Minaris' Free First-Chapter Review/Feedback Thread

ObsequiumMinaris

New member
Joined
Nov 7, 2022
Messages
16
Points
3
Let's get this ball rolling, shall we?

Pleased to meet you, I go by Minaris. I have been writing on FFN for several years now and recently self-published my first original story over on Amazon, with two more in the works as of the time of this writing, and hopefully many more to come afterwards. I have also helped other authors over the years - I currently have around 80 reviews published on various stories over on FFN, and I am assisting several friends of mine with their own stories, providing feedback whenever they ask for my help. All this is to say that I've given feedback before, and it's generally been very well-received.

Now that my boring qualifications are out of the way, I'll get to what you're really here for - I will read and provide feedback on your first chapter, completely free of charge, no strings attached.

"Why should I have you read and critique my story?" you may ask.

That's a fair question. My answer is this: Because good feedback is hard to come by, and I pride myself on providing good feedback. I will not be rude or mean or anything like that, either - we're all here to learn and get better. My job as a reviewer is to lift you up, not put you down. By the same token, if there's something I think could use some improvement or adjustment, then yes, I will mention it along with possibly a suggestion for what can be done to work on it. I was once a beginning author, myself - I know what it's like to desperately want feedback, and yet be unable to ask for it out of fear of having my work just torn to shreds before my eyes. You have my word that I will not be that kind of reviewer. I'm here to help you, not hurt you.

Writing is hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it. My job is to make it easier for everyone who so desires my help by being as supportive as possible, but also to make sure they're improving as a writer, too. I am not going to just heap praise on your story, but at the same time, I'm not going to just rip it to pieces, either. Good constructive criticism is a two-part process - it is both insightful and supportive. It's a two-way street, basically.

Just as well, writing is not a zero-sum game. One person's success does not take away my success, or anyone else's for that matter. it does not help anyone to just rip into someone else's work without mercy. With that in mind, the best and most logical thing to do is to help each other out however we can. This is my way of doing that. In layman's terms: If you want help, I'm here for you.

"What do you get out of this, anyway?" you're probably wondering. "Why volunteer to help a bunch of random strangers for free?"

Aside from the warm and fuzzy feeling that I'm helping a fellow author out, you mean? Well, I get to read more, which is always a plus. I also get to learn more about writing myself by explaining it to other people - after all, the best way to learn something is to teach someone else how to do it. And, admittedly, if I'm trying to grow my brand as a writer and get my name out there and hopefully sell some more of my books, this is a good way to do it. But even if I don't end up selling more books, the knowledge that I'm helping people out is more than enough for me.

"Okay, I'm sold. How is this going to work?"

Drop a link to your story's first chapter in this thread and I will take a look at it and provide feedback as soon as I am able. Fair warning - I work a full-time job and also have my own slew of stories that demand my attention like a baby screaming for a diaper change, not to mention other hobbies of my own. But I will get to your story in time, count on it. It might be later in the night, or maybe at a later day in the week, but I will get to it. And if you've posted here and I haven't gotten to it after a while, by all means, please send me a message either here or on FFN kindly - emphasis on kindly, please - asking me to take a look, and I will. Odds are, I'm at work/working on my own stories/otherwise indisposed by something else, and could use a reminder that I need to take a look at your story.

"What kind of feedback will you give me?"

If you're looking for purely grammar-related feedback, you're probably in the wrong thread, because I go through life following the PVC Rule - that is, if it reads like it was written by a Pirate, a Viking, or a Caveman, then it's probably wrong, unless the character in question happens to actually be a pirate, a viking, or a caveman. That being said, I will certainly do my best if that's what you're looking for, but my areas of expertise generally lie elsewhere. What I can provide in terms of feedback, or at least what I'm most confident at providing feedback in, is everything else - plot, prose, characterization, how your story simply feels to read, etc. All the good stuff, basically.

"Why only the first chapter?"

Because I'm unfortunately a very busy man with a very busy life. Much as I would love to read your entire story and provide an in-depth review of the whole thing, I simply do not have the time for it. Limiting my feedback to your first chapter is unfortunately necessary if I want to help the most people I can. That being said, if there's a specific other chapter of your story you'd like me to look at that isn't the first, by all means, post it here with a request for me to look at it, and I will, so long as it's just the one chapter. At least for now, please do not post multi-chapter requests.

"Are there any stories you won't read?"

There are stories/genres I'm not particularly fond of, obviously, but I'm willing to look past my own tastes if it means helping someone else out. I am not much one for smut, for example, but if you have a smut story you'd like feedback on, then I'll give it a shot, and I'll do my best to set aside my own taste and be as impartial and helpful as possible. That being said, I'd obviously appreciate not being inundated with such requests, but if it happens, well, I made the thread and the offer of no-strings-attached feedback, so that just means I did it to myself, lol.

Now then, that's my overly long sales pitch done. If you're at all interested in some free feedback, please post your story here, and I will get to it as soon as I am able. Thank you, and I look forward to seeing what you've been working on.
 

DecolonialBlack

Active member
Joined
May 9, 2020
Messages
3
Points
43
Hello there and thank you for being willing to provide feedback on folks' stories. Here's mines, By Any Magical Means Necessary. It's a near future science fantasy. I would love feedback around the plotting, keeping your interest, and fiction-believability since it's a "real world" story.
By Any Magical Means Necessary
 

ObsequiumMinaris

New member
Joined
Nov 7, 2022
Messages
16
Points
3
Hello there and thank you for being willing to provide feedback on folks' stories. Here's mines, By Any Magical Means Necessary. It's a near future science fantasy. I would love feedback around the plotting, keeping your interest, and fiction-believability since it's a "real world" story.
By Any Magical Means Necessary
Thank you for the story!

Alright, so, to begin with - I like the newspaper headlines to open the story. It helps set the stage without being overbearing. It's a good way to do worldbuilding right at the start without having to get too deep into the nitty-gritty of things and just dump a bunch of lore on the reader.

As for the story itself, the first thing that jumps out to me is the MC identifying the country in the story as fascist. Immediately, that had my attention, in the what's-so-fascist-about-it-I'd-like-to-know-more kind of way. We have the MC identifying the country as fascist, but at the same time, there's a protest going on, one that we learn later they had a permit for. Sure, the police adjust the permit so it no longer applies to the protestors, which is definitely scummy, but at the same time, this seems almost a little tame for a fascist government, you know? If you wanted to really portray them as evil, you might want to have the protest be completely unsanctioned but still extremely peaceful, and done in complete defiance of the government. In that case, their protest might be illegal, but they're not actually hurting anyone, so there'd be no reason for the police to crack down that hard, and yet they still would.

And while we're talking about the police cracking down hard, if you're going to go with the route of a fascist government, you can have the police come down even harder than you did, if that's what you want. That'd really help sell the fact that they're evil - they just attacked an unarmed peaceful protest, hurting and possibly killing a bunch of people. It doesn't get much more evil than that, so that'd be a good way to both raise the stakes immediately as well as set the tone for the rest of the story.

Also, speaking more on the protest - I like how you're having the MC just drop everything to join in, despite the danger. That's a great way to establish character early on - she knows it's dangerous, but she doesn't care, because she thinks it's the right thing to do. Immediately, we get a sense of who she is, which is exactly what you want in your first chapter - set the tone of the story, introduce the main character and give us a basic grasp of who they are, maybe lead into what will be the main conflict. You're doing exactly what you need to do so far in terms of storytelling.

Then, we get to the chapter's ending. Someone in the crowd does something, and then all hell breaks loose. This is good - it raises the stakes introduced earlier by adding an unknown third party to the mix, and also reveals a bit more about the setting itself. What did he have on his arm? Is that technology, magic, something else? We don't know, which is good, because that's your lead-in to chapter 2, where presumably we begin getting answers to these sorts of things - not all the answers, mind you, but enough to sate our curiosity and hold our interest. The thing is here, as good as this is, it's over very fast - we get a few sentences of the effect of whatever it is he did on the protagonist, and then she's knocked out, and the chapter ends. This is an excellent opportunity to flex your writing muscles a bit, so to speak - we saw what happened to the MC, but what happened to her friends? What happened to the other people in the crowd? What happened to the police? Some additional description there showing the effect of this event on the rest of the world would go a long way towards helping sell it.

Those are my initial thoughts upon a first reading, but I can see you asked for some stuff in particular, too.

"I would love feedback around the plotting, keeping your interest, and fiction-believability since it's a "real world" story."

My thoughts on those are as follows:

Plotting - It's a bit too early to tell in the first chapter. From what I can parse, this is going to focus on the protag and her friends fighting against the fascist government. That's perfectly fine - we've seen that kind of story done before, so it can be done well, and you're putting your own unique spin on it, which is great. I have no real complaints with the initial setup here, and as far as plot goes, this is one that we all know can be a winner.
Keeping Interest - Enough questions were raised early on that I felt compelled to keep reading in order to see if they were answered. So in that sense, yes, my interest was held through the first chapter. The setting in particular is what drew me in here - there's a lot of nice little breadcrumbs laid out in just this first chapter that make for interesting worldbuilding/history/lore/etc. Again, this is good - you're laying the groundwork for the rest of the story here, but it's also not just being dumped on us all at once. You'll definitely want to embellish the setting some more as the story goes on, because to me, that's the most interesting part so far. You've got a good groundwork to really portray a nation in decline through the eyes of your protagonist, so I think it'd be wise to take advantage of that.
Fiction-believability - It's certainly there, in the sense that a once-democratic nation can fall to fascism; IRL history is proof enough of that, so I have no reason to doubt it here. I would say that if you wanted to make it believable, you might want to go even farther with it. The expected fascist government tropes are all right where we'd expect them to be so far, but they feel almost too light for a story like this. Your protag is clearly supposed to be the underdog here, so don't be afraid to have her lose badly in this first chapter, if you catch my drift. I'd say that if you really want to sell the idea of a fascist government, you can absolutely have them go even farther than they did here, because it would still make perfect sense and it would help sell the fact that our protagonist and her friends are in very deep trouble.

A quick note about grammar - I don't like to harp on this because it's generally not very helpful when it comes to actually writing a story (grammar is nice but I find characterization, setting, plot, etc. to be far more important), but in this case, I do think you could benefit from improving your grammar somewhat. It doesn't need to be a primary focus right now, because that's the kind of thing that you'll improve naturally the more you read/write, but if you do want to work on it, I think you could benefit from doing so. I'd recommend reading some of your favorite books, fiction books in particular, and really taking note of how they're formatted with regards to dialog, etc. There's also a specific book you can check out for further help with this - The Elements of Style, by EB White and William Strunk Jr. You can find that book completely for free legally in .pdf files online if you Google it, or from Amazon for a few dollars if you'd prefer a physical copy you can take notes in/highlight in. I'd recommend reading through that and trying to implement some of what they have to say into your writing, if only to make it look a bit more professional.

A brief note to anyone else who may be reading this - The Elements of Style is going to be a recurring recommendation of mine throughout the thread for anyone who's looking for assistance with grammar. If you're interested in that sort of thing, I recommend getting a copy of the book, either through (legal) .pdf or an actual physical copy.

My overall thoughts: This first chapter is a good lead-in to the rest of the story. It provides enough interesting tidbits to draw the reader in and force them to ask questions about the setting, the history, etc. but it also doesn't feel like a lore dump. As far as things you might want to add to, I'd say focus on making the government even more evil than their initial portrayal, because there's definitely room for that and it would really help sell the danger a bit more. Work on your descriptions some more, too - help sell the fear from the crowd, the apprehension from the protag, the destruction inflicted upon the police/city/environment/protagonist when the man in the hoodie does his thing. And, if you so desire, maybe try to work on your grammar a bit, too.

Thank you again for the story, and I hope my feedback is able to assist you in some way.
 

DecolonialBlack

Active member
Joined
May 9, 2020
Messages
3
Points
43
Thank you for the story!

Alright, so, to begin with - I like the newspaper headlines to open the story. It helps set the stage without being overbearing. It's a good way to do worldbuilding right at the start without having to get too deep into the nitty-gritty of things and just dump a bunch of lore on the reader.

As for the story itself, the first thing that jumps out to me is the MC identifying the country in the story as fascist. Immediately, that had my attention, in the what's-so-fascist-about-it-I'd-like-to-know-more kind of way. We have the MC identifying the country as fascist, but at the same time, there's a protest going on, one that we learn later they had a permit for. Sure, the police adjust the permit so it no longer applies to the protestors, which is definitely scummy, but at the same time, this seems almost a little tame for a fascist government, you know? If you wanted to really portray them as evil, you might want to have the protest be completely unsanctioned but still extremely peaceful, and done in complete defiance of the government. In that case, their protest might be illegal, but they're not actually hurting anyone, so there'd be no reason for the police to crack down that hard, and yet they still would.

And while we're talking about the police cracking down hard, if you're going to go with the route of a fascist government, you can have the police come down even harder than you did, if that's what you want. That'd really help sell the fact that they're evil - they just attacked an unarmed peaceful protest, hurting and possibly killing a bunch of people. It doesn't get much more evil than that, so that'd be a good way to both raise the stakes immediately as well as set the tone for the rest of the story.

