Jan 30, 2023
First thing I have to give you is that it’s a lot shorter and way more digestible. I was able to follow what was happening at any given moment.
With that, though, I noticed a few more issues. I’d say that this chapter is heavy on what we call info-dumping. If you’re not familiar with the term, it means throwing a heap of information on your audience all at once and expecting them to remember it. Every writer falls into this trap, and sometimes it’s okay, but it’s well overdone in this chapter, and in the novel in general. Characters are introduced left and right, with no semblance of whether they’ll be important. I do feel a bit bad criticizing your unfocused cast of characters considering I have something similar in my novel, but if I could go back, I would have created a more tight-knit set of main characters.
One thing that makes characters work is dynamics. A set of characters having a dynamic, or difference, between each other is an essential narrative tool to refine their personalities. The only character dynamic you have in this book is the classic ‘two sarcastic characters making quips’ trope, which works until it doesn’t. That trope works best when the characters are much more complex. For a good example of sarcastic quips, I would check out “The Devil I Know” here on Honeyfeed. It’s really good at painting those kinds of relationships between characters which this story so desperately needs.
There’s one other dynamic that I won’t touch on any more than I already have, that being Ethan. I just… man, I hate that character. Blaming comic relief on a speech disability is just not cool, man.
This is about as far as I’m gonna get in this series. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I didn’t despise it, for what that’s worth. I think there’s a lot here that, when refined, could potentially make for a pretty fantastic novel. You just have to carve that out for yourself.
Take care. :)
