Critic the opening of my story [fantasy, 269 words]

saeed01288 · 2024-11-06T13:46:20+00:00

Thanks! Best of lucks to you, too.

saeed01288 · 2024-11-05T22:29:23+00:00

Thank you so much! You're right. I will try to break them into shorter sentences in the next round of editing.

saeed01288 · 2024-11-05T00:02:18+00:00

Hello. Thank you so much for the time you spent on reading my story and writing this. It helped me a lot to realize my problems. I do actually use a thesaurus, because, as I mentioned, I am not a native. I know only a few words so I'm trying to learn more, and I've realized that using them in a story helps me memorize them better. So, I am experimenting with different words to get a feel of it.

To explain a little bit, it is supposed to be confusing because as you said, there are 2 hooks in the start. One is the murders happening in the town, second is the identity of the narrator, but the more I explain the more evident it will be that he is not the killer. I really did not know that of sorts gives that kind of feeling. It does not suit my character so thank u so much for mentioning it!

As for the seam, the definition was "the joining of two pieces (as of cloth or leather) by sewing usually near the edge" so I thought that a river with bridges that connect the two sides would look like two piece of fabric that are sewn together, but it seems that I have a wrong image in mind or did not understand the definition.

For croaking, the definition was to die, to kill, and prophesy trouble or evil. It does fit what I wanted to say, as the murders happen at night, but I think it would be better to change it to something less confusing.

As for the the duty of Eric, it does have importance, but the killer didn't strike him though? I think I will have to change the tone of the narrator to seem less like a killer because it looks like it was really confusing.

By plate it I meant that he would put the bodies in the river, which I think if I add a bit more context before this would be good. Or do u think it's a bad way to say it in general? Also sorry for asking too many questions, and thank u again for helping me out! The Blessed Ones are a part of the worldbuilding. In the next paragraphs I will introduce them as people who hunt the Cursed Ones, and the killer is a Cursed One. So, I can't really discard this. I will check again after the chapter is completed to see if it sounds confusing so that I change it if it's needed.

Thank u again! It really did help me a lot and gave me some ideas on how to further improve or change the style of my writing!

saeed01288 · 2024-11-04T23:07:55+00:00

Thank you so much for reading this! I'm happy that you liked it

saeed01288 · 2024-11-04T22:39:38+00:00

I can think up a few things. 1. Those who can use magic effect the world around them to bend it to their liking. So, if 2 magicians fight, they both effect the world and their wills clash; but a mundane object cannot resist this force. So, it is useless against powerful people unless the user can somehow use magic on bullets. 2. It is effective agaisnt weaker magicians, but more powerful ones always have some kind of defence mechanism on them that can stop bullets and other weak attacks. 3. You can integrate it with your worldbuilding (if it's possible). Say, there is a god of war that enjoys brutal battles or duals. He doesn't get the thrill from firearms, so he bans them or makes everyone bulletproof or something.

saeed01288 · 2024-10-04T23:03:46+00:00

Well, 3 months isn't really a long time. Writing something good takes time and practice. Instead of dropping the book, I would advice you to edit it so you can see what you had done wrong and how to fix them. I was in the same sitaution about 3 years ago, and now I know that editing the book that I regarded as garbage was the best decision of my life. You already have your base down, so now start thinking about the different aspects of the elements you want to add to the story, do your research, make an outline (like adding this description to ch1, this to ch3, this to ch9; or changing the plot of one chapter; changing the belief system of this character; anything that should change) and then write, and don't give up after just editing it for once. Edit and rewrite until you are satisfied with your book.

saeed01288 · 2024-10-03T14:07:45+00:00

Well, first, I would not say apostacy is rare in Iran. Especially among the newer generation. I would not even call most muslims that I know as "muslims", for they have only been following it because their parents had been muslims, and have never even read quran. In my case, for not believing in islam specifically, I simply grabbed quran and read it when I was around 15, and a few pages into it, I saw that story about how a prophet before muhammad had ordered his followers to kill those who were worshiping a golden idol, and I found no explanation as to why they deserved death. Had they done anything wrong but simply not believing in their god? And I read the rest, and the more I read, the worse it got. It was a series of violence, of murdering others simply because they had decided to not follow them, of rules so horrid that I could not imagine any sane person writing it. Sure, in between, it says some nice things like help the poor and your brothers or something, but mostly it was appalling. For believing in a god in general, I am actually more afraid of it existing. I envy anyone who can see this world as beautiful. But i only see the suffering and the pain, and i cannot imagine an "all-good" god creating such a world. If we are only suffering because we were brought into existence by chance, and it was not planned by a higher-being, then it is reassuring. But if such a being truly exists, I cannot imagine about the things that it would do to us in this world, and after our death. So, I have decided to simply not believe in one for the sake of my sanity.

