Looking for feed back

[Tricky786]

i want your honest brutal, constructive criticism, especially for the first 3 chapters, i want to know how and what needs to be improved in them. thanks in advance!

 

[FRWriter]

i want your honest brutal, constructive criticism, especially for the first 3 chapters, i want to know how and what needs to be improved in them. thanks in advance!

What kind of story is it? Is it a translation? Did you use AI to create it?

Give us some more info.

 

[Tricky786]

oh, its a fantasy story, its not a translation, but i used Ai to proofread it.

 

[Ellie_in_Pink]

Okay, first, some good news. Your story is polished enough where the issues are a bit trickier to nail down. I don't know how much is AI-aided or to what degree. But fortunately for us all, I'm not the AI police. And if I am, someone had better send me a badge and a hat. Otherwise, I'm just going to assume you actually did just use it for proofreading.

First issue, your paragraphs. Like a lot of writers here, you seem afraid of a proper 5-sentence paragraph. The issue always ends up being that, without them, the entire chapter starts to look like one big, uninterrupted paragraph with a LOT of white space in between. Meaning, instead of your pace being faster, it starts to feel SUPER slow. Save the one-line paragraphs for dialogue and sentences you REALLY want to create emphasis for, for dramatic effect.

Got it?

(See? Like what I just did up there?) Also, please use dialogue tags. Yes, in the same line as when the character speaks.

"Like this, see?" Ellie said, trying with all her might to convince just one person that the word 'said' was not indeed a naughty one that would send you to writer-hell.

Okay, next point. Narrative voice. You don't seem comfortable with one yet, so you jump all over the place. So you end up having a god-narrator hovering over the lands, telling a mythical story, one minute. And the next minute, the camera is shoved right into the point of view of a character. Then we're so close we can see their thoughts. At least until you need to drop more exposition, at which point, god starts speaking again. The effect for the reader basically feels like a camera doing pan-in and zoom-out shots, over and over. It's both dizzying and confusing. Which is all solved if you just stick with one narrative style and take your time with establishing shots.

Speaking of exposition ... you have 99% too much. And that includes the old guy tell his story. The reason you want to avoid exposition, especially in your first chapter, is because you haven't hooked us yet. You need to show us enough (without telling us) about a character before we'll care enough about them to remember any of it. Same for the plot, same for the world. We need to care BEFORE we learn. And when you do the opposite, we just stop paying attention.

Fix up your paragraphs, focus your narrative voice, cut exposition.

If you focus on those three things, your story will be SO much better. And then, people will be able to focus on the plot enough to give you feedback on it, instead of feeling stuck on the details.

Best of luck!

 

[Tricky786]

Okay, first, some good news. Your story is polished enough where the issues are a bit trickier to nail down. I don't know how much is AI-aided or to what degree. But fortunately for us all, I'm not the AI police. And if I am, someone had better send me a badge and a hat. Otherwise, I'm just going to assume you actually did just use it for proofreading.

First issue, your paragraphs. Like a lot of writers here, you seem afraid of a proper 5-sentence paragraph. The issue always ends up being that, without them, the entire chapter starts to look like one big, uninterrupted paragraph with a LOT of white space in between. Meaning, instead of your pace being faster, it starts to feel SUPER slow. Save the one-line paragraphs for dialogue and sentences you REALLY want to create emphasis for, for dramatic effect.

Got it?

(See? Like what I just did up there?) Also, please use dialogue tags. Yes, in the same line as when the character speaks.

"Like this, see?" Ellie said, trying with all her might to convince just one person that the word 'said' was not indeed a naughty one that would send you to writer-hell.

Okay, next point. Narrative voice. You don't seem comfortable with one yet, so you jump all over the place. So you end up having a god-narrator hovering over the lands, telling a mythical story, one minute. And the next minute, the camera is shoved right into the point of view of a character. Then we're so close we can see their thoughts. At least until you need to drop more exposition, at which point, god starts speaking again. The effect for the reader basically feels like a camera doing pan-in and zoom-out shots, over and over. It's both dizzying and confusing. Which is all solved if you just stick with one narrative style and take your time with establishing shots.

