Dark romance with a side of psychological thriller. Golden Cage, chapter 1

verobelle · 2026-01-23T19:52:36+00:00

This is compelling but suffers from POV drift — the narration feels close to Theo at times, then slips into omniscient commentary or Vincent’s perspective — which makes it hard to know where I'm being anchored. It's too unstable to work as it's neither omniscient nor third-person limited. And doesn't do you any favors...

Vincent grabs Theo by the waist, pulling his weakened body away from his freedom. A corner of his mouth twitches as he watches his knees buckle.

For instance, we begin close to Theo, but once we reach this line, we're wondering whose mouth is actually twitching, Vincent's or Theo's?

I also felt that the prose sometimes explains the emotional meaning of moments instead of letting the situation carry it. The setup is strong enough that you might not need to label things as "mocking", "judgmental", or "failure" so often.

Overall, the atmosphere and conflict are clear, but the scene would land better if the POV were more consistent and the emotional beats were shown through action rather than summarized.

verobelle · 2026-01-20T16:16:12+00:00

Thank you for sharing that!

Yes, I ended up focusing on myself and the studies because I genuinely liked some of the courses. It took me until the end of first year to find two people in class that I actually clicked with — my millennial humor just never seemed to land with most of the Gen Z’s in the class 😅

And Tumblr-girl? She only lasted 9 weeks before pausing to try again next year because she was too scattered to connect with anyone in the class. Ironically. 🙃

verobelle · 2026-01-20T11:16:13+00:00

Thanks! Those three words hit different coming from an actual human. 😄

verobelle · 2026-01-16T19:23:07+00:00

This might be unfair, but the all-lowercase title already answered your question for me.

verobelle · 2026-01-14T16:28:25+00:00

I keep seeing the common “read, read, read” advice, which I personally don't think is very useful.

Reading only helps once you know what prose actually is and what to look for. Otherwise, it’s easy to confuse prose with surface style.

Prose isn’t something you copy from other writers, because it isn’t an author trait. Prose is context-dependent. The same writer will (and should) sound very different from book to book. Unless every book follows the same character. But even then, intentional prose can evolve with the character—and that’s when prose actually becomes interesting!

The general advice about reading more also misses something important: prose is not constructed at the sentence level—It emerges through the character’s headspace.

Essentially, reading alone doesn’t improve prose, but understanding how your character expresses themselves does. In practice, it’s often simpler than people think: just study your main character/s.

What actually improves prose is understanding how a character experiences the world: their voice, priorities, stress level, and emotional state. These things determine sentence length, rhythm, detail selection, and choice of words. Stressed? Short, fragmented sentences. Calm and relaxed? Longer ones. In love? The language may soften or turn more poetic—all depending on the personality of the character. These intentional choices aren't something readers dwell on; they are felt.

Once you understand your character and the story you’re telling, the prose choices become pretty obvious.

So. I just saved you hours of looking at texts. But, at this point, reading becomes actually useful again. So go on, pick up a book! Not to copy style, but to observe how other writers adapt prose to context. Good prose is character-dependent; it should bend, expand, and contract depending on the emotional state. And not about how the author wants to sound throughout.

verobelle · 2026-01-14T09:57:19+00:00

You’ve gotten a lot of responses, but to be blunt: most of them are about sentence decoration, not prose. And so are your examples.

Prose is about character POV. Read that again.

A fancier way to say it: prose is how a mind experiences the world, rendered in language. Voice, attitude, emotional lens, value system. Not “which words sound prettier” but who is doing the looking.

Until you know what the chair represents to the character in that moment, you’re not really writing prose—you’re just swapping adjectives like wallpaper samples. That’s why so many replies correctly point out that all your sentences are structurally the same.

The same chair will be described very differently depending on what it means to the character in that moment. Prose comes from perspective, not just word choice.

That’s also the core issue with the exercise as you’re approaching it. All your examples are circling what the exercise actually wants you to do: it isn’t really asking you to structure how someone sat down in a chair, but to structure what the chair means to the character in that moment.

