Please Give Me Advice! · 10:40pm Aug 28th, 2014
Ok, so here's the problem: I need your guys help. I have an assignment in my Language Arts Class at school, and I want to show you it. First I'm going to tell you guys about the Main Character-
Character Name: Amura Whisperhaze (Girl)
Appearence: Ghostly Blond Hair, Peircing Icy-Blue Eyes, and Tan Skin.
Clothing: Aquamarine T-Shirt, Purple Skirt, 2 Earrings in the Shape of Snowflakes.
Age: 15 Years Old.
Okay, now that we're done with that, I'd like to start on the first chapter, just so you guys can have an idea about what I have to do. Please comment on this and tell me if this is a good idea and if I should use this. Here we go! Chapter 1-
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My Life Is Miserable.
I Never Asked For This, I thought as my shovel hit the gravel, and I grunted as I tried to life the heavy load. I grinned as the shovel slowly inched upward, and then sighed when I tipped the shovel, moving the gravel into a wheelbarrow next to me, but my grin faded as I watched a small boy with dark, chocolate brown hair lift the wheelbarrow and stroll away.
Why Did They Do This? My mind started to wander again, but then stopped when a scream came out and pieced the air, and I turned around to find a young girl slip and fall off the edge of a cliff, down into the rocks below. My eyes widened for a bit before slowly returning to their normal size. I turned back around, as did all of the other kids. I felt no pain, just numbness. There was no point in feeling any emotion towards the girl...she was gonna come back anyway.
Let Me Explain.
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The kids who live here never die. We can try. A lot of us have come close to a Coma, but we wake up. Only one person in the entire time has ever died with this curse. No one knows how he did it, and they're still trying to figure it out. I was one of the first. I watched my parents, friends, aunts, uncles...I watched them all die before my eyes. And I could do nothing to make me go too. But other people have joined, and I'm happy that I'm not the only one.
Other people are afraid. When the curse came, no one understood how it worked, so they got scared...and locked us away. Now every one of us work, day and night, only getting about an hour of sleep. It's miserable...but we all know they won't let us out until they know what it is and how to control it.
People who don't know us call us The Cursed Ones. But we call ourselves The Immortals.
okay first of all you are doing good for starting the story. I can easily tell that it is about this girl who wants to die, but the thing she has to get past is the fact that her and a lot of other people have been cursed and can no longer do that, thus making them immortal. but with this first chapter you don't have enough detail to allow for the scene to become clear enough, and we have no idea of how the curse came to be, or if it even affects how they age.
Second, I had a slight issue with the deliverence the diolog, and what i can only assume was the character taking about five moments, in some cases about one to two minutes, to explain something. you could have just used done this:
moving on to another paragraph like that basically says that at least a few seconds, or less sometimes, have passed. which is indicitive of the pause you wanted in the characters thoughts.
Third this is a great start to a story, but it just feels a little to short to be a first chapter. it feels more like a prolog (a small scene before the story starts to get the reader hooked), this can easily be fixed by extending the characters thought to acomidate what you need to happen. in the case of this story, or this specific chapter, have the character continue to work, explain a bit about the situation, introduce herself to the reader, and add little interaction that make the character seem more real.
Next, you can work a little more on the paragraphs, think of them as snapshots in some ways.
from the looks of the story it will be in a first person perspective, so the best thing to do is visualize what the character sees and discribe that in a paragraph. as certain events happen try to think that everytime the character shifts their focus, that is supposed to be a new paragraph.
Finally you look decent form a first glance but i would suggest getting someone to proof read your work for small mistakes that could slip by you. it would be a great idea to have a bunch of people read so that you catch as many little mistakes as possible; otherwise the flow of your story could get halted and ruin the emersion of the story itself.
keep in mind not everything i have said could be affecting the whole chapter; just some of it. This could also be me just not noticing a slight style choice in the writing, as I have a slightly more picky free-style of writing.
Thanks!
I'll keep that in mind.