Impie
Junior Member
Posts: 137
Registered: 01-07 |
Well, the rhetorical issues can easily be solved by an excessive amount of proofreading and the back pages of a Webster's dictionary (well, I'm excessive; I dunno about everyone else). I also suggest using twelve-point courier / times new roman font and double-spacing. It's easier on the eye.
For dialogue, you clearly understand the rule about starting a new paragraph when the speaker changes (a nice change of pace, lemme tell you--I've seen entire stories comprised of a single paragraph). But you have a habit of linking blocks of description with lines of dialogue when the two aren't necessarily directly related to one-another. You'll want to keep an eye on that. And especially don't put dialogue at the end of a long descriptive paragraph if you can help it.
The biggest problem I have is the content, which is probably the hardest part of a writer's job next to marketing. First, this could be an interesting story, except so little actually happens in the course of 33 pages that it doesn't really give me incentive to keep reading, especially with its lack of resolution: each individual chapter of a story needs to be treated like its own story with its own rising action, climax, and conclusion. Anything you tell the reader should advance the story; otherwise, throw it out.
Second, if anyone suddenly found themselves in the middle of a shootout they wouldn't recover right away, yet your characters freak out and then abruptly forget about it for a while, and then when they bring the incident up again they talk about it like calling the police is an arbitrary thing. They certainly wouldn't wait until the next day to do it, especially if they had been the intended victims.
Third, the story is so centralized on a boy's relationship with his teacher (I got the impression she's his teacher) that I thought it was going to be a saucy teacher-student romance story, which would've been pretty sweet, so the presence of the shooters seems like a non-sequitur. I think it's partly due to the lack of buildup to the action and the over-abundance of characterization. Finally, in the scene at Sam's place, I noticed a decline in the quality and coherence of the writing, like you were running out of steam. Nothing that proofreading or a rewrite couldn't fix.
In summary, build up to the action more, only give us details that advance the story, and proofread the crap out of it when you're done. Maybe you can condense this chapter into "Jon and Kat go to gas station and get shot at" and rewrite the rest in the later sections. Or just make this a short story about their sexual tension and end it with the two of them being so thankful to have survived the shooting that they break down and have sex and get it over with. I dunno. Either direction could be fun.
lol I suppose I should've warned you beforehand that I'm pretty serious about all this shit...
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04-07-08 18:52 
