First Chapter Analysis

Story_Marc

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Thinking about going back to update all my chapters once the first arc is done, it will be great to know what I did wrong in my first chapter.


Okay, I spent the last two days reviewing some notes and studying because this one has been bothering me. I wanted to recommend something new which I haven't to other people. Aside from some issues like missing punctuation, I just didn't care about anyone or anything in it. I have a question real quick, as I think I'll need more of a back & forth here: what's your intended hook? Is it just the fact action is happening? Right now I feel it's impossible to because it's just stuff happening. I have no emotional bond forged with anyone and I'm not given a reason to forge one. I feel like you're going for a catastrophe hook, which is why I'd recommend reading this and taking it into consideration.

For the part in particular...


3. The “Catastrophe” Hook​

One of the most popular hooks for your opening chapter is that of the catastrophe. This is technically a “why” hook, but it is focused less on curious incongruities and more on shock and awe.

Usually when writers first learn about the concept of opening a story in medias res—or “in the middle” of things—they think it means opening with a catastrophe. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it can be extremely effective. However, as Stuart shows, the best approach is usually to open immediately after the catastrophe, so you can dramatize your characters’ reactions. In an opening chapter, when readers don’t yet have a reason to identify with characters, reactions are often better hooks than actions.
Okay, I actually see potential in this approach. The biggest issue I find with it is how purple the prose is. Every single line like that combined with such an unusual approach overwhelms quite quickly. Which is a shame as I actually am intrigued by the experiment. It doesn't feel like different for the sake of different so much as there's a potential experience with it. ...I'm thinking of Mr. Robot now with it. So, quick question: are the protagonist (the you and I?) the same person? Just making sure because this could be turned into something interesting. It would be a far more demanding work to make, but what you're doing could work great for a dual-consciousness type thing.

If anything, I'd say that it's harder at the very beginning, but it gets better when you're trying less hard. Maybe Orwellian prose would help you out.


Here's a video on it, maybe this will give you what you need to make this work!

Also, I'm trying a new approach with these. I can do it much faster when I'm far more relaxed like this and setting up more of a back & forth.
 
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MrCrunch

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Okay, I spent the last two days reviewing some notes and studying because this one has been bothering me. I wanted to recommend something new which I haven't to other people. Aside from some issues like missing punctuation, I just didn't care about anyone or anything in it. I have a question real quick, as I think I'll need more of a back & forth here: what's your intended hook? Is it just the fact action is happening? Right now I feel it's impossible to because it's just stuff happening. I have no emotional bond forged with anyone and I'm not given a reason to forge one. I feel like you're going for a catastrophe hook, which is why I'd recommend reading this and taking it into consideration.

For the part in particular...




Okay, I actually see potential in this approach. The biggest issue I find with it is how purple the prose is. Every single line like that combined with such an unusual approach overwhelms quite quickly. Which is a shame as I actually am intrigued by the experiment. It doesn't feel like different for the sake of different so much as there's a potential experience with it. ...I'm thinking of Mr. Robot now with it. So, quick question: are the protagonist (the you and I?) the same person? Just making sure because this could be turned into something interesting. It would be a far more demanding work to make, but what you're doing could work great for a dual-consciousness type thing.

If anything, I'd say that it's harder at the very beginning, but it gets better when you're trying less hard. Maybe Orwellian prose would help you out.


Here's a video on it, maybe this will give you what you need to make this work!

Also, I'm trying a new approach with these. I can do it much faster when I'm far more relaxed like this and setting up more of a back & forth.
I am assuming you only read the prologue, so ill discuss that. If not, let me know ill try to clarify what I can. Ill mostly give my intentions when writing this. Hopefully, this can help you help me.

Yes, my intention was to start off with a catastrophe hook, although my initial intention was to make the main character dream this up, I thought that an actual event with a time skip and POV switch to the MC would work better, as I wanted to use these events as a major plot point later on in the story. My focus was less about the characters and more about the event itself.

I wanted readers to ask certain questions and hopefully keep them reading.
Such as what betrayal she might be referring to or what exactly has caused this event to happen.

All of which would be revealed as the MC's story progresses.

Maybe my choice of storytelling was wrong, or it was just simply bad execution idk.

I've only started writing for a few months and even though I've done a bit of research, there are still a lot of concepts I'm still lost on, so I appreciate you taking the time to help nubs like me.
 

Story_Marc

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I am assuming you only read the prologue, so ill discuss that. If not, let me know ill try to clarify what I can. Ill mostly give my intentions when writing this. Hopefully, this can help you help me.

Yes, my intention was to start off with a catastrophe hook, although my initial intention was to make the main character dream this up, I thought that an actual event with a time skip and POV switch to the MC would work better, as I wanted to use these events as a major plot point later on in the story. My focus was less about the characters and more about the event itself.

I wanted readers to ask certain questions and hopefully keep them reading.
Such as what betrayal she might be referring to or what exactly has caused this event to happen.

All of which would be revealed as the MC's story progresses.

Maybe my choice of storytelling was wrong, or it was just simply bad execution idk.

I've only started writing for a few months and even though I've done a bit of research, there are still a lot of concepts I'm still lost on, so I appreciate you taking the time to help nubs like me.
Hopefully, I can help! Yeah, trying to focus on the event typically doesn't work. I discuss this a bit on the first page, but I'll add more on it on why.

Characters are pretty much the window into a work. We share what the character feels when it comes to prose, which is why forging an emotional bond with them so quickly is so important. Curiosity immediately typically doesn't work because it has to be earned.

Here, let's jump over to a quick lesson using human psychology. I'm copying a bit from Wired for Story here:

COGNITIVE SECRET: Emotions determine the meaning of everything -- if we're not feeling, we're not conscious.

STORY SECRET: All stories are emotion based -- if we're not feeling, we're not reading.


The Protagonist: You Feel Me?
When we’re fully engaged in a story, our own boundaries dissolve. We become the protagonist, feeling what she feels, wanting what she wants, fearing what she fears—as we’ll see in the next chapter, we literally mirror her every thought. It’s true of books and it’s true of movies, too. I remember in college walking home after seeing an old Katharine Hepburn movie. It didn’t occur to me how deeply I’d been affected until I caught my own reflection mirrored in a darkened store window. Until that moment, I’d been Katharine Hepburn. Or, more precisely, Linda Seton in Holiday. Then all of a sudden I was me again, which definitely meant that Cary Grant was not waiting for me on board a ship about to set sail into a glorious future.

But at least for a few splendid minutes walking down Shattuck Avenue, I saw the world through Linda Seton’s eyes. It was visceral, and it felt like a gift—because my worldview had shifted. Linda was the black sheep of her family, and so was I. She’d fought tradition, regardless of the consequences, and even though she spent years in the proverbial attic, in the end, she triumphed. Maybe I could too. My step was lighter walking home than when I left for the theater.

This is a gift that so many of the manuscripts I’ve since read didn’t quite bestow, because the author had fallen prey to a very common pitfall, one that in essence rendered their protagonist off-limits to the reader. They had mistaken the story for what happens in it. But as we’ve learned, the real story is how what happens affects the protagonist, and what she does as a result.

