Warning: This work has been rated 18+ for language and mature content.
This story begins with a frantic knock on the door. This knock was different from any knock I’d ever heard before. It wasn’t that quick knock a delivery man gives right after he drops off a package, it was nothing like the knock my best friend Lina always gave me when she got a new toy that she wanted to show off and I definitely was not greeted with the smiling face of a solicitor trying to sell me religion or cookies. No, this was a knock that would change the course of my life forever. It was Gale my second best friend (although I would never tell her that) she was crying harder than I’d ever seen her cry before and trust me she was always crying, whether it was because Johnny didn’t ask her to Prom or because her brother ripped out all her American Girl Doll’s hair she always seemed to be upset about something ,but this time was different, she looked...broken. Between gasping breaths and globs of snot she managed to get out “I think Lina’s dead” I laughed so hard I snorted “Wow Gale you almost got me that time” “This isn't a joke we were walking down the street and she ran ahead of me like she always does and by the time I got around the bend on Plymouth she was gone all I found was her necklace” she sobbed putting the silver necklace with the gold dog charm in my hand. Bewilderment came across my face she would never give her necklace up even if it was for one of the stupid pranks they were always pulling on me because I was the most gullible of our Treo. “O-h my-G-oo-d you’re you’re actually serious?!” the slight nod of her head told me everything I needed to know and then suddenly I felt it too the...brokenness. I didn’t yet know that this brokenness would be the death of me.”We have to find her,” I said taking in a deep breath stifling my sobs “she can’t be dead she just can’t I would feel it” “I’m sorry Mary I can’t look for her it’s too dangerous we should just bring the necklace to your dad at the police station and let them do their job this isn’t our fight. I know she means a lot to but..” I pretty much tuned out after she said that there is no but she meant so much to me words could never explain it. She was no is in love with me I’ve known that for a while and although I could never love her in the way she wanted me to I did love her I mean we have been best friends since preschool and although there was so much unspoken between us she and I had this unexplainable bond and somehow I knew she was out there she just had to be.”Gale I understand that this is dangerous but we can’t just leave her out there. I mean I don’t even want to think about what could be happening to her” I countered. “Mary she is on the track team and in MMA she can take care of herself. We wouldn’t be any help to her and we could end up getting ourselves hurt I’m not willing to take that risk, just give me the necklace and I’ll take it to your dad at the police station and they can test it for fingerprints or whatever” she objected. “No no I won’t leave her out there alone and you of all people should know how my dad handles his cases,” I said trying touch a nerve. A few years ago her mom disappeared and despite her and her dad’s best efforts after a while my dad just seemed to give up. I never understood how he could do that just give up on someone and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake with Lina. “I’m sorry Gale I won’t give up on her” “You know what Mary fine I give up just do whatever you want you can even get yourself killed like Lina for all I care” Those words sent a shockwave through my heart and although part of me knew it was just said in the heat of the moment I couldn’t help the words that came out of my mouth next: “Fuck off Gale we never should’ve let your fat wanna be ass into our group anyway” and the worst part was I didn’t even regret those words until the worst possible thing imaginable happened. I just kept dwelling on the fact that she had just given up on 13 years of friendship like it was nothing. I didn’t even bother telling her how much I loved her and how blessed Lina and I were that she came into our lives. Later that night I got the call. Gale had killed herself To be continued...
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
125,005 Literary Works • 672,804 Reviews
Thank you all for your helpful reviews! I really didn't spend much time editing this like I should've. I do agree that this is just one big block of text so, a big apology goes out to my readers. I just put this out there to get a bit of feedback about if this was a good start rather than worry too much about paragraphs and grammar. Thank you for the input about the characters, it was really helpful. I will make edits so that people can actually sympathize with my main character. I plan on taking a totally different turn later on in the story and I will repost when it is finished under the name: "The Death of me Revised." Hopefully, then I will be able to get some more accurate feedback. Look forward to you all reading my future work.
Thank you all for your helpful reviews!
Hey there! I'm here to review this story!
