Quote:
Originally posted by Sticks
Quote:
Originally posted by AndyJK
Ok I read some of chapter 1 before stopping. The sentences are too long, you're spending too much time describing minor aspects which make the story, so far, a little longwinded. There's a few grammitical errors and you definitely need to work on your metophors and similes. For a start air doesn't whistle. The first sentence would have been better read:
The dust flew into the wind whistling around the buildings of Holburn Junction. Succinct and to the point, and that's how you have to be when telling a story otherwise the reader is going to get bored quickly.
Another thing it would have been best to describe Holborn Junction and the world at the start so we get a better picture of what's going on and character build. Is your story set in some apocalyptic period in the future? What's with the guy in the hovver car and why are cats 'murdered?' Sorry Sticks but I couldn't go on any longer (not that I want to be critical just trying to help). I wonder what others thought.
|
This was set in a kind of post apocalypse, albeit an economic one.
When I first penned this, it was in 1988 at the place I did my first degree in Aberdeen, so the target audience was only too aware of the geography of that area.
For reference here it is on Google Maps
Incidentally in the original, 1988 version, the episode one was one page long. The 1993 rewrite was a vain attempt to boost it to the size of a novel. I was looking for work then and wondered if I could hack it as a writer back then.
In the first write in 1988, the guy in the hover car was just a throw away character, in the 1993 re-write he was turned into a relative of the commander of a base of US Marines.
As for grammar and such, when I rediscovered this set of files, all I did in the conversion process was remove obvious spelling errors and some of the grammatical bits that gave the green wavy line in Word. There rest was preserved for historical purposes, i.e to compare writing styles.
The question is, with my most recent work, has there been an improvement in the 15 years since the rewrite (20 years since the original)
|
That's fair enough. I suggest if you feel this is a strong story to go over the whole thing completely checking for errors, condensing sentences and editing parts out that drag it down. I wouldn't start off as you did, it's very Enid Blyton-esque. It's not far from "It was a dark and stormy night..". I am sure you get my meaning. Be original, avoid cliches and non sequiturs. Be descriptive but don't over do it.