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Xereva

Xereva

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"Aleth’s eyes snapped open..."

- Eyes snapping open is quite a common description. Perhaps just 'She woke. Not more than a dozen steps away...'?

"...heavy boots ringing on the cobblestone."

- Cobblestones.

"Her breath caught in her throat..."

- I would use a different description here. Breath catching can definitely lead to a cough, but try to think about the moment right before you cough and what that feels like, and then describe that. The slight tickle or rasp of grit, the feeling of suddenly and desperately needing to clear something from your lungs...

"She made it maybe three paces..."

- Maybe? I understand your intent, but I would omit that word. You're the omniscient narrator, after all.

"and before she had finished coughing, she..."

- You have enough commas in the sentence without the one after 'coughing.'

"A hundred soldiers thundered in pursuit."

- A hundred? It's not entirely impossible, but that's a lot of soldiers in one patrol, let alone a pursuit. It would probably be a smaller group.

"Spinning so fast she lost her footing..."

- I would re-word this sentence. I get the picture clearly enough (she stops, turns, flails, falls down almost all the way, but catches herself on the one hand and with perhaps a slipping footstep or two runs on) but the first part of the sentence needs to be in a different tense. 'She spun so fast she lost her footing,' for instance.

"...a feathered shaft certainly would."

- Arrow works.

"Her legs ached like fire..."

- You've used fire a couple times already, and 'ached like fire' doesn't exactly convey what I think you intended. I would re-word the entire sentence, in fact.

"...and tried not to give into fatigue, tried to..."

- Re-word this sentence.

"And then, just when she decided she was safe..."

- I would remove this sentence. It's more shocking to hear voices without any prior recognition from the character.

31-Jan-2013 14:22:07 - Last edited on 31-Jan-2013 18:37:23 by Xereva

Xereva

Xereva

Posts: 7,589 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
"The soldier had discarded his armor and sword..."

- In a hostile city, while actively hunting an enemy? Perhaps re-word so that the soldier was wearing it the whole time—maybe he's an archer and doesn't want the armor hindering him?

"Then, listening carefully to his footsteps..."

- Passive voice again****-word if you can.

"His steps hesitated, and Aleth held her breath."

- This entire paragraph is riddled with passive voice, and could use some significant edits. The action itself is good, you just need to frame it differently. 'Propelling,' 'catching,' etc. should be changed. Look out for it in the next paragraph, too.

"She picked up the dagger, pressed the blade..."

- This is really wonderfully done. A good ending to a well-written assignment. Only thing I would change (apart from the passive-voice bits) is the 'she could not make herself do it' bit. We guess her intentions by her actions, and it's more powerful if the reader is not told outright that she can't make herself do it.

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You've written a strong piece here, and I'm glad you took the time to do it. Your main job is to polish it up, because the fundamentals are all sound. A bit more buildup than I was expecting, perhaps, but that made the single moment of action all the more intense, which is the idea. Your pacing, especially with the description, was a bit slow, but I think it works, so I won't comment more on that.

Your biggest problem (in my opinion) is with passive voice. I'll let you look up the specifics, but suffice to say it tends to break the flow, and when you're using it interchangeably with other voices it makes the piece feel disjointed in a way I don't think you intended. Clean that up (look for words that end in -ing, that's usually the biggest clue) and everything will be much stronger.

31-Jan-2013 14:22:18 - Last edited on 31-Jan-2013 18:43:45 by Xereva

Xereva

Xereva

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You tend to also go a bit over the top with your descriptions, and add one clause too many so that the sentences get bogged down with detail. Especially in an action scene, streamlining is really important. I know you're long-winded, but experiment a bit and see if you can't cut some of the extraneous bits out. I was worse than you until my teacher made me write a Thriller-genre piece, and suddenly everything I wrote became much faster to read.

Despite any other shortcomings, however, I did get an excellent sense of the character's emotional state, and a fair bit of their backstory as well. It's not all incorporated smoothly, but it's still very well done for a rough draft, and the build up (as I said) gives the single moment of combat much more weight. It felt quite realistic, and I was glad that you described how her head hurt the moment after she hit the soldier. Too many people don't do justice to the pain of bone-to-bone contact.

There's more I could say, but I've nitpicked enough. Good work.

31-Jan-2013 18:43:56 - Last edited on 31-Jan-2013 19:13:05 by Xereva

Arcot

Arcot

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I was most active on these forums years and years ago. I still pop in from time to time, and had a brief stint as a debate mediator while The Novelist's Guild was experiencing growing pains.

Also while I'm here, I'll drop a friendly reminder not to confuse the passive voice with the progressive aspect. I agree with your suggestion, but the it's the progressive use of participles which is causing the effect you don't like, not the passive.