This means that everything in a story gets its emotional weight and meaning based on how it affects the protagonist. If it doesn’t affect her—even if we’re talking birth, death, or the fall of the Roman Empire—it is completely neutral. And guess what? Neutrality bores the reader. If it’s neutral, it’s not only beside the point, it detracts from it.

That’s why in every scene you write, the protagonist must react in a way the reader can see and understand in the moment. This reaction must be specific, personal, and have an effect on whether the protagonist achieves her goal. What it can’t be is dispassionate objective commentary.

Readers intuitively know what neuroscientists have discovered: everything we experience is automatically coated in emotion. Why? It’s our version of a computer’s ones and zeros, and it’s based on a single question: Will it hurt me, or will it help me? This humble equation underlies every aspect of our rich, elegant, complex, and ever-changing sense of self, and how we experience the world around us. According to Damasio, “No set of conscious images of any kind on any topic ever fails to be accompanied by an obedient choir of emotions and consequent feelings.” If we’re not feeling, we’re not breathing. A neutral protagonist is an automaton.

To simplify, action by itself at the beginning means nothing. It's just an event that's happening if we aren't immersed in the lead already. This is why I cited what I did with the catastrophe hook advice above.

And you're good at learning and all, we all go through it! :) It took me years of studying, practice, and experiments to reach where I'm at now and I still feel there's plenty for me to learn or master still.

Anyway, I think a flashforward here might harm you and be unnecessary. To be honest, most prologues are unnecessary. And since someone who is bored by the prologue won't go to the 1st chapter (since the prologue is the first chapter for them), it might work best to drop that opening, especially if the actual story starts long before then.
 

MrCrunch

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Hopefully, I can help! Yeah, trying to focus on the event typically doesn't work. I discuss this a bit on the first page, but I'll add more on it on why.

Characters are pretty much the window into a work. We share what the character feels when it comes to prose, which is why forging an emotional bond with them so quickly is so important. Curiosity immediately typically doesn't work because it has to be earned.

Here, let's jump over to a quick lesson using human psychology. I'm copying a bit from Wired for Story here:

COGNITIVE SECRET: Emotions determine the meaning of everything -- if we're not feeling, we're not conscious.

STORY SECRET: All stories are emotion based -- if we're not feeling, we're not reading.




To simplify, action by itself at the beginning means nothing. It's just an event that's happening if we aren't immersed in the lead already. This is why I cited what I did with the catastrophe hook advice above.

And you're good at learning and all, we all go through it! :) It took me years of studying, practice, and experiments to reach where I'm at now and I still feel there's plenty for me to learn or master still.

Anyway, I think a flashforward here might harm you and be unnecessary. To be honest, most prologues are unnecessary. And since someone who is bored by the prologue won't go to the 1st chapter (since the prologue is the first chapter for them), it might work best to drop that opening, especially if the actual story starts long before then.
I see very insightful.
 

Sahrynar

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Please feel free to critique my story as much as you want! Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated! 😊
 

Story_Marc

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I'm kinda curious what you think about mine.

Masako's Life In An Abandoned World
Going through these, just making this a quick one since... well... I have no clue how to improve yours yet. I guess maybe use italicizes instead of brackets for internal thoughts? I... I don't even know if that's necessary given what I see going on.

Your start is really engaging and, while I think what you're doing is really niche, it's something I'd 100% encourage. You do stuff I normally wouldn't recommend, like onomatopeia by itself, yet it somehow works?

Your work is weird. It weirds me out because it's so compelling and just... I'm going to read it again. While this isn't for me, it's not a case of it doing anything to repel me. It's literally just a matter of my tastes & type of emotional experience I'd look for as a reader. As an editor, I currently just want to give you two thumbs up.

So yeah, reading again because... you weird me out. I'm not used to not having commentary... You're experimental and weird stuff done right as you aren't sacrificing clarity and don't feel like you're trying too hard or being self-indulgent. This all feels intentional and well executed because it is engaging stuff.
 

RepresentingEnvy

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Here you go.
 

Story_Marc

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I absolutely appreciate this, fam. I’ve been on RR for months now, and I thought of posting revised chapters here on SH.
Okay, so, I think the best thing I can say for you first and foremost is to change your synopsis entirely. This isn't the stuff I normally critique -- maybe I'll make a thread for that -- but it's so... all over and confusing that it makes a horrible first impression. There's a reason why you have almost 900 page views yet under 20 have actually looked at the prologue, as of this writing. I have tips on a previous page for that.

I'll try to read it again later. That synopsis is, quite frankly, glaringly bad.
 

ProjCRys

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Going through these, just making this a quick one since... well... I have no clue how to improve yours yet. I guess maybe use italicizes instead of brackets for internal thoughts? I... I don't even know if that's necessary given what I see going on.

Your start is really engaging and, while I think what you're doing is really niche, it's something I'd 100% encourage. You do stuff I normally wouldn't recommend, like onomatopeia by itself, yet it somehow works?

Your work is weird. It weirds me out because it's so compelling and just... I'm going to read it again. While this isn't for me, it's not a case of it doing anything to repel me. It's literally just a matter of my tastes & type of emotional experience I'd look for as a reader. As an editor, I currently just want to give you two thumbs up.

So yeah, reading again because... you weird me out. I'm not used to not having commentary... You're experimental and weird stuff done right as you aren't sacrificing clarity and don't feel like you're trying too hard or being self-indulgent. This all feels intentional and well executed because it is engaging stuff.
Thanks for thoughts about my chapter. About how I used my onomatopoeia, I just typed in what I think it sounds like, it took me some trial and error to read it with satisfaction so I'm glad someone noticed it.
 

SuiPolaris

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Okay, I actually see potential in this approach. The biggest issue I find with it is how purple the prose is. Every single line like that combined with such an unusual approach overwhelms quite quickly. Which is a shame as I actually am intrigued by the experiment. It doesn't feel like different for the sake of different so much as there's a potential experience with it. ...I'm thinking of Mr. Robot now with it. So, quick question: are the protagonist (the you and I?) the same person? Just making sure because this could be turned into something interesting. It would be a far more demanding work to make, but what you're doing could work great for a dual-consciousness type thing.

If anything, I'd say that it's harder at the very beginning, but it gets better when you're trying less hard. Maybe Orwellian prose would help you out.


Here's a video on it, maybe this will give you what you need to make this work!

Also, I'm trying a new approach with these. I can do it much faster when I'm far more relaxed like this and setting up more of a back & forth.
Aye, the you and I are the same person with dual-consciousness trying to control the same body and tell the story from their perspective. And thank you very much for the feedback!
 

Story_Marc

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Aye, the you and I are the same person with dual-consciousness trying to control the same body and tell the story from their perspective. And thank you very much for the feedback!
I highly recommend you don't give up on this story idea. I've never encountered anything like it, nor would I have come up with it, but what you have in mind is a brilliant concept. I'm impressed. As said, there are some issues in the execution due to how flowery it is, but yeah, that's why I linked the video. Otherwise, what you're doing is something that can only be done with literature and is a unique utilization of the medium.

Actually, this is a great chance to share something else. The greatest strength of literature over any other form of storytelling is the ability to immerse into a character. We can get the reader closer to their experience than in other mediums. This is why I think literature is a powerful tool for handling characters and concepts such as this.
 

