Hello fellow writers! I'm new to VN writing but I want somebody to review/critique my writing style, so I wrote a short story that anyone is free to comment on. Specifically, I'm looking for peer review on my style. Thank you, and happy holidays! :]
Short Story: How I Met Her
By: Kawaiicy
“When I was little, I thought love was like in the stories.”
“Princes and princesses, true love at first sight, happy-ever-after, that kind of stuff.”
“Of course, people grow up, and my fantasies did too. Well, in a way.”
“You know that stereotypical anime scene where the protagonist and the obvious love interest crash into each other? Like, physically? That’s what I wanted it to be like when I met ‘her’.”
“It could have been a cute girl falling into my lap on a plane. Or a nice collision of bicycles where we ended up sprawled out on the grass. I wouldn’t have been unhappy with waking up to find a naked cutie in my bed.”
“…”
“I met ‘her’ at the beach. She was a blonde beauty. Saved my life in fact. I almost drowned that day. CPR isn’t the best first kiss, but it definitely wasn’t the last. Five years to the day, I married ‘her’, right on that beach. We lived happily ever after, laying side-by-side on the beach, listening to the ocean’s song.
“…”
“I met ‘her’ in the street. There she was, all by herself, playing a sad song on ‘her’ guitar. Every day I walked by ‘her’ to hear ‘her’ quiet and melancholy music, to try and catch a glimpse of ‘her’ night-black eyes under ‘her’ night-black hair, to feel my heart skip beats whenever she looked up at me. One day, I asked ‘her’ to marry me. I never saw ‘her’ again, but can still hear the strums of ‘her’ guitar in my sleep, and can see ‘her’ jet-black eyes whenever I look at the night sky.”
“…”
“I met ‘her’ in the outer lands, a place ravaged by war and tyranny. She was a princess, complete with fair brown hair, pale skin, and an evil king for a father. Unbeknownst to him, she had escaped in the middle of the night. My companions and I find ‘her’ asleep under a bush, dirty and exhausted. Quickly we took a liking to ‘her’ and brought ‘her’ into our group consisting of an elf-boy, two rats, a perverted old wizard, and I, and continued on our quest to find the sacred drinking mug of Ozz. Eventually, we married, and lived out the rest of our days watching our 212 children run through the fields.
“…”
“The truth is, I haven’t met her yet. The truth is also I’ve met ‘her’ in every way, shape, and form possible. I meet ‘her’ every day as I gaze out the bus window, completely lost in my thoughts. I’ve met a princess, a maid, a farm girl, a city girl, a shy girl, a loud girl, and any other kind of girl you can imagine.”
“But when I meet her, the real her, I don’t care if she’s straight out of a fairy tale or not; I’ll know it’s her because for once my reality will be better than my fantasies.”
“Until then, I’m going to keep on writing about ‘her’ and ‘her’, but they’ll be a day when my story will be the story of how I met her.”
Critique My Short Story
Re: Critique My Short Story
I rarely read and comment on other folks' writing (too busy to read a wall of text). I enjoyed your story.
"My companions and I find ‘her’ asleep under a bush, dirty and exhausted. "
I'd recommend changing the verb from 'find' to 'found'.
"My companions and I find ‘her’ asleep under a bush, dirty and exhausted. "
I'd recommend changing the verb from 'find' to 'found'.
Some of my visual novels are at http://www.the-new-lagoon.com. They are NSFW
Poorly done hand-drawn art is still poorly done art. Be a Poser (or better yet, use DAZ Studio 3D) - dare to be different.
Poorly done hand-drawn art is still poorly done art. Be a Poser (or better yet, use DAZ Studio 3D) - dare to be different.
Re: Critique My Short Story
Whoops. My b.
Re: Critique My Short Story
Usually I'd try to take something like this line-by-line, but I don't think you make enough individual errors to really warrant it. You do, however, make some stylistic choices that I would draw attention to, so I'll do my best to tackle them concisely.
