Reading Excuses - Nov. 16 - lethalfalcon - Mortal Divinity - Chapter 2

[Andrew the Great]

My issues were extremely similar to Chaos.

I'll be honest, I didn't like it. There's very good potential if you rewrite it to make it more interesting, but there was very little to actually catch my interest.

The problem isn't that you are using cliche settings or systems - that's fine. The problem is that we don't see anything different from the cliche. Until we do, we go, "I've heard this story before. Why read it again?"

The dome is good. Keep the dome. Move the dome up.

Your story suffers from the same issues as mine does, though. At this point, there is no plot. There is no reason to care.

Now I typically give an author fifty pages to get me interested, unless I've got a recommendation from a friend, so you definitely haven't lost me yet. But you've got to get something interesting going fairly soon, or you will lose me.

I want to make sure I say, there's a lot you can do with the setting you've established. None of it is fundamentally flawed, just the way it's used in this scene doesn't work.

You should also remember that you are getting critiqued by a bunch of dark-fantasy-lovers who are mostly firm believers in hard magic systems as well, and are used to reading huge tomes with nine thousand characters and a huge world with a decently steep learning curve. We get bored easily when we're reading things that are simpler than that, but there are a WHOLE lot of people out there who live for it. If you're writing a story set in such a world and all we ever critique is that we don't like your setting or your system, that means your doing it very well.

However, if you're shooting for our crowd....that's not good.

Overall, though, it had some real potential. Keep it coming, and try to add more tension to the scene.

[lethalfalcon]

Honestly, at this point, I'm starting to think that this chapter was more a test drive of the scene than something I should have submitted. However, I'm still glad I did submit it, because it shows me a lot about what the vast majority of the crowd does expect. At this point, I'm still a little unsure of how I want the book overall to go. Since it's a collaborative work, I need to match the style of the other writer, or it'll be really odd to read. He's currently stuck in classes, though. I'm definitely going for darker than this chapter shows.

This chapter has already started to undergo the process of butchering. I can't even continue on to my next chapter with the issues that I've unleashed. My next submission will probably be the prologue, and then a vastly rewritten chapter 2. Hopefully I can redeem myself. Or at least have more micro problems than macro.

[vegetathalas]

Heh, late, but here's my critique. In reference to your latest comment...I'd warn you against collaboration personally unless you have more experience. Or, at the least, I'd work on a project by yourself too on the side. That way, you can move forward and learn at your own pace as well as your partner's.

I like the fact you don't give away all of Aliese's background at once, though I think you could add some great humor with vague references. "And then there was the incident with the claustrophic rabbit..." [Brandon Sanderson did this a lot in Alcatraz with the "broken chicken"-type references] The fact that she is intelligent enough to use her teachers and do alliances creates a bond with me, which is good. I like intelligent characters.

I think you need to work on the "in-late" thing. Skip Aliese sliding the walls and find the first actual real-time conflict. The biggest problem is...that doesn't happen. We don't have any stakes. How unpleasant would it really be if Jade and Ian catch her? A mild scolding? Why does it matter? Since I don't know the stakes, I find myself skimming the garden chase. It might help if I felt her fear--heart pounding/sweat/etc. Otherwise, jump to a place where she a) gets caught b) is threatened somehow, physically or otherwise. The chase is meant to create tension, but it just isn't as written. A lot of that has to do with the fact I know her mother is influential, so chances are there will be no repercussions on her for sneaking around.

There's a lot of info-dumping that could probably be cut, such as dreaming about being a diplomat for the king, etc. I don't think you need to info-dump about the magic system at the moment. I would introduce a touch of mystery by leaving more out, personally-- ie "she made a gesture and smiled as the dice cups fell over". Make the reader wonder a bit more what she does/how she does it/what she's capable of. Mysteries (when done right) are my favorite hooks.

I think you have a nice clean style that's very clear. I don't feel confused, which is good, because I am easily confused. However, I think you could punch things up with stronger verbs and ruthlessly cutting extra words. "She dove through the thorns, ignoring the scratches on her arms as they tore at her shirt." BAM! That gets rid of five or six sentences of redundant information. Because of the mild verbs, I'm not getting a sense of the character's voice, or how she is different from other McCafferey-style fantasy heroines.

