Hidden 6 yrs ago Post by BrokenPromise
Raw
Avatar of BrokenPromise

BrokenPromise With Rightious Hands

Member Seen 4 days ago

I wanna thank the academy, and I wanna thank @Exit and @PlatinumSkink for joining the contest because I asked them to. I also wanna thank @Vocab for going super saiyan.

I know I clicked thank on everyone's review, but I also wanna write a thank you to everyone who commented on my story. I found myself agreeing with all the criticisms. I'll do better in the future.

Oh, but one point about your review for my entry @Calle:

Grammar wise, the thing I noticed a few times in the story was the passive form where you could have used the active.
she knew that papa was going to come in --> she knew that papa would come in
While she was recovering --> while she recovered
Fortunately she was wearing something other ... --> Fortunately she wore something other ...
There are more, those are the first three I came across.
I know I used the passive voice a lot too, until someone pointed it out. Nowadays I try to avoid using passive when active can be used and I seem to spot it more easily in other people’s writing too :) which is why I decided to mention it to you.


The advice that you're offering is good. You genuinely want to write in past tense unless it's in dialog. But what you're talking about is past/present/future tense, which isn't the same as passive/active voice. Passive is "Running for the door, Bob put on a coat." Where the active voice is "Bob put on a coat while running for the door." In passive, the verb comes first where in active it comes after the subject. Active voice is preferred in story writing because it's less confusing.

I just wanted to clear that up because if people are saying you're writing passive VS active voice, that's what they're referring to. Or they don't know what they're talking about!
Hidden 6 yrs ago Post by Frizan
Raw
OP

Frizan Free From This Backwater Hellsite

Contest Mod Seen 2 yrs ago

Congratulations to @Silver! It was neck and neck between Batten Valley and Sunday, but Batten Valley beat Sunday out by one vote.

Thank you to everyone that participated in RPGC #19: Beware The Metal Age!

I apologize for my lateness. New shift has screwed with my internal clock pretty bad.
Hidden 6 yrs ago Post by Exit
Raw
Avatar of Exit

Exit

Member Seen 3 mos ago

1x Laugh Laugh
Hidden 6 yrs ago Post by PlatinumSkink
Raw
Avatar of PlatinumSkink

PlatinumSkink

Member Seen 3 days ago

Alright. That could have been done with a little bit more fanfare,
or something, but anyways. Nicely done, Silver.

I’ll go ahead and reply to those that reviewed my entry.








Hidden 6 yrs ago Post by Loksfjoer
Raw
Avatar of Loksfjoer

Loksfjoer Lucky flame

Contest Mod Seen 1 hr ago

Thanks for clearing that up BrokenPromise.

I too want to reply to the people who reviewed my work so far. And if there are people who read it and couldn't add their review yet, I'd love to know what you thought about it.

First off, a big thank you for everyone who took their time to read the story and review it, your advice will help me improve my writing skills.

@Silver, thank you for the wonderful review, I'm glad you liked it so much. I will go over the story to see if I can find those moments of clumsy syntax and exposition.
I am planning to continue this story and I roughly know what I want to happen, so it's just a matter of finding the time to write it all down.

@PlatinumSkink, thanks for the review. I will read it over again to see if I can make it more interesting, more alive.

@Exit, I sincerely apologize for teasing you like that. In the end I wrote on this story every moment I could, but it wasn't enough time to tell the entire story. I'm glad you enjoyed what I had and I will finish it.
For some reason I saw the prompt and my mind went 'steampunk dwarves, let's write about that'
I agree I didn't give Mikhal really colourful lines, I'll see where I can add a bit more bard-like sentence to avoid that setup and no payoff. And in the future I will be more mindful about the scenes that might serve the bigger story, but are unneeded for the competition.

@BrokenPromise, thank you for reviewing my entry. The story does need a bit more finetuning. I'll definitely have another go at that scene you mentioned.
The story I posted was written as it played out. I didn't plan much of it and I admit I rarely do. I generally just write and the story unfolds, and in this case it lead to some scenes that, in hindsight, weren't needed for the competition or could be condensed.
You'll be glad to hear that I did skip two scenes I came up with, but of which I decided they weren't needed in the story (lemitsa actually taking lady Catheryn to the port city and Lemitsa meeting the thief).
I'll take the advice of a word budget in consideration, but I honestly have no idea on how to guess the amount of words I'll need to properly do a scene or a conversation. As I write I don't pay attention to the word count because I found that hinders the creative flow, but I can look things over afterwards and decide for every scene or every line of dialogue if it's really needed or not.
The discoveries about the steam tech were planned for the second part of the story. The reason for their invasion was mentioned, although not obviously stated, as wanting more coal and needing more water.
They started building mines to mine for more coal. (...) While they didn’t let any human near the coal-mines or any of the factories, they did let the humans gather water for them, which wasn’t as abundant in their own region as it was here.

Hidden 6 yrs ago Post by BrokenPromise
Raw
Avatar of BrokenPromise

BrokenPromise With Rightious Hands

Member Seen 4 days ago

Anyways. I’m happy you found it entertaining. Heh, how many other works of mine have you read, I wonder? How long have you been here that I don’t currently remember? Oh, well, anyways. Thank you for the review~


Just your last entry when I started reviewing, admittedly.