Also, speaking more on the protest - I like how you're having the MC just drop everything to join in, despite the danger. That's a great way to establish character early on - she knows it's dangerous, but she doesn't care, because she thinks it's the right thing to do. Immediately, we get a sense of who she is, which is exactly what you want in your first chapter - set the tone of the story, introduce the main character and give us a basic grasp of who they are, maybe lead into what will be the main conflict. You're doing exactly what you need to do so far in terms of storytelling.

Then, we get to the chapter's ending. Someone in the crowd does something, and then all hell breaks loose. This is good - it raises the stakes introduced earlier by adding an unknown third party to the mix, and also reveals a bit more about the setting itself. What did he have on his arm? Is that technology, magic, something else? We don't know, which is good, because that's your lead-in to chapter 2, where presumably we begin getting answers to these sorts of things - not all the answers, mind you, but enough to sate our curiosity and hold our interest. The thing is here, as good as this is, it's over very fast - we get a few sentences of the effect of whatever it is he did on the protagonist, and then she's knocked out, and the chapter ends. This is an excellent opportunity to flex your writing muscles a bit, so to speak - we saw what happened to the MC, but what happened to her friends? What happened to the other people in the crowd? What happened to the police? Some additional description there showing the effect of this event on the rest of the world would go a long way towards helping sell it.

Those are my initial thoughts upon a first reading, but I can see you asked for some stuff in particular, too.

"I would love feedback around the plotting, keeping your interest, and fiction-believability since it's a "real world" story."

My thoughts on those are as follows:

Plotting - It's a bit too early to tell in the first chapter. From what I can parse, this is going to focus on the protag and her friends fighting against the fascist government. That's perfectly fine - we've seen that kind of story done before, so it can be done well, and you're putting your own unique spin on it, which is great. I have no real complaints with the initial setup here, and as far as plot goes, this is one that we all know can be a winner.
Keeping Interest - Enough questions were raised early on that I felt compelled to keep reading in order to see if they were answered. So in that sense, yes, my interest was held through the first chapter. The setting in particular is what drew me in here - there's a lot of nice little breadcrumbs laid out in just this first chapter that make for interesting worldbuilding/history/lore/etc. Again, this is good - you're laying the groundwork for the rest of the story here, but it's also not just being dumped on us all at once. You'll definitely want to embellish the setting some more as the story goes on, because to me, that's the most interesting part so far. You've got a good groundwork to really portray a nation in decline through the eyes of your protagonist, so I think it'd be wise to take advantage of that.
Fiction-believability - It's certainly there, in the sense that a once-democratic nation can fall to fascism; IRL history is proof enough of that, so I have no reason to doubt it here. I would say that if you wanted to make it believable, you might want to go even farther with it. The expected fascist government tropes are all right where we'd expect them to be so far, but they feel almost too light for a story like this. Your protag is clearly supposed to be the underdog here, so don't be afraid to have her lose badly in this first chapter, if you catch my drift. I'd say that if you really want to sell the idea of a fascist government, you can absolutely have them go even farther than they did here, because it would still make perfect sense and it would help sell the fact that our protagonist and her friends are in very deep trouble.

A quick note about grammar - I don't like to harp on this because it's generally not very helpful when it comes to actually writing a story (grammar is nice but I find characterization, setting, plot, etc. to be far more important), but in this case, I do think you could benefit from improving your grammar somewhat. It doesn't need to be a primary focus right now, because that's the kind of thing that you'll improve naturally the more you read/write, but if you do want to work on it, I think you could benefit from doing so. I'd recommend reading some of your favorite books, fiction books in particular, and really taking note of how they're formatted with regards to dialog, etc. There's also a specific book you can check out for further help with this - The Elements of Style, by EB White and William Strunk Jr. You can find that book completely for free legally in .pdf files online if you Google it, or from Amazon for a few dollars if you'd prefer a physical copy you can take notes in/highlight in. I'd recommend reading through that and trying to implement some of what they have to say into your writing, if only to make it look a bit more professional.

A brief note to anyone else who may be reading this - The Elements of Style is going to be a recurring recommendation of mine throughout the thread for anyone who's looking for assistance with grammar. If you're interested in that sort of thing, I recommend getting a copy of the book, either through (legal) .pdf or an actual physical copy.

My overall thoughts: This first chapter is a good lead-in to the rest of the story. It provides enough interesting tidbits to draw the reader in and force them to ask questions about the setting, the history, etc. but it also doesn't feel like a lore dump. As far as things you might want to add to, I'd say focus on making the government even more evil than their initial portrayal, because there's definitely room for that and it would really help sell the danger a bit more. Work on your descriptions some more, too - help sell the fear from the crowd, the apprehension from the protag, the destruction inflicted upon the police/city/environment/protagonist when the man in the hoodie does his thing. And, if you so desire, maybe try to work on your grammar a bit, too.

Thank you again for the story, and I hope my feedback is able to assist you in some way.
Thank you so much for the review/commentary on the story. I'm glad that alot of my characterizations and such hit the way they should have. Your comments about elevating the evilness of the fascist regime are super interesting because I explicitly toned down the villainy to make it more believable. IRL fascism is rarely as comically evil as we see in something like Star Wars, it's much more bureaucratic and petty. I wanted to try and capture that by showing a fascist government that knows how to "control the herd" so nobody is truly miserable enough to risk it all. BUT I don't wanna undermine the fun factor so I will think on this and play around with it. Also I'm so glad my lore dumps don't feel like it. I HATE so much when scifi/fantasy authors infodump with little context (which is ironic since infodumping is like a top tier autistic personality trait lol).

All said, I will definitely be using this feedback well, and thanks for the reminder to get on reading The Elements of Style.
 

Scaver

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 8, 2022
Messages
198
Points
58
Let's get this ball rolling, shall we?

Pleased to meet you, I go by Minaris. I have been writing on FFN for several years now and recently self-published my first original story over on Amazon, with two more in the works as of the time of this writing, and hopefully many more to come afterwards. I have also helped other authors over the years - I currently have around 80 reviews published on various stories over on FFN, and I am assisting several friends of mine with their own stories, providing feedback whenever they ask for my help. All this is to say that I've given feedback before, and it's generally been very well-received.

Now that my boring qualifications are out of the way, I'll get to what you're really here for - I will read and provide feedback on your first chapter, completely free of charge, no strings attached.

"Why should I have you read and critique my story?" you may ask.

That's a fair question. My answer is this: Because good feedback is hard to come by, and I pride myself on providing good feedback. I will not be rude or mean or anything like that, either - we're all here to learn and get better. My job as a reviewer is to lift you up, not put you down. By the same token, if there's something I think could use some improvement or adjustment, then yes, I will mention it along with possibly a suggestion for what can be done to work on it. I was once a beginning author, myself - I know what it's like to desperately want feedback, and yet be unable to ask for it out of fear of having my work just torn to shreds before my eyes. You have my word that I will not be that kind of reviewer. I'm here to help you, not hurt you.

Writing is hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it. My job is to make it easier for everyone who so desires my help by being as supportive as possible, but also to make sure they're improving as a writer, too. I am not going to just heap praise on your story, but at the same time, I'm not going to just rip it to pieces, either. Good constructive criticism is a two-part process - it is both insightful and supportive. It's a two-way street, basically.

Just as well, writing is not a zero-sum game. One person's success does not take away my success, or anyone else's for that matter. it does not help anyone to just rip into someone else's work without mercy. With that in mind, the best and most logical thing to do is to help each other out however we can. This is my way of doing that. In layman's terms: If you want help, I'm here for you.

"What do you get out of this, anyway?" you're probably wondering. "Why volunteer to help a bunch of random strangers for free?"

Aside from the warm and fuzzy feeling that I'm helping a fellow author out, you mean? Well, I get to read more, which is always a plus. I also get to learn more about writing myself by explaining it to other people - after all, the best way to learn something is to teach someone else how to do it. And, admittedly, if I'm trying to grow my brand as a writer and get my name out there and hopefully sell some more of my books, this is a good way to do it. But even if I don't end up selling more books, the knowledge that I'm helping people out is more than enough for me.

"Okay, I'm sold. How is this going to work?"

Drop a link to your story's first chapter in this thread and I will take a look at it and provide feedback as soon as I am able. Fair warning - I work a full-time job and also have my own slew of stories that demand my attention like a baby screaming for a diaper change, not to mention other hobbies of my own. But I will get to your story in time, count on it. It might be later in the night, or maybe at a later day in the week, but I will get to it. And if you've posted here and I haven't gotten to it after a while, by all means, please send me a message either here or on FFN kindly - emphasis on kindly, please - asking me to take a look, and I will. Odds are, I'm at work/working on my own stories/otherwise indisposed by something else, and could use a reminder that I need to take a look at your story.

"What kind of feedback will you give me?"

If you're looking for purely grammar-related feedback, you're probably in the wrong thread, because I go through life following the PVC Rule - that is, if it reads like it was written by a Pirate, a Viking, or a Caveman, then it's probably wrong, unless the character in question happens to actually be a pirate, a viking, or a caveman. That being said, I will certainly do my best if that's what you're looking for, but my areas of expertise generally lie elsewhere. What I can provide in terms of feedback, or at least what I'm most confident at providing feedback in, is everything else - plot, prose, characterization, how your story simply feels to read, etc. All the good stuff, basically.

"Why only the first chapter?"

Because I'm unfortunately a very busy man with a very busy life. Much as I would love to read your entire story and provide an in-depth review of the whole thing, I simply do not have the time for it. Limiting my feedback to your first chapter is unfortunately necessary if I want to help the most people I can. That being said, if there's a specific other chapter of your story you'd like me to look at that isn't the first, by all means, post it here with a request for me to look at it, and I will, so long as it's just the one chapter. At least for now, please do not post multi-chapter requests.

"Are there any stories you won't read?"

There are stories/genres I'm not particularly fond of, obviously, but I'm willing to look past my own tastes if it means helping someone else out. I am not much one for smut, for example, but if you have a smut story you'd like feedback on, then I'll give it a shot, and I'll do my best to set aside my own taste and be as impartial and helpful as possible. That being said, I'd obviously appreciate not being inundated with such requests, but if it happens, well, I made the thread and the offer of no-strings-attached feedback, so that just means I did it to myself, lol.

Now then, that's my overly long sales pitch done. If you're at all interested in some free feedback, please post your story here, and I will get to it as soon as I am able. Thank you, and I look forward to seeing what you've been working on.
If you may then,

Now that since it's my chapter(6) and you said you are not going to read more than one, which is fine, I would love to hear your thoughts on, prose,sentence structure, world building, dialogues, and if the things happening are keeping you interested or not. just go as in depth as you can.
Thanks for your work!
 
Last edited:

ObsequiumMinaris

New member
Joined
Nov 7, 2022
Messages
16
Points
3
Oooh! I want to give it a go!

Wraps
Thank you for the story!

Okay, so, I'm going to talk prose in this post. For those of you who may be reading this and don't know what prose is, it's basically the way in which a sentence is written. You can think of it almost as your voice as an author. Everyone's prose is different, but there are some general guidelines that can help prose stand out no matter who is writing it.

Alright, so, the first thing I notice here - there's quite a bit of telling going on in terms of prose. I understand that the whole show vs tell thing can be obnoxious to try and understand - I'm partway tempted to do an entire thread just on the differences between the two, with examples for emphasis - but I'm going to try my best to explain it here in a way that's easily understandable. I hate when people just leave this as "Show, don't tell" because that explains nothing, so instead, I'm going to see if I can't emphasize what I'm trying to say via some brief examples.

Let's take this sentence for example, since it's the first one that stood out to me:

"The view below was so beautiful with its purple skies and gray clouds."

There's nothing inherently wrong with this sentence, but it's kinda dry on its own. Not to say dry is a bad thing - Cormac Mccarthy's prose is simple, direct, and to-the-point, and he's one of the most celebrated authors of all time - but in this case, I think we can throw something into the mix here and really help set the scenery. Even with something as simple as describing the weather, there's room to embellish quite a bit. What you've done here is tell us outright that the view is beautiful; what you can do instead is imply or show that the view is beautiful.

How about an example of what I'm talking about. Let's try and spice this sentence up a bit, shall we? I'm going to take the exact same information that the sentence above gave, but I'm going to do my best to embellish it and, for lack of a better term, really author it up. Let's see what we can get:

"I stood up and walked across the top of the building. I stopped at the edge, staring out over the vast city beneath me. Underneath my feet, the clouds curled around the tall buildings, enveloping them in gray, their color mixing with the sky's deep purple. I soaked in the view, basking in the sight of it for just a moment."

See what I did there? It's the same information, but the way it's provided to the reader is a lot more embellished and in-depth. It's a bit less dry in terms of prose - I'm not just directly stating information, instead I'm painting a scene. Remember, when it comes to your story, the reader is going to visualize things different than you do, so it pays to be as descriptive as possible if you want their visualization to closely match what's in your head.