Part of your voice problem is your rigid sentence structure. For example, in one place, I counted four "she's" in a row to begin a sentence, ie. "She (verb) (object). She (verb) (object)" which is a little hard on your reader.

Hmm, you spend more time describing the hedges than the dome/magical wasteland, which is a strange balance given that I bet your dome is more important to your story than a thorny bush. You also need to mention that the dome covers the city and then some--for a moment I thought she'd left the dome when she went into the forest. Unless the pasture/forest is inside the city, somehow?

Yeah, I might run away from the summons. Or at least call them something different. Unless you do something brilliant in the first few pages, seeing the word "Summons" is enough to make me put the book down and start playing Final Fantasy instead. Does anyone else remember wandering through the cave of the summons with Rydia in FFIV (I think--or it could have been III)? That place rocked.

And the whole Snow White thing with all the creatures gathered around her is...weird. Your character says she finds it creepy. If that's what you're going for, ramp it up! Make the animals like the critters christmas' evil things from South Park.

The conversation with Zellenya is a little on the boring side. It doesn't seem to offer the reader any useful new info. I don't know what advice to give you about writing un-cliche dialogue other than to practice. Too many names dropped all at once. Definitely could use some cutting. Unless Zellenya's cooking is essential to the plot...

Yeah, the horses confused me, too. Definite Valdemar flashbacks. Why didn't the horse go to the stablemaster in the first place? Why do you have horses anyway in a domed civilization? I would think that the gain/loss tradeoff of how much food they use versus their utility since no one ever has that far to travel would mean that the limited pastureland goes to cattle and sheep instead. I would expect sedan chairs with laborers to carry the nobility around, especially since you likely have an impoverished class of people who cannot escape the city. I hope you go into the economics of dome-land, because that would be interesting. I guess the dome is fairly recent, otherwise diplomacy isn't really necessary since there's no one to negotiate with, and that ended Aliese's dreams.

The near-dead foal problem got solved too easily. I think you can throw in some more tension.

I'm okay with the physical energy becomes magic thing as well as a base elemental system. I don't love it, but I don't hate it, either.

---
In general:

To me, I don't mind cliched characters/settings/magic systems so much. My own book is very cliche, unfortunately. I feel like compelling characters/plot elements can save a cliche from being unreadable. (Example, Name of the Wind handles the magic school cliche well).

Even if you as an author feel discouraged by your book's cliched-ness--keep writing anyway! I found that I had to get all my cliched ideas out on paper in this current book I'm writing before I could move on and do something more innovative. Like Guy Gavriel Kay, who wrote the Fionavar tapestry (well-written Tolkein/C.S. Lewis/Susan Cooper cliche--and is so well done it's one of my favorite series despite the overuse of genre stereotypes) before he moved on to his more interesting alternative history works. Similarly, Neil Gaimon wrote a lot of cliche comic book dialogue and plots before he started writing amazingly different/creative novels. So work with the cliche, love the cliche, develop as a writer, then abandon the cliche. And cliche-d ness doesn't matter so much in MG/YA, I think, if that's what you're going for.

My advice: 1) Write down what you NEED to achieve with this chapter and go to that. Cut everything else. Structure your tidbits of character information around that important info/action. Right now, there's no threat. No stakes. I think that's going to be a bigger problem for you than magic schools and stiff dialogue. Maybe if you start the chapter with saving the horse.

I won't deny this needs a lot of work, but I wouldn't call it an eye-scratcher.

There's an entire thread dedicated to Frog-bashing? Wow. I'm jealous

[Frog]

There's an entire thread dedicated to Frog-bashing? Wow. I'm jealous

There are actually several, all masquerading as critique threads. I'll try to properly label the next one so we don't have any more  confusion on where to direct these worthy comments.  

[Silk]

Aliese spends a lot of time sneaking around in the first three, three and a half pages, and it started to lose interest for me before she was finished trying to be a ninja. I think that's because I have absolutely NO idea what's at stake here. I don't know why she's trying to leave, or where she's trying to go, or what happens if she gets caught (other than that she doesn't get to leave, and that doesn't hold any significance for me right now).

