• Were the scenes and character actions easy to visualize?
Dude, I’ve read the first three chapters. And I’ll say this honestly… sorry, but your narration is still vague, which makes the scenes difficult to visualize—at least based on my reading experience.
In terms of story premise, your fiction may have some fairly interesting dark fantasy elements that create a sense of discomfort for the reader (in a positive way; dark fantasy premises are indeed bleak). Unfortunately, the execution is still far from good. When I read your chapters, I felt frustrated, as if I wanted to say, “This scene is interesting, but the execution is not good.”
Here are some technical problems I found in your narration:
(1) At first, I wanted to praise the atmosphere at the beginning of Chapter 1, when the narration used a fly hovering over a corpse to portray a tense and disturbing mood.
A fly circled lazily, landing on Maya’s open eye.
She couldn’t blink.
Thirty minutes ago, she’d been alive. Now her body lay cold—half-covered by a crumpled bedsheet, face frozen in an agonized grimace.
And then—
...
Finally—she broke free.
The fabric around her was her own bedsheet.
Still naked beneath it, Maya shook off dirt and wrapped it tighter around herself. A gentle rain fell from a pale afternoon sky—maybe around two or three.
(My home’s backyard… inside the compound of a major cult facility in Valeslin.)
A towering statue of the cult’s founder loomed beside the mansion. At its base—that was where she had been buried.
(So it was him. My father.)
She spat the last grit from her mouth and scanned the house. The front door was locked. The car was gone. Her father was out.
But I quickly felt disappointed because this atmosphere feels more like a decorative attachment rather than a living environment that supports the plot. This detail seems useless when Maya manages to rise from death in a relatively “clean” state. I don’t see her wounded, bleeding, or decaying even though she has just risen from death. You know… flies usually swarm around rotting corpses.
By ignoring this detail, a fly here feels more like a random insect that happened to pass by rather than representing the symbolism of resurrection after death.
Well, that’s just one detail. I won’t mention every single detail, but my overall impression is that your narration lacks environmental texture. The world feels more like a static backdrop rather than a living environment that influences the characters.
You need to narrate a more vivid atmosphere. For example:
How the rain makes the protagonist’s clothes wet; how the wounds, blood, and pus on the protagonist’s body attract flies; how oppressive silence makes the protagonist uneasy. This is what I call a living atmosphere.
(2) Your narration tends to suffer from what I call “white room syndrome,” where the reader feels as if the protagonist is floating in a blank white space. Why?
Returning to point 1 because the narration lacks environmental texture. For example:
“You’re pretty popular, huh Maya?”
“I’ve had a few confessions, sure. But I’ve never dated anyone. You?”
“I’ve got a boyfriend now. But guys are the worst, seriously.”
“The worst?”
“They only talk about themselves, never listen, and their kissing? Ugh. Tongues everywhere.”
“Hah. Sounds like you’ve had a rough time.”
“If they suck at kissing, you can bet they suck at everything else too. Idiots.”
“Did something happen?”
“I think he’s cheating.”
“…That’s awful. You should dump him. You can do way better.”
In the dialogue scene between Maya and Sophia, the narration immediately jumps into dialogue without body language details or environmental descriptions. As a reader, I feel like I’m hearing disembodied voices speaking rather than watching characters interact.
I don’t know where Maya and Sophia are positioned during the conversation. Are they sitting? Standing? Walking? Where exactly are they having this conversation? What are they doing while talking? It’s too vague.
To avoid white room syndrome, you need to give texture to the environment by building a living atmosphere, providing spatial and temporal context, and giving spatial cues related to the characters’ relative positions.
In dialogue scenes, you should also insert body language to avoid the “talking heads syndrome.” By showing body language, readers perceive that the speaker is a human being, not a recorded voice. In addition, body language also conveys the characters’ emotions. This will make the dialogue feel more alive.
(3) Your protagonist’s movements still feel jumpy, almost like teleportation. Characters arrive at locations too quickly or suddenly.