Here's an exercise to try if you want to work on prose - look up some movie scripts, particularly noir and neo-noir movies. Some of my favorites for this include Michael Mann's Heat, Michael Mann's Collateral, and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver; the scripts for all three can be legally found online for free with a quick Google search. Do a ctrl+F search through those scripts for the word "city" and read how the screenwriter described the city in the script. Screenwriters have to be good at descriptive stuff like this, since their vision is going to be captured on film, and it has to closely match what's in the script for it to make sense. Read through some of those and take note of how they do their descriptions, and try to take what you notice/learn from that and implement it into your own writing. I think you might be surprised by just how descriptive you can get, as well as how many opportunities to be descriptive you can find. And this goes for most people's writing, too - we could probably all stand to be more descriptive, myself included.

Also, a brief note - descriptions don't have to be limited to just scenery. They can help paint a picture of pretty much everything in your story - scenery, characters, items, even entire specific scenes themselves.

"Those things…they became foreign. It's all in disarray. Like having broken pieces of glass scattered all over the ground and being left to pick them up and put them back together again."

This is a good example of what I'm talking about - here's what you should be trying to do if you want to spice your prose up. This is a well-done sentence - it directly states what's wrong with the MC's memory, without being in-your-face about it. This is exactly what you want to do more of. Obviously, you don't want to overdo it - moderation is key in all things, after all - but adding a little bit more of this wouldn't hurt.

The next big thing that stood out to me was the fight scene. I don't how violent you want your story to be, but I thought there was definitely room to really bring things up a notch here, again using those descriptions I mentioned earlier. Your MC says they're a monster, right? Well, let's see what we can do to have them fight like a monster, and really underscore what they think about themselves.

Okay, so, the first big thing I'd say with regards to a fight scene like this: Flex those descriptive muscles again. Get visceral with it, without being over-the-top. You want to be nasty about it, but not too nasty. Show me bones breaking, blood being spilled, people crying out in pain and fear - the MC's a monster, or at least they think of themselves as one, so why not give us something straight out of a monster movie?

"I shot out another bandage to catch the guy and it did. It wrapped around his neck and I gave a quick yet forceful yank. A loud snapping noise could be heard."

This is a very good start - I mean, breaking someone's neck in the first chapter? Brutal. That's certainly one way to spice things up. That being said, even this is still a bit clean, I think - after all, we're trying to really underscore the fact that the MC thinks of themselves as a monster, so perhaps clean isn't exactly what we want here. So, let's try and make it a bit more nasty, shall we? What if we did something like this instead:

"I shot out another bandage to catch the guy and it did. It wrapped around his neck and I gave a quick yet forceful yank. He let out a scream that was suddenly cut short by a loud snapping noise. His neck contorted unnaturally, and his body went limp in my grasp."

Descriptions are kind of funny - a little bit can have a big effect. Here, I just took everything you already had and looked for a way to make it even nastier, without getting too over-the-top or violent so as to be ridiculous. Think about what it would look and sound like if someone were to be killed this way - now, I've never seen anyone die via broken neck in real life (thankfully) but the scene is vivid enough in my head that I can imagine roughly how I think it would go, and it involves a lot of screaming, struggling, and body parts being twisted unnaturally. For a horror story or even just a horror scene like this, that's the kind of thing you want to call upon and describe.

This is just an example, of course - you know your story better than I do, so I'm sure you can come up with something that better fits your character. What I'm trying to do here is draw attention to those areas where I feel like, if you so desired, you could add something extra to really boost the narrative effect of what you're doing. I noticed little spots like this all throughout the first chapter, and if you were to go back and specifically look for them, I think you could find plenty of them, too. Note that what you're already doing isn't bad at all, rather I'm trying to emphasize the places where, if you wanted to, you could go back and spice up your prose.

And finally, we come to the last scene of the chapter, which I thought was done very effectively. I assume just from what I'm reading that Nightfall is the benefactor behind your protagonist's sudden emergence in the new world? Even if he isn't, it seems to me like he'll have a recurring role of some kind, which is great, because he's really entertaining to read. He reminds me a lot of the Joker - no idea if that was an intentional parallel on your part, but in any case, it certainly had the desired effect, which was getting me interested in him as a character. I can tell he's one of those characters that will absolutely steal whatever scene he's in, in the best way possible, which is awesome, because those types of characters are always fun to read. And all this from a very brief scene at the end of the chapter - this right here is characterization done right.

Final thoughts on this one: There's a very good baseline story here, but if you want it to stand out a bit more, look for places where you can spice up your prose. I would suggest going back and looking for places you can add more in-depth descriptions, and being careful about what you directly state to the reader in your prose itself. Oh, and Nightfall is a heck of a lot of fun, and I really hope the readers get to see more of him throughout the story.

Thanks again for the story, and I hope this review is able to help you in some way!
 

CrazyKid21

Member
Joined
Apr 19, 2022
Messages
27
Points
18
Thank you for the story!

Okay, so, I'm going to talk prose in this post. For those of you who may be reading this and don't know what prose is, it's basically the way in which a sentence is written. You can think of it almost as your voice as an author. Everyone's prose is different, but there are some general guidelines that can help prose stand out no matter who is writing it.

Alright, so, the first thing I notice here - there's quite a bit of telling going on in terms of prose. I understand that the whole show vs tell thing can be obnoxious to try and understand - I'm partway tempted to do an entire thread just on the differences between the two, with examples for emphasis - but I'm going to try my best to explain it here in a way that's easily understandable. I hate when people just leave this as "Show, don't tell" because that explains nothing, so instead, I'm going to see if I can't emphasize what I'm trying to say via some brief examples.

Let's take this sentence for example, since it's the first one that stood out to me:

"The view below was so beautiful with its purple skies and gray clouds."

There's nothing inherently wrong with this sentence, but it's kinda dry on its own. Not to say dry is a bad thing - Cormac Mccarthy's prose is simple, direct, and to-the-point, and he's one of the most celebrated authors of all time - but in this case, I think we can throw something into the mix here and really help set the scenery. Even with something as simple as describing the weather, there's room to embellish quite a bit. What you've done here is tell us outright that the view is beautiful; what you can do instead is imply or show that the view is beautiful.

How about an example of what I'm talking about. Let's try and spice this sentence up a bit, shall we? I'm going to take the exact same information that the sentence above gave, but I'm going to do my best to embellish it and, for lack of a better term, really author it up. Let's see what we can get:

"I stood up and walked across the top of the building. I stopped at the edge, staring out over the vast city beneath me. Underneath my feet, the clouds curled around the tall buildings, enveloping them in gray, their color mixing with the sky's deep purple. I soaked in the view, basking in the sight of it for just a moment."

See what I did there? It's the same information, but the way it's provided to the reader is a lot more embellished and in-depth. It's a bit less dry in terms of prose - I'm not just directly stating information, instead I'm painting a scene. Remember, when it comes to your story, the reader is going to visualize things different than you do, so it pays to be as descriptive as possible if you want their visualization to closely match what's in your head.

Here's an exercise to try if you want to work on prose - look up some movie scripts, particularly noir and neo-noir movies. Some of my favorites for this include Michael Mann's Heat, Michael Mann's Collateral, and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver; the scripts for all three can be legally found online for free with a quick Google search. Do a ctrl+F search through those scripts for the word "city" and read how the screenwriter described the city in the script. Screenwriters have to be good at descriptive stuff like this, since their vision is going to be captured on film, and it has to closely match what's in the script for it to make sense. Read through some of those and take note of how they do their descriptions, and try to take what you notice/learn from that and implement it into your own writing. I think you might be surprised by just how descriptive you can get, as well as how many opportunities to be descriptive you can find. And this goes for most people's writing, too - we could probably all stand to be more descriptive, myself included.

Also, a brief note - descriptions don't have to be limited to just scenery. They can help paint a picture of pretty much everything in your story - scenery, characters, items, even entire specific scenes themselves.

"Those things…they became foreign. It's all in disarray. Like having broken pieces of glass scattered all over the ground and being left to pick them up and put them back together again."

This is a good example of what I'm talking about - here's what you should be trying to do if you want to spice your prose up. This is a well-done sentence - it directly states what's wrong with the MC's memory, without being in-your-face about it. This is exactly what you want to do more of. Obviously, you don't want to overdo it - moderation is key in all things, after all - but adding a little bit more of this wouldn't hurt.

The next big thing that stood out to me was the fight scene. I don't how violent you want your story to be, but I thought there was definitely room to really bring things up a notch here, again using those descriptions I mentioned earlier. Your MC says they're a monster, right? Well, let's see what we can do to have them fight like a monster, and really underscore what they think about themselves.

Okay, so, the first big thing I'd say with regards to a fight scene like this: Flex those descriptive muscles again. Get visceral with it, without being over-the-top. You want to be nasty about it, but not too nasty. Show me bones breaking, blood being spilled, people crying out in pain and fear - the MC's a monster, or at least they think of themselves as one, so why not give us something straight out of a monster movie?

"I shot out another bandage to catch the guy and it did. It wrapped around his neck and I gave a quick yet forceful yank. A loud snapping noise could be heard."

This is a very good start - I mean, breaking someone's neck in the first chapter? Brutal. That's certainly one way to spice things up. That being said, even this is still a bit clean, I think - after all, we're trying to really underscore the fact that the MC thinks of themselves as a monster, so perhaps clean isn't exactly what we want here. So, let's try and make it a bit more nasty, shall we? What if we did something like this instead:

"I shot out another bandage to catch the guy and it did. It wrapped around his neck and I gave a quick yet forceful yank. He let out a scream that was suddenly cut short by a loud snapping noise. His neck contorted unnaturally, and his body went limp in my grasp."

Descriptions are kind of funny - a little bit can have a big effect. Here, I just took everything you already had and looked for a way to make it even nastier, without getting too over-the-top or violent so as to be ridiculous. Think about what it would look and sound like if someone were to be killed this way - now, I've never seen anyone die via broken neck in real life (thankfully) but the scene is vivid enough in my head that I can imagine roughly how I think it would go, and it involves a lot of screaming, struggling, and body parts being twisted unnaturally. For a horror story or even just a horror scene like this, that's the kind of thing you want to call upon and describe.

This is just an example, of course - you know your story better than I do, so I'm sure you can come up with something that better fits your character. What I'm trying to do here is draw attention to those areas where I feel like, if you so desired, you could add something extra to really boost the narrative effect of what you're doing. I noticed little spots like this all throughout the first chapter, and if you were to go back and specifically look for them, I think you could find plenty of them, too. Note that what you're already doing isn't bad at all, rather I'm trying to emphasize the places where, if you wanted to, you could go back and spice up your prose.

And finally, we come to the last scene of the chapter, which I thought was done very effectively. I assume just from what I'm reading that Nightfall is the benefactor behind your protagonist's sudden emergence in the new world? Even if he isn't, it seems to me like he'll have a recurring role of some kind, which is great, because he's really entertaining to read. He reminds me a lot of the Joker - no idea if that was an intentional parallel on your part, but in any case, it certainly had the desired effect, which was getting me interested in him as a character. I can tell he's one of those characters that will absolutely steal whatever scene he's in, in the best way possible, which is awesome, because those types of characters are always fun to read. And all this from a very brief scene at the end of the chapter - this right here is characterization done right.

Final thoughts on this one: There's a very good baseline story here, but if you want it to stand out a bit more, look for places where you can spice up your prose. I would suggest going back and looking for places you can add more in-depth descriptions, and being careful about what you directly state to the reader in your prose itself. Oh, and Nightfall is a heck of a lot of fun, and I really hope the readers get to see more of him throughout the story.

Thanks again for the story, and I hope this review is able to help you in some way!
Thanks for the review! I really appreciate it! I'll make sure to keep that in mind.:biggrin_s:
 

Prince_Azmiran_Myrian

🐉Burns you with his Love🐉
Joined
Aug 23, 2022
Messages
1,831
Points
128

As much as I'd like for you too look at my first chapter, I think I want you to look at this one. It has the first real fight scene and I'd like your opinion. The assailants are trying to capture the prince without seriously harming him.

Since I'm dropping you into the middle of this, the previous chapter showed that dragons can breathe underwater with their breath magic and also introduced the slave characters. That chapter also explains that skarsh (basically shark people) heal by consuming flesh but originally tatooed themselves as willing sacrifices.

I don't intend this to be a xenofiction but they aren't fully anthropomorphic creatures either. This is my first story I've written.
 

ObsequiumMinaris

New member
Joined
Nov 7, 2022
Messages
16
Points
3
If you may then,

Now that since it's my chapter(6) and you said you are not going to read more than one, which is fine, I would love to hear your thoughts on, prose,sentence structure, world building, dialogues, and if the things happening are keeping you interested or not. just go as in depth as you can.
Thanks for your work!
Thank you for the story!

First thing I noticed - when you're writing dialog, each new speaker needs a paragraph of their own. Allow me to demonstrate:

""As you know I had been tasked with mapping out the third zone but," I began, recounting what they already knew, "soon after I had started doing such lord dayahan there, " I pointed my fingers at a fat man wearing an embroidered cloak and beside him, his sickly apprentice standing, "-have come to me offering their clan's helping hand. Being short with the necessaries I'd gladly accept their help. But who would have thought..." I gently dragged my words out and lord dayahan burst out with his words, "Zareth, what are you saying?! Even though you planned to""

This reads a little bit clunky, because Lord Dayahan needs a paragraph of his own for his outburst.