Oh, and I'm a guy. Waifu avatars confuse everyone. I'm not sorry.

@Calle

So you did mention what they were after. Fair enough. I must have been growing restless. I'll blame Frizan's narrow deadline for the votes anyway, heh.

Word budgeting is a writer's tool, and there's not really any easy way to estimate unless you practice. Because I always count my words after writing a post, I can usually guess how much I've written withing a few hundred words. But a lot of things factor into how long a scene is from your writing style and how detailed you choose to make a particular scene. Writing is kind of magical in that a quick brown fox can jump over a lazy brown dog in just ten words. But it can also be blown up to a hundred words if I want to make it a bit more dramatic, or even a thousand words if I want to add in some backstory.

To start though, you just need to decide on how many scenes you want to have and how long the story has to be. As an example, Let's say I want to write a story about a man who goes to war. I may want to write a story that has 6K words and has 3 arcs. The first arc is the man telling his family he's going to war, the second arc is the war itself, and the third arc is him returning home and seeing how much has changed. I would start writing with the idea that my budget was 2k words for each arc. If I start to go over, I could just prune the current/former arc or decide that the next arc will just be shorter. But maybe my second and third arc are shorter than expected and I have an extra 1.5K words to play with. Maybe I could write a 4th arc where he visits the enemy nation if it helps the idea I'm trying to establish with my story.

Just something to play around with. Some people find it helpful, others distracting.
Hidden 6 yrs ago Post by PlatinumSkink
Raw
Avatar of PlatinumSkink

PlatinumSkink

Member Seen 3 days ago

@BrokenPromise Not so much that I'm confused and more that I have made the active decision to call everyone with an obviously female avatar for "she", heh.
Hidden 6 yrs ago Post by Silver
Raw
Avatar of Silver

Silver Aut Viam Inveniam Aut Faciam

Member Seen 3 yrs ago

Thanks to all so much for your kindness and criticism!







Hidden 6 yrs ago Post by SleepingSilence
Raw
Avatar of SleepingSilence

SleepingSilence OC, Plz No Stealz.

Member Seen 16 hrs ago

A review of my own work. (Line By Line.) I had others done long before this, but stopped halfway through from an ironic lack of caring. But if you want to see ones worst critic. Here's how you actually review a work. And I also explained my thought process in making something "that could have been." (But wasn't.)


1x Like Like 1x Laugh Laugh
Hidden 6 yrs ago 6 yrs ago Post by SleepingSilence
Raw
Avatar of SleepingSilence

SleepingSilence OC, Plz No Stealz.

Member Seen 16 hrs ago

>Most of this was written quite a bit ago. Bout day one of the contest. (And I've taken too long. So just going to post the few I finished. And do the others later when I get around to it.)

Before I read any of the entries, I wanted to explain what I’ll be looking for when I’m reading these. How I originally, and how everyone else judged most stories to a far lesser extent is purely/mostly on typos, minor errors and inconsistencies in writing. But I realized just how flawed a method that is when comparing stories. Imagine two separate stories, one with perfectly adequate and simplified structure that has no flaws. The other has a typo or three, missing period here, sentence fragment there, but the theme, plot, characters, dialogue, lines and the actual effort was vastly unique and interesting. Is that one worse because its lack of polish? So I’m going to do something, I hope everyone does more of. I’m going to pretend a basic level of polish would inevitably happen with every single one these drafts if it was sent to an editor.

Because polish alone can’t make a story interesting. Make a theme unique, make dialogue sound natural or not depending on the effect, how well is the plot, world and character established? What actually happens in the story? How is this going to be compelling to imagine playing out in my head? Will I be impressed and acknowledge the level of craftsmanship each sentence took to craft? I’m not a teacher marking you for errors. Though more polish will still be appreciated. I’m a reader, who wants to actually be entertained by the story you wrote. Did that paragraph give your information in an interesting way? Or did you just write “Person walked into room, didn’t do anything interesting then said something in horribly broken dialogue and slang.”

So I will not focus on editing, merely provide it as background assistance. If there’s only a few errors you won’t even see me acknowledge their existence. If certain words or phrases are abundantly used or if something is repetitive, in a way it’s stated or acted upon, that is a flaw of a lacking vocabulary and/or imagination. But I will try to focus more than ever, on if you have a noticeable theme, impressive lines/unique writing, and story that hooks me in the beginning, keeps me engaged throughout the middle and ends sensibly.

With that introduction made and out of the way, allow me to judge these pieces of writing from that lense with what I hope comes across in equal fairness. (Yep, I’ll even be judging my own piece and become my own worst critic. With hope that maybe you can try doing the same for yours.)

That and following the rules. One theme that was particularly expressed in the prompt itself was the idea that it would not be easy to overcome this invasion. I’m expecting an oppressive atmosphere and if there isn’t one, there better be a good/clear reasoning for the lack of specified tone. A mary sue or badass character that isn’t brought a swift punishment/that doesn’t suffer immensely is not one I want to see...nor feel justified for the given prompt.







Edit 2: And because I finish what I start, long after it will be useful or relevant.







1x Laugh Laugh 1x Thank Thank
↑ Top
© 2007-2024
BBCode Cheatsheet