Published March 8, 2011
Hey guys i deleted this post cause i want to edit it...
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Thanks alot for the advice you've given. It stung at first but i realise what you were saying is true...Gonna work harder on it! By the way, is the story interesting in the first place?
I'm going to give you some very large-picture pointers about how to make your writing more interesting. The numbered issues I address are ones that crop up repeatedly.
1) There's more to storytelling than simply "telling the story." The majority of your writing is a straight Point A to Point B. This happened then this happened, with little embellishment or plain, boring embellishments ("He was furious."). There's almost no flavor to your writing. It's "Ryan did this. Ryan was angry. Ryan thought about this."
That is, this point is all about your lack of voice as a writer. You have no tone, you have no mood. Most writers convey a voice with word choice, but it didn't seem like you were picking your words from your own mind, but rather just using words that moved us from one event to the next.
You set the mood a little bit with the foreshadowing in the first section, which was nice. But after that section (where we travel back in time? I guess? It's a little weird because he's driving...then he gets out of the car...then there's a time jump and he's driving again. Too much similarity that it's just weird. It needs to be a stark difference to pull off a time change without notification)..anyway, after that first section, it becomes very straightforward with a couple bland metaphors here and there.
2) On that note, metaphors. Here are two examples:
Those metaphors...are...pretty silly, honestly. Metaphors are one of the author's major opportunities to establish the mood, tone, and how serious we should take the writer. "Water off a duck's back" is a metaphor you might find in a toddler's book. And "jumping out of a car like it was a monster" is rather silly. First of all, why compare the car to a monster? Because people might jump out of monsters' mouths? Well, if that's your only criteria, then we might say, "he jumped out of the car like he was a stunt car driver" or "like it was on fire" or "like he really had to go to the bathroom." All of those are reasons people jump out of cars, but are any of them suitable for the mood? So what I mean is...the overall image, the feeling, of your metaphors are a bit irrelevant and silly.
3) Too much detail. Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" has a rule I consider number 1: Your writing shouldn't have unnecessary words.
That is, if the words don't convey mood, characterization, emotion, action, theme, or anything of that sort...then it's probably unnecessary and clogs up your writing and is tedious for the reader.
Go through and pick out where there's too much information. Like, did we need to know that the antiseptic cream was gotten from the upstairs bathroom medicine cabinet?
4) You switch tense a lot, going from past to present in mid-sentence or mid-paragraph. Fix that.
5) You'll see this a lot on this site: Show, don't tell.
When you just come right out and say someone's emotion, it's a throwaway statement. We don't feel or understand him at all. Okay, he was fuming. Okay, he had super sharp vision. But so what? We, as the reader, don't truly understand what you want to say. So give us examples of how he is fuming or super sharp. Maybe time slowed. Maybe he could hear a pin hit the ground. Maybe he could count the hairs in Max's mohawk.
6) More paragraphs. Makes it way easier to read for your reader. There are entire scenes of action that are just one paragraph.
Others:
You do inject a little more personality by this point. It looks like you started to hit your stride with the story by this point. But some of it just rings so hollow, like "Cool water running down his fit body" and "He ate the food in eleven seconds."
Snorefest. Any way to make this big block of information-laden speech any more interesting?
Is that the best gory image you can come up with? "Things like that"?
Somehow, that line doesn't strike me as very military.
It's like the Partridge Family military. They're so congenial with each other.
So those major points are some things you should strive for in your writing. Some of them are big ideas that don't have an easy answer. Don't lose heart, though, you're young yet.