Firstly, your formatting has some issues. This is more of a technical point, but it's worthy of mention. You use quotation marks when writing entirely in first person narration, which is confusing and unnecessary. In a first person perspective, quotation marks are crucial in differentiating the narration from any spoken dialogue in the story which is being narrated. Even though this narration doesn't include any dialogue, the reader doesn't know that until it's over. We just assume that quotation marks are there to indicate what they're always supposed to indicate. You also go for paragraph breaks very early and very often. I don't see why your first and second sentences couldn't have been in the same paragraph, for example. You can certainly use paragraph breaks to stilt a dialogue or narration in order to add emphasis to a line, but you can't really get away with doing that for every line. Overuse will kill the effect you were going for. Your use of ellipsis doesn't have any discernible purpose other than to possibly act as another form of pause break for the reader, but there's nothing about the way you use your ellipses that wouldn't have been just fine as an ordinary paragraph break. Again, I think you are misusing a tool in the hopes of achieving emphasis and visual spacing, but ruining the intended effect by overusing it. Finally, the emphasis you place on the word "her" repeatedly abuses the use of a visual marking to indicate something you are already clearly communicating through your prose. It does not take the reader too long to pick up on the reality that the "her" whom the narrator refers to is not actually a current girlfriend but a hypothetical one, and the process of that realization sinking in is what would be the most powerful effect of this passage. Giving it away so blatantly destroys the opportunity you had to ease the reader into that realization, much like feeding an audience the meaning of a joke before delivering the punchline. Ultimately, this is all a matter of using your tools for their intended purpose, rather than to create a visual effect that you wanted to have in your text. I recommend you format conventionally and let your words speak for themselves.
Now onto the content.
You start by mentioning standard fare fairy tale romance, then you add in a reference to anime. Now I'm as much a weeb as the next, but you severely limit your audience when you try to reference them to an already niche interest like anime. You already made your point in a way which has a broad appeal by referencing ordinary romance stories, so there's no need to potentially alienate parts of your audience by creating a barrier of entry to their understanding or creating an awkwardly nerdy moment in your prose. Besides, accidentally violent first meetings are a staple of romance in general, not just in anime, so there's no need to specifically reference Japanese cartoons when everyone can already understand the romantic appeal of crashing into your love interest. Unless you're really trying to pander to an extremely specific demographic in the rest of your story, I would recommend against the use of unnecessary audience-narrowing references.
There's something about the way you describe women which strikes me as being very distinctive of what is found almost ubiquitously in amateur erotica. You immediately set yourself to the task of describing hair, eye, and skin color as well as body type or just general physically visible condition (naked, beautiful, a princess "complete" with explicitly attractive features), and this really stands out. The distance between where you are with your descriptions and straight up fapfic is your lack of specification about the women's height, weight, and breast size, or a few uses of the word "voluptuous." Admiring beauty is a fine thing to do, but in a story which is already this short, it stands out when you focus such a large percentage of your limited text on describing the physical features of your dream girls and straight up telling the audience that these hypothetical girlfriends are easy on the eyes. I'm not saying you're being shallow, but I am saying you're overdoing it and again not trusting the audience to come to reasonable conclusions. You could spend more of your words talking about how the guitar-playing girl produced soothing music and fewer of them hammering home just how jet/night-black the colors of her various features are, and the audience would be likely to assume that any girl of your dreams would be good-looking, even if you didn't explicitly say so. Your swooning is enough to get the point across, and your audience is unlikely to conclude that your hypothetical lover is ugly unless you specifically point it out.
I would note that, for a story, this is extremely short. 521 words, to be somewhat precise. At the average human reading speed (300 WPM), that's a little under two minutes. I suppose this is where we get to talk about art being subjective, but something that short isn't exactly what I would call a story. A little piece of writing, maybe. Perhaps a very short scene, or a brief bit of introductory exposition. In fact, that's what this really reads like: the very beginning of a story about a starry-eyed dreamer escaping into a world of imaginary romance. With pretty minimal changes, I would suggest using this as the opening narration for a cute love story.
