. He was at the point of tears as this was too much for him to handle. He was just like me a few years back. When the first tear poured out of his eyes, he limped away, nearly running.
I had silently watched Nathan retreat from my home, and I knew that the gang would have a new leaver to hunt after. I went upstairs to discover that Amber was okay despite what Daniel said. That whole gang was a bunch of cowards, and I left because I was the biggest one.
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125,020 Literary Works • 672,861 Reviews
This is a powerful and promising opening with a lot of detail. It could be improved a lot by cutting out some of the longer sentences. It is not necessary to use three sentences to say that it's unusual for people to be running around at two in the morning.
There are a lot of powerful lines-I particularly like the ending. The only piece of dialogue that didn't flow well was this: “The real thief here is a member of a gang, I climbed up his ladder trying to stop him, but I was unsuccessful as I fell down this ladder. He’s still inside,” because it seems very smooth and well-rehearsed for someone who's just been chasing after a gang member. Of course, this depends on Nathan's character. He may be a very robotic, precise sort of person, in which case this manner of speech is in-character for him.
Hey hey,
Welcome to YWS. Before I begin, I think I should say that here we have a policy that for every story or poem you post, you should review two others. It ensures everyone is covered, okay?
--
Some people say personal character thoughts need to be italicised to be distinguished from narrative; it's not a rule and some people think otherwise, so long as it's done well. I think we can leave the opening thoughts as they are, just recognise that it might come across better in other ways.
Here's an awkward sentence. You can't really shift your head onto a clock, which is, grammatically speaking, what the first sentence there tells us. No, it should read something like:
'I shift my head over. The clock reads: 2:00 AM.'
Or something like that. Clocks can't speak or read actually, so think of another way to get that across.
You start out okay and then degenerate into a needlessly repetitive and over-written description of something that is really quite simple. This is the biggest problem with the writing in this piece. It's far too repetitive - something happens, then its thought about and analysed by the character in a really unbelievable, unreadable fashion that distances the reader from the action and the piece. The paragraph above should read something like:
'Another noise blasts its way through my ears. I'm only now aware that there was an original noise in the first place. One that woke me up. This new sound was a cry for help and it came from right outside my window.'
Now, that's just me cutting and reordering the sentences, it doesn't necessarily mean that in itself is okay. I think it all needs to be rewritten. It needs to be more direct, more present, less passive and more active.
Unnecessary. Cut it.
You write as though you're painfully aware of what you are doing. Of the fact that you are writing, or as though you are not used to the English language - foreigner's tend not to use contractions and speak like that. You shouldn't write like that though. Certainly, every action doesn't need to be recounted. Why? It's boring and stilted and unnatural.
A simple: 'I got out of bed and looked out the window' - would've sufficed.
You have a very awkward way of phrasing sentences. And chronologically speaking some sentences are just plain strange. I walked over....but before that I did....' - you should write it as it happens. Above, you need a bit of revision:
'Ever since I was little I've been paranoid of...'
['I was always' is just plain strange]
....this is what I mean about your writing being unnatural and strangely phrased. Even here 'human figure' is just such a strange observation for someone to make, even more so for someone who has just woken up. 'their' should be 'there', also.
This whole thing needs to go. Stop analysing - even if it was a good, clinical, enlightening analysis this wouldn't be okay and its not.
Firstly - there's nothing wrong with jeans and a dark shirt, even at night.
Secondly - we already know the time, don't repeat it.
Thirdly - the most important observation is bogged down in dross. Cut it all away, get to the point. You have to stop being so aware of what your writing, so removed from the story and get within the character, within his mind and his experiences - that's what integrating backstory and action and description is all about; you start okay with his thoughts showing us his disorientation, etc but after that your a thousand miles away from the story.
Get to the point. Why? If you'd just woken up, having heard wierd noises and seen someone on your lawn would all of the text up to this point adequately show how you felt? No. No way.
Dark. Morning. Disorientation. Noise. Getting up, blearily looking out. Man bleeding.