""As you know I had been tasked with mapping out the third zone but," I began, recounting what they already knew, "soon after I had started doing such lord dayahan there, " I pointed my fingers at a fat man wearing an embroidered cloak and beside him, his sickly apprentice standing, "-have come to me offering their clan's helping hand. Being short with the necessaries I'd gladly accept their help. But who would have thought..." I gently dragged my words out."

lord dayahan burst out with his words, "Zareth, what are you saying?! Even though you planned to""

See what I mean? It's a lot easier to keep track of who's saying what when done this way. It wasn't especially hard to keep track of with this particular sentence, but I was getting a bit lost later on, so that's something to keep in mind.

Next, I have no idea if this was intentional or not, but I noticed that some characters' names were not punctuated correctly. When referring to someone's name and title, you want to capitalize both. For example - in the sentence above, "lord dayahan" should instead be Lord Dayahan. I noticed this was happening with multiple characters, so I have no idea if it was a a stylistic choice or not, but I figured I'd mention it for anyone else who may be reading the thread, too - as a rule, you want to capitalize names and titles.

I want to talk about pacing for a bit. This chapter starts fine and stays fine content-wise throughout its length, right up until the end - I thought the ending was abrupt; it kinda just appears. The MC meets with Aria, she greets him, and then... next chapter. Pacing can be difficult with web novels and serials, because the chapters tend to be shorter than traditionally published fiction - traditionally published fiction, fantasy and sci-fi in particular, generally come in around 3k to 4k words per chapter, possibly more depending on the story. Web novels don't have that luxury - generally, my understanding is that they tend to be shorter, owing to the fact that they're serialized. It's a lot easier to come up with a convincing beginning, middle, and end when you have a thousand more words to do it in a traditionally published story, but I'd suggest trying to do the same for a web novel, too. In this chapter, we have a beginning, we have a middle, but we don't really have an ending, it just kinda stops abruptly. Not in the same sense as a cliffhanger, either - with a cliffhanger, the abruptness is done for dramatic effect. Here, it's just kinda there.

I'd say that you might want to consider having a more conclusive ending to this chapter, because as-is, it kinda sneaks up on the reader.

Alright, now then, you asked for a few things in particular, so I'm going do my best to address them here.

Prose - as luck would have it, I just made a big post about prose in this thread, so I'd suggest reading through that to start, because the same thing with regards to descriptions applies here. It would be done differently here, though - this a very political scene, and the other characters clearly do not like the protagonist, so you might want to emphasize their emotions instead. Things such as their faces contorting in anger when the protagonist says something that contradicts them, etc. You had a very good line in here, actually:

""What are you not going to answer me now?" he asked, almost standing from his dignified chair and spit flying through his redden mouth,"

I thought this line right here was actually excellent, and it fits in exactly what everything else I'm saying. It does exactly what it needs - it establishes that the speaker is very angry without directly stating it outright. This is very good - I'd love to see more stuff similar to this not only in this chapter, but throughout the entire story.

Sentence structure - The only thing that really comes to mind outright is that bit about dialog I mentioned earlier. Keep that in mind for future reference - a new speaker requires their own paragraph. That'll help make things flow much easier in terms of structure.

World building - It's there, for sure, but this chapter didn't strike me as being very heavy on worldbuilding in the traditional sense. That's not necessarily a bad thing - this is Chapter 6 and you have an entire book to worldbuild in, so it makes sense not to front-load your worldbuilding. That being said, what is here is important. It's clear that there's some kind of nobility system in place, and that the MC is an outsider. There's a council involved made up of various Lords and their apprentices. And then we have that bit with the letter, which was certainly curious. The thing is, this chapter seems to deal more directly with the fallout of an earlier chapter than anything. The various bits of worldbuilding and possible plot points we get here don't feel like a setup as much as they do a payoff for an earlier setup, if that makes sense. That bit with the letter, for instance - the setup there would be the MC finding the letter in an earlier chapter and wondering what it is; the payoff is here, where he brings it to the attention of the rest of the council. Sure, it doesn't lead to anything immediately, but it is a form of payoff.

I guess what I'm getting at is this: There is worldbuilding here, but it feels secondary compared to serving as the payoff for something that was possibly set up in an earlier chapter. Again, though, this isn't a bad thing - you've got an entire book ahead of you to do worldbuilding in, so there's no need to rush and front-load everything. And the worldbuilding that was in this chapter felt pretty natural - there was nothing there that really broke my suspension of disbelief. I suppose the only question I have is why they even let an outsider into the council if they have so much disdain for him in the first place, but that's a question that will likely be answered elsewhere in the story, so I won't harp on it here.

Dialogs - Nothing really felt unnatural to me with regards to dialog, but again, I will reiterate the thing about formatting from earlier.

Interest - This is actually a difficult question to answer. I can't really say yes, and I can't really say no, and here's why - because this chapter as I was reading it isn't a "hook", it's a payoff for an earlier "hook" in the story. I'll explain further, but first, we need to talk about the concept of tension and release.

Alright, so, tension. What is tension? In my own words, tension is what keeps you reading a book, or watching a movie, or something. Tension even applies to music - western harmony is entirely about setting up tension and then resolving or releasing that tension. The same principle applies to storytelling - tension is what initially grabs the reader and forces them to keep reading. Have you ever read a story and found yourself unable to put it down? If you're here, you almost certainly have, and if that's the case, I want you to think back to how you felt while reading that story for the first time. Were you excited, and apprehensive? Maybe even a little nervous? That's what tension is.

Okay, so we have a rough idea of what tension is now. What about release? Release, quite simply, is the payoff for the tension you set up earlier in the story. Think back to that story that really held your attention again, but this time, I want you to think back to how you felt when reading about the end of the climax. Let's use a famous example that almost everyone here will know, I'm sure - when Darth Vader killed Emperor Palpatine and saved Luke Skywalker, how did that make you feel as a first-time viewer? Odds are, you felt a big wave of relief watching Palpatine be defeated. That's what release is - it's that wave of relief you feel after realizing the danger has passed for the heroes, or that a plot point has been resolved.

So, where am I going with this? Well, when it comes to drawing a reader in and holding their interest, tension is what does it. Tension is the "hook" I mentioned earlier - it's the thing that grabs the reader's attention right away and holds them there. Release, on the other hand, is the payoff for that tension.

With that established, this chapter does not feel like a tension chapter to me - rather, it feels like a release chapter. It didn't grab my attention because that's not the function of this particular chapter - this particular chapter was designed to release the earlier tension set up by a different chapter. Hence why I said it's complicated - no, it didn't really catch my attention, but that's not what it's supposed to do. What it's supposed to do is answer questions set up by an earlier chapter and lead in to the next round of tension that will be happening later. This chapter's actual function is basically to serve as one big pressure release valve for this part of the story. And just to be clear - this is not a problem in the slightest; in fact, that is exactly what you want from this chapter. You can't have constant tension after tension, because then the audience grows numb to it and stops caring. You need to release that tension a bit in regular intervals throughout the story, and that is what this chapter is supposed to do. And in that regard, I thought it did so well enough - we the audience got some politics out of it, and it looks like we also got some answers to some things that were established earlier in the story. And we still have that letter there, providing just the slightest bit of tension for a later story arc. This is how you want your storytelling to go.

So, what's the takeaway lesson here? It's this: Stories, much like music, operate on a system of setting up tension, and then releasing tension. Not every chapter is going to be attention-grabbing right away, and that's perfectly fine, because the audience needs a breather and some answers every now and again.

Try this: the next time you go to write a chapter, or even a story arc, try to think of the writing behind it in terms of tension and release. You want to introduce the tension, steadily crank it up throughout, and when the time is right, begin to steadily let it off. I mentioned flow earlier in this review - thinking of your story in terms of tension and release can help with that. Generally, you want the conclusion of a chapter to release some of that tension, unless it's a cliffhanger, which does the opposite effect. So if you're reading your chapter and you realize your ending is just kinda neutral, as in it doesn't really release any of that tension nor does it add more tension, that's probably a sign that the ending to your chapter could use a little something extra to help it feel more conclusive.

It doesn't need to be anything big, either - at the end of this chapter, the MC meets Aria, and casually mentions that she's the one person he feels like he can trust, and yet he hasn't seen her in a month. Rather than just end on her asking a casual question, why not have them walk off together, with them excitedly chatting to each other the entire time as they try to catch up after a month apart? That would help add a bit of lightheartedness to the scene, and would make it feel conclusive - after all, they literally walked out of the scene while talking to each other, so we the audience know it's over. This chapter is now done; brief timeskip to the beginning of the next chapter, and we start again. It's nothing fancy, but it works to both end the scene and help release some of that earlier tension. And if these two are going to be romantically involved, it helps with that, too.

Final thoughts - I'd suggest working on the ending, as well as the mechanical stuff (dialog, capitalizing names) I mentioned. Also, keep the concept of tension and release in mind, too - that will help with your flow later on in the story, particularly your endings.

Thank you again for the story, and I hope that my review is able to help you in some way!

As much as I'd like for you too look at my first chapter, I think I want you to look at this one. It has the first real fight scene and I'd like your opinion. The assailants are trying to capture the prince without seriously harming him.

Since I'm dropping you into the middle of this, the previous chapter showed that dragons can breathe underwater with their breath magic and also introduced the slave characters. That chapter also explains that skarsh (basically shark people) heal by consuming flesh but originally tatooed themselves as willing sacrifices.

I don't intend this to be a xenofiction but they aren't fully anthropomorphic creatures either. This is my first story I've written.
Thank you for the story!

Alright, so, right away - I thought this was very well-written. Your grammar was on-point, your descriptions were very good, and the entire thing flowed very well and had great pacing throughout.

That being said, there was one thing I wanted to address outright, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this since I've only read this one chapter - the previous chapter before this one introduced the slave characters, yes? And one of those same slave characters is the one who sacrificed himself to save the main character?

If I'm right, and that is the case, I would suggest that you maybe might want to add a chapter or two in-between the previous chapter and this chapter, of just something lighthearted involving this particular character - Camon, that is. Give the audience time to get attached to him a bit, and learn to start liking him. Then, when the time is right, have him sacrifice himself and die in the process. Once the audience has had more time to get attached to him, it'll be like a punch to the gut, watching him die. Especially the way he does it.

You ever see the movie Old Yeller? The entire reason the movie works and is such a gut punch is because we get pretty much the whole runtime to get attached to the dog before (spoiler alert for an almost 70-year-old movie) it finally has to die for plot reasons. The same principle applies here - we might not get the entire book to get attached to Camon, but a chapter or two would certainly help. I'd say if it's at all possible to add even a single chapter of filler to let the audience get more attached to Camon before he sacrifices himself, it might be worth a shot to try it. Anything to make his death actually hurt in some way.

Next, you brought up the fight scene. To tell you the truth, I thought your fight scene was very well-done, same as the rest of the story. That being said, I think if there was one thing I'd try to add, it's to make it even more visceral than it already is. We see parts of this - when Tirii's face gets burned with acid, for example, and she writhes on the floor in agony, which was a great scene by the way - but I think there's room for more of it. Make it clear that this stuff hurts - really focus in on that. Like when she pulls the spear from her abdomen - we get a line indicating that the blood is flowing, but there's no real indication of pain on her part that I could find until her face gets burned with acid. It doesn't even need to be anything big, either - a brief line about how her face contorted in agony as she tried to wrench the spear out of herself, or how her hands were holding onto it with a white-knuckled grip and she was gritting her teeth as she steadily forced it out of her body... something like that goes a long way towards helping sell the effect of the character being in pain. More importantly, it shows that the character is willing to force themselves through the pain in pursuit of a greater objective, which can be a nice little bit of extra characterization for them.

Of course, that's not to say this fight scene is bad, because it's not - in fact, it's actually very good. This is just something that stood out to me as maybe a brief thing to add. The acid scene had it, and I would've liked to see more of it, because you did it brilliantly there.

Now, as long as I'm talking about fight scenes, I'd like to deviate for just a moment to share a method I have for improving at them to anyone who may be curious. Not necessarily only for you, but for anyone who may also be reading this thread and may want to improve their action scenes. Honestly, your action scenes were pretty good as-is, so I don't know how much value you'll get out of this yourself, but I do want to mention it just in case someone is reading and they're someone who does struggle with action and wants to improve.

How do you all feel about action movies? Personally, I love action movies - gunfights, fistfights, the works... I live for that stuff. Why am I bringing this up? Simple - because in lieu of getting into an actual fight IRL (which I obviously do not recommend you do) or doing martial arts (which isn't an option for everyone), the only way to really improve at action scenes is to see them done and take notes on them. So how do you do that? Well, my go-to recommendation is to pick some scenes from your personal favorite action movies. Look up a video of that scene, and follow along with the actors. Now, try to write down what you see on screen exactly as you see it. Be as precise as you can, but also try to copy the flow as best as you can. You can make this into an exercise, if you really want to improve - every day for X number of days, pick a scene from a movie and try this method out. See how your action scenes improve over time as you learn to visualize the scene better and follow along more closely. Then, when you're ready, try to write an action scene of your own using what you've learned. No, it probably won't be very realistic, because Hollywood, but then again, we're writing fiction, here - realism isn't exactly the name of the game. A fight that's as realistic as possible is honestly pretty boring, at least from what I've seen, so even for a realistic story, that's probably not what you actually want, anyway.