Story_Marc

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I absolutely appreciate this, fam. I’ve been on RR for months now, and I thought of posting revised chapters here on SH.
Okay, this story has been flabbergasting me. I saw you... sort of changed the synopsis, so I tried to read. Repeatedly. I kept procrastinating on this since I was trying to figure out what is wrong or if there is anything I can suggest. It's confusing and it turns me off because, combined with the synopsis being confusing, I fear this work is an unfocused mess that just hops from event to event. Add in the title and that's the impression it gives off. I don't even know how anything in this opening is relevant to anything else in the story.

To note, if you have to explain why the scene is relevant, it means the writing failed to do its job.

Anyway, I hate what I'm about to say: I don't know how to edit this beyond the stuff I've already said to others, like starting with the actual protagonist. Maybe work on your prose for greater clarity? See the Sanderson video I linked for more on that. Otherwise, I'm just instantly turned off of this story and it doesn't even just doesn't seem like a case of it not suiting my tastes. The work failed to earn my trust. I don't feel like I'm in the hands of someone I can trust as a storyteller when I read it and thus I can't invest.

...I think that's maybe it. I get serious red flags about the actual storytelling from this opening.
 
D

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Okay, this story has been flabbergasting me. I saw you... sort of changed the synopsis, so I tried to read. Repeatedly. I kept procrastinating on this since I was trying to figure out what is wrong or if there is anything I can suggest. It's confusing and it turns me off because, combined with the synopsis being confusing, I fear this work is an unfocused mess that just hops from event to event. Add in the title and that's the impression it gives off. I don't even know how anything in this opening is relevant to anything else in the story.

To note, if you have to explain why the scene is relevant, it means the writing failed to do its job.

Anyway, I hate what I'm about to say: I don't know how to edit this beyond the stuff I've already said to others, like starting with the actual protagonist. Maybe work on your prose for greater clarity? See the Sanderson video I linked for more on that. Otherwise, I'm just instantly turned off of this story and it doesn't even just doesn't seem like a case of it not suiting my tastes. The work failed to earn my trust. I don't feel like I'm in the hands of someone I can trust as a storyteller when I read it and thus I can't invest.

...I think that's maybe it. I get serious red flags about the actual storytelling from this opening.
Well, I’m sorry to hear that. But really, it’s more of me throwing away so many info dumps and giving spotlight to those that were relevant. Here’s the thing about my revised chapters: they don’t tell or explain all that much, and it’s a rather slow burn. As you’ve probably seen, this book has 100+ chapters under its belt on RR. I used to tell more than showing, and as soon as one told me I had zero fate for my readers’ imagination, it changed how I viewed writing forever.

Yes, I’m aware of Sanderson’s seminars. But alas, we’re not on the same boat. For me, he’s a good example of having little to no faith for one’s readers. Some say his prose has no flavor, barely any subtext, but I did find some merits on his series. Not from his attempts at humor, but his straightforwardness. Yet I learned I couldn’t use that as a crutch for weak prose. And again, I can’t just spoonfeed my readers 24/7 like he does.

In all honesty, your post confused me more than even Sean Penn’s Bob Honey. I revised my chapters to give intertwined scenes more clarity. Multiple POVs aren’t for everyone, I know, but I intend to handle this beast as I continue. I do plan as I write, but a movie plays in my head whenever I type. But once more, I gave up trying to write a screenplay or slideshow—it’s not worth it. I’m dabbling with metaphors for now, and even writing info only to have my readers realize it was a character talking.

I would add a sighing onomatopoeia here, but no need. Out of all the feedback I’ve gotten, only one of them was helpful. And it wasn’t even like they understood next to nothing. It was real incite of my lead character’s traits, an overarching battle scene, and a huge info dump backstory that spanned 15 chapters. And I agreed to the faults on my part. Here, though? Sorry to say, but you didn’t even give me the bare minimum.
 
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Nhatduongg

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Is the first chapter present the prologue or the chapter 1? Either way, can you give me your thoughts about my practice piece? It's in my signature. Thanks.
 

Story_Marc

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Is the first chapter present the prologue or the chapter 1? Either way, can you give me your thoughts about my practice piece? It's in my signature. Thanks.
The first chapter is the prologue only. The first chapter read by the reader. Anyway, you can add it in. I'm a bit behind on giving feedback, though I'm on vacation from work next week, which is when I'm going to binge through feedback hard. I'm just also making sure I'm on top of my game with stuff for each person.
 

Story_Marc

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Well, I’m sorry to hear that. But really, it’s more of me throwing away so many info dumps and giving spotlight to those that were relevant. Here’s the thing about my revised chapters: they don’t tell or explain all that much, and it’s a rather slow burn. As you’ve probably seen, this book has 100+ chapters under its belt on RR. I used to tell more than showing, and as soon as one told me I had zero fate for my readers’ imagination, it changed how I viewed writing forever.

Yes, I’m aware of Sanderson’s seminars. But alas, we’re not on the same boat. For me, he’s a good example of having little to no faith for one’s readers. Some say his prose has no flavor, barely any subtext, but I did find some merits on his series. Not from his attempts at humor, but his straightforwardness. Yet I learned I couldn’t use that as a crutch for weak prose. And again, I can’t just spoonfeed my readers 24/7 like he does.

In all honesty, your post confused me more than even Sean Penn’s Bob Honey. I revised my chapters to give intertwined scenes more clarity. Multiple POVs aren’t for everyone, I know, but I intend to handle this beast as I continue. I do plan as I write, but a movie plays in my head whenever I type. But once more, I gave up trying to write a screenplay or slideshow—it’s not worth it. I’m dabbling with metaphors for now, and even writing info only to have my readers realize it was a character talking.

I would add a sighing onomatopoeia here, but no need. Out of all the feedback I’ve gotten, only one of them was helpful. And it wasn’t even like they understood next to nothing. It was real incite of my lead character’s traits, an overarching battle scene, and a huge info dump backstory that spanned 15 chapters. And I agreed to the faults on my part. Here, though? Sorry to say, but you didn’t even give me the bare minimum.



Do you truly wish to learn as an author? Okay. Here we go. Because giving you my impression of your work – confusing and frustrating – was the best I could do without going into... what I'm about to. Beyond that, your issues weren’t worth special attention and didn’t require more than what was already said. But since you want attention, I’ll give it to you. Here are some lessons I feel you need to grow as a writer. While my kid gloves are off.

Also, for anybody else, these are good lessons, though I’m being blunter than usual about it. This is the guiding philosophy to some of the stuff I look for and I keep in mind as an author, editor, and reader.

LESSON #1: ENTERTAINMENT IS A TRANSACTION

Welcome to the transactional marketplace! Here’s how things work here: the audience pays (with time and/or money) for that which entertains them. No entertainment, no audience. I wouldn’t read your work if I didn’t have an obligation to because of this thread. I considered big time putting you in the “I refuse to review” category because your writing is so terrible – more on that in the next lesson! But first, let’s get to the root of why I only ever read 1 chapter: because real readers will only read one chapter.


I’m going to quote from Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile.


“People are afraid to admit they’d dismiss a work of art instantaneously, whether it’s the first five pages of an unsolicited manuscript or the first five pages of Faulkner. But the truth is they do. When it’s a “classic,” most read on and finish the book to keep up pretext and not seem so presumptuous as to pass instant judgment on a great work. But they’ve secretly made up their mind after page 5, and 99 percent of the time, they’re not going to change it.”