Speaking of exposition ... you have 99% too much. And that includes the old guy tell his story. The reason you want to avoid exposition, especially in your first chapter, is because you haven't hooked us yet. You need to show us enough (without telling us) about a character before we'll care enough about them to remember any of it. Same for the plot, same for the world. We need to care BEFORE we learn. And when you do the opposite, we just stop paying attention.

Fix up your paragraphs, focus your narrative voice, cut exposition.

If you focus on those three things, your story will be SO much better. And then, people will be able to focus on the plot enough to give you feedback on it, instead of feeling stuck on the details.

Best of luck!

yeah i used ai for proofreading, and an editor helped me out too, but that guy said that i needed more one liners in the chapter, thats why i split the paragraphs up, guess i gotta undo that. and about the narrative part, you are talking about in the starts i talks about the festival and then shifts to the dead bodies yea? if so then, thanks i will fix that.

man i have been struggling to write it into a good first chapter.

the old mans story is there cuz it introduces to the reader a bit about the world and its history, but that's coming out as exposition. can you give me a few ideas? i thought of making the scene with the corpses a prologue or ch 0 and expand it a bit to introduce the old man, and the orphanage, and cutting it from chapter one. but most people just jump to ch 1 and skip the prologue entirely.

Thus back to square one. well thanks man, for checking it out and taking the time to point out the mistakes, i will try to fix them.

 

[Ellie_in_Pink]

If you stop addressing me as "man" I can help, haha.

So what I'm going to do is cut everything you don't need, condense paragraphs so you can see how it's done, and then tell you where you need to write more. I think that'll give you something substantial to work with. Note, I'm not going to fix all the mistakes, because fixing them yourself is how you learn. I'm also not going to point out every tiny one, because overloading you with everything that's wrong isn't going to help. But I can point you in the right direction for the problems I mentioned above. Then you can use that to redraft your whole story. After that point, you'll be ready to work on more nuanced problems.

Any instructions I give will be in parentheses, within the quoted text from your chapter. Also, work on always capitalizing the first word in a sentence.

Chapter 1: The Night of the Full Moon



The night when the moon shone bright, people of the kingdom celebrated the arrival of the new year. Bards singing songs, children playing around, people enjoying the festival with their families. but where there is light, there are bound to be shadows. Screaming bodies wreathed in flames.

(You have room for more setting detail in the above paragraph. Don't tell us what happened, just show the village and the corpses inside.)

In the middle of it all … a boy stood still.

The smell of iron hung so thick in the air that he had stopped trying to breathe. And around him, bodies lay where they had fallen. Some reaching towards him, and some turned away as though even in death they could not agree on what to think of him.

The boy didn't know how long he had been standing there. Blood had seeped through his shoes, and he could feel its hot stickiness. It had been warm at first, but now it was cooling between his toes. His ribs ached, and his hands were numb from holding the knife, while the wounds on his back still stung. but he stood there, silent except for the quivering gasps that escaped from his mouth.

Then a corpse spoke, breaking the post-battle silence. "W-Why?" Its lips moved unnaturally, as if it were possessed.

But the boy didn't look at it. Nor did he answer.

Voices of other corpses started join in. Ragged, overlapping, pulling at him from every direction.

"You won't live well after this."

"You won't find peace."

"Y-Your life will be..."

The words were whispers that unravelled into echo. Like they bounced off his surroundings.

But the boy was beyond caring, beyond paying them any mind, and he started walking. And as he trekked, his steps left dark deliberate prints in the ground. heavy impressions as if he was bearing a burden that no one could see, and it sank his weight down into the ground.

They kept calling. their whispers becoming shrill and insistent as he moved further away.

But the boy didn’t look back.

✦ ✦ ✦

Ric opened his eyes to the children laughing.

(you open with sight, but then pivot to sound. Either focus on a visual he woke to, or a sound he woke up hearing. Then you can switch to a second sensory detail.)

