Hey there Starlight,
Jaspercat here to leave you a review.
It's his second winter with a loving family--and his first winter since becoming a Giant.#FF1493 "> I would recommend taking away the dashes in this sentence. Right now it looks a little weird and it disrupts the flow of the sentence. If you really need to keep a form of punctuation then you should change it to a comma. However I do believe that the line would be just fine without any form of punctuation. He's not sure how to feel, honestly. #FF1493 ">I'm not sure how he feels either. So far the writing is very transparent and I would love to see some depth. He's glad to be free of the basement. But every time he looks in the mirror, he wants to scream. He hates his new body so much…
A hand on his arm. #FF1493 ">This is honestly written a little weird. He looks down at Thea.
"What's wrong?" she asks.
"I'm f--"
"Sam could tell you're not fine." She looks at him steadily. #FF1493 ">Maybe it's just me but I don't think the word 'steadily' works here. "He felt your pain from the other side of the house." #FF1493 ">I think it's interesting that this Sam character can feel the pain. Makes me wonder how he is able to feel the pain.
And suddenly he can't hide it anymore. The truth spills out in a rush:#FF1493 ">I would get rid of the colon here. he's scared of his own strength. He feels sick every time he steps on the scale. He still sees Opal in his nightmares. #FF1493 ">Try to either combine these last three sentences or find a way to write them a bit different. The repetition of 'he' at the beginning of each is a little tiring.
Thea listens. He can tell she doesn't fully understand,but she listens.
After a moment she opens her arms. And he hugs her without fear for the first time in months. #FF1493 ">Take away the period and make this into one sentence.
"You won't break me," she's often told him since it happened. #FF1493 ">Ok is this something she's telling him now or is it something that she has said that he's remembering. Right now it seems like the later and so if it is I would take away the dialogue tags and change the text to italics. If it is something that she's currently saying then I would indicate it a bit better.
Finally, he lets himself believe it.
Ok so overall this was a very short story. I'm a little curious what is actually going on and I hope you either continue this or you rewrite and make it a tad bit longer. I personally have to disagree with the previous reviewer, I don't see a lot of backstory myself. Yes, you do have some moments that hint to some backstory but it was overall confusing.
For one I would have loved to have a name for the main character. It made it really hard to try and connect to him. Especially in short stories you don't have a lot of time to make your readers care about the characters and if your readers don't care about the characters then all the emotions you're trying to express are going to get lost. This brings me to my second point: expression.
You've tended to tell us everything that is happening in the story in short, straight to the point sentences. In short stories its not bad but here it just left something to be desired. You told us that your character was in pain, I would have loved to see that pain expressed in the writing. I wanted more concrete details so I could experience it for myself.
Overall though, this piece is pretty interesting. Like I said before I'm curious to see if you continue this. I hope I've helped a little. If you have any questions please feel free to ask. Good luck and continue writing always.
Points: 16
Reviews: 265
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