The truth of the matter is that I only need the first couple of pages to understand something because if there are issues on the first page, chances are all the issues are going to remain because the writer didn’t view the issues as an issue. Let’s think of it with another art form: music. You only need to hear a little to be able to form an expectation of their skill level.

“No, it’s different with storytelling because you haven't seen the full thing—”

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Any setup you do should do double duty of being interesting and strong in its own right. If you can't handle something in the micro, the likelihood of being able to handle it in the macro is unlikely. This is why I keep telling people to focus on focusing on introducing character early on. It’s something people can attach to quickly and moves them through to everything else. Concept grabs, character keeps. and it provides the window into the world for the reader to get attached to and to care about everything else through. I have a video on this on the first page. about that.

“But I have 100+ chapters--”

IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW MANY CHAPTERS YOU HAVE WRITTEN! I don't care if you have 1 hundred chapters, 1 thousand chapters, 1 million chapters if I can't even read one. Why should I have faith in you for all of those – which demand more out of me – when you couldn’t do that much in that tiny space? I feel like I’m dealing with a con artist then. A con artist pulling an advanced fee fraud. "Aww, just invest in this, I promise it'll work out. Trust me -- I like what I came up with." We'll address the issue with this mentality in lesson 4.

Anyway, I wondered if it was just me, so I went to testing. We’ll revisit one test in a bit, but first, I asked a guest staying at my place. They were confused, feeling it was a disjointed mess that jumped from one scene to another without any connection between things. Maybe that wouldn’t happen if you applied some basic scene/sequel to things. On top of, you know, having a grasp on how sentences are formed. Or how indirect internal dialogue works. Which brings us to lesson two.


LESSON #2: GRAMMAR MATTERS!

“It’s a movie in my head!”

It’s not one in mine because your prose is poor. Let me give you a little science lesson that’s relevant to writing. I’m going to first quote a bit from The Science of Storytelling.

In order to tell the story of your life, your brain needs to conjure up a world for you to live inside, with all its colours and movements and objects and sounds. Just as characters in fiction exist in a reality that’s been actively created, so do we. But that’s not how it feels to be a living, conscious human. It feels as if we’re looking out of our skulls, observing reality directly and without impediment. But this is not the case. The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain.


This is how it works. You walk into a room. Your brain predicts what the scene should look and sound and feel like, then it generates a hallucination based on these predictions. It’s this hallucination that you experience as the world around you. It’s this hallucination you exist at the centre of, every minute of every day. You’ll never experience actual reality because you have no direct access to it.

So, why does that matter? We skip up to this:

The revelation that we experience the stories we read by building hallucinated models of them in our heads makes sense of many of the rules of grammar we were taught at school. For the neuroscientist Professor Benjamin Bergen, grammar acts like a film director, telling the brain what to model and when. He writes that grammar ‘appears to modulate what part of an evoked simulation someone is invited to focus on, the grain of detail with which the simulation is performed, or what perspective to perform that simulation from’.


According to Bergen, we start modelling words as soon as we start reading them. We don’t wait until we get to the end of the sentence. This means the order in which writers place their words matters. This is perhaps why transitive construction – Jane gave a Kitten to her Dad – is more effective than the ditransitive – Jane gave her Dad a kitten. Picturing Jane, then the Kitten, then her Dad mimics the real-world action that we, as readers, should be modelling. It means we’re mentally experiencing the scene in the correct sequence. Because writers are, in effect, generating neural movies in the minds of their readers, they should privilege word order that’s filmic, imagining how their reader’s neural camera will alight upon each component of a sentence.


For the same reason, active sentence construction – Jane kissed her Dad – is more effective than passive – Dad was kissed by Jane. Witnessing this in real life, Jane’s initial movement would draw our attention and then we’d watch the kiss play out. We wouldn’t be dumbly staring at Dad, waiting for something to happen. Active grammar means readers model the scene on the page in the same way that they’d model it if it happened in front of them. It makes for easier and more immersive reading.



Easier and immersive, aka the exact opposite of your reading. That’s why I referenced Sanderson. He himself notes he intentionally keeps himself out of things because Orwellian prose is designed to put the focus on the story instead of going “look at my beautiful prose!” And see the first page on my take on that stuff. Also, see the part on self-indulgence since I feel that’s relevant to your writing too. We’ll come back to that in Lesson 4 -- the most important lesson for all this.


Regardless, if your work is a movie, what I experienced was some director who has non-stop shaky cam and random jump cuts. This is why I often tell people about prose issues because I’m not even asking for top-of-the-line prose. I just want basic grammar so I can follow the story. If something is confusing, I’m moving on.

And with your whole “I want the reader to work” mentality, I’m all down for the reader working… IN THE RIGHT WAY! WITH THE RIGHT THINGS! If I need Matpat to come in and make a Literature Theory video to explain the basics of what’s going on in a chapter, I don’t feel like reading. This brings us to what works for slow burns and why trying to constantly explain away stuff will never, ever work.

As said, I tested your prose on others too, just to see if it wasn’t me. I don’t wish to copy every reaction, but I feel this one summarizes things well:
Story Marc — Yesterday at 10:42 PM

Mind if I use you for a quick experiment? It's to help test my theory.

[10:43 PM]

I mostly want to see how far into reading something you can get. You're free to stop whenever you want.



deathpigeon — Yesterday at 10:44 PM

go ahead.



Story Marc — Yesterday at 10:44 PM

[I give the link]

[10:44 PM]

Try to make it through the prologue



deathpigeon — Yesterday at 10:47 PM

Brave, they were.

................this was on thin ice with "mega annum", but we're not sure if we want to continue after this.

"brave, they were." as a full sentence is upsetting.



Story Marc — Yesterday at 10:48 PM

LMAO! XDD

[10:49 PM]

To note, I'm making an argument. That if you can't pull off 1 chapter, people aren't going to want to read 100 chapters.

[10:49 PM]

Because it doesn't inspire confidence in the writer’s ability



deathpigeon — Yesterday at 10:49 PM

......we've just realized we haven't made it through the synopsis.



Story Marc — Yesterday at 10:49 PM

...LMFAO!!!! XDDD

[10:49 PM]

Yeah, I spoke about that to them already.

[10:49 PM]

Oh, please, go to the prologue.



deathpigeon — Yesterday at 10:52 PM

"Puttupi (புதுப்பி)" ....pretty sure the tamil writing there is nonsense.

[10:52 PM]

like, it doesn't seem to say puttupi.

[10:54 PM]

like, that says putupapi, we think.

[10:54 PM]

...are we allowed to skip the prologue? we don't want to read all this not particularly good prose.



Story Marc — Yesterday at 11:02 PM

Yes, you may skip

[11:03 PM]

To note, the fact you would've given up at the prologue makes my point, but you can try another chapter



deathpigeon — Yesterday at 11:03 PM

The black ink dwellbeast: rarer, more dangerous than other species.

...................................



Story Marc — Yesterday at 11:04 PM

Hm?



deathpigeon — Yesterday at 11:04 PM

like. why is that how the chapter starts?

we really don't want to read more of this.