He lay still for a moment, staring up at the branches overhead. The bark of the oak dug into his back where he'd slumped against it. Sunlight filtered through the leaves in thin shafts, catching dust. Somewhere nearby, someone was frying onions, and the smell made his nose wrinkle.

Ric hated onions.

Ric sat up and ran a hand through his black hair. He was fifteen years old.

(You need more character detail that is showing him, not arbitrarily telling us things about him. Also, the transition from this to the next paragraph is part of the issue I mentioned. You jump from being way outside of the character, far enough that you paint a picture of him as if he's a third person character in a video-game. But then, immediately, we jump into his thoughts. Give him a moment, maybe let him look at the mirror, or out the window.

Dang. That one again.

(I have no idea what he's inner-dialoguing about. You explain it in the next paragraph. But your order of operations is making me confused and then clarifying after the fact. You need to create context first, and then let him think about it, once the reader has some idea of what he's even referring to.)

The dream was a recurring nightmare. The talking corpses, his blood soaked boots. And the endless distance across which he trekked. It was always almost the same, but sometimes one thing, or another, was different. A corpse that had spoken before would be silent. its voice replaced by another, or the blood was soaking his vest, and not his boots…

(The above exposition could be condensed, but notice that I didn't cut it. I didn't cut it because he is reflecting on something the audience has already been *shown* not just told about)

Ric sighed. filing the dream away amongst all the others and turning his attention to the commotion in the yard.

He could see that it was Old Sven. Old Sven had gathered the orphanage children into a loose semicircle near the fire pit. And whatever tale he was spinning had the younger ones vibrating with excitement.

Ric yawned. pretending to be weary. but he pushed himself up and off the ground, and wandered closer, ears pricking up to listen.

"—and peace reigned, my young ones. There was a dwarf whom I used to play with. he was my friend, strong, bulky, and he used a mace as his weapon and a turban as his helmet. "

A warm smile on Sven's face.

"He used to say: The turban is our pride and a symbol of unity! But others and I used to make fun of him for his height, we used to say: Looks like it united your height in those muscles. and he used to chase us around till he got tired.”

(Just have Sven say this to the children. Don't tell us about something he said some other time. Also, I cut some of Sven's dialogue below because it was just becoming exposition, instead of scene setting. Save lore for much deeper in the book.)

Ric leaned against the fence at the edge of the group. He'd read this history in the library years ago. The demon incursions, the decade of war. the other races paralyzed by the demon king's influence.. He knew how it ended. A sharp pain flickered behind his left eye. He pressed two fingers to his temple. Closed his eyes and endured. By now, it had become an everyday habit for him. He said nothing and waited for it to pass.

Sven continued, his voice dropping to the kind of register that made the younger children lean in.

"They killed and devoured. And the world, which had been so certain of its peace, had no answer for them."

An eight-year-old at the front raised his hand. "Sir. Did you see him? The hero?"

Sven's expression changed. It was subtle the kind of change that only happened when memory caught a person off guard. When nostalgia hits and the expression instinctively changes to something soft.

"Yes," he whispered. He shook his head and smiled. "He was an extraordinary young man."

(Note, because you are doing scene building, you have the allowance of *some* limited exposition. Because the focus isn't on the exposition itself. It's about painting a scene of an old man teaching a bunch of kids.)

At the back of the group, a ten-year-old named Gray grew visibly distracted. He squirmed sideways until his shoulder bumped against Alden. Who was thirteen. And had the unfortunate habit of sitting very still whenever she was trying to invisible.

(Okay, I'm addressing this entire "Gray" section here. This is another example of your struggle with narrative focus. You have spent the entirety of this scene trying to put us in Ric's point of view. To the point, where we are now basically over his shoulder, Gears of War style. But then this Gray kid suddenly is the focus. We can hear his whispers, and notice details that Ric isn't even thinking about. Which suddenly makes the reader feel like they have no idea where the camera is. For now, I'm just going to rewind with a scene break, since we are no longer in Ric's point of view.)


