Tree House Guardian or Vampire hunter series???

[Red_web_city]

A feel for what I like in literature...never saw it that way. Ok. Will do. Thanx

[Davidizer13]

Ok. Will do. Thanx

Do what, exactly? What are you going to do to become a better writer? I'm serious here, you have to have something concrete before you go and claim my God as the inspiration and reason for your writing and totally screw it up.

[Xeno]

start by visiting a library. there are a lot of really good books there. the one down the street from my apartment complex is p cool. it has a deal outside of it of a velociraptor holding a stack of books and it's dropping one, and i think it's kind of cute even though it's entirely scientifically inaccurate. velociraptors didn't have opposable thumbs so they wouldn't have been able to hold books...but maybe that is why its dropping one?

anyway that is my library story.

[mechana2015]

So first of all moderator message, all sides, tone it down a bit. I'll lock the thread if I have to edit anything else.

Second, Red Web, this is a story a friend told me about something they did recently.
They pitched a book to an editor.
They were fortunate enough to ask what to do to prepare the day before their interview, thanks to the pitch being at a multi day event.
They were told to have titles of media they could relate to the story they were pitching and descriptions of the aspects of those titles that they could compare to their story pitch to make clear points that they knew what genre they were writing in. Novels, TV shows, short stories and films that they could use to help get the idea of their story across. This means that the editor wanted to know that they knew their genre, what they were working with and who their contemporaries and forerunners are. My friend was able to name half a dozen books and TV shows to describe aspects of her setting, characters and tone of the book she was trying to sell them, and the editor know all of the books and TV shows she was talking about, which was extremely helpful since the entire pitch was five minutes long. This is why you have to have an extensive knowledge of the genre and media you are writing for, because the people who you will be trying to sell your book to WILL know the genre and the associated media and know what you're working close to, story wise, and it could just give you the chance to make a pitch in 5 minutes to the person who could buy your book.

[Red_web_city]

Ty Xeno, ok Mechana. My genre is Action Sci fi. A cross between Vampire hunter D, and Phoenix from X men... and for Davidizer I am reading other books but have'nt found one that keeps me interested or inspired. I'll keep searching until I can soak up all the necentials need to know how to write a readable interesting book. I'm a "plot thickens" type writer, so bare w/ me

[K. Ayato]

Why not grab a copy of the book How to Write Fiction while you're at it. It focuses on something else you might want to tighten up: character motives.

[Davidizer13]

and for Davidizer I am reading other books but have'nt found one that keeps me interested or inspired. I'll keep searching until I can soak up all the necentials need to know how to write a readable interesting book. I'm a "plot thickens" type writer, so bare w/ me

Mmkay. So why should I give your story the literary scrutiny and respect you think it deserves when you can't work up an attention span long enough to get through something more stimulating than Hatchet? That's like being a cook who doesn't eat his own food.

More to the point, why are you writing at all? What is your reason for spending the time and effort to build all this? Out of all the things you could do for God, what caused you to choose being a writer as the focus of your mission?

Why not grab a copy of the book How to Write Fiction while you're at it. It focuses on something else you might want to tighten up: character motives.

I'd also recommend Thanks, But This Isn't For Us by Jessica Morrell once your story starts getting more coherent. While it's targeted towards people who are way closer to finishing their manuscript than you are, there's a ton of great bits about genre conventions, how to build your plot, ratcheting up the tension, what it takes to build meaningful conflicts, and more.

[mechana2015]

Hmm ok, I will try that also. Thanks again. LOL @ Hatchet. Ok so it's hard to try to focus like I used to. I've had years of smoking marijuana, so I'm only 9 monthe clean again. Give me some more time...

I also do music, went to engineering school and know how to make beats, produce n sing...but I'm waiting to get my apartment to built my own studio to work at a focused steady pace. I love expressing my ideas n concepts, thats why I write. Drawings my first love. I'm better with inking n penciling then the graphic smart phone finger paintings you see...