Story Marc — Yesterday at 11:10 PM

Does it feel confusing to read?



deathpigeon — Yesterday at 11:11 PM

it's not even confusing. it's just actively difficult to read.

So yeah. How do you expect to get readers when you fail to engage with them? And speaking of that, let’s bounce over to this important thing to keep in mind:


LESSON #3: PEOPLE FEEL FIRST, THINK SECOND
You have to make the reader FEEL something first and foremost before they think about anything! That’s why I insist on starting narrow with a central character and expanding out slowly – which is a tip so many different fantasy writers and so on insist on too. You have to make the setup interesting in its own right AND setup. Explaining to someone why they’re wrong for feeling that way doesn’t convince them shit. It just makes them want nothing to do with you or your work.

I’ll cite a book series I read that has… let me count… 22 books in it! Here’s what the big story is all about:

“Imagine a multiverse of countless worlds, parallel Earths like an endless string of pearls in a vast and infinite night. Some of these worlds look just like ours — close enough you might not even realize you’ve slipped sideways until it’s too late — and others are bizarre, twisted, deadly. Some are battlegrounds. This is the continuity of the First Story, and four of Schaefer’s series (two of them now complete, two ongoing) take place here.”


It does A LOT of setup. There’s an entire 4 book series which was setup for things. And you know what it also did? IT STARTED NARROW! I don’t care about any of that on its own. I just was looking for a caper novel and I read this description for the 1st book in the series:

“Nobody knows the seedy underbelly of Las Vegas like Daniel Faust, a sorcerer for hire and ex-gangster who uses black magic and bullets to solve his clients' problems. When an old man comes seeking vengeance for his murdered granddaughter, what looks like a simple job quickly spirals out of control.



Soon Daniel stands in the crossfire between a murderous porn director; a corrupt cop with a quick trigger finger; and his own former employer, a racket boss who isn't entirely human. Then there's Caitlin: brilliant, beautiful, and the lethal right hand of a demon prince.



A man named Faust should know what happens when you rub shoulders with demons. Still Daniel can't resist being drawn to Caitlin's flame as they race to unlock the secret of the Etruscan Box, a relic that people all over town are dying -- and killing -- to get their hands on. As the bodies drop and the double-crosses pile up, Daniel will need every shred of his wits, courage and sheer ruthlessness just to survive.

Daniel Faust knew he was standing with one foot over the brink of hell. He's about to find out just how far he can fall.”

And how does the first chapter start? Like this:


“I know what you are,” the old man said. The tremor in his voice told me he wasn’t so sure. He’d introduced himself as Jud, Jud Pankow from Minnesota. He was a long way from home.

We sat in a booth in the back of Tiki Pete’s, a seedy diner four blocks east of the Vegas Strip. I doubted the place would survive a health inspection, but the grimy windows and the backwater street kept the tourist traffic at bay. Besides, I didn’t come here for the food.

“Then you know I’m not a private investigator,” I told him, “not a licensed one, anyway.”

He gripped a coffee-stained manila folder in his thick farmer’s hands and clenched his jaw. I sipped my mai tai.

“He killed my little girl, Mr. Faust. He murdered her and he threw her away like a piece of garbage. I don’t need any private eye to tell me that.”

“The police think otherwise. You want me to prove them wrong?”

“I don’t care what anybody thinks,” Jud said, “and nothing’s going to bring my baby back, proof or no proof. I know that.”

“So what do you want from me?”

His rheumy eyes flooded with a pain I couldn’t imagine. The folder crinkled in his grip as he whispered just loud enough for me to hear, “I want him punished.”



This isn’t some explosive opening or anything. It’s nothing grand either. It just delivers on the genre goods while giving me something to hook onto right away that the synopsis promised me (the emotional experience I was looking for as a reader) and I’ve grown to see the much bigger world and care about others because I gradually got to them. Hell, as my friends can attest to, I’ve geeked out over the possibility of who is The Paladin in The Chosen One myth or everything going on with The Enemy or how Harmony got a sister series, with Harmony being my favorite character from Daniel’s book 2 through 4, while she was his lawful rival. And how hyped I was for their inevitable meeting again and it made Wisdom’s Grave Book 2 all the more anticipated. Or even me caring about little things like Daniel Faust’s missing car. The payoff to where the car was was great, built up across multiple books, but I cared because the author made me laugh in the immediate with Daniel’s constant bitching about it and insistence that Harmony stole his car. This is what proper setup is like.

And if you look at most successful stories, they function like this. That’s the key to big serials. You start narrow, don’t overwhelm or confuse at the start, and drip feed people information as it goes on, as you make them want the info.

Now here’s the lesson you need most of all because I’ve seen how you keep responding to other people.

Also, you know what? I want you to understand this about storytelling and skill with it:

“Good stories are felt, not understood. Just as a musician plays an instrument, a storyteller plays the emotions of their audience. They lead their audience through a series of ups and downs, using the principles of engagement to keep their audience focused and moving along an emotional journey through the story.

To be a good storyteller means to be good at controlling and directing the emotions of your audience, preferably without the audience realizing they’re being manipulated. A good story feels natural, unforced, and as though it were something which is really happening in the hearts and minds of the people experiencing it.”

You are not controlling and directing the emotions. Unless feeling frustrated is what you want of the audience, at which case… well, mission accomplished? I’m not sure how that gets people to read the remaining chapters though.

That brings to the most important thing to say to you. The most important lesson.


LESSON #4: THE FIRST LAW OF WRITING FOR STRANGERS

You keep talking about this and that with your readers, but here’s the thing I’m noticed: you have almost no readers. You barely have any views and, if you keep going the course you are, nothing will ever change. The reason why you lack them is the same reason you react as you have to me and others when you face criticism: you don’t care about the audience’s experience. Or at least that’s how you come off. You only care about your feelings and the attention you want from others. That brings us to the first law of writing for strangers! What you absolutely fail at so far:

1. You Must Write for an Audience, Not Just Yourself

This is the big one. And it’s also the biggest hurdle for some writers.


Many writers fear that if they try to write for an audience they’ll end up “pandering” or “chasing the market.” Indeed, both of those are bad, because the audience doesn’t want to control your narrative. They want you to control their experience. They want you to set, upset, and reset their expectations. They’ll never admit it, but they want you to masterfully manipulate their emotional experience every step of the way. Figuring out how to do that is the number one goal for any writer.


If you feel you have to choose between writing for an audience and writing from the heart, then you’re in big trouble, because to become a great writer, the two must be the same thing.


In the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola turned out a remarkable string of masterpieces (The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather: Part II, Apocalypse Now) because he respected himself and his public at the same time. He wasn’t chasing an audience but was skillfully enticing them to chase after him. He didn’t give his audience exactly what they wanted, but he did tune into their wavelength to find stories that resonated with them.


But by the time Coppola got to the nineties, he had a total disconnect: He gave several interviews in which he explained that his goal was to make “one for them” followed by “one for me.” But it was kind of hard to tell which was which, because none of his movies from that period (The Godfather: Part III, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Rainmaker, Jack) were any good. As soon as you make the distinction, you’ve sabotaged yourself.


