Bob Giligand:
Your story was entertaining, but abrupt, and left me feeling a little confused. You did a fine job of description – it felt like I was watching a short clip of some longer movie though, and I missed a lot of the point.
One thing is that you might consider making some transitions a little smoother. For instance, you wrote: “I looked in at my spouse’s peaceful sleeping form. I lied down next to her slowly so as not to wake her.” And then immediately wrote “I bolted upright”. I feel like this could be made more clear by simply adding “and drifted off to sleep” after “not to wake her”.
This is just an example, but when changing scenes I think it is important to keep things as smooth as possible, or otherwise use a stark contrast to make it obvious that the scene is different. When you get ‘in the middle’ it confuses the reader so it’s best to be completely one way or the other.
Furthermore, I was confused near the end as to whether it was their common enemy or the tribe they had decided to ‘ally’ with which attacked them. You said ‘our new allies were attacking’, but this was the only line about it. If the point of the story was not to trust evil men I thought you would’ve made a bigger deal of the betrayal.
As for grammar, you did remarkably well. I did*’t notice any blatant errors and the whole story read easily from that perspective.
The dialogue felt a little unnatural, but I did*’t really know what to expect since I don’t know how tribesmen would talk.
Overall the story was enjoyable, though I think it could use a little revision, and perhaps a few additions to make it more clear what the point of it all was.
Good work.
07-Mar-2011 05:33:15
