“When I said I would make a magic powder to give the emperor immortality, I thought it would only take two years!” I raise my hands in frustration wanting to throw my workbench across the room.
“Maybe you should wait until tomorrow to continue research”, said my beloved wife, Tsou Bai, who somehow always manages to keep me calm and determined to make this immortality powder.
“ Alright. I shall continue my research at dawn.” The next day, I woke up, ate my breakfast consisting of yams and milk and started to work with a feeling that today might be the day I get the answer to this long project. “Let us try using this combination. Mr. Jinjing, Please hand me the spice on the shelf to the right.
“Yes, Dr.” said my trusted assistant, Mr. Jeng Jinjing. “I cannot find it, doctor. There is too much clutter here! It would be impossible to find a paper lantern!” My research room was very cluttered. Dozens of shelves lined the walls with many labels, but not in order. My desk took up most of the space in the small brick room, and had many bottles on it from failed experiments.
“Alright, I will find it.” I said as I crossed the dark room towards the shortest shelf in the room, which has the bottle I was going to use to make a new concoction. Several hours later, I went in to my research lab to check on the mixture when I found a powder with an amazing black hue to it in the mixing bucket.
“It is amazing! This might be the day that I find the answer to immortality for all!” I call in Mr. Jinjing and we go to study it.
“This is unlike anything I have ever laid eyes upon!” said Mr. Jinjing, staring in awe. I take the powder, and begin analyzing the possibilities of this great powder.
“May the emperor have mercy upon us, we have created a death machine!” I cry.
“What shall we do Dr?”
“We will travel east, to Chang’an, and the Emperor's palace!”
Once we get there, we stop and knock on the door. By this time by hemp clothing was very dirty from traversing the land.“We wish to see the great emperor!” I say “We have made an incredible discovery! It may be the best discovery for a very long time!” We hear a thump, a loud clapping noise, then CRASH!!!!! The door swung to the side, and a very large man wearing a silk cape came lumbering through the doorway.
“Who dares to disturb me!” The emperor bellowed
“Why, it is me, emperor, Dr. Bai! I was the one who researched how to make an immortality powder for you!”
“Ah, yes. The almighty scientist that thinks he can crack the secret to immortality. You have failed so many times that if the Persians were here I would send you with them!”
“Yes, that is me, and please don’t do that. Instead of creating a powder to become immortal, my last test created this!” I pull out the black powder. Tang looked upon it and said,
”This is the most brilliant powder I have ever seen! What is it?” Glad to gain the emperor’s approval, I smile and tell him what it was.
“It is a powder that when lighted, it goes boom! We call it gunpowder! We have created some weapons to show how it wor-”
“Weapons?! You will surrender them at once and tell me how to use it to gain more loyal servants by scaring them out of refusing!”
“Never!” I cry as Mr. Jinjing and I run away from the palace while the guards come to fetch the weapons. “Quick! We must grab all of the weapons and leave!”
“Where are we going, Kang?” said my very frightened wife
“We are leaving. We are going into the forest to escape the emperor!” “SURRENDER AT ONCE!!!” We were out of luck and very much out of time. The guards have reached the house!
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-”
“What was th- Oh no! Not my beloved wife! NOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
“We have little time doctor! We must leave at once!” Mr. Jinjing yelled trying to keep me from running out to my wife.
“Yes, we must leave. Lead the way!” I said with tears in my eyes, not wanting to leave her behind. We eventually get to the point in nighttime where it is the darkest and predators come out. “Look out for the Siberian Tiger. They don’t just bite, they kill.”
“I will keep that in mind doctor.” I Think I scared him a little bit more than I thought I would, but there was truth to my words. For many days, Mr. Jinjing and I traversed the forest with surprising luck, until just a few feet from the edge of the forest.
“Now what are we going to do doctor?”
“We are going to destroy the powder and the weapons by throwing it into the river over there.” On the count of three, we shoved the weapons into the water and watched it sail down the river, never to be seen again.
“What shall we do now doctor?” Mr. Jinjing asked.
“We are going to go to the emperor and tell him what we did and hope nothing will ever be invented like it ever.”
“But won’t he kill us too?”
“Yes, but it will be for the much greater good.” And with that in mind, Jeng Jinjing and I, Kang Bai, left for the Tang family palace.
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,798 Reviews
Yo. I'm on a phone as I type this so I'm going to make this quick. Please excuse any odd typos/letterage; you can blame my autocorrect for that.
Feel free to poke me if you need anything.)
(Welcome to YWS, by the by.
Grammar-wise, you have a tendency to leave spaces between your dialogue and quotation marks. You also fluctuate between keeping your commas inside the quotation mark, and outside of it; and I've noticed that sometimes you miss a comma where your dialogue is accompanied by a dialogue tag. This article might help. Since this piece is so dialogue-heavy, you might want to be more careful about the way you cultivate this.
