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After reading most of your first chapter my impression of your story would: really bad, but not incompetent. At a basic technical level you seem to have a handle on things, but your plotting, description and characterization are really weak. I may not be your target audience because I was immediately turned off by the presence of a bunch of Proper Noun characters talking who clearly embodied cliche High Fantasy / Anime stereotypes. And they proceed to have a really cliched and dull conversation about a bunch of things that I as a reader have no relationship to except that I can already imagine what they are based on the laundry list of cliches they appear to be checking off. Stuff like "the ultimate badass who is eventually killed by their apprentice" or characters going "I swore I'd kill you the next time we met!" being deployed with no sense of irony really killed any interest I would have had. If you're going to recycle these extremely venerable tropes then either do something different with them or at least ease the reader in rather than just bludgeoning me over the head in the very first paragraphs of the tale. While you aren't bogged down by overly long sentences or purple prose your writing felt really flat and sterile. I would highlight this line as particularly bad: quote:His psychic senses scrabbled around Shura's mind, finding no grasp or leverage. This feels like a D&D Dungeon Master describing the effect that a player character's spell just had (or failed to have): "You cast psychic senses but Shura's saving throw is too high." Was there really no way for you to describe this psychic battle without literally just telling the reader that it's taking place? Is there any way you can convey to use what it actually feels like to try and exercise your psychic powers, only to have them blocked by a stronger mind? Some of your other action descriptions are better than this particular line but a lot of your descriptions suffer from this common flaw: at most, you tell us what the action looks like, but you don't do much to involve our other visual senses. Also, your action scenes come off like you've watched too much anime: characters trading the occasional awesomely powerful blow, then pausing to gloat to each other, then exchanging another powerful blow, kinda sucks when you're just reading about it rather than watching it. And that sort of sums up my main objection to your piece (other than not particularly liking the plot or setting): it doesn't really feel like you value the written word very much. Instead it feels like this is really supposed to be an anime or manga. Mostly we just get a lot of expository dialogue and descriptions that feel more like instructions for the director or artist. To my mind, enjoyable prose fiction is not interchangeable with visual story telling. The strengths of prose fiction are specifically in its ability to draw the reader's imagination into the scene, to really make them feel what is happening on a visceral level. This is the essence of the "show, don't tell" mantra that is driven into writer's heads. So reading a line like "His psychic senses scrabbled around Shura's mind, finding no grasp or leverage" just kills the story as far as I'm concerned. It's 100% telling rather than showing, and because it describes a completely fantastical event I can't even plug in my own sensory experience here. I have no real frame of reference for what is happening so I'm immediately ripped right out of the scene at exactly the moment I should be getting into it. I would ask yourself to be honest here: do you really enjoy reading, or do you find that you mostly consume comic books, TV and movies? Because no offense but this came off as the work of somebody who wants to tell a story, but who isn't necessarily committed to that story being a work of prose fiction. If you're just using your story to tell a story that deep down you think should be an anime then why even bother writing it down? If you're gonna write, take advantage of the things that writing is good at rather than poorly imitating a different medium. I apologize if this comes off as harsh. You seem like you would have the capacity to be a decent writer if you put your mind to it and you avoid a lot of common mistakes so I'm absolutely not telling you to give up, but I also know from personal experience that sometimes it's important to get harsh feedback.
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Jun 22, 2015 22:32
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 04:50 |
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