[Davidizer13]

Mmkay. So I see you've made a few revisions to your story. It's incrementally better than the last, but that's not saying much. The fight between Yozara and the vampires has a good propulsive energy to it, so I know you can kinda sorta write, but that comes in fits and starts when compared to the rest of the story, which is still quite the mess. You've still got a lot of awkward phrasing and metaphor, which I'm convinced will go away once you start reading and know what reads well. Another suggestion to fix this would be to read parts of it aloud to yourself, listening to how it flows - until you get your grounding in the written word, your natural sense for what English should sound like will have to compensate.

Speaking of awkward language, seriously, what is this?

'No meal tonight boys!', she shouted, gesturing a 'NO' as she wagged her finger.

I know what you're trying to say here, but this is a really awkward sentence - you find three ways of saying "no" and put them next to each other in the same sentence. That ain't good.

The second half of the story is a big fight scene between the vampires, who gather up and have themselves a nice little riot and attempt to fight the Full Armor people. But it's a confusing mess. Besides all the writing flaws we've discussed in previous posts (which somehow have held on through countless revisions and attempts to point them out *cough cough*), the biggest problem is that there's no tension and no buildup. You make it completely obvious from the get-go who's going to win, despite your attempts to make it sound a little hopeless by making it a thousand versus twenty. Unfortunately, since you're playing by Japanese cartoon rules, this makes it even more obvious that they're going to win, and how badly that thousand is going to get stomped. A battle this big and important should be deeper into your story, something that's coming about due to the good guys getting a few wins, the bad guys getting a little desperate. Or maybe they're trying to exploit some weakness after the good guys lose. Either way, right now it sits out of place with the rest of the story, and feels like you have it there just because you have to have some sort of fight RIGHT NOW. Let your story breathe a little bit - not everything has to happen right at once, one big event after another. Build the tension by breaking things up, splitting the story between two points of view you can switch between for each chapter. (Of course, this might be a little over your head, seeing as you're struggling to build one character into something readable, let alone two or more.)

The last thing I want to bring up is a big one: the use of faith in your story. This is something I see in a lot of the concepts/treatments/short stories/whatever that come across CAA, so it's not just you, but come on, be above the influence.

In the real world, faith is just that - faith. (This is gonna get deep, so hold on tight.) Personally, I don't believe you can prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, whether God exists, be it through a scientific, mathematical, logical, or any other proof. By His very nature, God exists beyond our universe and is therefore beyond these tools we use to examine things that exist in our world. The only proof I can fall back on is my experiences with God and how they've affected me. To get excruciatingly personal here, I believe that I've truly been in the presence of God a couple times, and even that I've received instruction about something from God. It wasn't speaking in tongues, miraculous healing, or anything of that nature, but I believe I've felt God working in me. Now, the way these experiences manifested themselves, I think you could make a case for a naturalistic explanation for them - an ecstatic teenaged reaction combined with a strong peer pressure/desire to experience something, for instance; or maybe my own mind coming to a solution on its own, even just a good stiff breeze. And you could be absolutely right in saying those experiences had nothing to do with God. But within my understanding of God's nature and what I felt in those moments, I have chosen to believe it was God working. To me, that's what constitutes faith.

In the world of Red Web City and Full Armor 7, however, faith works differently. In fact, there's no need for faith at all. In your story, certain expressions of faith are rewarded directly, immediately, and without any ambiguity that it was God's doing. You say the right words, stick your hand on your chest, and bam, you have divine anti-vampire power armor. It's repeated several times (and many more elsewhere in the world, presumably), and the results are exactly the same every single time. You don't need to have faith that God's going to work through you in a way you don't fully understand, you know exactly what He's going to do right away, right before your very eyes, every time you do it! Faith, and by extension, God's power, is turned into a repeatable, scientifically testable process, and by doing the right song and dance, you can get God to give you powers. Theologically worse yet, God might be obligated to give your powers - it doesn't really matter if I actually care about what God has to say, all I have to do is say the magic words and slap my chest, and He has to give me armor!