Now, of course, you might be thinking, Don’t audiences get it wrong all the time? Don’t they embrace crap? Why should I trust their taste more than my own? But this sort of antagonistic thinking will cripple your artistic growth. Do audiences get browbeaten into consuming and even “liking” bad stories? Yes, but in most cases they feel guilty about it before too long. Ultimately, they know a truly great story when they see it, and those are the stories that stay with them. That’s the story you want to write.




“But this worked in—” NOBODY CARES! You're not them! Chances are there's stuff you're missing they did. Regardless, see lesson one again! Then come back and read this at the start of these laws for writing for strangers.



You have to ask yourself why you’re doing this. If you’re only doing it to please yourself, then you’re guaranteed to succeed and guaranteed to fail. I promise that you will eventually satisfy yourself, but your end product will never satisfy anybody else. You may think you’re capable of holding yourself to a high standard, but that almost certainly isn’t true.

The problem is that you already know how to identify with yourself, so achieving self-satisfaction will be way too easy. What you don’t know how to do is make strangers identify with the heroes you create. That’s much harder, and a much more ambitious goal.

When you look at your manuscript, you see a shiny gem that you lovingly cut and polished. Strangers just see a pile of paper. Eventually, you realize it’s not that gratifying to say, “I love my shiny gem!” but it’s very gratifying to say, “A stranger loves my pile of paper!” The first is easy to achieve, and therefore worthless. The second is extremely difficult, which makes it priceless.


I’ve been in your shoes before where I failed at getting stuff across because I had plans for later. I would push people to keep reading, that they’d understand when they got to this part! Their emotions on everything leading there would change! Guess what? They didn’t! And my takeaway wasn’t to blame them. I instead asked myself “What can I do to make what’s going on more clear? To make the experience better for them while still doing what I wish to?”

And guess what happened after I started thinking that way? I failed! Again! But I failed only in small ways while improving in others. So I kept trying and trying and got it to a point where I realized I needed to make every point stuff that my intended audience understood and enjoyed immediately. And that they’d WANT to continue.

I think this is what you lack. You see someone tell you your stuff is confusing (multiple people, in fact) and you don’t think about how you could make it easier for them. You instead become antagonistic towards the reader for not feeling what you want them to. You failed at communication.

Anyway, this is a lengthy response. This is me putting effort into it more. Why didn’t I do this before? One, it’s an overwhelming amount of info. I could go into much, much more if I wished. For instance, when it comes to prose, I could talk about the rhythm of a sentence and how each punctuation mark – or lack thereof – can impact the experience of it. The double dashes there are a perfect example. Or how this sentence is part of a combination which goes long, short, long.

Or I could bring up euphonics and how different sounds and presentation of them can impact emotions differently. I could even go over rhetorical terminology – examples including alliteration, polyptoton, or synaesthesia – and the many ways I could use those. But I decided against any of that.

I decided against it because it depends on what someone is ready for and needs to/wishes to know ,pre about. Your writing comes across as someone who needs to know that it’s frustrating to read, so all you need to know is that you need to simplify it first to make more accessible. Work on your grammar and pick a better starting point to open on. How you do that is up to you.

And there, that’s pretty much all I have left to say. I owe everybody else more attention since I can actually read what they wrote without it feeling like an obligation. If you think I'm wrong, show me by getting tons of readers who will argue for your work instead of telling me about what you're trying to do and why it'll work. AKA "Show, Don't Tell."

...Which everything on that is another lesson onto itself, how "show, don't tell" is advice given to beginners because they tend to tell far too much. Growth as a writer involves understanding how to balance between the two -- when to show, when to tell. I have a whole thing on why I think those words are bad for conveying what the thing means (evoking vs. informing are better IMO) but I'm just... tired of typing. You got your lesson, take it, leave it, be disappointed in it, be angry, whatever. If you're angry, prove me wrong by staying the course and getting the audience you believe will love your work. Then come rub it in my face that I was wrong or whatever. Personally, I wish I was wrong since I'd like to see everybody succeed, but I can recognize when something is just fundamentally flawed from the ground up and my only thoughts are "destroy this entire opening chapter."
 
Last edited:

Candescence

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You mind taking a look at my story's first chapter? I feel I did something right in focusing on establishing the main characters first and foremost, even if I had to jump between their perspectives in the middle of the actual chapter. I wanted to establish who they were and enough of their core personalities to get a reader invested to know more. (And no, I'm not starting the first chapter with lewd material, either, that's a bit much.) But I'd need outside input to know if I actually succeeded or not, so, yeah.

 
D

Deleted member 93348

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Do you truly wish to learn as an author? Okay. Here we go. Because giving you my impression of your work – confusing and frustrating – was the best I could do without going into... what I'm about to. Beyond that, your issues weren’t worth special attention and didn’t require more than what was already said. But since you want attention, I’ll give it to you. Here are some lessons I feel you need to grow as a writer. While my kid gloves are off.

Also, for anybody else, these are good lessons, though I’m being blunter than usual about it. This is the guiding philosophy to some of the stuff I look for and I keep in mind as an author, editor, and reader.

LESSON #1: ENTERTAINMENT IS A TRANSACTION

Welcome to the transactional marketplace! Here’s how things work here: the audience pays (with time and/or money) for that which entertains them. No entertainment, no audience. I wouldn’t read your work if I didn’t have an obligation to because of this thread. I considered big time putting you in the “I refuse to review” category because your writing is so terrible – more on that in the next lesson! But first, let’s get to the root of why I only ever read 1 chapter: because real readers will only read one chapter.


I’m going to quote from Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile.




The truth of the matter is that I only need the first couple of pages to understand something because if there are issues on the first page, chances are all the issues are going to remain because the writer didn’t view the issues as an issue. Let’s think of it with another art form: music. You only need to hear a little to be able to form an expectation of their skill level.

“No, it’s different with storytelling because you haven't seen the full thing—”

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Any setup you do should do double duty of being interesting and strong in its own right. If you can't handle something in the micro, the likelihood of being able to handle it in the macro is unlikely. This is why I keep telling people to focus on focusing on introducing character early on. It’s something people can attach to quickly and moves them through to everything else. Concept grabs, character keeps. and it provides the window into the world for the reader to get attached to and to care about everything else through. I have a video on this on the first page. about that.

“But I have 100+ chapters--”

IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW MANY CHAPTERS YOU HAVE WRITTEN! I don't care if you have 1 hundred chapters, 1 thousand chapters, 1 million chapters if I can't even read one. Why should I have faith in you for all of those – which demand more out of me – when you couldn’t do that much in that tiny space? I feel like I’m dealing with a con artist then. A con artist pulling an advanced fee fraud. "Aww, just invest in this, I promise it'll work out. Trust me -- I like what I came up with." We'll address the issue with this mentality in lesson 4.

Anyway, I wondered if it was just me, so I went to testing. We’ll revisit one test in a bit, but first, I asked a guest staying at my place. They were confused, feeling it was a disjointed mess that jumped from one scene to another without any connection between things. Maybe that wouldn’t happen if you applied some basic scene/sequel to things. On top of, you know, having a grasp on how sentences are formed. Or how indirect internal dialogue works. Which brings us to lesson two.


LESSON #2: GRAMMAR MATTERS!

“It’s a movie in my head!”

It’s not one in mine because your prose is poor. Let me give you a little science lesson that’s relevant to writing. I’m going to first quote a bit from The Science of Storytelling.



