Critique/Review [Archive]

Bloodrose

07-27-10, 10:58 PM

Hello Jalim! Attached below you'll find what you've asked for - a critique/review based on the scoring rubric used on the site. Rather than offer a straight up review, however, I've approached it more from a judging perspective, and included comments that I might have made back in my actual judging days. These are meant not only to give you an idea of how you are doing, but also to give you ideas on how you could improve in each area.

It might seem like I go pretty hard on you in some areas, but keep in mind that I'm only doing so in order to help. If I don't tell you that something is broken, then you can't exactly work to fix it, can you?

I hope this helps, and I hope you'll stick around Althanas for a while to come. From what I've seen you've got promise, you just need a nudge in the right direction to help you improve.

* STORY ~

Continuity (??) ~ Where is the village? What caused the flood? Why did they decide to leave rather than help the villagers? Your continuity score is based on the reader's sense of how well the thread to come fits into the grander scheme of your character's story. Where has Jalim been? Where is he going? A good continuity score doesn't require that you spoon feed the reader a bullet-point list of how the story to come fits into Jalim's overall arc, but you want to avoid dumping the reader right into the middle of the story with no explanation of how it got started (There are ways to do that and get away with it, but for starters, probably shy away from getting too fancy).

Setting (??) ~ The key to getting a decent setting score is to try and incorporate the five senses into your description of the forest, ship, inn, etc. What does the place smell like? How does it look? How does the material of his chair feel to Jalim as he sits in it? Note: You don't want to go overboard (you don't want to spend a whole paragraph describing one chair, and you certainly don't want to go through all five senses like some sort of checklist every time the thread's locale changes), but you want enough little details to help your reader paint a picture. Right now, the thread pretty much just gives me a "this is an inn" and leaves the rest up to me.

Pacing (??) ~ Since this thread isn't finished, it's really hard for me to guess how well you'll do in this category. Based on what I've got to go with, I can tell you that as a reader, you're story seems to transition quickly between scenes without a lot of details to help me follow what's going on. It's also generally a bad idea to let the reader get all the way to post five, and still not give them many clues about what the purpose of this thread is. Why is Jalim going to Corone? Why is he so worried about Mathwain? The reader needs something to latch onto, a reason to keep reading. If I can't figure out the basic premise by the five-post mark, then I'm likely to get bored and stop reading.

Also, the flashbacks break up the thread in such a way that it's almost like reading two threads in one. I can sort of see what you're trying to do with these, so I would hesitate to tell you to take them out. What I would say is maybe try to find a way to weave them into the story in such a way that doesn't seem to trip up the story as a whole.

* CHARACTER ~

Dialogue (??) ~ Dialogue is tricky. You want to give each spoken sentence some sort of flair - some kind of character to set it apart from the sentences of other characters - but you don't want to pour on the flair to thick. Even I have trouble with letting my dialogue slip into the realm of cliché, so I'm afraid you're on your own for this one.

Action (??) ~ Stuff happens, it happens fast, and as the reader, I'm left wondering just what exactly happened. Fights in threads, especially if you mean them to be short, can be difficult. You might not want to spend a lot of time describing what's happening, or how your character is doing what they are doing (or knows what they know), but you don't want to go to the other extreme either. How is it that Jalim knows how to use a sword? How good is he with it? What exactly is going on when he and Mathwain fight the Kael Orks? What is/how does one defeat a Kael Ork?

Persona (??) ~ I understand that Jalim is sort of a quiet, reserved, "steely" guy, but... that's about it. What kind of person is he, aside from the cool-tempered warrior shtick? What are his likes? Dislikes? Why is he so stern with people? I, the reader, certainly don't need a full-blown personal ad, but I do need some sort of reason to care about what happens to Jalim. What makes him tick? Am I supposed to like him (he's the hero!), or am I supposed to hate him (he's evil, boo!)?

* WRITING STYLE ~

Mechanics (??) ~ Spell-check is your friend. I didn't notice a huge amount of spelling errors, but each one counts. Also, I'll let you in on a little secret: read your posts out loud to yourself when you've finished writing them. As you're typing it's very easy to miss little words like "the", "he", "she", etc. The best way I've found to catch these is to just sit down and read your posts out loud. If you can't finish a sentence in a single breath, or if it makes no sense as you're reading it, you should probably rework that line.

Spelling and grammar are the building blocks of each and every thread on this site, and scoring poorly here can and will negatively influence just about every other category in this rubric.

One last note (and this is more of a personal preference), make sure to space out your paragraphs in a uniform manner. Leaving a blank line between paragraphs really helps to define where they begin and end, and prevents them from blending together.

Technique (??) ~ If you're just getting started as a creative writer, this is one category you might do yourself a favor by ignoring. Stuff like foreshadowing and using symbolism in your writing can wait until after you've got the basics down. Will ignoring this category hurt your score in the short-term? Yes. However, in my experience, ignoring it entirely will hurt your score less than trying to work more advanced writing techniques in and then doing it poorly (which will then negatively impact pacing and action).

Clarity (??) ~ For reasons stated above, it's been kind of hard to follow what you've got thus far. Small picture, I can keep track of what's going on in the moment, but there seems to be a lot of little details missing that could help me paint a better picture. I also don't have a good grasp on what this thread is about... yet.

* Wild Card (??) ~ Overall you've got a decent framework for a good thread. The skeleton is there, it just needs some more detail and a better understanding of what's going on to really bring it to life.