There are other fantasy works that run into the same problem: in a world where God/the gods/supernatural beings exist and interact directly with the world, how do you explain faith or even non-belief in those beings? To give one example of a solution, Dungeons and Dragons/Pathfinder explain it by saying that if you're a cleric in the service of god X, you have to be close to the way they behave or the way they would like to behave in order to win their favor and gain the ability to cast Smite Undead. But from a Christian standpoint, that sounds rather like salvation by works, which goes in the face of Christianity's point, that that's not how our God works. Beyond the lack of grace such a faith would entail, God is not bound to do Y every time we do Z, otherwise He would not be the omnipotent sovereign God of the universe because some rule beyond Him is more powerful than He is.

</davidsimportantopinions>

[K. Ayato]

I wish you would at least use spaces/breaks between paragraphs and characters talking instead of lumping everything into one condensed mass that looks like a stream of consciousness essay (aka making no sense and near impossible to read, let alone figure out). CAA has a preview and editing option before you actually submit a post. Maybe you could benefit from using it so you can see how illegible your "story" appears to the rest of us.

[Red_web_city]

Ty davidizer, i know exactly what you are getting at. If you've ever seen the anine movie "Straight Jacket", the main character attacks with great power by saying a phrase " I challenge the laws of nature & reason", and this inspired me to use two combines scriptures that the hunters use to pledge allegiance to their faith. I don't want to give too much away, but down the line I will further explain the power from the heavens which teleports the armors to them. I wanted to make sure the reader knew Yozara was wagging her finger "no" as she said "no meal tonight boys", and I know O should space between each fight, but this is just the beginning, it will slow down after chapter1....thanks for reading n wisdom, corrections...I know it may need a bit of work

[Davidizer13]

MMkay, so I did another rewrite of your first chapter, and this is what I came up with. It's not my best work, I'll admit that - I think I relied too heavily on cliches for dialogue and actions, and it's definitely lacking in polish, but there you have it.

So when I was writing this, I noticed that in your story you put a lot of emphasis on secrecy - the good guys are trying to keep the number of witnesses that saw their fight or came into contact with them to a minimum. But you've got someone getting busted through a wall in front of a bunch of goth/punk/subculture people; do you think the bar owner's going to look at a gaping hole in his wall and say "Welp, must be them durn pack rats!" And in your version, the chapter ends with a huge fight in the streets between two thousand vampires and twenty people in power armor, with tanks and laser guns and explosives and stuff. You don't think anybody's going to notice or call the police on that?

Maybe it's a scale issue, like you don't realize what two thousand people entails. One of the first couple revisions of this story had the same problem when you said there were a hundred murders a night or something like that. I looked it up, and Philadelphia's a real life American city with 1.5 million people in it. They had about 300 reported murders last year, less than one a day. From what I know of Philly (and no offense to anyone who lives there), it's not a nice town to live in, so I'm going to assume that their crime rate is going to be a lot higher than the average, so even less than one a day, even one every two days (180 per year) is a serious problem, let alone a hundred a night.

But anyway, the point is someone's gonna see two thousand people having ray gun fights in the streets every night, and all that secrecy the heroes are trying to tack up around it will be for naught.

[K. Ayato]

Unless someone has a mind-wipe device, like in Men in Black. And even if someone in your story did, the logical conclusion would be he/she would be wanting some serious R&R after making a whole population forget what really happened as well as convincing them that any collateral damage was the result of say, maintenance failure.

[Yuki-Anne]

Oh, goody. One of these.



Since you seem to have a hard time getting what people are talking about when they critique your spelling and grammar, I'm going to be REALLY specific and hope it gets through.

Question: Are you even using spellcheck? Not that Spellcheck is the be-all end-all of correct spelling, but it will at least filter out things like "tomarrow," which I'm fairly certain isn't a word in any existing language.

October 10th- The harvest moon light compliments the pulsating night, as the streets glistened from a passing mist.