So, why does that matter? We skip up to this:





Easier and immersive, aka the exact opposite of your reading. That’s why I referenced Sanderson. He himself notes he intentionally keeps himself out of things because Orwellian prose is designed to put the focus on the story instead of going “look at my beautiful prose!” And see the first page on my take on that stuff. Also, see the part on self-indulgence since I feel that’s relevant to your writing too. We’ll come back to that in Lesson 4 -- the most important lesson for all this.


Regardless, if your work is a movie, what I experienced was some director who has non-stop shaky cam and random jump cuts. This is why I often tell people about prose issues because I’m not even asking for top-of-the-line prose. I just want basic grammar so I can follow the story. If something is confusing, I’m moving on.

And with your whole “I want the reader to work” mentality, I’m all down for the reader working… IN THE RIGHT WAY! WITH THE RIGHT THINGS! If I need Matpat to come in and make a Literature Theory video to explain the basics of what’s going on in a chapter, I don’t feel like reading. This brings us to what works for slow burns and why trying to constantly explain away stuff will never, ever work.

As said, I tested your prose on others too, just to see if it wasn’t me. I don’t wish to copy every reaction, but I feel this one summarizes things well:


So yeah. How do you expect to get readers when you fail to engage with them? And speaking of that, let’s bounce over to this important thing to keep in mind:


LESSON #3: PEOPLE FEEL FIRST, THINK SECOND
You have to make the reader FEEL something first and foremost before they think about anything! That’s why I insist on starting narrow with a central character and expanding out slowly – which is a tip so many different fantasy writers and so on insist on too. You have to make the setup interesting in its own right AND setup. Explaining to someone why they’re wrong for feeling that way doesn’t convince them shit. It just makes them want nothing to do with you or your work.

I’ll cite a book series I read that has… let me count… 22 books in it! Here’s what the big story is all about:




It does A LOT of setup. There’s an entire 4 book series which was setup for things. And you know what it also did? IT STARTED NARROW! I don’t care about any of that on its own. I just was looking for a caper novel and I read this description for the 1st book in the series:



Daniel Faust knew he was standing with one foot over the brink of hell. He's about to find out just how far he can fall.”

And how does the first chapter start? Like this:






This isn’t some explosive opening or anything. It’s nothing grand either. It just delivers on the genre goods while giving me something to hook onto right away that the synopsis promised me (the emotional experience I was looking for as a reader) and I’ve grown to see the much bigger world and care about others because I gradually got to them. Hell, as my friends can attest to, I’ve geeked out over the possibility of who is The Paladin in The Chosen One myth or everything going on with The Enemy or how Harmony got a sister series, with Harmony being my favorite character from Daniel’s book 2 through 4, while she was his lawful rival. And how hyped I was for their inevitable meeting again and it made Wisdom’s Grave Book 2 all the more anticipated. Or even me caring about little things like Daniel Faust’s missing car. The payoff to where the car was was great, built up across multiple books, but I cared because the author made me laugh in the immediate with Daniel’s constant bitching about it and insistence that Harmony stole his car. This is what proper setup is like.

And if you look at most successful stories, they function like this. That’s the key to big serials. You start narrow, don’t overwhelm or confuse at the start, and drip feed people information as it goes on, as you make them want the info.

Now here’s the lesson you need most of all because I’ve seen how you keep responding to other people.

Also, you know what? I want you to understand this about storytelling and skill with it:


“Good stories are felt, not understood. Just as a musician plays an instrument, a storyteller plays the emotions of their audience. They lead their audience through a series of ups and downs, using the principles of engagement to keep their audience focused and moving along an emotional journey through the story.

To be a good storyteller means to be good at controlling and directing the emotions of your audience, preferably without the audience realizing they’re being manipulated. A good story feels natural, unforced, and as though it were something which is really happening in the hearts and minds of the people experiencing it.”



You are not controlling and directing the emotions. Unless feeling frustrated is what you want of the audience, at which case… well, mission accomplished? I’m not sure how that gets people to read the remaining chapters though.

That brings to the most important thing to say to you. The most important lesson.


LESSON #4: THE FIRST LAW OF WRITING FOR STRANGERS

You keep talking about this and that with your readers, but here’s the thing I’m noticed: you have almost no readers. You barely have any views and, if you keep going the course you are, nothing will ever change. The reason why you lack them is the same reason you react as you have to me and others when you face criticism: you don’t care about the audience’s experience. Or at least that’s how you come off. You only care about your feelings and the attention you want from others. That brings us to the first law of writing for strangers! What you absolutely fail at so far:




I’ve been in your shoes before where I failed at getting stuff across because I had plans for later. I would push people to keep reading, that they’d understand when they got to this part! Their emotions on everything leading there would change! Guess what? They didn’t! And my takeaway wasn’t to blame them. I instead asked myself “What can I do to make what’s going on more clear? To make the experience better for them while still doing what I wish to?”

And guess what happened after I started thinking that way? I failed! Again! But I failed only in small ways while improving in others. So I kept trying and trying and got it to a point where I realized I needed to make every point stuff that my intended audience understood and enjoyed immediately. And that they’d WANT to continue.

I think this is what you lack. You see someone tell you your stuff is confusing (multiple people, in fact) and you don’t think about how you could make it easier for them. You instead become antagonistic towards the reader for not feeling what you want them to. You failed at communication.

Anyway, this is a lengthy response. This is me putting effort into it more. Why didn’t I do this before? One, it’s an overwhelming amount of info. I could go into much, much more if I wished. For instance, when it comes to prose, I could talk about the rhythm of a sentence and how each punctuation mark – or lack thereof – can impact the experience of it. The double dashes there are a perfect example. Or how this sentence is part of a combination which goes long, short, long.

Or I could bring up euphonics and how different sounds and presentation of them can impact emotions differently. I could even go over rhetorical terminology – examples including alliteration, polyptoton, or synaesthesia – and the many ways I could use those. But I decided against any of that.

I decided against it because it depends on what someone is ready for and needs to/wishes to know ,pre about. Your writing comes across as someone who needs to know that it’s frustrating to read, so all you need to know is that you need to simplify it first to make more accessible. Work on your grammar and pick a better starting point to open on. How you do that is up to you.

And there, that’s pretty much all I have left to say. I owe everybody else more attention since I can actually read what they wrote without it feeling like an obligation. If you think I'm wrong, show me by getting tons of readers who will argue for your work instead of telling me about what you're trying to do and why it'll work. AKA "Show, Don't Tell."

...Which everything on that is another lesson onto itself, how "show, don't tell" is advice given to beginners because they tend to tell far too much. Growth as a writer involves understanding how to balance between the two -- when to show, when to tell. I have a whole thing on why I think those words are bad for conveying what the thing means (evoking vs. informing are better IMO) but I'm just... tired of typing. You got your lesson, take it, leave it, be disappointed in it, be angry, whatever. If you're angry, prove me wrong by staying the course and getting the audience you believe will love your work. Then come rub it in my face that I was wrong or whatever. Personally, I wish I was wrong since I'd like to see everybody succeed, but I can recognize when something is just fundamentally flawed from the ground up and my only thoughts are "destroy this entire opening chapter."
Sir, you’ve hurt my feelings. I outta arrest you right now for giving the most well-thought out critique given to me in a lifetime. You hear me? Right now! (insert cry emoji here).

