"Daddy! Daddy come here" Chloe said. She was knelt in her white winter coat and brown trousers. Her ginger hair crawled out from beneath her grey hat. I walk down the garden, past the frozen flowers and iced over pond. When I got to her she had her hands clasp tightly over something.
"What is it baby girl?" I smiled. She looked up eyes wide with excitement.
"I got one! I finally caught one!" She yelled folowed by laughter. A hard cough left her gentle frame, so I took her in my arms. Pulling her into my arms.
"Look Daddy," She has put her hands up to my face and made a slight hole in her hands for me to see. A firefly dances inside her hands giving off a luminous green glow. "I finally caught her daddy," She said with excitement.
"Her?"
"Her name is . . . Daddy she needs a pretty name,"
"Then why don't we call her chloe," I offered her. She sat pondering the thought.
"But I'm chloe. . . she is Chloe two!" she smiled up at me. I held her closer in my arms, she was so delicate, so beautiful and so close to death it was unbearable. My little girl was dying and there was nothing I could do.
"Come on in you two or you'll catch the cold," My wife yelled from the top of the garden. She leant against the chipped white door frame in her old grey cardigan and her jogger trousers. Her dark brown hair twirled up into a bun.
"Let her go ,Chlo." I whispered in her ear. She opened her hand and the fly jumped out and within seconds it was gone.
"Bye Chloe two," She yelled getting to her feet. She turned and looked at me stern faced, held that for a few seconds then burst into a giant smile. I smiled back. She ran up the garden towards her mother's warm embrace. Lilly, she was the candle in this darkness.
I began to walk up the garden as they went inside. The pain inside my chest was unbearable. I still couldn't comprehend how neither of us were a match. We're her parents for christ sake. For christ sake, I had been saying that a lot lately. I had to blame someone. I walked into the house and shut the door behind me. Chloe was sat at the end of the dining table swinging her legs. I sat opposite her, and she began pulling funny faces, I pulled them back of course. Lilly walked in carrying the bowl full of cranberry sauce to complement the turkey.
"Yuck! Cranberry's . . .Can I have chocolate sauce instead?" Chloe asked. It was moments like that I was going to miss. Lilly placed the bowl on the table and gave me a kiss. She smelt like cinnamon and her lips were so soft. Her phone blarred into life, mistltoe and wine sung from the Blackberry.
"Hello," Her voice changing as she is on the phone. Chloe had started copying her every move.
"Oh hello. You're working on christmas day?!" Her voice a mixture of confusion and shock.
"Oh right, Fair enough, I suppose thank you for working is in order then," she laughed a little. Silence filled the air for a little while, until Lilly fell to her knees, the blackberry smahing on the floor. I jumped straight to her side.
"what's a matter Lilly? what did they say?"
"They've . . They've" She started breathing heavily. I rubbed her back slowly trying to sooth her.
"They've got lungs for Chloe. Andy, they've got a perfect match." I couldn't reply. My heart was pounding a thousand beats to the second. My head felt like it had been covered with a strange haze. My breath became short and rapid. I thought I was on the verge of collapsing until Chloe spoke.
"What does that mean?" she asked with a serious, scared look on her face.
"It means." I stopped and stared at her. My beautiful little girl with long ginger hair, a beautiful smile. I thought of all she will be, of all that will happen to her and I just smiled.
"It means everything will be okay Chlo," She smiled and jumped down next to me. I took her in one arm and held Lilly in yhe other. Everything was going to be okay. Nothing else mattered at that point. My little girl was going to be okay, My life was how it should be;perfectly normal. It had simply become the best christmas ever.
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140,804 Literary Works • 673,688 Reviews
Hey there Retro! I'm going to be your reviewer for tooday. :3
Corrections and comments in red.
Final thoughts:
Please, please don't get offended, but I'll tell you this because you need to know it. Your grammar is all over the place. >< You're missing commas, dealing with run-ons and fragments, and the formatting is skewed. I caught a number and fixed what I could, but I'm fairly sure I missed a bunch.
Here are some articles that can help you:
Punctuation Marks, by Rosey Unicorn
Commas, by Mythic Writing
Punctuation Within Dialogue, by Demeter
Also, beware of fragments.
This is a fragment:
This is how it should be:
Alternatively, you could do this:
Even if I put your grammar aside, though, I'm afraid I have to disagree with the first reviewer. This piece needs work.