...I don't really know how else to put this, but, if I were you, I'd start writing a different story. There are just so many things about the plot and the characters that I'm having trouble with, and it gets in my way of enjoying the story. Namely, Mary. I couldn't sympathize with her. I tried to - she's just lost her best friend, there's the possibility Lina's case might fall into the gutter and disappear (so to speak), and so she's freaking out. But taking shots at (her second best-friend, which is suspect in and of itself) Gale, a friend for 13 years, and her weight is just over the top. I'm sorry, but it is not how I would respond in a traumatic situation, and it says a lot about Mary if she's willing to destroy a friendship like that. Especially when it sounds like Mary's comments lead Gale to commit suicide. Not to say Gale is much better in her "you can get killed like Lina" line, especially given Mary's feelings for Lina, but at least Gale is described as emotional, and has just been repeatedly rebuffed by Mary. Mary, in the meantime, has an unrequited romance for Lina that I can only describe as creepy. Yes, Mary can have those feelings, and Lina can be disinterested - that happens all the time. But that unbreakable bond and deep friendship stuff is both biologically inaccurate and also vaguely disturbing. Mary doesn't sound very good at dealing with her emotions in a healthy way.
And that's my problem with Mary, I suppose. Gale might be described as emotional, but she's also the one proposing the more rational solution - going to the cops and providing evidence. Mary, meanwhile, lashes out at Gale and calls out her "fat wanna be a**". Then I can't believe it when Mary goes on to think about how great friends Gale and Linda are. It's like, no, Mary can't be both absurdly loving and absurdly hateful about her best friend - either it's one or the other, or Mary just isn't stable. And having an emotionally unstable protagonist is fine - I've written quite a few. But, to do it successfully, there has to be something likeable about that character, and I can't find anything to like about Mary. Her dad kind of sucks, sure. So what? There's the chance that hey, he's a busy guy, and maybe Gale's mom's case just went cold. That also happens all the time. Other than that, Mary comes across as creepy and volatile, and I can't say I feel a whole lot for her when her words lead to Gale's death. Mostly, I'm hoping Gale's death teaches Mary how to care, which also says a lot about Mary.
Heck, even killing a character to force an emotional catharsis in another one can be done well, though it often veers off into Stuffed into a Fridge territory. But right now, I can't see myself reading the second part. There isn't anything for me to really like Mary, and she's at the heart of the whole story. The comments about how much she loves Gale and Lina come too late to grab my interest, and, in light of her actions, don't fit. In all, I sympathize with Gale a lot more than I do with Mary, which I think is the opposite of what you were trying to convey. Except Gale's dead now. So yeah - this was a decent first try, and I even liked some parts of it (the LGBT+ representation and the solicitor comment, the latter of which I thought was brilliant), but I just didn't get anything out of this story. To say nothing of all the obvious foreshadowing - the title, "this was a knock that would change the course of my life forever," and "the worst possible thing imaginable happened" - and the grammar and spelling stuff (which I think lizz does a better job discussing than I do). But hey, you're a new member, and everyone's got stuff to learn, so keep on writing!
Hey there Nellie and welcome to YWS!
The story that you've presented here is unfortunately just one big block, even though it's not that long overall. I've decided to split this up into parts as I go along, since I'm in the mood to do a lot of critiquing anyways.
There's also several big issues that stick out to me and if you see me repeating certain critiques, that's probably a sign to why they need to be changed.
There's two things about this.
1. It's cliche.
If I have to explain why it's cliche, that's bad.
Starting a story with a phrase such as "this is how the story goes", is a flashback to how essays were written in elementary school. Even though it's still a little bit cliche, you could totally start this story with "there was a knock at the door".
It might not be the exact feeling that you were going for, since it's most commonly used for dramatic mysteries, but it could still work.
2. It's not much of an opener in general though because there's no event happening to interrupt. Maybe a better introduction of the main character doing some activity, could better lead into this disturbance.
I've decided to split this little bit off from the rest because I think that you truly were going for drama. And if the whole goal of your piece is to be as dramatic as possible, please don't throw everything into one hole and hope the reader survives.
I didn't explain it before but the issue with having just one block of text, is that no one can read it. You also have a bunch of run on sentences, which only adds to the confusion that comes along with how close knit the sentences are in the first place. I haven't gotten a real feel for the story yet, mainly because i haven't been able to see it yet.
This is something that I would have qualified as a new paragraph but instead it was just one sentence. It needs a little bit of space and that's what I've given it. For all of the ideas to be clear, they need to have space.
And you also start to introduce things here, such as another character, but we still don't know who the first character is. Hopefully there will be some dialogue to lend a hand to all of these identities, even though i don't remember spotting it in my initial skim.
I'm still confused about the way you're choosing to introduce characters because these just seem to be details that we don't need. And then you're lacking in any actual details.
