This is a very long piece, so instead of giving you a line-by-line edit, I am just going to give general grammar notes (highlighted by bullet points), backed up with examples from your text. I will move on to concrit, as follows.
- We don’t know what else is going on, because we are so cut off from everything else. Watch your commas. Some minor missteps throughout, like this one before “because”.
-“How did you get the name ‘Hatter’?” The punctuation should go inside both sets of quotations
-Hewson started to laugh but stopped abruptly when he saw how serious she was. “Laura-” remember to use a proper emdash, not an endash, to designate an abrupt interruption.
-My dad died in combat when I was 19.”Numbers smaller than one hundred should be written out.
First of all, this piece starts off with a bang! You got my attention right away. A strong part of your writing is your dialogue. Some writers are afraid to work with speech, but you used it to best advantage, and it worked to great effect here. The plot elements are really interesting and seem well-researched without being too dense. The way you told us about the origin’s of Hatter’s name, for instance, was good pacing to offset the potential info-dump of the medical details.
The only complaint that I have is how you chose to break the story up into sections. I know why you did, but it breaks up the flow and interest of the reader and makes it choppier than it really is. You don’t need to break the scene to move to a new one, you can just transition. It is hard to get the hang of, but I think you can do it with pretty much minimal rewrites; the scenes lend themselves as they are to easy transitions. It wouldn’t take much just to eliminate the breaks, in most places, or at most just write a sentence in to smooth the way. It will give the overall story a less-jarring feel.
This is one of your best stories. I can see how much you put into it, and it has certainly paid off. It is well-researched and well written. It is clear but emotional without tipping into the maudlin. A personal best, in my opinion. You should be very proud. Excellent work.
This is a very long piece, so instead of giving you a line-by-line edit, I am just going to give general grammar notes (highlighted by bullet points), backed up with examples from your text. I will move on to concrit, as follows.
- We don’t know what else is going on, because we are so cut off from everything else. Watch your commas. Some minor missteps throughout, like this one before “because”.
-“How did you get the name ‘Hatter’?” The punctuation should go inside both sets of quotations
-Hewson started to laugh but stopped abruptly when he saw how serious she was. “Laura-” remember to use a proper emdash, not an endash, to designate an abrupt interruption.
-My dad died in combat when I was 19.”Numbers smaller than one hundred should be written out.
First of all, this piece starts off with a bang! You got my attention right away. A strong part of your writing is your dialogue. Some writers are afraid to work with speech, but you used it to best advantage, and it worked to great effect here. The plot elements are really interesting and seem well-researched without being too dense. The way you told us about the origin’s of Hatter’s name, for instance, was good pacing to offset the potential info-dump of the medical details.
The only complaint that I have is how you chose to break the story up into sections. I know why you did, but it breaks up the flow and interest of the reader and makes it choppier than it really is. You don’t need to break the scene to move to a new one, you can just transition. It is hard to get the hang of, but I think you can do it with pretty much minimal rewrites; the scenes lend themselves as they are to easy transitions. It wouldn’t take much just to eliminate the breaks, in most places, or at most just write a sentence in to smooth the way. It will give the overall story a less-jarring feel.
This is one of your best stories. I can see how much you put into it, and it has certainly paid off. It is well-researched and well written. It is clear but emotional without tipping into the maudlin. A personal best, in my opinion. You should be very proud. Excellent work.
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I'm not sure what you're saying about the transitions and sections?
It was actually a lot of fun to write. Though, Blue yelled at me for killing characters...
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