31-Jan-2013 20:16:13 - Last edited on 31-Jan-2013 20:16:56 by Arcot

Chuk

Chuk

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"Also while I'm here, I'll drop a friendly reminder not to confuse the passive voice with the progressive aspect. I agree with your suggestion, but *he it's the progressive use of participles which is causing the effect you don't like, not the passive."

Thanks for giving it a name, Arcot, 'cause I was about 110% sure it wasn't the passive voice.

31-Jan-2013 20:22:28

Xereva

Xereva

Posts: 7,589 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
Ah, hell. I've never been good with terms. Thank you for the correction, I'll have to do some reading in my spare time. I think my most recent writing teacher may have had the terms confused as well, might have to correct him on that too...

And it's good to see you back, especially if you've done work for one of the guilds. We need more people in this forum who know what they're doing.

31-Jan-2013 20:22:36

Chuk

Chuk

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Yeah, passive voice is that stuff that Tolkien uses all the time. "No sound could be heard," and the like.

It's when there's nothing doing the action. To be honest, it doesn't bother me that much. I don't write with it, 'cause people say not to, but I don't mind reading it, as long as a piece isn't chock full of it.

Honestly, I'd never heard that the progressive aspect was a bad thing. I was just using it as a way to try to break up the structure of my sentences, since it gets boring if every sentence is formatted too similarly. So that's a good bit of education.

Then the one other thing I can remember after skimming the review is about the dream scene. Honestly, I didn't have that planned until I wrote that she fell asleep. She's exhausted, so it's natural for her to sleep. And then my thoughts were: "Oh crap, now how do I pass some time while she's asleep? I hate having a character fall asleep in one sentence and wake up in the next one. Huh. Cliched dream scene it is, I guess." And then, like you, I liked how I brought it to her waking up, if I do say so myself.

Oh, I was going to comment on the soldier without armor, too. I think of armor as being what knights wore, more or less, and obviously, you can't go running around chasing people dressed in 60 pounds of steel, so that's why he ditched his armor. But then there's the fact that your average foot soldier didn't have nearly that much metal weighing him down, but I still figured it would be easier for the chasers to chase and keep up with Aleth if they weren't in armor, so that's the reasoning there. Do you disagree with it (and why, if you do, of course), or did that concept just not come out in my writing?

31-Jan-2013 21:05:59 - Last edited on 31-Jan-2013 21:36:54 by Chuk

Azigarath

Azigarath

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Well, I figured I’d comment on a few things, too.

Chuk, as for the weight of armour, I don’t think it’d weigh up to forty/sixty pounds for the common soldier, but then again I don’t think the kind of armour is mentioned. Almain Rivets and other munition armour, consisting of thin low-quality plate, usually weighed no more than thirty pounds altogether, and would consist of back- and breastplate, helmet, and maybe cuisses, and sometimes armour for the arms. Now, while exhausted any weight feels heavier than it is, but knights were able to sprint while in full plate armour. Even today, you can sprint while wearing a plate harness (except from those modern replicas, made of thin metal and heavy like crazy, but weak as fabric).

During battle, knights have been known to discard the helmet.

But I liked your story, it was written well throughout and there was good description, especially the opening, though there was a lack of action, but it did have a reasonable purpose. The ending was nicely done, but I wonder why so many soldiers would want to kill one woman, let alone destroying the city to such an extent. Btw, is this story something from EotG?

Zmaster,
“Extending her finger, she caused the water to surge forward directly towards him.
He dived out of the way and the water clashed to the floor where it reformed into a giant snake that lashed out at him.”
Speaking of which, how could magic water hurt someone? But the magic then transforming into a snake-like watery creature (I’m assuming it’s magical water-snake) was not something I saw coming. The future examples of animate magic was, in my opinion, pretty cool, I don’t see that so often, but I have done similar things myself.

01-Feb-2013 01:55:41

Azigarath

Azigarath

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As a suggestion, perhaps change the water magic into frozen water (ice) or maybe boiling water or even steam? Water magic by itself doesn’t seem to do anything but get an opponent wet, or drown one by flowing it into his nose, doesn’t sound nice to drown while not even in water.

There are a few clichés though, such as the silly girl not knowing how to use a sword, or an overreaction from the upsetting of hairdo, but then again I have seen YouTube videos about extreme overreactions about disturbing one’s hair, so maybe it’s not as unrealistic as I think.

Zmaster (second story),

“As he reached for the telephone”
I don’t think calling for help/police is much help in this kind of situation :/

Um, I’m not sure what’s going on here, I think it’s part of the “other world” like from your previous submission. But I read both through anyways. You need to work on basic stuff, like grammar and connection of scenes, but such things will grow with you. I’m pretty sure a search engine of any kind for “English grammar” would be a *tart.

01-Feb-2013 01:55:54

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