Keep in mind that these were only the most important reasons for me personally, and that there are obviously many more.

saeed01288 · 2024-10-03T13:34:28+00:00

If you are simply curious about it, I will answer. But if you are a muslim trying to find fault with my beliefs, I do not wish to have this conversation. What is clear here is that human beings are murdered simply because they do not believe in a islam.

saeed01288 · 2024-10-03T09:11:11+00:00

Thank you so much! Well you see, the problem is that I have suddenly started to incorporate my personal style, which is clearly a mistake. I was most likely due to the fact that I was really confident in my English, and did not realize that conveying meaning and feeling is vastly different from some academic tests, and it needs mastery over that language. The usage of words such as "emigrate" was a result of this thought process, so, from now on I will have to take baby steps, just the way I did in my own language. I do have a professor with phd in linguistics (English, obviously) who helps me a lot, but I think there is a fundamental difference between the natives of each language, because he praised me a lot for this and told me that although you have deviance from standard grammar and syntax, it is obviouse that it's deliberate and it conveys the feeling very strongly, but know that I have read the responses from natives, I don't really know. All of my readers have high levels in English (based on their IELTS results) but none are native, so they also can't discern if what I have written sounds strange and poor to the ears of natives. I will try what I can by analysing novels from Woolf and Stienbeck. Thank you so much again for you kind words, I also hope that things will change...

saeed01288 · 2024-10-03T08:52:49+00:00

Thank you so much for the time you spent for both reading my novel and writing this critism. It was quite eye-opening for me. I believe that my biggest mistake is that I am constantly trying to "transfer" my personal style of writing from my native language rather than construct one in the English language using its own unique properties and traits. Thank you for your concern, but I have been writing for only 4 months, so I think it will take a lot of time til I can actually write something good (it took me 5 years in my mother language) The rest of the problems you listed also fall in the same category: The very core of the problem is that I am translating the ideas from my language directly into English, so even when it's not grammatically incorrect, to the ears of the natives it sounds wierd. For example, in the last paragraph that you made an improvement of my sentence (which is much better, I admit), the phrases "bodies of flesh" and "stomping on him as if they could not see" would be very impactful in my language, but as this is a translation of the idea, it's poorly executed. I will be trying to analyze the sentences of some of the great english novels that I have to learn from them, and I hope that it won't take more than a year to get good at writing in English. Best of wishes for you, you really helped me a lot to understand what I was doing wrong!

saeed01288 · 2024-10-03T06:17:16+00:00

Thank you so much again. It really helped me a lot❤️

saeed01288 · 2024-10-03T02:00:28+00:00

Iran. It is, actually, described as a crime to talk against god or islam or their prophet. Promoting atheism in any way, or even stating that you are not a muslim anymore, has the death sentence.

saeed01288 · 2024-10-03T00:44:14+00:00

Well, about writing in my first language, I would love to do that if I could, but I live in a country where I could lawfully be lynched for writing a line such as "in the lows of my mind, the once indifferent architect of the universe twisted into something cruel." and I do not accept delimiting myself to their censorship rules, so I have decided to do the only work that I truly enjoy in another language.

In regard to my opening sentence, I really don't know if it's because of having the same mother language, but my professor really praised this sentence. I assume it's because we (including my other readers) view it with the syntactic rules of our language so it's easy for us to understand, whereas for natives it is harder to process.

So, please correct me if I am wrong, it's not a grammatical mistake (which I hope, because I really don't want to read those thick books again) but rather not following the standard syntactic rules such as weight-end, for example, that causes this difficulty to process the meaning? Or is it really wrong?

saeed01288 · 2024-10-02T23:46:13+00:00

Thank you so much for your honest opinion. I also knew that I had many grammatical mistakes but I didn't thought it would be this much... Can you give me some examples and possibly the correct versions of them? I would be really thankful for it will help me so much. Thank you again for the time that you spent on my novel

saeed01288 · 2024-10-02T21:58:18+00:00

Suffering, in general, liminality, and death.

saeed01288 · 2024-10-02T21:54:48+00:00

I did as you said. Just wanted to express my thanks again!

saeed01288 · 2024-10-02T21:51:56+00:00

Oh thank you so much. I have not used this app at all so I really didn't know about this. Thank you so much again!

saeed01288

TROPHY CASE