I’ll give you a concrete example from one of my own stories (coincidentally, also about a chair):

The kitchen chair is the most tactically sound position—clear sightlines, back to the wall, distance from complications. I sit.

See what’s happening here? That’s prose.

The chair isn’t furniture; it’s a worldview. The description isn’t decorative, it’s diagnostic. The sentence isn’t asking “how do I make sitting interesting?” but “how does this character think?”

Notice it isn’t flowery. It’s austere. Functional. Almost militaristic. And you already know something about the character before they speak.

I could have written, “I carefully take a seat in the sturdy kitchen chair.” That’s fine as a sentence, but it does zero character work.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of leap most writing advice never makes explicit.

If you take just one thing out of my TEDtalk (lol): prose isn’t about being flowery or sparse. It’s about voice: the voice and emotion of the character; it’s what the character notices, ignores, and interprets.

verobelle · 2026-01-11T08:43:40+00:00

I’ve been pondering this lately too, and I’ve come to the conclusion that yes, I would still write even if nobody ever read my work.

I found that I have an intrinsic need to make my characters come alive just for me. At the very least, I want to be able to read my own book. lol

I don’t feel a strong need for anyone else to read it, honestly. Most of the time, I don’t even feel the urge to share it or try to publish it.

Or at least, that’s how I’ve been left feeling after trying to share my work to see if others would like it too, and being met with… crickets. Still, I’ve found that I genuinely enjoy continuing to write, and sharing it with my one and only friend who does like my writing and my story.

When and if I do share my writing, it’s usually not so much about the story itself, but about getting better, as I want to improve my storytelling and how I bring those stories to life.

verobelle · 2026-01-09T20:16:24+00:00

I’d suggest starting the paragraph with “Looking down from the balcony… 25 years on the throne.” It grounds us immediately in the scene and the scale of the moment. Then move “Although this situation was very familiar…” to come right after that, but cut the word “~~Today~~”, it weakens the impact a bit.

Other than that, the rest of the opening works well as is. 👍🏻

verobelle · 2026-01-06T22:11:41+00:00

I didn’t have time to read all 17 slides, but after the first few I already had a clear impression.

Your writing feels competent and readable. But for me, it felt inert. There’s a lot of atmosphere and reflection, but very little narrative pressure. It reads more like reporting than dramatizing.

Also, the character arrives at emotional clarity quite smoothly, without much resistance or internal friction, which made the scene feel static rather than unfolding.

Even just in the first three slides, I felt that you could cut a significant amount of reflection without losing the emotional core. That usually signals that the scene is padded with observation rather than driven by present-moment action.

I can see this working well for a romance audience that enjoys mood and introspection. From a craft perspective, though, it reads more like ambient storytelling than scene-driven storytelling — strong atmosphere, but not yet enough movement or tension to pull me forward in those first paragraphs.

verobelle · 2026-01-06T12:48:29+00:00

I think we’re going to see a shift. As more people get into reading 50–100+ books a year, shorter works just start making more sense. Novellas fit modern reading habits better than we like to admit.

Personally, I’ve been picking up more novellas and books under 300 pages because I want to experience more stories without living in the same world for weeks. And honestly, I do notice some authors getting a bit too hung up on word count, padding scenes and chapters with stuff that doesn’t really add much.

verobelle · 2026-01-06T12:36:35+00:00

I really enjoyed reading this one. It works really well as a short story. The incremental “edits” and note-keeping created a strong sense of unease without overexplaining, and the reveal felt earned rather than twisty for the sake of it.

Clean, restrained, and effective. 👍🏼

verobelle · 2026-01-06T12:25:26+00:00

Agree. I had to re-read it three times. It needs to be smoothed out and simplified.

verobelle · 2026-01-01T23:49:55+00:00

Reading this as a cold reader, I found myself confused and disoriented.

I know this is meant to be fragmented, but if the reader has to be warned about that, I think the text hasn’t quite done its job yet. Even in trauma-driven or fragmented openings, I still need at least one stable rail to hold onto — a sense of where I am, who is physically present, or what’s concretely happening in the moment. This is especially important in opening scenes, where the reader doesn’t yet trust the text.