One more thing with regards to action that is specific to you, that I want to bring attention to - I noticed you did a very good job of juggling all the different characters fighting together at once. That's pretty difficult to pull off, but it didn't feel forced or strange or out of place at all to me while I was reading. It wasn't overly detailed, but I also didn't get lost throughout, which is unfortunately easy to do with scenes like this. Kudos for that - this can't have been an easy scene to write and you pulled it off.

Okay, with that out of the way, I'll be honest and say that I don't have too much to say here beyond what's already been said. I'll reiterate my previous suggestions of maybe giving us a chapter or two to get attached to Camon, as well as making the fight scene even more visceral than it already is. Past that, I thought it was written very well. It's certainly different from the usual stories that get posted on this site, but variety is the spice of life, after all, and I'm very glad to see it posted here.

Thank you again for the story, and I hope that this review is able to help you in some way!
 
Last edited:

Scaver

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 8, 2022
Messages
198
Points
58
Okay, so, I'm going to talk prose in this post. For those of you who may be reading this and don't know what prose is, it's basically the way in which a sentence is written. You can think of it almost as your voice as an author. Everyone's prose is different, but there are some general guidelines that can help prose stand out no matter who is writing it.

Alright, so, the first thing I notice here - there's quite a bit of telling going on in terms of prose. I understand that the whole show vs tell thing can be obnoxious to try and understand - I'm partway tempted to do an entire thread just on the differences between the two, with examples for emphasis - but I'm going to try my best to explain it here in a way that's easily understandable. I hate when people just leave this as "Show, don't tell" because that explains nothing, so instead, I'm going to see if I can't emphasize what I'm trying to say via some brief examples.

Let's take this sentence for example, since it's the first one that stood out to me:

"The view below was so beautiful with its purple skies and gray clouds."

There's nothing inherently wrong with this sentence, but it's kinda dry on its own. Not to say dry is a bad thing - Cormac Mccarthy's prose is simple, direct, and to-the-point, and he's one of the most celebrated authors of all time - but in this case, I think we can throw something into the mix here and really help set the scenery. Even with something as simple as describing the weather, there's room to embellish quite a bit. What you've done here is tell us outright that the view is beautiful; what you can do instead is imply or show that the view is beautiful.

How about an example of what I'm talking about. Let's try and spice this sentence up a bit, shall we? I'm going to take the exact same information that the sentence above gave, but I'm going to do my best to embellish it and, for lack of a better term, really author it up. Let's see what we can get:

"I stood up and walked across the top of the building. I stopped at the edge, staring out over the vast city beneath me. Underneath my feet, the clouds curled around the tall buildings, enveloping them in gray, their color mixing with the sky's deep purple. I soaked in the view, basking in the sight of it for just a moment."

See what I did there? It's the same information, but the way it's provided to the reader is a lot more embellished and in-depth. It's a bit less dry in terms of prose - I'm not just directly stating information, instead I'm painting a scene. Remember, when it comes to your story, the reader is going to visualize things different than you do, so it pays to be as descriptive as possible if you want their visualization to closely match what's in your head.

Here's an exercise to try if you want to work on prose - look up some movie scripts, particularly noir and neo-noir movies. Some of my favorites for this include Michael Mann's Heat, Michael Mann's Collateral, and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver; the scripts for all three can be legally found online for free with a quick Google search. Do a ctrl+F search through those scripts for the word "city" and read how the screenwriter described the city in the script. Screenwriters have to be good at descriptive stuff like this, since their vision is going to be captured on film, and it has to closely match what's in the script for it to make sense. Read through some of those and take note of how they do their descriptions, and try to take what you notice/learn from that and implement it into your own writing. I think you might be surprised by just how descriptive you can get, as well as how many opportunities to be descriptive you can find. And this goes for most people's writing, too - we could probably all stand to be more descriptive, myself included.

Also, a brief note - descriptions don't have to be limited to just scenery. They can help paint a picture of pretty much everything in your story - scenery, characters, items, even entire specific scenes themselves.

"Those things…they became foreign. It's all in disarray. Like having broken pieces of glass scattered all over the ground and being left to pick them up and put them back together again."

This is a good example of what I'm talking about - here's what you should be trying to do if you want to spice your prose up. This is a well-done sentence - it directly states what's wrong with the MC's memory, without being in-your-face about it. This is exactly what you want to do more of. Obviously, you don't want to overdo it - moderation is key in all things, after all - but adding a little bit more of this wouldn't hurt.

The next big thing that stood out to me was the fight scene. I don't how violent you want your story to be, but I thought there was definitely room to really bring things up a notch here, again using those descriptions I mentioned earlier. Your MC says they're a monster, right? Well, let's see what we can do to have them fight like a monster, and really underscore what they think about themselves.

Okay, so, the first big thing I'd say with regards to a fight scene like this: Flex those descriptive muscles again. Get visceral with it, without being over-the-top. You want to be nasty about it, but not too nasty. Show me bones breaking, blood being spilled, people crying out in pain and fear - the MC's a monster, or at least they think of themselves as one, so why not give us something straight out of a monster movie?

"I shot out another bandage to catch the guy and it did. It wrapped around his neck and I gave a quick yet forceful yank. A loud snapping noise could be heard."

This is a very good start - I mean, breaking someone's neck in the first chapter? Brutal. That's certainly one way to spice things up. That being said, even this is still a bit clean, I think - after all, we're trying to really underscore the fact that the MC thinks of themselves as a monster, so perhaps clean isn't exactly what we want here. So, let's try and make it a bit more nasty, shall we? What if we did something like this instead:

"I shot out another bandage to catch the guy and it did. It wrapped around his neck and I gave a quick yet forceful yank. He let out a scream that was suddenly cut short by a loud snapping noise. His neck contorted unnaturally, and his body went limp in my grasp."

Descriptions are kind of funny - a little bit can have a big effect. Here, I just took everything you already had and looked for a way to make it even nastier, without getting too over-the-top or violent so as to be ridiculous. Think about what it would look and sound like if someone were to be killed this way - now, I've never seen anyone die via broken neck in real life (thankfully) but the scene is vivid enough in my head that I can imagine roughly how I think it would go, and it involves a lot of screaming, struggling, and body parts being twisted unnaturally. For a horror story or even just a horror scene like this, that's the kind of thing you want to call upon and describe.

This is just an example, of course - you know your story better than I do, so I'm sure you can come up with something that better fits your character. What I'm trying to do here is draw attention to those areas where I feel like, if you so desired, you could add something extra to really boost the narrative effect of what you're doing. I noticed little spots like this all throughout the first chapter, and if you were to go back and specifically look for them, I think you could find plenty of them, too. Note that what you're already doing isn't bad at all, rather I'm trying to emphasize the places where, if you wanted to, you could go back and spice up your prose.

And finally, we come to the last scene of the chapter, which I thought was done very effectively. I assume just from what I'm reading that Nightfall is the benefactor behind your protagonist's sudden emergence in the new world? Even if he isn't, it seems to me like he'll have a recurring role of some kind, which is great, because he's really entertaining to read. He reminds me a lot of the Joker - no idea if that was an intentional parallel on your part, but in any case, it certainly had the desired effect, which was getting me interested in him as a character. I can tell he's one of those characters that will absolutely steal whatever scene he's in, in the best way possible, which is awesome, because those types of characters are always fun to read. And all this from a very brief scene at the end of the chapter - this right here is characterization done right.

Final thoughts on this one: There's a very good baseline story here, but if you want it to stand out a bit more, look for places where you can spice up your prose. I would suggest going back and looking for places you can add more in-depth descriptions, and being careful about what you directly state to the reader in your prose itself. Oh, and Nightfall is a heck of a lot of fun, and I really hope the readers get to see more of him throughout the story.

Thanks again for the story, and I hope this review is able to help you in some way!
First thank you for the detailed review. Now do you have any recommendation of fiction/non fiction with first person? I have been wanting to study some.
 

ObsequiumMinaris

New member
Joined
Nov 7, 2022
Messages
16
Points
3
First thank you for the detailed review. Now do you have any recommendation of fiction/non fiction with first person? I have been wanting to study some.
You are very welcome!

For first-person stories, I have a few I'd recommend off the top of my head:
Monster Hunter International (series), by Larry Correia. Most of Correia's stuff would probably qualify here, actually, since I'm fairly certain pretty much everything he's written has been in first-person, but don't quote me on that and definitely do your research on any books of his you buy that aren't MHI-related.
The Dresden Files (series), by Jim Butcher.
Residue, by Steve Diamond.
Also, as long as I'm throwing out Correia and Diamond as recommendations - they have a writing-related podcast called WriterDojo that I'd also recommend. They've done at least one episode on POV that you might find interesting - it can be found on the WriterDojo Youtube channel. I think everyone here should check out their channel because there's a lot of really interesting stuff on there that be pretty helpful to anyone who's looking to improve. This is the first time I'm plugging them but it will almost certainly not be the last, I'm sure.

As for non-fiction, there is one first-person book that comes to mind immediately, which also happens to be my favorite book - The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer. That book is harrowing. I could go on about it for days, but I'll refrain, instead recommending it based purely on the fact that it's a non-fiction book written in first-person.

I hope these recommendations help you!
Hello, can I get a critique too? This is the first time I post my writting for people to see, you i'd really appreciate something like that. There is only one prologue for now.


Thanks in advance
Thank you for the story!

First off, descriptions again. I've talked about this a bit already in previous reviews, but this is something I think a lot of authors could stand to work on some more, myself included, so I'll mention it again here. What I mean by this is that your current descriptions, while perfectly fine, still have room to really make them pop.

Let's take the first sentence for example:

"The light of the moon shimmered as the blade of the massive war scythe danced through the wasteland that was this battlefield."

This isn't bad by any means. In fact, it's actually quite good. But since this is the first sentence of the story, we really want it to pop and grab the reader's attention from the get-go. After all, you only get one chance to make a really strong first impression, so you want it to be as strong as you possibly can. With that in mind, it'd pay dividends to really emphasize this first sentence and make it as attention-grabbing as possible.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

"The silver light of the moon cascaded down on the battlefield below, illuminating the massive war scythe as it screamed through the air, cleaving through flesh and bone like a hot knife through butter."

That's a bit more attention-grabbing, yes? That's because the scene is more vivid with a bit more description added to it. A more vivid scene is better at grabbing the reader's attention, within reason - there's a limit to everything. And for your sentence, you really want to keep the reader's attention. Again, there's nothing wrong with your first sentence, but if you're going to make a first impression, you want it to be as strong as possible. And if that's the case, then you want to go all-out with your descriptions in order to really make them stand out to the reader.

"The weapon was swung again, and another life was taken in these fields of death."

This sentence is okay, but the action here is a bit awkward, I think. The action so far has been pretty direct, which is fine, but there's room to make it almost artistic. This fight scene is a lot like a dance - it was even described as such in the first sentence, and later it's also described as a macabre ballet - so why not make it flow like a dance?

"The scythe cut through the air, the blade singing as it made impact with the latest of her victims. Crimson arced through the night sky, and the victim's body fell in two pieces, joining the corpses already lying on the battlefield."

Fight scenes are an art unto themselves. They're the kind of thing that, generally, you really want to get descriptive with. Be artistic with them - every fight is like a dance, basically. This applies whether the weapons are blades, or guns, or bare hands, or something weird and esoteric. Is this realistic? No, not at all, but a "realistic" fight scene is a boring fight scene, and the last thing we want is a boring fight scene. This is fiction - you have a blank check to be as artistic with your fight scenes as you want, so long as it's not over-the-top.

What I'm getting at is this: When you're writing your fight scenes, try to be as descriptive as you possibly can. There's an art to this sort of thing, but you'll learn more as you do it and as you read more fight scenes from other people.

Now then, the actual story itself. This chapter is an effective prologue - it sets the stage for the main character and is also good at keeping the reader's attention. It's not overly explanatory, it's just explaining how we got to the actual story - again, that's what you want in a prologue. Grammar is good, pacing is good, dialog is good. If there's one thing I would say, it's that the fact that it's a prologue might end up working against it in some way, and here's why - I read through the description of this story as well. I can see that the viewpoint character in the prologue is not the same as the main character in the actual story. The prologue explains the setup for the story, but we don't actually see the main character at all in the prologue. This is a gamble - people are going to get attached to the viewpoint character in this prologue, and then when they read the actual story and see that the POV character is a different character entirely, well, that will probably be a bit jarring.

So, how do we address this? The first thing that comes to mind is to add to this chapter. You can keep everything here as-is, but maybe add a line at the very end referring to the actual viewpoint character. Allow me to demonstrate:

"But she had to risk it. Even if it did end up killing her. For such was the promise she made to the people she loved.

Back on Earth, an old man took his final breath, and his heart gave its last beat before stilling forever. Tyrannia watched, a sly grin slowly etching its way across her face.