The dynamic of their messed up friendship isn't something i need to know right out of the gate, even though it might be useful to me later on. This is a problem of prioritizing and is a large scale issue.
And again, this is another run on sentence. I don't even want to begin explaining how to fix this because at the end of the day, my answer is to trash and start over.
Your passion for typos continues here and I guess you aren't aware that punctuation needs to exist in dialogue. Most of my complaints here are about the dialogue. I'm reminded of a good infographic about dialogue that my friend likes to use when she reviews. Here's one version of it:
Dialogue is a super major issue here, not only in formatting, but also in the content aspect. because it's just not interesting to me as a reader. In fact, there's nothing much about this story that was too appealing to me, i just kept reviewing with hope in mind.
Your dialogue should be accomplishing more than it does currently, which is basically just repeating the same points back to the audience. The characters don't exchange that much information, except for some blatant name dropping about the main character's father.
I'd also like to add that this is the first serious detail of information about the main character and it takes a missing persons/murder case, for it to be revealed. Overall you do need to have more going on with personal details, rather than focusing on snot or a knock on the door. Give the characters some life if you want people to be invested in their stories.
I already started to address the formatting issues up there. This section better defines the issue I'm talking about when i say the content needs work, such as the realism factor. Is that really how someone would exclaim omg?
No. There's a million other ways to do it but that one just doesn't work for the sounds that you're going for.
And then we still don't know anything about the age of these characters, but they're magically just going to go on a missing persons hunt? In the place, that's obviously dangerous, if their friend went missing there?
Little bit wordy but all together not as terrible as the rest. It's good to see Mary actually expressing concern for another human being because the way you've described her so far, has not given a pleasant image to the audience.
This is one sentence.
It has too much going on for one sentence.
It also makes no sense.
Most of the time through this chapter, I had a slight sense about what you were going for, but you never quite made it there with the writing. I have some serious advice in mind for how to fix all of your structural issues. If you want to hear about those though, that'll be a super detailed review stretching across more chapters, so consider my trading post review thread.
Another thing about dialogue and not making sense, is that you completely switch the perspectives twice, and there's no signal of it. This entire section is going to need trash and reworked before it's going to be of any proper use to the reader.
This does sort of start to explain some motivations but it's still not giving any sort of impact to the audience. It's weird to say this to someone but you're not being dramatic enough with this, at least it's not getting put in all of the right places.
The same dialogue issues continue to present themselves and the only thing that occurs to me from the information, is more negative information about Mary. I think Mary is supposed to be a heroic main character but so far she has just been getting worse.
Cutting all ties with your other best friend who just came to tell you the other was dead? Not cool dude.
So teenager age drama but a way long friendship?
I still have no idea how old these characters are but they're definitely petty and made for each other.
This isn't much of an ending and it's certainly not going to improve my opinion of the main character. So really, I go back to the advice I had at the beginning.
Trash it and start over.
The concept is maybe.
The execution isn't there.
With a little bit of work, it could be a million times better.
Hi there and welcome to YWS! I hope you're enjoying your time here so far.
In case this is the first review you've received I just want to let you know that if it seems as though I'm being a little harsh then I apologise, but each thing I say is just in hopes of helping you!
First off you need to sort out your formatting. This is a huge block of text which makes it both unappealing to read online and also means it's not grammatically correct. There are many different reasons to start a new paragraph (and it might be worth doing a quick internet search as it will probably explain it much better than I can) including when a new character speaks. This is probably the first thing you could go about changing because it won't take long and will make the whole piece much better immediately.
This would work as a first paragraph and actually is a pretty good intro. It sets up the story well and makes your reader want to continue.
I find it odd that your character would refer to someone as their 'second best friend' as this is not often something that actually takes place past the age of something like 10.
You precede the section with her saying that Lina is dead with Gale looking broken. At this point is seems like your main character has grasped the severity of the situation and then she goes on to think it's a joke? I get humour being used as a defence but it doesn't seem to line up here. Maybe you could consider changing this.
This doesn't seem like cause to think she's dead. Could you make it less flimsy than this? Also, treo should be trio .
The other key thing you could do with researching is how to show not tell when you're writing. This whole chapter seems like an information dump. By revealing information more slowly it can intrigue your reader and make them want to continue you in the novel.
You start off really strong with this and if you can continue in that fashion I think this could work really well. Have a go at editing, and let me know if you have any questions.
Hope this helped!
Icy.