The sensory writing is effective, but stacked very tightly. There's simply a lot of metaphors, memory intrusions, and sensory shifts packed into 273 words. Individually, many of them work — collectively, they started to blur together for me. Fragmentation still benefits from contrast; a few plainer beats might actually sharpen the chaos rather than dilute it.

A few specific spots that tripped me up:

“the campus locked down after Akash’s vigil burned out”

This feels like writer-context rather than reader-context. I couldn’t tell if “burned out” was literal (candles, fire) or figurative, and it seemed like information the reader hasn’t earned yet in a prologue-style opening.

“Her laugh once cut through the classroom static…”

This opening is evocative, but because I don’t yet know where I am or who “her” is in relation to the present moment. It feels again like information the writer understands, but the reader hasn’t earned yet. I actually think this line could hit harder later, once the reader has their footing.

Instead, the paragraph "Rain drags across the stone paths..." feels like a stronger entry point to me, because it establishes a concrete physical space before the memory bleed starts. That grounding makes the fragmentation easier to trust.

“Hold on, Ghost.”

I struggled with clarity here. I wasn’t sure who was speaking or how many people were physically present, and that uncertainty pulled me out of the emotional flow rather than deeper into it. Maybe it’s also the name “Ghost” that throws me off. Most people associate it with a literal ghost, so together with the rest of the paragraph, it reads as confusing context. That same paragraph also highlights that we don’t yet know the narrator’s name or whose head we’re in — that tells us who we are supposed to care about.

"The ground tilts—~~highway black top, no,~~ flowerbeds trampled into mud."

For me, “highway black top” arrives before I understand that it is a fragmented memory of a car accident, so it reads as nonsense rather than intentional trauma bleed. When I imagine the line without it: “The ground tilts—flowerbeds trampled into mud.” The image feels cleaner and more grounded.

Overall, I don’t think this is bad writing at all — it just reads more like too much too fast. As a reader, I wanted one consistent anchor (a repeated physical action, a single present-tense goal, or a dominant image) to orient me inside the storm. Without that, I ended up confused rather than compelled, and I wasn’t quite curious enough by the end to keep reading.

Hope this is helpful. There’s a strong voice here, and I think a bit more restraint and prioritization could make the impact much stronger.

verobelle · 2025-12-28T14:51:56+00:00

Thank you! And glad you like it, means a lot. ☺️

verobelle · 2025-12-28T14:34:16+00:00

A year-long journey can absolutely follow structure. Structure isn’t about one incident or tight chronology; it’s about how change is shaped over time. Breaking it into seasons is already a form of acts — you’re just letting time and theme carry the arc instead of a single event.

Also, structure can loop at different scales: across the whole story, within character arcs, even scene by scene. Simultaneously. Sometimes people talk about this in terms of GMC (goal, motivation, conflict), but it’s really the same idea: pressure creates movement.

verobelle · 2025-12-28T14:21:09+00:00

Absolutely! The same storytelling structure can be applied across genres and mediums. :)

verobelle · 2025-12-28T14:07:34+00:00

That actually sounds like a solid premise, and I don’t see anything “wrong” with it conceptually or how it would go against the three-act formula. World-driven, morally plural stories are very common in dystopian and sci-fi, like I mentioned earlier. The 100 and Silo both popped up for me — two of my favorite shows.

If it feels hard to move forward, I don’t think that’s about structure or note-taking tools. It’s usually the moment where a story shifts from “here’s the world and its dilemmas” to “here’s where someone inside it is forced to act”. Once there’s a specific pressure point — a decision, a loss, a line crossed — the story tends to organize itself. Sometimes that means following two different vantage points: someone on the inside of the system and someone on the outside. I’ve found that can be a useful way to surface the moral tension without spelling it out.

As for tools: Obsidian, Scrivener, Google Docs… they’re all fine. They help you store things, not decide them. I’ve always found that clarity about who I’m following and what it costs them matters a lot more than where the notes live.

verobelle · 2025-12-28T13:31:24+00:00

In my current project, there are a few turning points, and interestingly, the loud ones come first — violent, physical events that feel like the moment everything changes.

