Another YouWriteOn review. With reviews like this it’s going to be hard for me to keep my spirits up…
The very first line of this story seemed promising. But then I found the next three paragraphs written in a choppy and terse style that continued for the entire read. It almost felt as if I was reading notes the author made to himself in outlining his story progression. The story idea is interesting a brother’s concern for his lost sister but the author doesn’t give the reader any true connection to his characters. Ben sits, Ben nods, Ben speaks, Ben wonders, Replace Ben with Helen or any of the other character’s names and you discover the author is freezing his story with stock, trite phrasing – sounds of silence, dead of night, sun is rising. In one paragraph Hanna pushes the key…pushes open the door…she calls out her greeting…she calls again…”Ben” she calls.” Following that scintillating lead in I learn that his (Ben’s) cousin arrives and stops, hanging in the doorway. In the author’s own words – “It’s grey. It’s concrete. It’s cold.”
I wonder if it would be more helpful if you gave the YouWriteOn crits a rest for a while, and concentrated on revising the first few chapter bearing in mind comments you’ve received to date? It seems to me that a lot of the crits are saying essentially the same thing regarding the prose style, and it might be more beneficial for you to think about how to address this issue before putting yourself through the YouWriteOn mill again? If you’d like me to give you an indepth crit at any point, I’d be happy to do so, and perhaps help you work out what you need to do to make the prose style a bit less ‘filmic’, which I think perhaps is where the problem lies??
OUch, that is quite hard! I agree with Helen that maybe it’s better to take yourself off there for a while, since you’ve probably got all the useful feedback you can expect! There does seem to be a thread of similarity between all the reviews, so you can work on that, but this review does seem a lot more dismissive than the others, so try not to take it to heart – it’s just not to their taste.