Sep 24, 2022
is it the time I think it is
in fact it may be
critique time
boy howdy :)))
So, I’ll mention my most important note first. Why do you start a new paragraph every sentence? I’ve seen stories forget to indent at all, but this might be just as bad. There’s no structure to the words on the page, no good place to stop halfway and pick it back up later. It’s just a lot of space. I wanted to mention this for two reasons:
One, it affects your pacing dramatically. I can’t actually comment on your pacing, because it essentially doesn’t exist. The line breaks make it hard to tell what’s what, who’s speaking the scene at hand, everything.
Two, the monotonous structure makes my eyes glaze over. It also could be that it’s 12:30am as I’m writing this review, but it’s hard to stay focused on the writing if it’s nothing but words, space, words, space. Don’t take this personally— I just think using line breaks more cleverly would highly benefit you.
My second point is this: be more direct with your readers. I didn’t know who was talking half the time (could be midnight brain but it’s still an issue), and that made the dialogue feel really shallow to me.
I also wanted to mention your prose, since it’s not the strongest. Be more confident in the words you’re writing. If you’re not confident, use a dictionary, or a thesaurus, whatever you need. Think about transitions between scenes. Think about how characters might interact before writing down the dialogue. The key is to build confidence.
There were probably a few other things I wanted to say, but holy shit, midnight brain is killing me. Have a good day. :)