As Davidizer pointed out, you're mixing up your tenses. Never start out a sentence in the present tense ("compliments") and end it in the past tense ("glistened"). In fact, you did it in your very first sentence. "This city had a population... and reports reveal that it appears to be..." Pick a tense and stick with it.

Also... what the heck is a "pulsating night"? You know what "pulsating" means, right?

pul·sate
/ˈpəlˌsāt/
Verb
Expand and contract with strong regular movements.
Produce a regular throbbing sensation or sound.
Synonyms
pulse - throb - beat - vibrate - palpitate - tremble

How does a night pulsate? It's somehow producing a throbbing sensation? It's expanding and contracting with strong, regular movements? And how would a harvest moon compliment this rumored "pulsating"? You've basically just picked out words that sound good to you but mean absolutely nothing when strung together.

the shadows of the districts rooftop

District's. You've got a possessive noun here, so you use an apostrophe. You may not seem to think that grammar matters much, but the entirety of the English language disagrees with you.

'Hissss'! warned a white cat and a near by trash can rattled. An alarming presence was felt. 'Honey did you hear that?,' the tipsy woman nervously wondered. ' ahh, it's just a cat babe, No worries.,' her partner replied.

There is so much wrong with this. As I believe Davidizer pointed out, cat scares are extremely overused. What does it add to the story? If you removed the cat, what would be missing? Answer: a pointless cat. Also... "An alarming presence was felt" is just a clunky sentence that makes no sense. By whom? By the cat? By the tipsy woman? How did she feel it? Intuitively? Or did something grope her from the shadows?

Also, again, grammar: When using a quotation, you never end the quotation with two punctuation marks ('Honey did you hear that?,'). Also, you should be using double quotation marks. Here's what your conversation SHOULD look like:

"Honey, did you hear that?" the tipsy woman nervously wondered.
"Ahh, it's just a cat, babe. No worries," her partner replied.

TAKE CAREFUL NOTE OF EVERY CORRECTION I MADE. THERE IS NOT JUST ONE. THERE ARE FIVE. And that's just trying to get your sentences up to par grammatically; I haven't even gone into why it's bad writing. You've used too many adjectives in that first sentence: "the tipsy woman nervously wondered" is just clunky writing. Show us that she's nervous and tipsy, don't tell us. For one thing, you've already told us they're intoxicated. You don't need to say it again. And instead of "nervously wondered," you could replace it with something more dynamic and illustrative, such as, "the woman asked, her voice shaking as she glanced warily at her surroundings." Instead of telling us that she is "nervously wondering," in this sentence the author has demonstrated nervousness without once saying the word "nervous." That's the key to "show, don't tell," and it makes the difference between junior high English Comp writing, and writing that catches the reader's interest.

Oglar: A slender crimson clothed general with studded silver armor walked before his muscle: Megron and Otek, two 7 foot armoured spiked soldiers.

This sentence needs a colonoscopy, and by that I mean that you've seriously misused colons and should probably study high school grammar again. First of all, it's a clunky way to introduce characters, but if you MUST introduce them this way, here's how you would do it with CORRECT grammar: "Oglar, a slender, crimson-clothed general with studded silver armor, walked before his muscle: Megron and Otek, two 7-foot soldiers in spiked armor." The way you wrote "7 foot armoured spiked soldiers" is just really bad. The phrase "spiked soldiers" implies that they might be at least as intoxicated as the couple. Or perhaps by "spiked soldiers" you mean that if one were to eat them, one would get high?

I'm going to skip the next paragraph, not because there are no problems, but because there are so many that if I critiqued everything wrong with your story I'd be writing a novel myself.

But I'll bring up what someone else and I myself have already mentioned before: When you have multiple people talking, you start a new paragraph when the next person starts talking. Don't clump all of everyone's talking into one paragraph. It's terribly hard to read and it's not good writing at all.