Simplify. Okay? I want you to describe things but I want you to do it in a less obvious way; to demonstrate rather than explain, to make it visceral and real, rather than contrived and plodding. There is no suspense whatsoever. Directly related to the distance I keep mentioning, the passivity. Also, spice up the writing! The tone, the sentence variation, the descriptions. Why can he see the blood at night, through the jeans? [profoundly doesn't work in this context, by the way, and adverbs are icky in general.] Is it gleaming? Is the thief grasping his leg, staining his hands red?
No, no it doesn't. This is you, the author, allowing your knowledge to influence the character. There's just no way you could say that with any conviction, with the story thus far. None of this is being presented well. 'Indeed' implies that he had suspected this fact previously and there's no indication of that in the text.
However, it seemed odd that the thief...
break
Listen. None of this is realistic or believable in the slightest. Some guy wakes up, discovers a bleeding stranger on his lawn and does what? Stands there for a while examining why the thief chose to break in the wrong way and...what?! !!!!
There are no feelings! There's no sense of character whatsoever. Crisis decisions are prime ways of showing the true nature of a character without telling and there's just no sense of that here. You need to weave back-story into action, okay? This guy has been in some tough situations, he's not panicking, he's confident and not calling the cops. Why? Give us some reasoning. There's just no way he'd be standing there doing nothing, he'd definitely be doing something. Running down the stairs to deal with it, checking the rest of his house for other thieves, calling the cops (or not, because he has contraband?) etc.
The following paragraphs are awful, awful info-dumps. You just vomited out his life story with no thought whatsoever about placement or subtlety; this wasn't an integrated, seamlessly transitioned sequence of events, but a disjointed explanation of poorly phrased sentences, regarding a very cliched story and a character not worthy of being anything other than a cardboard cut out. There's no originality of voice, style or content. Grammatically speaking, you do fairly well - a few basic errors here and there, but its the general manner of storytelling and characterisation that I'm having a problem with it. Let's review the story structure:
What happens:
A former gang member and thief wakes up one night, to find he's been found by his former gang. His wife opened his eyes many years ago and they've been on the run ever since. On this night, the struggle to escape is fought once more.
How You Tell It:
Protagonist wakes up to hear someone crying for help. He gets up to find someone sprawled on his lawn. After examining the situation he decides that the person is a would-be thief and without further thought or investigation decides to go down and talk to said thief. He doesn't call the police or check the rest of his house - no indication of the layout or whether anyone else is in the house, if he's married or not, - and there's no sense whatsoever of surprise or alarm.
He doesn't administer aid or interrogate the man or check on his wife (who for some reason isn't mentioned for the entire story up to this point) but talks to the thief, who lies to him. He doesn't believe the cock and bull story anyway. Meanwhile he is found out by the other thief (who for some reason can't see as well as the protagonist could from that window and can't tell who is who) and together (they're co-operating now, injured thief and protagonist, for some as yet unknown reason) they dupe the other, bring him down and the protagonist kills him in a fit of rage.
A fit of rage from one of the most detached characters I've ever come across. There's no sense that he's been on the run. There's no sense that he's been in danger and needs to be fearful, otherwise seeing a thief on his lawn would've freaked him out (surely the gang would have some sort of distinguishable dress? manner? tattoo?) and sent him packing, but no. There's no sense he has a wife and if he does, why is she not sleeping in his room? Despite that she gets found by the other thief, but is left unharmed?? None of this makes sense. Not only is the writing passive, plodding, basic in description and sentence structure, the actual story itself and sequence of events doesn't make sense. It's as if you only realised the story as you wrote it. It comes across as very haphazard and poorly executed. You need to think this through and rewrite the entire piece. The dialogue too, is horrible.
Look, it's great that you're being creative, that you have stories to tell but you need a lot of help in doing it. Ask yourself, what is it about this story that needs telling? What distinguishes it from all the others being told? What is it about this character that makes him worthy of being read? Why should we care about him or what's happening? This isn't, in my opinion, a good story. You can write and you keep a fairly decent hold on grammar most of the way through, so that's great. You just need to think this through, rewrite with better characterisation and suspense. Don't be discouraged by this review. At your age, I couldn't write for shit, okay? I was absolutely rubbish and I wouldn't have been able to write even this. You get better as you write more, though. Keep practicing, keep trying your hardest. I'm going to recommend you check out the 'Knowledge Base' section of YWS. It contains heaps of articles on how to improve your writing.
Hope this helped,
Cheers