He would do nicely."

My example is admittedly a bit clunky, but in my defense, I am a bit drunk right now, and regardless, I think it illustrates my point, that being this - you'll want to lead in to the POV change in the next chapter, just to make it a bit smoother. It doesn't even need to be anything big, but just something to indicate that we're going to change to a different POV. A little bit goes a long way.

Final thoughts - this was very good. Your descriptions are good, though there is room to embellish upon them if you so desire. Your prologue is effective at setting the tone for the story and at leading into the plot, though I'd suggest hinting at the POV change here to make the switch a bit easier on the reader.

Also, another brief note before I go - I read your description and saw that you are updating five times a week, and also cross-posting on Royal Road. I would suggest everyone reading this who's interested in trying to make it big as a writer follow this example pretty much to the letter. I understand that Royal Road doesn't have the best reputation on this site, but if you want to make it big as a writer and (more importantly) get paid, then you do yourself no favors by not cross-posting there. Also, wherever you post, make sure you're consistently uploading. The ideal is at least five times a week at roughly the same time every day. I know that's hard for a lot of people reading this, but that should be your initial goal if you plan to try and do this as something you can get paid for. You don't have to come bursting out of the gate ready to upload five times a week, but it is something tangible that you can work towards in time.

Thank you again for the story, and I hope my feedback is able to help you in some way!
 
Last edited:

Prince_Azmiran_Myrian

🐉Burns you with his Love🐉
Joined
Aug 23, 2022
Messages
1,831
Points
128
Thank you for the story!

First thing I noticed - when you're writing dialog, each new speaker needs a paragraph of their own. Allow me to demonstrate:

""As you know I had been tasked with mapping out the third zone but," I began, recounting what they already knew, "soon after I had started doing such lord dayahan there, " I pointed my fingers at a fat man wearing an embroidered cloak and beside him, his sickly apprentice standing, "-have come to me offering their clan's helping hand. Being short with the necessaries I'd gladly accept their help. But who would have thought..." I gently dragged my words out and lord dayahan burst out with his words, "Zareth, what are you saying?! Even though you planned to""

This reads a little bit clunky, because Lord Dayahan needs a paragraph of his own for his outburst.

""As you know I had been tasked with mapping out the third zone but," I began, recounting what they already knew, "soon after I had started doing such lord dayahan there, " I pointed my fingers at a fat man wearing an embroidered cloak and beside him, his sickly apprentice standing, "-have come to me offering their clan's helping hand. Being short with the necessaries I'd gladly accept their help. But who would have thought..." I gently dragged my words out."

lord dayahan burst out with his words, "Zareth, what are you saying?! Even though you planned to""

See what I mean? It's a lot easier to keep track of who's saying what when done this way. It wasn't especially hard to keep track of with this particular sentence, but I was getting a bit lost later on, so that's something to keep in mind.

Next, I have no idea if this was intentional or not, but I noticed that some characters' names were not punctuated correctly. When referring to someone's name and title, you want to capitalize both. For example - in the sentence above, "lord dayahan" should instead be Lord Dayahan. I noticed this was happening with multiple characters, so I have no idea if it was a a stylistic choice or not, but I figured I'd mention it for anyone else who may be reading the thread, too - as a rule, you want to capitalize names and titles.

I want to talk about pacing for a bit. This chapter starts fine and stays fine content-wise throughout its length, right up until the end - I thought the ending was abrupt; it kinda just appears. The MC meets with Aria, she greets him, and then... next chapter. Pacing can be difficult with web novels and serials, because the chapters tend to be shorter than traditionally published fiction - traditionally published fiction, fantasy and sci-fi in particular, generally come in around 3k to 4k words per chapter, possibly more depending on the story. Web novels don't have that luxury - generally, my understanding is that they tend to be shorter, owing to the fact that they're serialized. It's a lot easier to come up with a convincing beginning, middle, and end when you have a thousand more words to do it in a traditionally published story, but I'd suggest trying to do the same for a web novel, too. In this chapter, we have a beginning, we have a middle, but we don't really have an ending, it just kinda stops abruptly. Not in the same sense as a cliffhanger, either - with a cliffhanger, the abruptness is done for dramatic effect. Here, it's just kinda there.

I'd say that you might want to consider having a more conclusive ending to this chapter, because as-is, it kinda sneaks up on the reader.

Alright, now then, you asked for a few things in particular, so I'm going do my best to address them here.

Prose - as luck would have it, I just made a big post about prose in this thread, so I'd suggest reading through that to start, because the same thing with regards to descriptions applies here. It would be done differently here, though - this a very political scene, and the other characters clearly do not like the protagonist, so you might want to emphasize their emotions instead. Things such as their faces contorting in anger when the protagonist says something that contradicts them, etc. You had a very good line in here, actually:

""What are you not going to answer me now?" he asked, almost standing from his dignified chair and spit flying through his redden mouth,"

I thought this line right here was actually excellent, and it fits in exactly what everything else I'm saying. It does exactly what it needs - it establishes that the speaker is very angry without directly stating it outright. This is very good - I'd love to see more stuff similar to this not only in this chapter, but throughout the entire story.

Sentence structure - The only thing that really comes to mind outright is that bit about dialog I mentioned earlier. Keep that in mind for future reference - a new speaker requires their own paragraph. That'll help make things flow much easier in terms of structure.

World building - It's there, for sure, but this chapter didn't strike me as being very heavy on worldbuilding in the traditional sense. That's not necessarily a bad thing - this is Chapter 6 and you have an entire book to worldbuild in, so it makes sense not to front-load your worldbuilding. That being said, what is here is important. It's clear that there's some kind of nobility system in place, and that the MC is an outsider. There's a council involved made up of various Lords and their apprentices. And then we have that bit with the letter, which was certainly curious. The thing is, this chapter seems to deal more directly with the fallout of an earlier chapter than anything. The various bits of worldbuilding and possible plot points we get here don't feel like a setup as much as they do a payoff for an earlier setup, if that makes sense. That bit with the letter, for instance - the setup there would be the MC finding the letter in an earlier chapter and wondering what it is; the payoff is here, where he brings it to the attention of the rest of the council. Sure, it doesn't lead to anything immediately, but it is a form of payoff.

I guess what I'm getting at is this: There is worldbuilding here, but it feels secondary compared to serving as the payoff for something that was possibly set up in an earlier chapter. Again, though, this isn't a bad thing - you've got an entire book ahead of you to do worldbuilding in, so there's no need to rush and front-load everything. And the worldbuilding that was in this chapter felt pretty natural - there was nothing there that really broke my suspension of disbelief. I suppose the only question I have is why they even let an outsider into the council if they have so much disdain for him in the first place, but that's a question that will likely be answered elsewhere in the story, so I won't harp on it here.

Dialogs - Nothing really felt unnatural to me with regards to dialog, but again, I will reiterate the thing about formatting from earlier.

Interest - This is actually a difficult question to answer. I can't really say yes, and I can't really say no, and here's why - because this chapter as I was reading it isn't a "hook", it's a payoff for an earlier "hook" in the story. I'll explain further, but first, we need to talk about the concept of tension and release.

Alright, so, tension. What is tension? In my own words, tension is what keeps you reading a book, or watching a movie, or something. Tension even applies to music - western harmony is entirely about setting up tension and then resolving or releasing that tension. The same principle applies to storytelling - tension is what initially grabs the reader and forces them to keep reading. Have you ever read a story and found yourself unable to put it down? If you're here, you almost certainly have, and if that's the case, I want you to think back to how you felt while reading that story for the first time. Were you excited, and apprehensive? Maybe even a little nervous? That's what tension is.

Okay, so we have a rough idea of what tension is now. What about release? Release, quite simply, is the payoff for the tension you set up earlier in the story. Think back to that story that really held your attention again, but this time, I want you to think back to how you felt when reading about the end of the climax. Let's use a famous example that almost everyone here will know, I'm sure - when Darth Vader killed Emperor Palpatine and saved Luke Skywalker, how did that make you feel as a first-time viewer? Odds are, you felt a big wave of relief watching Palpatine be defeated. That's what release is - it's that wave of relief you feel after realizing the danger has passed for the heroes, or that a plot point has been resolved.

So, where am I going with this? Well, when it comes to drawing a reader in and holding their interest, tension is what does it. Tension is the "hook" I mentioned earlier - it's the thing that grabs the reader's attention right away and holds them there. Release, on the other hand, is the payoff for that tension.

With that established, this chapter does not feel like a tension chapter to me - rather, it feels like a release chapter. It didn't grab my attention because that's not the function of this particular chapter - this particular chapter was designed to release the earlier tension set up by a different chapter. Hence why I said it's complicated - no, it didn't really catch my attention, but that's not what it's supposed to do. What it's supposed to do is answer questions set up by an earlier chapter and lead in to the next round of tension that will be happening later. This chapter's actual function is basically to serve as one big pressure release valve for this part of the story. And just to be clear - this is not a problem in the slightest; in fact, that is exactly what you want from this chapter. You can't have constant tension after tension, because then the audience grows numb to it and stops caring. You need to release that tension a bit in regular intervals throughout the story, and that is what this chapter is supposed to do. And in that regard, I thought it did so well enough - we the audience got some politics out of it, and it looks like we also got some answers to some things that were established earlier in the story. And we still have that letter there, providing just the slightest bit of tension for a later story arc. This is how you want your storytelling to go.

So, what's the takeaway lesson here? It's this: Stories, much like music, operate on a system of setting up tension, and then releasing tension. Not every chapter is going to be attention-grabbing right away, and that's perfectly fine, because the audience needs a breather and some answers every now and again.

Try this: the next time you go to write a chapter, or even a story arc, try to think of the writing behind it in terms of tension and release. You want to introduce the tension, steadily crank it up throughout, and when the time is right, begin to steadily let it off. I mentioned flow earlier in this review - thinking of your story in terms of tension and release can help with that. Generally, you want the conclusion of a chapter to release some of that tension, unless it's a cliffhanger, which does the opposite effect. So if you're reading your chapter and you realize your ending is just kinda neutral, as in it doesn't really release any of that tension nor does it add more tension, that's probably a sign that the ending to your chapter could use a little something extra to help it feel more conclusive.

It doesn't need to be anything big, either - at the end of this chapter, the MC meets Aria, and casually mentions that she's the one person he feels like he can trust, and yet he hasn't seen her in a month. Rather than just end on her asking a casual question, why not have them walk off together, with them excitedly chatting to each other the entire time as they try to catch up after a month apart? That would help add a bit of lightheartedness to the scene, and would make it feel conclusive - after all, they literally walked out of the scene while talking to each other, so we the audience know it's over. This chapter is now done; brief timeskip to the beginning of the next chapter, and we start again. It's nothing fancy, but it works to both end the scene and help release some of that earlier tension. And if these two are going to be romantically involved, it helps with that, too.

Final thoughts - I'd suggest working on the ending, as well as the mechanical stuff (dialog, capitalizing names) I mentioned. Also, keep the concept of tension and release in mind, too - that will help with your flow later on in the story, particularly your endings.

Thank you again for the story, and I hope that my review is able to help you in some way!

Thank you for the story!

Alright, so, right away - I thought this was very well-written. Your grammar was on-point, your descriptions were very good, and the entire thing flowed very well and had great pacing throughout.

That being said, there was one thing I wanted to address outright, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this since I've only read this one chapter - the previous chapter before this one introduced the slave characters, yes? And one of those same slave characters is the one who sacrificed himself to save the main character?

If I'm right, and that is the case, I would suggest that you maybe might want to add a chapter or two in-between the previous chapter and this chapter, of just something lighthearted involving this particular character - Camon, that is. Give the audience time to get attached to him a bit, and learn to start liking him. Then, when the time is right, have him sacrifice himself and die in the process. Once the audience has had more time to get attached to him, it'll be like a punch to the gut, watching him die. Especially the way he does it.

You ever see the movie Old Yeller? The entire reason the movie works and is such a gut punch is because we get pretty much the whole runtime to get attached to the dog before (spoiler alert for an almost 70-year-old movie) it finally has to die for plot reasons. The same principle applies here - we might not get the entire book to get attached to Camon, but a chapter or two would certainly help. I'd say if it's at all possible to add even a single chapter of filler to let the audience get more attached to Camon before he sacrifices himself, it might be worth a shot to try it. Anything to make his death actually hurt in some way.

Next, you brought up the fight scene. To tell you the truth, I thought your fight scene was very well-done, same as the rest of the story. That being said, I think if there was one thing I'd try to add, it's to make it even more visceral than it already is. We see parts of this - when Tirii's face gets burned with acid, for example, and she writhes on the floor in agony, which was a great scene by the way - but I think there's room for more of it. Make it clear that this stuff hurts - really focus in on that. Like when she pulls the spear from her abdomen - we get a line indicating that the blood is flowing, but there's no real indication of pain on her part that I could find until her face gets burned with acid. It doesn't even need to be anything big, either - a brief line about how her face contorted in agony as she tried to wrench the spear out of herself, or how her hands were holding onto it with a white-knuckled grip and she was gritting her teeth as she steadily forced it out of her body... something like that goes a long way towards helping sell the effect of the character being in pain. More importantly, it shows that the character is willing to force themselves through the pain in pursuit of a greater objective, which can be a nice little bit of extra characterization for them.