First of all, first person is a very good choice for emotional pieces, but in here? It falls flat. It doesn't live up to expectations at all. I didn't feel anything. Not a smidge. This is first person, Retro. That means the reader ought to have free access to the main character's thoughts. We should feel his pain, his laughter, his relief. Problem with this piece is that I felt nothing. It was a bit monotonous and I almost gave up on reading it halfway through, to be honest. oo"
The first person POV is good because it's emotional, and it latches onto you and never lets go. Your aim here is to make us sympathize with the MC, so show us his thoughts. Show us why Chloe is so precious (and don't say she's his daughter - that won't make us, the readers, like her too). Show us what she means to him, okay? :3
I smelled the ending the minute they entered the dining room. This piece doesn't win points for originality, but do try to inject some freshness into the topic. It's overused and I've seen it done a million times before - this is a reason for you to do better. You're going to need to work doubly hard to make this piece click, because the idea has been done a million times before.
Where is the description? All I see area bunch of adjectival phrases. The phrases are weak and don't really add to the prose. They actually choke the prose, to be honest. You use them a lot because your dialogue is weak. We'll move on to that later, but for now, you're going to have to find more ways to describe the surroundings and such. Think of the reader as someone deprived of all five senses - you're going to have to guide them through everything. Also, a tip - instead of just blindly describing everything, have your MC comment or interact with whatever you happen to be describing. Have him offer opinions.
Your dialogue is flat. Very much so. It's not too stilted, but it sounds somewhat practiced. The scenes feel rehearsed. You might want to work on your flow. Observe the world around you, and listen while you do so. Take note of how people talk, of their body language, and especially to how things work out. The reactions here seem forced, and this is partly why the reader doesn't really feel much for the characters. I can practically see a director telling the characters exactly what they should do.
You should let the words flow from your fingertips, Retro. :3
Finally, your characters are flat. I can't feel anything for them. I can't even distinguish the mom from the dad. Of course, this is a short piece, so there's very little room for character development, but it's still possible. Little quirks help. You don't need big, life-changing moments to show your character's personality. You can show them through their reactions. Maybe have someone put her hands on her hips, or fold her arms across her chest. That'd be enough to give us a clue to her personality.
That's all I can say for now~ Don't take this as a definitive opinion, since most of it came from my brain, and it's a bit messy there. If you have any questions, feel free to PM me, all right? ^^
-Jae
Hi, Retro.
Feel free to send me a PM if you have any questions.
So, I thought this was a cute little story. You had some good ideas and the ending has a feel that reflects the spirit of Christmas, and the winter holidays in general. However, I bet that it could probably be a lot better then it is right now. I can tell that you have the basic idea down, but overall this piece still feels very rough. Here are a few things you can look for while editing:
~ Grammar. All in all, this is what is really killing your piece. There are parts where it is alright, but throughout most of it everything feels just inconsistent and lazy. For one thing, proper names should be capitalized at all times. A comma should be directly after the word proceeding it and there should be a space between it and the next world. However, most of the errors are prevalent in your dialogue punctuation. Sometimes you have nothing after a quote, and occasionally you have commas where they shouldn't be. Take a look at this article, and then do a spot-check of the piece, and you'll see what I am talking about.
To avoid many of these mistakes in the future, what you can do is proofread your piece. Read it once aloud, and once to yourself, and you'll catch a lot of things you messed up on when writing originally.
~ Emotion. Right now, I can tell this is supposed to be a very emotional piece, and while I'm grasping some of that, it just doesn't really feel as strong as it should be. We all understand that loss, especially that of a child, is something terrible that no one wants to go through. However, the characters feel underdeveloped, which makes it hard to sympathize with them and understand what the narrator and his wife are going through.
I think you have the individual characters down, but you need to focus more on the relationships, which will really make the piece click. How long has Chloe been sick? How old is she? Does she know that she's sick? Has the couple had to spend a lot of money they do not have to help her find treatment? Have they been having horrible nightmares of what it might be like to loose their daughter?
Basically, if you build up what's at stake, it will make the ending seem all the more relieving and wonderful and not as forced.
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Overall, I think this is a well-written piece and I can't wait to see where you take it.
~ Elinor
Hello there! I'll be your reviewer for today.
Okay, so I didn't see any nitpicks. You did an awesome job describing, but sometimes you needed a little more. Especially near the end when they were so joyful it didn't seem as if there was much description. That is an important place to put it.
This was amazing. I totally loved it. You even made me cry you punk! Kidding, its a good thing it made me cry. I loved how close the family was and how they weren't broken, but they were good to each other and that they were tied together, unlike a lot of families we see. This was amazing. Keep up the good work.