✦ ✦ ✦


At the back of the group, a ten-year-old named Gray grew visibly distracted. He was especially tall for his age. He squirmed sideways until his shoulder bumped against Alden. Who was thirteen. And had the unfortunate habit of sitting very still whenever she was trying to invisible.

(If this is the start of a new Point of View, you need to add scene detail from Gray's perspective. Also, the narration should feel more like the child's voice.)

"Their final battle," Sven said, “Then the hero got a grave injury, but he didn't give up, and kept fighting. In the end, he struck the decisive blow and the demon king fell." Sven folded his hands in his lap.

(I moved the above section because the plot coincidence of the kids talking about the hero dying *before* it came up naturally just makes it seem more like exposition through plot convenience. By reversing the order, it seems more natural that the characters would just naturally begin talking about the topic of Ric's backstory.)

A moment of silence. Even the wind seemed to cooperate.

"Hey," Gray whispered. "Is it weird that I'm less interested in the hero's name than everyone else is?"

Alden's eyes slid sideways. "That's because you fell asleep that day."

"...What day?"

She leaned a fraction closer, voice dropping until it was nearly nothing. "You see Big Brother Ric over there?" A pause. "Don't say the hero's name in front of him.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say, he goes crazy if he hears it.” Alden replied.

“Huh? I have never seen him-” Gray began to say, before he was cut off.

That's the rule. If you're that curious, ask the teacher some other time." Alden said.

Gray looked at Ric, then back at Alden. He had at least fourteen follow-up questions. He asked none of them.


✦ ✦ ✦

(Here, we again jump in point of view back to Ric. There are other ways you could deal with the problems of narrative voice. But I've done it this way so that you have a clear view of when your character perspectives are shifting. If you keep this scene break, then you will also need a short introductory paragraph to put us back over Ric's shoulder.)

"Sir!" A girl near the middle shot her hand up. "What class was he?"

"Ah." Sven's mouth curved. "He was a Barriard."

Blank faces. The word landed like a stone in still water and sank without leaving a ripple. None of them had heard it before. None of them except Ric, who had gone perfectly still. He'd read every book in the orphanage library twice, looking to find it. He'd traded chores for access to the village archivist's shelves. He'd asked every travelling merchant who passed through whether they'd heard the word. Nothing.

(I moved the above exposition from later in the chapter. I did this instead of deleting it because we are currently in Ric's head. This is something he would actively be thinking about, because it's directly related to Sven's story. Also, this amount of exposition doesn't give any answers, so it doesn't feel like cheating. It's more like an emphasis on how important the conversation is to Ric.)

Ric's hand was up before he'd decided to raise it. "How did a Barriard kill the Demon King?"

Every head turned to Ric. Sven looked at him for a long moment, the way teachers looked at one who had asked the right question.

"That," The old man said slowly, "Is the question, isn't it? As I say always, limits are something which we set on ourselves." He stroked his beard, gaze drifting somewhere past all of them. "Perhaps he knew something about those barriers that the rest of the world never bothered to learn."

He let the words sit.

"One more thing before dinner," Sven said, standing and brushing off his robe. "Tomorrow, a mage from the Magic Tower will be visiting the orphanage. He'll be assessing each of you for your class awakening. So sleep well tonight."

The yard erupted.

“Yay, tomorrow we will see a mage!” they spoke in unison.

Children scattered in every direction. Yota, who was Ric's age and inherently incapable of stillness, appeared at his elbow. His blonde hair and yellow eyes were unique features, which the children used to spot him in hide and seek. among everyone else, and he had been restraining himself for the past ten minutes.

(These are the sorts of physical details about Ric we should have seen from the beginning)

"Ric. Fire mage. I'm calling it right now."

(This dialogue comes out of nowhere, and I have no idea who is talking to who.)

"You'll set yourself on fire." Ric said.

"That's part of the aesthetic." Yota shoved him, Ric watched him run.

Ric didn't follow. He stayed where he was, watching the fire pit. The flames were blazing at first, then slowly started dying down to embers. The yard slowly emptied around him.