Of course, that's not to say this fight scene is bad, because it's not - in fact, it's actually very good. This is just something that stood out to me as maybe a brief thing to add. The acid scene had it, and I would've liked to see more of it, because you did it brilliantly there.

Now, as long as I'm talking about fight scenes, I'd like to deviate for just a moment to share a method I have for improving at them to anyone who may be curious. Not necessarily only for you, but for anyone who may also be reading this thread and may want to improve their action scenes. Honestly, your action scenes were pretty good as-is, so I don't know how much value you'll get out of this yourself, but I do want to mention it just in case someone is reading and they're someone who does struggle with action and wants to improve.

How do you all feel about action movies? Personally, I love action movies - gunfights, fistfights, the works... I live for that stuff. Why am I bringing this up? Simple - because in lieu of getting into an actual fight IRL (which I obviously do not recommend you do) or doing martial arts (which isn't an option for everyone), the only way to really improve at action scenes is to see them done and take notes on them. So how do you do that? Well, my go-to recommendation is to pick some scenes from your personal favorite action movies. Look up a video of that scene, and follow along with the actors. Now, try to write down what you see on screen exactly as you see it. Be as precise as you can, but also try to copy the flow as best as you can. You can make this into an exercise, if you really want to improve - every day for X number of days, pick a scene from a movie and try this method out. See how your action scenes improve over time as you learn to visualize the scene better and follow along more closely. Then, when you're ready, try to write an action scene of your own using what you've learned. No, it probably won't be very realistic, because Hollywood, but then again, we're writing fiction, here - realism isn't exactly the name of the game. A fight that's as realistic as possible is honestly pretty boring, at least from what I've seen, so even for a realistic story, that's probably not what you actually want, anyway.

One more thing with regards to action that is specific to you, that I want to bring attention to - I noticed you did a very good job of juggling all the different characters fighting together at once. That's pretty difficult to pull off, but it didn't feel forced or strange or out of place at all to me while I was reading. It wasn't overly detailed, but I also didn't get lost throughout, which is unfortunately easy to do with scenes like this. Kudos for that - this can't have been an easy scene to write and you pulled it off.

Okay, with that out of the way, I'll be honest and say that I don't have too much to say here beyond what's already been said. I'll reiterate my previous suggestions of maybe giving us a chapter or two to get attached to Camon, as well as making the fight scene even more visceral than it already is. Past that, I thought it was written very well. It's certainly different from the usual stories that get posted on this site, but variety is the spice of life, after all, and I'm very glad to see it posted here.

Thank you again for the story, and I hope that this review is able to help you in some way!
Thank you for your review. It boosted my author ego, which I kinda needed. I appreciate that.

You are totally right about readers not being attatched to Camon, unfortunately there's not a lot of space to work with him since the last chapter goes straight into this one. I could perhaps add more to the scene where he is introduced, though he already sort of acts like the leader of the slaves there. I decided on his sacrifice to really wake up Syn to the reality of the war in the next chapter.

Writing the action, I had to keep in mind how much time each characters action could keep them busy so that I could spend focus somewhere else. I kept rereading it to make sure i knew who was doing what and that the flow was still fast paced. I also knew it needed to be back and forth and not a one-sided fight. I dunno if that'll help you or anyone else in writing such scenes in the future but that how i remember doing it.

As for your topic asides in each comment, you may want to edit some borders for those sections with a header to help them stand out for people who aren't closely reading each review.
 

Arkares

New member
Joined
Jan 28, 2023
Messages
8
Points
3
You are very welcome!

For first-person stories, I have a few I'd recommend off the top of my head:
Monster Hunter International (series), by Larry Correia. Most of Correia's stuff would probably qualify here, actually, since I'm fairly certain pretty much everything he's written has been in first-person, but don't quote me on that and definitely do your research on any books of his you buy that aren't MHI-related.
The Dresden Files (series), by Jim Butcher.
Residue, by Steve Diamond.
Also, as long as I'm throwing out Correia and Diamond as recommendations - they have a writing-related podcast called WriterDojo that I'd also recommend. They've done at least one episode on POV that you might find interesting - it can be found on the WriterDojo Youtube channel. I think everyone here should check out their channel because there's a lot of really interesting stuff on there that be pretty helpful to anyone who's looking to improve. This is the first time I'm plugging them but it will almost certainly not be the last, I'm sure.

As for non-fiction, there is one first-person book that comes to mind immediately, which also happens to be my favorite book - The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer. That book is harrowing. I could go on about it for days, but I'll refrain, instead recommending it based purely on the fact that it's a non-fiction book written in first-person.

I hope these recommendations help you!

Thank you for the story!

First off, descriptions again. I've talked about this a bit already in previous reviews, but this is something I think a lot of authors could stand to work on some more, myself included, so I'll mention it again here. What I mean by this is that your current descriptions, while perfectly fine, still have room to really make them pop.

Let's take the first sentence for example:

"The light of the moon shimmered as the blade of the massive war scythe danced through the wasteland that was this battlefield."

This isn't bad by any means. In fact, it's actually quite good. But since this is the first sentence of the story, we really want it to pop and grab the reader's attention from the get-go. After all, you only get one chance to make a really strong first impression, so you want it to be as strong as you possibly can. With that in mind, it'd pay dividends to really emphasize this first sentence and make it as attention-grabbing as possible.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

"The silver light of the moon cascaded down on the battlefield below, illuminating the massive war scythe as it screamed through the air, cleaving through flesh and bone like a hot knife through butter."

That's a bit more attention-grabbing, yes? That's because the scene is more vivid with a bit more description added to it. A more vivid scene is better at grabbing the reader's attention, within reason - there's a limit to everything. And for your sentence, you really want to keep the reader's attention. Again, there's nothing wrong with your first sentence, but if you're going to make a first impression, you want it to be as strong as possible. And if that's the case, then you want to go all-out with your descriptions in order to really make them stand out to the reader.

"The weapon was swung again, and another life was taken in these fields of death."

This sentence is okay, but the action here is a bit awkward, I think. The action so far has been pretty direct, which is fine, but there's room to make it almost artistic. This fight scene is a lot like a dance - it was even described as such in the first sentence, and later it's also described as a macabre ballet - so why not make it flow like a dance?

"The scythe cut through the air, the blade singing as it made impact with the latest of her victims. Crimson arced through the night sky, and the victim's body fell in two pieces, joining the corpses already lying on the battlefield."

Fight scenes are an art unto themselves. They're the kind of thing that, generally, you really want to get descriptive with. Be artistic with them - every fight is like a dance, basically. This applies whether the weapons are blades, or guns, or bare hands, or something weird and esoteric. Is this realistic? No, not at all, but a "realistic" fight scene is a boring fight scene, and the last thing we want is a boring fight scene. This is fiction - you have a blank check to be as artistic with your fight scenes as you want, so long as it's not over-the-top.

What I'm getting at is this: When you're writing your fight scenes, try to be as descriptive as you possibly can. There's an art to this sort of thing, but you'll learn more as you do it and as you read more fight scenes from other people.

Now then, the actual story itself. This chapter is an effective prologue - it sets the stage for the main character and is also good at keeping the reader's attention. It's not overly explanatory, it's just explaining how we got to the actual story - again, that's what you want in a prologue. Grammar is good, pacing is good, dialog is good. If there's one thing I would say, it's that the fact that it's a prologue might end up working against it in some way, and here's why - I read through the description of this story as well. I can see that the viewpoint character in the prologue is not the same as the main character in the actual story. The prologue explains the setup for the story, but we don't actually see the main character at all in the prologue. This is a gamble - people are going to get attached to the viewpoint character in this prologue, and then when they read the actual story and see that the POV character is a different character entirely, well, that will probably be a bit jarring.

So, how do we address this? The first thing that comes to mind is to add to this chapter. You can keep everything here as-is, but maybe add a line at the very end referring to the actual viewpoint character. Allow me to demonstrate:

"But she had to risk it. Even if it did end up killing her. For such was the promise she made to the people she loved.

Back on Earth, an old man took his final breath, and his heart gave its last beat before stilling forever. Tyrannia watched, a sly grin slowly etching its way across her face.

He would do nicely."

My example is admittedly a bit clunky, but in my defense, I am a bit drunk right now, and regardless, I think it illustrates my point, that being this - you'll want to lead in to the POV change in the next chapter, just to make it a bit smoother. It doesn't even need to be anything big, but just something to indicate that we're going to change to a different POV. A little bit goes a long way.

Final thoughts - this was very good. Your descriptions are good, though there is room to embellish upon them if you so desire. Your prologue is effective at setting the tone for the story and at leading into the plot, though I'd suggest hinting at the POV change here to make the switch a bit easier on the reader.

Also, another brief note before I go - I read your description and saw that you are updating five times a week, and also cross-posting on Royal Road. I would suggest everyone reading this who's interested in trying to make it big as a writer follow this example pretty much to the letter. I understand that Royal Road doesn't have the best reputation on this site, but if you want to make it big as a writer and (more importantly) get paid, then you do yourself no favors by not cross-posting there. Also, wherever you post, make sure you're consistently uploading. The ideal is at least five times a week at roughly the same time every day. I know that's hard for a lot of people reading this, but that should be your initial goal if you plan to try and do this as something you can get paid for. You don't have to come bursting out of the gate ready to upload five times a week, but it is something tangible that you can work towards in time.

Thank you again for the story, and I hope my feedback is able to help you in some way!

Thanks for the review. I actually agree with everything you said, my descriptions are just kind of there. I want to be more artistic in my writing, but as you have seen it just doesn't come off naturally to me. Is there any way to actually pratice them or any resource I could use to get better at them?

And the POV lead idea is good. A bit difficult since the main character is actually not the only one she tries to make her offer to, so singling him out is gonna be a bit harder, but I'll figure something out. Once again, thanks for everything

PD: first time I ever hear of royalroad having a bad reputation here lol. Why is that?
 

Tempokai

Overworked One
Joined
Nov 16, 2021
Messages
559
Points
133

Thanks in advance, I have one question about my first chapter. Did I did the infodump right? I would like to hear you answer!
 

ObsequiumMinaris

New member
Joined
Nov 7, 2022
Messages
16
Points
3
The Last Progenitor (Rewrite) Read Chapter 1: New World, New Headache please!
Thank you for the story!

First thing I'd like to discuss: The MC's narration. Now, I think I know why this is written this way - it's to break the monotony of having a chapter that's just descriptions. You're having the MC narrate her thoughts in quotes as a way to provide information without just throwing an entire chapter of just descriptive prose at the reader. I understand why you chose to do this, and on a certain level I can respect the desire to break the monotony, I'm just not sure if this is the most effective way to do it, at least the way it's done here.

Let's take this first block of text, for example:

"I looked down at my body again. I was definitely in the body of the character I had made. That much was obvious. I remembered every detail of this body. Even the robes I was currently wearing I had gathered myself. “What is even going on?”"

Alright, so, we've established that the MC is in the body of a character she's made. She knows this because she recognizes it from earlier. That's established pretty firmly here - she knows what's going on. And yet, there's that end quote there - "What is even going on?" - that feels redundant, given the circumstances. She knows what's going on already - she's in the body of the character she made. Even if that wasn't the case, and she didn't know what was going on, this quote doesn't really add anything. Allow me to demonstrate - I'm going to take this sentence and change it a bit for emphasis. I'm going to do a brief re-imagining so the MC doesn't know what's going on, and we're going to see what the quote adds to that sentence.

"I looked down at my body again. It was unrecognizable to me - the clothes were strange, and I could already tell that my physical appearance was different, just from the shape of my body underneath my robes. "What is even going on?""

See what I mean? That quote doesn't really add anything to the sentence, even when the sentence itself is changed to try and make it fit. It's just kind of there.

So, what's the lesson to be learned, here? It's this - be very careful with having a character talk to themselves like this. It can be done effectively, but it can also lead to dead words, such as in my example above. This was just one example - I found that most of the MC's self-quotes here were a bit redundant. And if they weren't redundant, then a lot of them felt like they were stating the obvious. Take the following paragraph/quote, for instance:

"A huge part of me suspected everything around me was the real deal, but the rational part of my brain didn’t want to accept this deduction. There were so many noises playing out around me. Creatures could be heard scuttling about to and fro. The sound of rushing water played in the distance. Even focusing my eyes in a direction had a magnifying effect. If I turned my head towards the sounds of a small creature’s footsteps I could see them clearly, if they weren’t blocked by trees. Even a colony of ants had been magnified from a large distance.

“I still have the keen senses I had in the game. In that case…”"

Again, I understand what you may be trying to do here - that is, really establish that the main character has the powers from the game - but I'd advise you to be careful with it. The quote above feels unnecessary to me, since we've already established that the character has the traits from the game. The words feel unneeded when put into context with the rest of the paragraph.

Now, is this a big issue? Admittedly, not really, but it was enough that I felt it warranted being brought up. It was certainly enough to pull my attention away, so I figured I might as well. It also leads into my next point, as will be demonstrated later. I think there's a way to not only keep the scenes of the MC talking to herself, but make it feel more natural, too. But we'll get to that in a bit.

