by strangeshellie

Published October 10, 2010

Comments & reviews · 2
User avatar
Shearwater
Review
Shearwater wrote a review Review · Oct 10, 2010

Why Hello, Strange :)
Pink here, I'll be reviewing this for you today.
Oh...you're new? Well, welcome to YWS! I give Penguins to new members, so here is yours.
Image
Alrighty, back to the review!

Nitpicks/suggestions

I ran around the corner and found myself on a deserted street. The houses on either side of the road were dark and lifeless. I heard a sudden howl behind me and without looking back I ran into the front yard of the nearest House to my left. I climbed over the gate and hid behind an old oak tree. I

Alright, first off, you have too many "I's" in this first paragraph. I have struggled with this too, to be honest.
When writing in first person, be sure to cut back on the I's as much as you can, otherwise your sentences will sound quite repetitive. Instead of staring a sentence with: "I climbed over the gate and hid behind a old oak tree" Cut it down to:
"Climbing over the gate, I hid behind an oak tree".
The reason I have taken out the 'old' here because well...what difference do you picture when you say old oak tree and just oak tree? I'm not sure about everyone else, but I all I need to know is that she hid behind a tree.
I turned around and was face to face with a tall figure, its face hidden under his hoodie and the shadow of the tree

I dislike the 3 repetitions of 'face'. :(
“There was something out there” I whispered. “Come on, let’s get out of here” Spider mumbled and dragged me with him.

There's two things to be learned here. :)
First of all, break your sentence when a new character is speaking. As in, start a new line. Here, a new line should have been started after, "I whispered."
The next thing is correct quotation punctuation. I find that most people have trouble with this but it's okay. The rules aren't too hard and it can be an easy learn if you focus on them and understand the way sentences should be constructed.
Here is a small site that can help with the basics: Click Me!
Also Purdue Owl is a decent site: Click Me!
** The last paragraph is a big clump. I suggest you try to cut it up to help the flow as well.
***

Overall
Well, I'm not going to go through and nitpick every little thing because that's not for me to do. I want you to be able to go back, edit and revise this accordingly. You have an idea, a plot, a certain story but there are a few things holding this back. I didn't notice many misspelled words or anything, not many typos either. My main concern is over punctuation, flow and comprehension.
Punctuation wise, you need to learn correct quoting, where commas should be placed and where they shouldn't. Try bringing some of your sentences together, make longer ones shorter and easier to read. Trash unneeded description and make this tight. lol ^^
As for your flow, I think you were rushing a bit. You barely gave us a good description of how her friend, Spider, looks like or what exactly they're planning. Take a breath, slow down and bring us into your story with ease and understanding.
Speaking of understanding, I found a bit of your wording mixed up. Not that it doesn't make sense, but when reading it all together it was hard to picture the scene you were trying to create. Maybe it's because I found this piece lacking detail in places. I suggest you take a second to go back and put some meat on your words, bring out your characters and the story.
One more point before I leave, I know I've said this before but try to vary your sentences. Not with with the "I" thing but the way you're describing your actions. We jumped to the right. We hid behind the tree. I threw a rock and smiled.
Try spicing it up so it's not only fun to read but fun to picture. Anyway, that's about all. I'm glad you have the whole hunting thing going on here because I was afraid this was going to be like another Vampire/werewolf love story thing but that doesn't seem to be the case lol. I wish you luck in writing the rest of this. I also apologize if I came across as harsh in anyway. Just trying to help out =P
Have fun on the site, contact me if you need anything ^^
Cheers,

~Shear

User avatar
itsjustemilie
Comment
itsjustemilie commented Comment · Oct 10, 2010

like it!

well done



This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy