Looking for feedback/reviews of my new novel!

[Kowai]

Just curious of what people think about my style of writing and what I could use to improve it. Feel free to suggest anything; I appreciate any type of feedback.

Read Stellar Lumen | Tapas Web Community

[Maki-08]

Here are some of my thoughts as I was reading:

• Ground the scene somewhere concrete. Who is the POV character? Where is he at the beginning of the scene? Why is his life flashing before his eyes? Its hard to feel anything for a character that isn’t named or whose emotions or circumstances aren’t made clear.
• Thoughts should not be in quotations. As a reader, its confusing when you indicate that a thought is a thought but place it in quotation marks.
• Limit the use of tags, such as “he said” or “he thought.” The reader already knows that italicized phrases are thoughts and phrases in quotations are dialogue. Try to only use tags when the format doesn’t make it immediately clear who is speaking or if what is being said contradicts how it is delivered. For example: "Your money or your life," his wife teased.
• Too many paragraph breaks. There are paragraphs that you can group together to make the delivery and evolution of ideas clearer. If the time, place, topic, or person doesn’t change then don’t start a new paragraph. This will make it easier for the reader to follow the progression of a scene.
• Some of the sentences try to deliver too many ideas at once. Break some of the longer sentences into two or three more sentences to make it easier for the audience to digest. Alternatively, don't be shy to use colons and semicolons.
• Add more variety in the types and lengths of sentences. Compound sentences aren’t inherently bad, but having too many placed too closely together can make reading difficult and the experience monotonous.
• Avoid redundancy. For example, in the first paragraph, you stated that the POV character was seeing his life flash before his eyes. I understood this as him seeing everything that he experienced. Writing “He saw everything” in the following sentence sounds redundant (0). Jumping straight to the next part of the second sentence (“the memories. . .”) will remove any redundancy while making the writing tighter.
• There are some sentences that are too wordy. For example, in one sentence you wrote: “. . . resurrecting a dead, rotting flower back to life. . .” (0). Resurrecting something is bringing it back to life. So, simply writing “. . . resurrecting a flower. . .” is more than sufficient. Less is more.
• The simile about the POV’s memories of happiness and despair isn’t landing as hard as it should. Why would the waterfall stop flowing? The audience doesn’t usually associate waterfalls with anything but a steady stream of water. I think the impact of the simile is softened because of “. . . that couldn’t stop flowing” (0).
• Try to make the transition between the memoires more fluid and dream-like in tone so that when he wakes up there is a clear distinction between the dream and the waking world. Beginning a sentence with “A memory formed. . .” or “Another memory formed. . .” is a bit bland and dry, especially when they are so close together. What does the POV see in between each memory? How does one memory transition into the other? Add more vivid descriptions.

[Kowai]

Thanks for the feedback! It's nice to have people see the flaws in your writing style so you can learn from that kind of mistake.