She spat the last grit from her mouth and scanned the house. The front door was locked. The car was gone. Her father was out.
He was a branch leader in a powerful religious cult. Since he rose to that position, followers in the district had multiplied. Even the neighbors had been converted. Every last one.
Charming. Persuasive. A predator who preyed on the broken, wearing the charisma of a savior.
(I might be the only one who knows what he really is. If I screamed for help, they’d believe him over me.)
And if anyone saw her like this—naked, filthy, crawling out of the founder’s grave—they wouldn’t rescue her. They’d return her.
Maya kept low and crept along the wall.
(The bathroom door’s unlocked.)
She slipped inside through the side entrance.
She peeled off the filthy sheet and stepped into the shower.
She didn’t want comfort. She wanted the dirt gone—proof gone—the smell gone. She needed to look normal enough to pass.
Her hands were shaking. She pinned them under the water until they obeyed.
The mirror reflected her 170-cm frame—ice-blue eyes, ruined hair, skin streaked with mud.
I suspect this happens because the narration is chasing plot progression, so characters are immediately narrated as arriving at the next location.
To avoid this teleportation effect, you need to structure the scene flow more clearly, sequentially, and logically. For example: from location X, the protagonist moves to location Y. Then from location Y, the protagonist moves to location Z.
You can adjust the proportion of narration in each location depending on its relevance to the plot. For instance, you might narrate the murder scene in detail at location Y, but summarize it if location Y only serves as a transit point. Then you narrate the climax of the scene at location Z.
The point is: make your characters feel alive and moving within their world.
Did the flashback or memory sections strengthen the story, or did they interrupt the tension?
(4) This concerns flashbacks. Honestly, the flashbacks in these chapters feel like info dump. Why?
Ezekiel’s face twisted grotesquely. Wrinkles formed between his brows. His mouth contorted. The light vanished from half his face, revealing the darkness beneath.
It was a face he never showed to his followers. Only Maya had seen it.
The true face.
Her Mother
Maya wasn’t Ezekiel’s biological daughter.
She was born to a mother who had endured domestic abuse long before Maya was even born. Even after birth, Maya grew up terrified, watching the violence firsthand.
When Maya was eight, her mother finally left her abuser—to protect Maya.
That’s why Maya loved her.
Because the flashbacks feel forced rather than emerging organically through character interaction.
I understand that the flashback is meant to provide Maya’s tragic background and show how evil her father was. But the execution is poor and disrupts the scene flow. As a reader, I feel lost… why does this flashback suddenly appear?
For example, the flashback of Maya’s mother’s death is narrated through the explanation of an omniscient narrator, even though the chapter’s POV mostly uses limited third POV through Maya. This narrator intervention disrupts the flow of the scene and makes the reader feel disoriented.
I call this POV leakage, when the narration suddenly shifts POV without a smooth transition from limited third POV to omniscient third POV.
If your narration uses limited third POV through Maya, then Maya must become the reader’s lens to enter the story world. You can only narrate what Maya experiences at the present moment.
So what if you want to insert a flashback? This can be done much better if you use Maya’s memory as a gateway into the flashback. For example:
Maya sees a photo of her mother, then she closes her eyes. Her memories drift back as she reminisces about her mother. (You can narrate the flashback scene of Maya interacting with her mother here). Then Maya opens her eyes again… (and the scene returns to the present).
If I suggest you reread the Captain Reynard chapter that you previously reviewed. In that chapter, I inserted a long flashback scene through memory symbolism during Captain Reynard’s interaction with the mist ghost (his wife). Notice how the ghost’s kiss on Captain Reynard’s forehead becomes the trigger that brings back his memories and serves as an effective plot device to enter the flashback.
The point is: you need to integrate flashback scenes organically into character interactions.
Well, that’s probably enough feedback from me for now. You can consider the criticism and suggestions above or not.
Also, some details might have been missed because I read your three chapters in one sitting to measure the reading experience… so my judgment might be somewhat biased.
Best regards.