But how does it work? There was nothing in the books about how the hero used it…"

(Note the transition in the previous two paragraphs. You jump from Ric doing something, to Ric thinking something. But here, it mostly works. That's specifically because you already had the camera hovering right over Ric. So glimpsing into his thoughts doesn't feel jarring)

He kicked a stone in the fire pit.

"Sure, it can be used for defence, I get that… but you can't defeat the demon king with just defending. He stood still for a moment. Why is it that it's not mentioned in detail about how it was used?

A beat of silence.

He kicked another loose stone toward the dying fire and watched it vanish beneath the ash. Tomorrow I will find out about my class. He stood there silently, watching the fire burn out.

 

[Tricky786]

If you stop addressing me as "man" I can help, haha.

Haha, my bad, its like a habit of mine. and thanks for the edits you pointed out, i have edited and added some paragraphs and stopped using much of the one-liners, and thanks to that, the chapter looks much better than it was! so for the sake of convenience i will just put edited parts here and update the chapter.

The night when the moon shone bright, people of the kingdom celebrated the arrival of the new year. Bards singing songs, children playing around, people enjoying the festival with their families. But where there is light, there are bound to be shadows. In a far away village, screaming bodies wreathed in flames. houses were destroyed, corpses lay around mutilated, disfigured. Some were missing a hand, others didn't have legs, and many were headless with their eyes open in disbelief even after death.

Many people died…

No, they got murdered, and yet…

In the middle of it all…

i added a bit of the description, to show the scene well, hope this is good.

Ric opened his eyes, his vision was still blurry. He blinked hard and opened them, now he could see clearly, the branches of the tree he slept on. He lay still for a moment, staring up at the branches overhead. The bark of the oak dug into his back where he'd slumped against it. Sunlight filtered through the leaves in thin shafts, catching dust. Somewhere nearby, someone was frying onions, and the smell made his nose wrinkle.

Ric hated onions.

He sat up and ran a hand through his black hair, the leaves on his head fell down. he noticed the dirt on his white clothes and brushed it off with his hand, and shrugged off the dry leaves that fell on him. His face was a bit tense due to the nightmare, but this had become a habit to him. He was fifteen years old, sharp-eyed, and was already tired of being surprised by anything.

Dang. That one again.

the character description and (tried to) gave the scene a moment.

At the back of the group, a ten-year-old named Gray grew visibly distracted. He squirmed sideways until his shoulder bumped against Alden. Who was thirteen. And had the unfortunate habit of sitting very still whenever she was trying to invisible.

Gray stared at her, he was a curious kid, as well as the eldest among the kids, and the youngest among the teens, he didn't know why she was trying to hide, he wanted to ask but he decided to focus more on Sven's story and turned away. he didn't had much trouble looking at Sven due to his height, but the kids behind him couldn't feel the same.

"Their final battle," Sven said, “Then the hero got a grave injury, but he didn't give up, and kept fighting. In the end, he struck the decisive blow and the demon king fell." Sven folded his hands in his lap.

i was confused as to how to make the narration like a child's voice, well here is what i came up with.

Ric's pain finally drifted away, and he opened his eyes and realized that the story was over, and the children were asking questions about it. he stretched out his arms, and finally relaxed, then started to listen.

"Sir!" A girl near the middle shot her hand up. "What class was he?"

a bit of a short paragraph like you said,

"Ric. I will get the Fire mage class. I'm calling it right now."

"You'll set yourself on fire." Ric said.

fixed the dialogue. and the rest and all of the chapter is mostly how you wrote, and the way you explained the scenes like camera, it was very good and simple explanation for me to understand. thanks!

 

[Ellie_in_Pink]

There you go. That's looking so much better. For now, learning to do that in all your chapters is going to reward you with heaps of progress. And once you have those skills under your belt, and everything in your book is redrafted to meet your new standards, you should post for feedback again to help refine your skill further.

 

[Tricky786]

Thanks for the help, i really appreciate it.