I have no idea how old either Aliese or Zellenya are, but right now I'm assuming that they're fairly young.

At some point, I'm going to need some clarification on the relationship between Zellenya and Aliese and their--families? Teachers?

Aliese makes some remark about how "if you say that to my mother, we'll never see each other again". If her mother lets Aliese and Zellenya see each other, however grudgingly, what's with the need for the big escape scene at the beginning? Wouldn't Aliese sneaking out of the castle just make her mother more inclined to put her foot down?

I'm interested in why the runemasters in the city might object to Aliese's presence in their classes.

I'm having some problems grasping the setting here, or maybe you just need clearer transitions when your character is moving from one space to another. The entire city is under a dome, but Aliese sneaks out of the palace and is suddenly in a forest. Zellenya leaves and Aliese starts to wander away, and suddenly there's a Queen's horse in front of her. Since the Queen probably isn't letting her mount run wild, I assume that means we're at the stables that Aliese mentioned earlier... but there's no real indication of that in the text. And now she's feeding the horse forest grass.

You referred to Cloud Dancer as a female, but when Aliese comes across the stable boy with the other horse, the one dropping the foal, Aliese remarks that the foal is probably "one of Cloud Dancer's git", which I would normally assume means that Cloud Dancer is the father. But later on, you once again refer to Cloud Dancer as a mare.

Also--and I know basically nothing about horses--but I've never heard of a horse acting like that. XP

Alright, so. There are definitely a lot of things I'm interested in after this chapter. But (you knew it was coming, didn't you?) the execution isn't quite doing it for me.

The only real point of tension here is the dying foal, which seems a little... tangential to the rest of it. I'm not saying you shouldn't include it, but it seemed more interesting than anything else in the story, and that's probably not what you want.

There is a little tension at the beginning of the chapter, when Aliese is sneaking out of the castle. But I found that that dissipated quickly, because you spent quite a bit of time on that, and we had no idea what the significance of that was for the whole 3.5 pages that she spent sneaking out of the castle. In fact, I still don't really know what the significance of that is. As far as I can tell, she spent all that time sneaking out of the castle so that she could have lunch with a friend, which kind of deflates any of the tension that came before it. In the grand scheme of things, it just doesn't seem that important. And I still don't really know why it was so important for her to not get caught in the first place, since it seems that she does this often and that her mother hasn't yet put her foot down in terms of her meeting with Zellenya.

To respond to what others have said:

Comparing this to Naruto? Man, LTU, that's low. *

Okay. I didn't have a problem with the magic system. I've played a few of the Final Fantasy games and it never occured to me that this was particularly similar to those systems. It's true that the elemental magic system is fairly common, but I would never stop reading on the basis of a magic system alone--especially this early on. We've barely seen your magic system, and I have no idea what you're going to do with it yet. I also assumed that there were more runes than just elemental ones. Actually, the one particular thing that your magic struck me as reminiscent of was Elantris, since you can draw "modifiers" on runes that do specific things. I'm honestly not too sure how you could circumvent that, though, without losing the entire concept of modifiers, though. Bindrunes, maybe? (Combining one rune with another.) Of course, that's not quite the same thing, and may also be distinctly more Norse than what you're looking for; I don't know.

Okay, whoa, I thought both Zellenya and Aliese were way younger than seventeen. I would have guessed twelve.

This tone definitely does NOT imply dark. Not in the slightest Personally, I'm fine with that if you are.

Ah, so you're going the collaboration route, are you? I wish you the best of luck with that. I've only tried that route once, and I think my friend and I got maybe two chapters in. Of course, we were also sixteen at the time, and the story would have ended up going nowhere anyway (as did my other projects based in that world). So that's my cautionary tale, to be taken with salt to taste.

* The TV show, anyway. It had its endearing elements but the pace moved like a glacier. I haven't read the manga and heard that that's much better. Also, we knock Naruto because it's easy. Kinda like Twilight. All the cool kids are doing it!