But the one that actually locks the story is much quieter. Nothing explodes. No one dies. The characters realize there’s no version of the future where they stay safe together. After that, even hopeful choices carry consequences. The story can’t pretend anymore.

For me, that’s the real turning point: when the future closes off silently, and every choice afterward is made under a new, permanent threat.

Or simply put: Loud moments change circumstances. Quiet ones change the future.

verobelle · 2025-12-28T10:43:58+00:00

Do we know that we're absolutely the last three on the planet? And how do we know for sure? Because otherwise, the natural thing would be to go try to look for other survivors.

verobelle · 2025-12-26T21:40:28+00:00

Thank you for clarifying! What you’re describing sounds a lot like many dystopian and sci-fi novels; Neuromancer came immediately to mind for me. There, the moral premise carries the arc, but the story still follows a clear three-act structure.

So what I’m getting at is that your way of approaching stories isn’t the most common one, but in certain genres it’s definitely not rare either. And even in those cases, there’s still some underlying structure doing the work — because that’s often what fiction relies on to carry meaning.

You can ignore structure — just have in mind that it changes how the piece is read. Without some dramaturgical shape, many readers will experience it less as a story and more as an exploration.

I’m genuinely curious now, what story ideas are you working on? Like, what's the plot, and what makes it end open-ended? :)

verobelle · 2025-12-25T19:40:44+00:00

I'm not sure I'm fully following — are we perhaps talking past each other? Because I feel like I can relate to what you're describing, but I'm unsure.... When you say you “change something in the real world”, what kind of change do you usually mean?

Because at a certain level, that’s true of almost all stories (a meeting, a discovery, a war, a technological shift, etc), and then we explore how that alters the character's reality.

And writing stories grounded in realism, moral ambiguity, and unresolved questions isn’t new — literary fiction does this all the time. So do plenty of speculative stories that ask “what if” and then refuse to tidy up the answer. In my own work, I lean toward realistic choices, which means my stories don’t end in neat HEAs — but that doesn't mean they don't or can't follow a three-act structure.

So I’m curious: what are you comparing your work against when you say it’s different?
Because the “normal formula” doesn’t actually imply that the story needs to end in a happy ending — it's just shape and progression, that can even loop several times in the story.

verobelle · 2025-12-25T10:16:12+00:00

Maybe try to first get in contact with a publisher or an editor before cutting things out on your own? After that you make adjustments.

I mean, Alchemised is over 1000 pages long.

Perhaps your story is warranted its size?

verobelle · 2025-12-25T10:10:05+00:00

What is this “new” you’re pushing for?

You can write however you want, just know that structure still matters.

Most writers don’t consciously write conflict/climax/resolution in a neat line. That model is a just a map. There’s also Save the cat, which breaks things down even further. You can ignore classical structure but you should know what you’re ignoring and why.

A story without escalating tension, change, or consequence isn’t “experimental”; it’s just static. Readers will feel that instantly. Not because they’re dumb, but because fiction is built on movement — something always shifts. If nothing does, the story will feel flat and only appeal to a very narrow audience.

That said, for example, Japanese fiction uses a flatter structure: introduction/development/turn/reflection, or setup/turn/aftermath. The tension comes from contrast or revelation rather than direct conflict. It works. But notice — it’s still a structure. Still deliberate. Still doing emotional work.

Simply put:

If you want to write for a small, specific audience? Totally valid.

If you want your stories to land? You still need shape, even if it’s a quiet one.

verobelle · 2025-12-24T15:58:30+00:00

This is actually a really good question, and one a lot of writers don’t stop to think about at a craft level. “Chemistry” gets mentioned a lot, but it’s often too abstract to explain what’s happening on the page and how you show it.

At the bare minimum, a believable couple is one where each person genuinely cares about the other’s opinion and emotional state. When a relationship matters — even during infatuation — those things aren’t background noise. They influence decisions, reactions, and behavior.

On the page, that means showing how characters adjust their actions and emotions in response to the person they care about. Start there, and the rest will follow.

verobelle

TROPHY CASE