FOURTH UPDATE! (Replies 18-28)
Smoke and Murders @Freemints30
-Very compelling start
-The sentence structure seems to be a bit confused. E.g.: “All I ever knew of it was that it was the output from the Asbjorn corporation and in its production of, power, water, life for all of Ildens, its suburbs and even its distant countryside, all with the small price of the main city being under a constant smog of Ventis.”
^Just a hair’s breadth away from being complete word salad. It’s comprehensible enough to understand with context, but still hardly acceptable.
-Erg, tense switching…
=To be perfectly honest, I think you’re a good writer, fundamentally. The flow of ideas is excellent…but the writing itself is just so distracting with all the errors and general weirdness…if you could work closely with a good editor/proofreader, I think you could polish this rough ore into a gem, so to speak.
The Story of Osram @feuersichel
-Empty is spelled with a p
-The expressions are a little overdone…I can tell what you’re going for, but it works better when you just lean on the face; all the arm gestures are unnecessary and make the comic look overdramatized. Like…these are just little quips, right? ^^;
=I can tell the humor in this is very anime/manga-inspired, very reactionary…unfortunately, that kind of humor relies totally on whatever’s being reacted to, and if it doesn’t strike one as funny/strange then there’s nothing left. Personally, I didn’t find the scientist-guy all that ridiculous (a little pathetic, maybe, but nothing special) so…yeah.
Really the whole “lives with his mother/can’t get a girlfriend, what a loser!” archetype is kind of outdated/overdone…I don’t know if it works at all anymore if you don’t do something creative with it. =/
Individuality @milejdyvan
-I really love that first chapter art…could you possibly tell me who did it?? O.O
-This is just so easy to improve I gotta say it. Consider:
“It was the day for a sixteen-year-old boy called Mathiaz Rider”--> “It was the day for sixteen-year-old Mathiaz Rider”
Just a few little changes and it immediately sounds 500% more natural. I think it could probably be improved more, even…but that’s the obvious edit.
-Yeah, in general the writing is really unnatural…the playful mood of the actual events and the overly-detailed language used to describe them clash really severely, so much so that it comes off as pretentious. The dialogue is good, but there’s not enough of it (yet) to make up for this.
=So basically the main problem is this: you have the wrong narrative voice. You’re writing Subway Surfers as if it’s Lord of the Rings…which could work if you played it ironically, but so far I’m not seeing that.
I think what this story needs most is for a lot of those flowery descriptions to be simplified or cut out altogether, at least to improve the pacing. Plus, you still need an editor: the language might be flowery, but it’s also awkward and incorrect in some places.
Paint Me a Murder @AnimeKitty
-Okay, well, that first sentence…if I’m being honest, it reads like satire. Like the kind of thing someone would write if they were trying to make fun of emo YA novels. “Color their world in shades of emotion”…?
I assume it’s just a metaphorical sort of introductory sentence for the whole novel? If so, I think you should just get rid of it. The next line works just fine as an opener…better, even.
-There’s something wrong with that first part that I just can’t put my finger on…basically, it feels like you’re just explaining a character, rather than actually telling a story.
And on top of that there’s this eerie ‘substance abuse PSA’ vibe throughout…I guess most people would just say you’re being ‘preachy’, but I feel like it goes deeper than that, with the cliché of “the one teacher who understands” (and his name is Lamphere) who then dies because of course he does, and those little statements like “drugs didn’t ruin his life— he did”...like, was this intentional? You have to know how low-key corny it reads…right?
-Gang…office??? Is…is that a thing…?
=Okay, I think I see what’s going on here…overall, the story reads like something that’s 90% research, 10% experience. The details are there, you can tell that a lot of work went into the worldbuilding…but the lens through which the world is described, the mood applied to the scenes; it all screams “I don’t know how it actually feels to live in this environment, so I’ll just give it my best (dramatized) guess”. In a word: artificial.
I highly recommend you try to consume more material written by people who live in urban/inner city areas, even if it’s just journal-type stuff about their own lives. A little less EDGE and a little more authenticity would do wonders for this novel.
And speaking of edge…those poetic bits, man…’a heart amid a cage, where it could not break out of the harsh, cold bars of hate’… ^^;;; I just hope you have a sense of awareness about that. Like, it’s not that it’s not okay to have cornball stuff like that in there, or even to have that be part of the character (some teens really are like that, and it can be cute if you do it right) but you have to make it clear with your writing that you know it’s cornball…otherwise, the only assumption left to make is that you are the cornball, and unless this novel is secretly a comedy, that would not be ideal. =/