I notice Wolf has already mentioned dialogue, how important it is, but I think one of the key issues here isn't just the unrealistic speech--you need to strike the much-needed balance between narration, scene, and dialogue. You can aim to develop your characters entirely through what they say, but your character development will remain sparse until you focus on how they say it. To an extent, your dialogue is accompanied by movement/action/expression, but merely telling us that 'here we have a narrator, currently in the mood to toss objects across the room...' does not help form a clearer picture in our minds. You also have a lot of 'telling' rather than 'showing', like where you mention Tsou to be the narrator's 'beloved wife'. But why does the narrator have to mention this to us, like it is a formal essay? Why doesn't Tsou Bai show us through her actions, and the narrator through his, how much they care for each other--in the most subtle manner possible? Make this interesting.
You have dialogue, you have plot, you have characters and a setting: these are all necessary elements of a story. But your pacing is not gradual, your characters flit from scene to scene too fast, and I am completely and utterly lost. This is only your first chapter; remember! You have twenty or fifteen, or even forty more chapters in which to tell the story of this amusing emperor and Kang. Why hurry everyone along? Your pacing is crucial, your flow immensely important if you want the reader to both understand and be intrigued by the course of events.
So far, your characters are having to tell us everything through their dialogue, and I don't see this as a good thing. Real people don't speak like this. Bad stage dramas speak like this. I have to struggle to keep my dialogue realistic, too, as does every other writer out there, and you always need to balance it out. Describe Kang's surroundings, show us his research room--which he must obviously be attached to--in greater detail. Use sensory description, i.e.: taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell. But beyond everything else: take it easy. You don't want to run out of plot in the first two chapters, do you, because everything is so fast?
I hope I was't too harsh; I honestly liked the quirky, different story you've got rolling here, and I wouldn't be making these suggestions if there wasn't room for improvement. I always enjoy writing centred along different cultures, and this has managed to grasp my interest. Do make sure your research keeps up with your writing, though!
I'll leave you with this one article to writing dialogue: c:
Keep writing; keep it up~!
I hope to see more from you soon.
Hello there.
So, first things first. I notice a lot of dialogue in this story, and it seems to me that the story revolves around the dialogue rather than the dialogue revolving around the story. What does this mean? It means that most of your story falls around your dialogue and there's a little too much of it.
In a story, dialogue is supposed to be used to enhance the characters, showing off their personalities and how they interact with one another. Here, it seems to be telling the entire story and the narration is just helping the dialogue. And that's kind of a no-no. Well, dialogue is supposed to be used sparsely in only character interaction while narration is needed everywhere. That's supposed to be the main 'meat' of the story, where are the lavishing descriptions are and the actions are shown through carefully chosen words.
The dialogue is an awful lot like narration here, and thus it becomes really flat. A really good exercise for creating dialogue with emotion in it rather than just words is to think about what you would say or hear someone say. If you read all that dialogue out loud, does it feel natural? Does it flow from your mouth? Could it be thought up on the spot and feel right? It not, the there needs to be something changed. Dialogue is a difficult thing, yes, but it's only helpful when done correctly.
My advice is to just practice with dialogue and it'll come eventually. Now, the narration in this also falls a little on the flat side. A lot of the stuff is just told to us, there isn't much elaboration to it, and so it feels drab and boring, like you are creating list versus telling the story.
Especially in first person, emotion is really important to include in narration. It shows the thought process of the narrator and really gets inside or their head. And also, everything moves by so quickly, there is no time taken to stop and develop anything. One minutes the narrator is frustrated and then four paragraphs later, he made gun powder?? Just take a deep breath and slow down a bit. Develop the plot, the characters. Add in some suspense, you know.
Anyways, this is a nice start, but there'a lots of improvement needed for this to become decent. But don't give up!
Keep on Writing,
~Wolfare~
Hello there! Buggie here to review.
First off, I have a little cultural note for you: Please keep in mind that family names come first in Chinese! You've been calling Mr. Jinjing by his first name, and since Bai is the family name of the doctor, he and his wife (when called in full) should be written Bai Kang and Bai Tsou. You almost never see family names with multiple characters as well, which should help.
(By the way, I am actually Chinese, so I do know the culture fairly well. And adding on, Chinese order is only used if the setting demands it. ie: In Taiwan, I am called Ming Li-Qi, but if I used my Chinese name in the states, people would call me Li-Qi Ming.)
Going on:
Your grammar is, overall, fine. There were a few instances where you worded things in a way that involved too many commas (the last sentence), and places where you forgot them (the second). Remember to separate clauses, and that it's weird to have more than three or so commas in one sentence. Unless there's a list--then it's okay.
And lastly, while your action and dialogue flow moderately well, the lack of setting description hinders how your reader might picture the scene. I can feel the excitement and see a lot of the movement, but it's all in white space as far as I know. Tell us what it is like where the characters are!
I don't know if you'll be continuing this or not, but if you are, please let me know when you write more. I rarely get the chance to read about Asian characters, and it means a lot to me that someone is out there writing it.
Best of luck!
-Buggie