For real though, I now “see the light,” if that makes sense. Let’s just say that my prose used to be a lot like Sanderson’s. Straight to the point, blunt, not even remotely poetic. One day, a fellow reviewer on RR considered said prose “dry” but liked the opening. I stopped being flowery and self-indulgent in the coming chapters, yet they didn’t like that? I was confused, but somehow, I took that to heart and dabbled with nonsensical schlock. I see now that my coming chapters are easier to read, albeit in need of typo and grammar checking.

So yes, you gave me the greatest point I’ve read in a while. And since that one reviewer had 2 followers even after five months, perhaps I followed the “wrong path” in prose. They told me passive voice was “always bad,” using the word “had” should be omitted 24/7, and whatnot. I agreed with omitting some glue words, but still. No one wants to see a comma in short sentences every time, and I see that now. This is the light you’ve shown me.

I’m no poet, and I’m no Voltaire no matter what star I wish upon. You see that? That’s the extent of my “poetry.” Imagine that but for an entire opening. It’s even divisive because none of the other chapters are like this. I’m no Hemingway either, because that guy’s the bluntest writer I’ve ever known. It ain’t gonna mix well with whackass faux-flowery sentences that don’t even flow well.

tl;dr You’ve told me the same things my Discord told me: the opening is bad despite the improvement as it goes on. But it seems my heart wasn’t in the right place, so I secretly scoffed at them.

As a firm believer of reparations, here’s the shortest synopsis I cooked up:

Haruto, the duel-weilding archmage, had slain another foul beast on the cobblestone steps of Vetus. The next day, his family of three set out to prove that heroes lived on. But within hours on the asphalt roads of the capital, he longer believed in a “City of Gods,” lest he’d defeat the grinning devil who tormented his family. Yet the other family of three waved at them in smiles. Had they known something even an archmage hadn’t? Haruto refused to back down, believing the world of Parallaxis revolved around him.
I still feel it’s crap to a T, but it does cram everything you need to know. So I have a better idea with the prologue: just start with his family of three! It’s not like most people will expect them to be on the next chapter. Either that, or I’ll clarify that the prologue starts with a god reading a story within a story.

And yes, I will info dump (to an extent). I’ll shove it up their throats so deep, it’ll come out the other end. I might delete that cringe analogy later on. Sorry.

P.S. Puttupi’s name means “revamp” or “update” in Tamil, and that’s intentional. I do this for every name I write, even with Latin-based ones.

P.S.2. I don’t write for fame or more readers. So your Saitama meme is so perfect, lol. My hobby, my choice. But reader’s eyes matter, too.

P.S.3. Fuck gerund words from now on. I’ll go with “X threw the frisbee, and Y ran further away from the field. The crowd cheered from their seats.” instead of “X threw the frisbee, making Y run further away for a decisively menacing catch that raced the hearts of many a crowd.”

P.S.4. Fuck Grammarly for giving me a lower readability score when using names on every paragraph. When Jimmy or Bob says something, I will emphasize that shit to death.

P.S.5. I now know the culprit to all my failings: believing an AI can be trusted on readability. Or better yet, believing that a readability score of 67 is “bad” in every way. Tell that to Mother of Learning’s first chapter, one of my all-time favorite fantasy novels. For real, I love it so much.
 
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Jailbreak571

Former CEO of Kamazon. Active lurker
Joined
Nov 17, 2021
Messages
370
Points
133
P.S.4. Fuck Grammarly for giving me a lower readability score when using names on every paragraph. When Jimmy or Bob says something, I will emphasize that shit to death.
...
I hope I'm not intruding the thread for this but Grammarly is only good at formal speeches like reports, presentations, and basically everything that is like that. Not saying that you should not use Grammarly, I'm just saying that you should not follow everything that Grammarly says.
 

Story_Marc

Share your fun!
Joined
Jul 23, 2022
Messages
365
Points
108
I'll add in more later, but it helps to use an AI that's designed for fiction writers. I recommend Autocrit. There's a lot I can say on how to use it, plus responses I can give to build on all said, I'm just tired. Long day at work.
Sir, you’ve hurt my feelings. I outta arrest you right now for giving the most well-thought out critique given to me in a lifetime. You hear me? Right now! (insert cry emoji here).

For real though, I now “see the light,” if that makes sense. Let’s just say that my prose used to be a lot like Sanderson’s. Straight to the point, blunt, not even remotely poetic. One day, a fellow reviewer on RR considered said prose “dry” but liked the opening. I stopped being flowery and self-indulgent in the coming chapters, yet they didn’t like that? I was confused, but somehow, I took that to heart and dabbled with nonsensical schlock. I see now that my coming chapters are easier to read, albeit in need of typo and grammar checking.

So yes, you gave me the greatest point I’ve read in a while. And since that one reviewer had 2 followers even after five months, perhaps I followed the “wrong path” in prose. They told me passive voice was “always bad,” using the word “had” should be omitted 24/7, and whatnot. I agreed with omitting some glue words, but still. No one wants to see a comma in short sentences every time, and I see that now. This is the light you’ve shown me.

I’m no poet, and I’m no Voltaire no matter what star I wish upon. You see that? That’s the extent of my “poetry.” Imagine that but for an entire opening. It’s even divisive because none of the other chapters are like this. I’m no Hemingway either, because that guy’s the bluntest writer I’ve ever known. It ain’t gonna mix well with whackass faux-flowery sentences that don’t even flow well.

tl;dr You’ve told me the same things my Discord told me: the opening is bad despite the improvement as it goes on. But it seems my heart wasn’t in the right place, so I secretly scoffed at them.

As a firm believer of reparations, here’s the shortest synopsis I cooked up:


I still feel it’s crap to a T, but it does cram everything you need to know. So I have a better idea with the prologue: just start with his family of three! It’s not like most people will expect them to be on the next chapter. Either that, or I’ll clarify that the prologue starts with a god reading a story within a story.

And yes, I will info dump (to an extent). I’ll shove it up their throats so deep, it’ll come out the other end. I might delete that cringe analogy later on. Sorry.

P.S. Puttupi’s name means “revamp” or “update” in Tamil, and that’s intentional. I do this for every name I write, even with Latin-based ones.

P.S.2. I don’t write for fame or more readers. So your Saitama meme is so perfect, lol. My hobby, my choice. But reader’s eyes matter, too.

P.S.3. Fuck gerund words from now on. I’ll go with “X threw the frisbee, and Y ran further away from the field. The crowd cheered from their seats.” instead of “X threw the frisbee, making Y run further away for a decisively menacing catch that raced the hearts of many a crowd.”

P.S.4. Fuck Grammarly for giving me a lower readability score when using names on every paragraph. When Jimmy or Bob says something, I will emphasize that shit to death.

P.S.5. I now know the culprit to all my failings: believing an AI can be trusted on readability. Or better yet, believing that a readability score of 67 is “bad” in every way. Tell that to Mother of Learning’s first chapter, one of my all-time favorite fantasy novels. For real, I love it so much.
Oh yeah, to note, I have much more I'm going to add to follow up. Stuff I just think is good to hear. Again, I'm just tired at the second.
 
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