Next, the content of the chapter itself. First off, let me state that I get the purpose behind this chapter - it's the first chapter after the prologue, so you wanted to establish the rules of the book in terms of magic. That's commendable, not to mention very important for you to do if this is going to be a book with a gamified magic system, but again, I think there's a better way to do it. What we get here is a chapter of the MC wandering around, talking to themselves and basically playing with magic. That's not bad on its own, but this is your first real chapter of your story - you had a prologue, sure, but this is your first real chapter. This is your first and arguably only chance to make a big first impression. If someone reads this story and they aren't grabbed by your first chapter, odds are they're going to exit the window and not come back.

So, we have a challenge, here - we need to establish that the MC has changed into their character from the game. We need to begin establishing the magic system at play here. We need to do both of those in a way that grabs the reader's attention. Finally, we need to do all that in, at most, around 4,000 words, and preferably closer to 3,000 since this is a web serial. Maybe even closer to 2,000 if that's more your speed. That probably seems like a tall order, but I think there's a deceptively simple fix for it.

Rather than just have the MC wandering around the woods, talking to themselves and practicing magic, why not have them be forced to defend themselves using their new magic? It doesn't even need to be against other people, it could be against wildlife, monsters, etc. This could possibly address everything I've brought up here in one relatively simple change. You could still have the MC's quotes to themselves in place, and have them come out as mid-fight dialog, which would feel more natural. The action would grab the reader's attention from the get-go, which would make them more likely to stay for future chapters. We'd start to get an explanation for the magic system (emphasis on start - you actually did a very good thing here by not just dumping the full rules for the magic system in the first chapter, so I'd recommend doing something similar here). Finally, I think this is very attainable in the word limit I provided. You'd get a few hundred words for the MC to figure out what's happening, then you'd get the rest of the chapter for the fight, the magic system, and the quotes to herself. So it's very doable, I think - after all, 3000 words is not a small amount, especially for a web serial. 3,000 words is quite a bit of room to work with. It tightens up a bit at 2,000 words or less, obviously, but again, I still think it's very doable.

Prospective authors who may be reading this should take notes - your first chapter needs to be as eye-catching as possible. After all, if your first chapter doesn't hold the reader's attention, the only thing keeping them around for the second chapter is inertia - that is, they already started, so they might as well keep going - but inertia is not the same as actually being invested in the story. An audience that's only sticking around due to inertia is far less likely to actually pay you for your work. And even then, inertia doesn't work for a lot of people. If they're not invested by the first chapter, they're not going to keep reading. So focus on making as strong of a first impression as you possibly can.

Final thoughts: I didn't mention this at the start, but I think this story has a strong core idea behind it. It's definitely very marketable to readers on SH, which is to say you're hitting all the key tags that readers here go crazy over, and believe me, that is not something I'm just throwing out there - a marketable story is a very good thing, and it's worth bringing up if you plan to eventually try to get paid doing this (which you should at some point - after all, if you're good at something, never do it for free). I would suggest being more careful with the MC's quotes to themselves - ask yourself if they really add anything to the rest of the chapter, and if not, that may be your sign to remove them. You may also want to think about making the first chapters of any future stories you write more eye-catching, since that's your first impression, and you want that to be as attention-grabbing as possible.

Thank you again for the story, and I hope this feedback is able to help you in some way!
Thanks for the review. I actually agree with everything you said, my descriptions are just kind of there. I want to be more artistic in my writing, but as you have seen it just doesn't come off naturally to me. Is there any way to actually pratice them or any resource I could use to get better at them?

And the POV lead idea is good. A bit difficult since the main character is actually not the only one she tries to make her offer to, so singling him out is gonna be a bit harder, but I'll figure something out. Once again, thanks for everything

PD: first time I ever hear of royalroad having a bad reputation here lol. Why is that?
Unfortunately, I don't really have a go-to method for how to get more artistic with your writing, like I do with fight scenes and the like. I wish I did, but unfortunately, I think it's the kind of thing you're going to have to just pick up over time as you do it more. It's certainly possible to improve at it, but it's going to take working at it to make the improvement. Keep reading and writing, and you'll get there in time. The one thing that comes to mind as something to actively try to get better at it is to read through your own writing and really keep a keen eye out for spaces where it feels like you can get more artistic with it. Once you find one, try to add to it after-the-fact.

I understand that it's probably very frustrating to try and work at this, especially since as you said, it doesn't come naturally to you. But that's the thing - writing doesn't come naturally to anyone. If it was easy, everyone would do it. The only way to make progress with writing, same as any other skill, is to practice at it. That's both a blessing and a curse - it's a curse because it means it's going to take work to get to where you want to be. But it's also a blessing because it means there's no magical process to it or anything like that. There is no secret to good writing - all the good writers you know got there because they practiced and worked at it, the same way people practice any other hobby, or skill, or job.

For now, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Keep it in mind as something to look for in your writing, but don't worry if you feel like there's still room for improvement. Your descriptions will get better over time, as will the rest of your writing, so long as you consistently practice reading and writing. And that's the key - consistency. Stay consistent with your writing schedule and I think you'll be surprised at how fast you can improve at this.

I guess what I'm saying is this: If you want to get better with your descriptions and making them more artistic, the only way to do it is to keep reading and writing. And the best way to do that is to be as consistent with your practice as you can be.

As for RoyalRoad having a bad rep here... it's something I've noticed among some of the writers here and on RR's own forums - a lot of people don't seem to have a very good opinion of the site. Common complaints seem to be that the reviewers there can be harsh towards stories they don't like. That's a common enough complaint that it's a regular forum topic even on their own forums. They also don't allow some of the genres that are big on SH, namely smut. Don't let any of that dissuade you, though - I'd still suggest that anyone reading this cross-post onto RR at some point, unless they exclusively write smut. After all, it doesn't make much business sense to cut yourself off from an active revenue stream. Even if you're not monetized yet, posting over there as well as here on SH is a great way to get critique and build a fanbase. The rest can come later.
 
Last edited:
D

Deleted member 93348

Guest
Good evening, @ObsequiumMinaris. I know my story is still in draft form and barely has any chapters, but I would love to here your thoughts either way. In a nutshell, it’s a meta isekai with a sarcastic narrator, a boatload of pop culture references, and a prideful MC who is more akin to characters like Kenpachi and Yujiro Hanma. The only difference is that he speaks in heavy gen-Z slang. I’ll only show you chapters 1-4 right now because 5-7 are still very rough on the edges. Thank you!
 
Last edited by a moderator:

RepresentingEnvy

En-Chan Queen Vampy!
Joined
Apr 13, 2022
Messages
5,051
Points
208
Thank you for the story!

First thing I'd like to discuss: The MC's narration. Now, I think I know why this is written this way - it's to break the monotony of having a chapter that's just descriptions. You're having the MC narrate her thoughts in quotes as a way to provide information without just throwing an entire chapter of just descriptive prose at the reader. I understand why you chose to do this, and on a certain level I can respect the desire to break the monotony, I'm just not sure if this is the most effective way to do it, at least the way it's done here.

Let's take this first block of text, for example:

"I looked down at my body again. I was definitely in the body of the character I had made. That much was obvious. I remembered every detail of this body. Even the robes I was currently wearing I had gathered myself. “What is even going on?”"

Alright, so, we've established that the MC is in the body of a character she's made. She knows this because she recognizes it from earlier. That's established pretty firmly here - she knows what's going on. And yet, there's that end quote there - "What is even going on?" - that feels redundant, given the circumstances. She knows what's going on already - she's in the body of the character she made. Even if that wasn't the case, and she didn't know what was going on, this quote doesn't really add anything. Allow me to demonstrate - I'm going to take this sentence and change it a bit for emphasis. I'm going to do a brief re-imagining so the MC doesn't know what's going on, and we're going to see what the quote adds to that sentence.

"I looked down at my body again. It was unrecognizable to me - the clothes were strange, and I could already tell that my physical appearance was different, just from the shape of my body underneath my robes. "What is even going on?""

See what I mean? That quote doesn't really add anything to the sentence, even when the sentence itself is changed to try and make it fit. It's just kind of there.

So, what's the lesson to be learned, here? It's this - be very careful with having a character talk to themselves like this. It can be done effectively, but it can also lead to dead words, such as in my example above. This was just one example - I found that most of the MC's self-quotes here were a bit redundant. And if they weren't redundant, then a lot of them felt like they were stating the obvious. Take the following paragraph/quote, for instance:

"A huge part of me suspected everything around me was the real deal, but the rational part of my brain didn’t want to accept this deduction. There were so many noises playing out around me. Creatures could be heard scuttling about to and fro. The sound of rushing water played in the distance. Even focusing my eyes in a direction had a magnifying effect. If I turned my head towards the sounds of a small creature’s footsteps I could see them clearly, if they weren’t blocked by trees. Even a colony of ants had been magnified from a large distance.

“I still have the keen senses I had in the game. In that case…”"

Again, I understand what you may be trying to do here - that is, really establish that the main character has the powers from the game - but I'd advise you to be careful with it. The quote above feels unnecessary to me, since we've already established that the character has the traits from the game. The words feel unneeded when put into context with the rest of the paragraph.

Now, is this a big issue? Admittedly, not really, but it was enough that I felt it warranted being brought up. It was certainly enough to pull my attention away, so I figured I might as well. It also leads into my next point, as will be demonstrated later. I think there's a way to not only keep the scenes of the MC talking to herself, but make it feel more natural, too. But we'll get to that in a bit.

Next, the content of the chapter itself. First off, let me state that I get the purpose behind this chapter - it's the first chapter after the prologue, so you wanted to establish the rules of the book in terms of magic. That's commendable, not to mention very important for you to do if this is going to be a book with a gamified magic system, but again, I think there's a better way to do it. What we get here is a chapter of the MC wandering around, talking to themselves and basically playing with magic. That's not bad on its own, but this is your first real chapter of your story - you had a prologue, sure, but this is your first real chapter. This is your first and arguably only chance to make a big first impression. If someone reads this story and they aren't grabbed by your first chapter, odds are they're going to exit the window and not come back.

So, we have a challenge, here - we need to establish that the MC has changed into their character from the game. We need to begin establishing the magic system at play here. We need to do both of those in a way that grabs the reader's attention. Finally, we need to do all that in, at most, around 4,000 words, and preferably closer to 3,000 since this is a web serial. Maybe even closer to 2,000 if that's more your speed. That probably seems like a tall order, but I think there's a deceptively simple fix for it.

Rather than just have the MC wandering around the woods, talking to themselves and practicing magic, why not have them be forced to defend themselves using their new magic? It doesn't even need to be against other people, it could be against wildlife, monsters, etc. This could possibly address everything I've brought up here in one relatively simple change. You could still have the MC's quotes to themselves in place, and have them come out as mid-fight dialog, which would feel more natural. The action would grab the reader's attention from the get-go, which would make them more likely to stay for future chapters. We'd start to get an explanation for the magic system (emphasis on start - you actually did a very good thing here by not just dumping the full rules for the magic system in the first chapter, so I'd recommend doing something similar here). Finally, I think this is very attainable in the word limit I provided. You'd get a few hundred words for the MC to figure out what's happening, then you'd get the rest of the chapter for the fight, the magic system, and the quotes to herself. So it's very doable, I think - after all, 3000 words is not a small amount, especially for a web serial. 3,000 words is quite a bit of room to work with. It tightens up a bit at 2,000 words or less, obviously, but again, I still think it's very doable.

Prospective authors who may be reading this should take notes - your first chapter needs to be as eye-catching as possible. After all, if your first chapter doesn't hold the reader's attention, the only thing keeping them around for the second chapter is inertia - that is, they already started, so they might as well keep going - but inertia is not the same as actually being invested in the story. An audience that's only sticking around due to inertia is far less likely to actually pay you for your work. And even then, inertia doesn't work for a lot of people. If they're not invested by the first chapter, they're not going to keep reading. So focus on making as strong of a first impression as you possibly can.

Final thoughts: I didn't mention this at the start, but I think this story has a strong core idea behind it. It's definitely very marketable to readers on SH, which is to say you're hitting all the key tags that readers here go crazy over, and believe me, that is not something I'm just throwing out there - a marketable story is a very good thing, and it's worth bringing up if you plan to eventually try to get paid doing this (which you should at some point - after all, if you're good at something, never do it for free). I would suggest being more careful with the MC's quotes to themselves - ask yourself if they really add anything to the rest of the chapter, and if not, that may be your sign to remove them. You may also want to think about making the first chapters of any future stories you write more eye-catching, since that's your first impression, and you want that to be as attention-grabbing as possible.

Thank you again for the story, and I hope this feedback is able to help you in some way!
Thank you for your critique! I will definitely think more about the MC's quotes, and try to improve the flow of the whole thing. As for the fight scene, I thought of putting that in the chapter as well; however, it ended up in Chapter 2. This problem more comes from the prologue I think. As it is not really a prologue and more like a 1st chapter. I am glad the magic system isn't coming off as super info dumpy. I had that worry, and I plan to use sprinkles.
 
Top