In fact, there's only one more thing I can bear to specifically critique. Critique junkie that I am, I've already had my fill. I hope I've given you enough pointers to make your story more tolerable for the next run around. The one more thing I have to address is what Davidizer already mentioned:

'No meal tonight boys!', she shouted, gesturing a 'NO' as she wagged her finger.

What. The. What. Seriously, the reason I'm addressing it is because Davidizer addressed it and you defended it like you didn't get that it's a terrible idea. First of all... no, wait. I have no first of all because a million reasons NOT to do this are occurring to me all at once. For some reason it brings to mind this part of Jurassic park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfiQYRn7fBg ... but don't try to draw a flattering comparison there, please. Your story is nowhere near even kissing the triceratops dropping pile of that worthy film.

I seriously don't know what you're trying to accomplish with making your heroine look like a total idiot. The only conclusion I can come to is this: You've got this idea that you want this to be manga or a graphic novel of some kind, so you have this random smattering of images in your head. You think the image of her wagging her finger like a granny at three vampires will somehow establish her character and make her interesting or something. But you don't have the talent, the know-how, or the patience to actually create a graphic novel, so you take these lazy images you've concocted and put them to paper... lazily.


Here's the thing about writing: there are tens of thousands of people just like you who have ideas just like yours. So what makes your story stand out from the other tens of thousands of stories that everybody's throwing about like so many feces in a monkey enclosure? If you don't at the very least get your grammar up to snuff, your story will be dismissed by publishers and readers alike after the first paragraph. After all, what makes you think people want you to write a story when you can't even be bothered to write English properly? You may not care, but it's so insulting to the millions of people who have studied and labored over the English language and know how to do it right. No student of English worth his salt will want anything to do with a book where the author clearly knows less about English than the reader himself does!

And that's not even going into the problems with your plot, characters, methods, and writing style in general. I'd normally be more gentle but reading the rest of this thread (this entire website, really) I see this pattern where you consistently defend the things you've been critiqued for, rather than saying, "Hey, you know what, that's a good point, I clearly need to rethink this stuff." Rather than getting defensive, take the critique in stride and understand that if you listen to what people are saying, your writing will improve. Don't say, "It's my style," or "naw, he's not sexist, he's just kind of rough" or any of the other weak defenses you've offered. Instead, trust some people who have put a lot of thought and effort into their own writing, that they might actually have a pretty good idea what they are talking about.

PS Davidizer's rewrite is awesome, and you would do well to pay close attention to the way he changed the story. My only real criticism is that I'm not sure what "tatami curtains" are, because tatami is flooring. Could he perhaps be referring to sudare?

But that's a minor detail. Pay attention to the way he set up the scene, helping us to kind of actually get to know the couple a little bit before they're attacked. He didn't do that just because it was fun; doing that allowed us, as the audience, to actually care a little bit what happens to this couple. And introducing Yozara as a somewhat timid vigilante also helped us to care more about what happened to her and whether she won or not. Plus, his attention to proper grammar and punctuation (I did find a few typos, but less than five, I think, and that's definitely forgivable) reduced the distraction and helped me get into the story. That's the main point I've been trying to make: bad grammar is distracting at best, and downright infuriating at worst. Please, please, PLEASE study grammar.

[K. Ayato]

Go Yuki!

[Ante Bellum]

But you don't have the talent, the know-how, or the patience to actually create a graphic novel, so you take these lazy images you've concocted and put them to paper... lazily.

Precisely this.

[Davidizer13]

My only real criticism is that I'm not sure what "tatami curtains" are, because tatami is flooring. Could he perhaps be referring to sudare?

That's what I meant, yeah. I was under the impression that tatami referred to the material the mats were made out of, that woven straw/bamboo stuff. Like I said, it wasn't my best work, and I wasn't too interested in touching it up a whole lot for a one-off gimmick thing. I'm glad someone appreciated it, at least!

[Yuki-Anne]

Well, to be honest, I didn't even know the real name of bamboo curtains was until this year, so...

Anyway if that's not your best work, I'd sure like to read whatever is.