In fact, I really think you should go for it. You've certainly got a solid base to work from. I would just recommend that you sharpen up your formatting, divert the focus of your descriptions away from shallower features, and trust your audience to be able to put two and two together. If this is the lead-in to a vanilla love story that you've been cooking up, I think we'd all be better off seeing the whole thing, once you finish writing it. Draft it up and get yourself an editor when you're done. I think you'll do alright.
Firstly, your formatting has some issues. This is more of a technical point, but it's worthy of mention. You use quotation marks when writing entirely in first person narration, which is confusing and unnecessary. In a first person perspective, quotation marks are crucial in differentiating the narration from any spoken dialogue in the story which is being narrated. Even though this narration doesn't include any dialogue, the reader doesn't know that until it's over. We just assume that quotation marks are there to indicate what they're always supposed to indicate. You also go for paragraph breaks very early and very often. I don't see why your first and second sentences couldn't have been in the same paragraph, for example. You can certainly use paragraph breaks to stilt a dialogue or narration in order to add emphasis to a line, but you can't really get away with doing that for every line. Overuse will kill the effect you were going for. Your use of ellipsis doesn't have any discernible purpose other than to possibly act as another form of pause break for the reader, but there's nothing about the way you use your ellipses that wouldn't have been just fine as an ordinary paragraph break. Again, I think you are misusing a tool in the hopes of achieving emphasis and visual spacing, but ruining the intended effect by overusing it. Finally, the emphasis you place on the word "her" repeatedly abuses the use of a visual marking to indicate something you are already clearly communicating through your prose. It does not take the reader too long to pick up on the reality that the "her" whom the narrator refers to is not actually a current girlfriend but a hypothetical one, and the process of that realization sinking in is what would be the most powerful effect of this passage. Giving it away so blatantly destroys the opportunity you had to ease the reader into that realization, much like feeding an audience the meaning of a joke before delivering the punchline. Ultimately, this is all a matter of using your tools for their intended purpose, rather than to create a visual effect that you wanted to have in your text. I recommend you format conventionally and let your words speak for themselves.
Now onto the content.
You start by mentioning standard fare fairy tale romance, then you add in a reference to anime. Now I'm as much a weeb as the next, but you severely limit your audience when you try to reference them to an already niche interest like anime. You already made your point in a way which has a broad appeal by referencing ordinary romance stories, so there's no need to potentially alienate parts of your audience by creating a barrier of entry to their understanding or creating an awkwardly nerdy moment in your prose. Besides, accidentally violent first meetings are a staple of romance in general, not just in anime, so there's no need to specifically reference Japanese cartoons when everyone can already understand the romantic appeal of crashing into your love interest. Unless you're really trying to pander to an extremely specific demographic in the rest of your story, I would recommend against the use of unnecessary audience-narrowing references.
There's something about the way you describe women which strikes me as being very distinctive of what is found almost ubiquitously in amateur erotica. You immediately set yourself to the task of describing hair, eye, and skin color as well as body type or just general physically visible condition (naked, beautiful, a princess "complete" with explicitly attractive features), and this really stands out. The distance between where you are with your descriptions and straight up fapfic is your lack of specification about the women's height, weight, and breast size, or a few uses of the word "voluptuous." Admiring beauty is a fine thing to do, but in a story which is already this short, it stands out when you focus such a large percentage of your limited text on describing the physical features of your dream girls and straight up telling the audience that these hypothetical girlfriends are easy on the eyes. I'm not saying you're being shallow, but I am saying you're overdoing it and again not trusting the audience to come to reasonable conclusions. You could spend more of your words talking about how the guitar-playing girl produced soothing music and fewer of them hammering home just how jet/night-black the colors of her various features are, and the audience would be likely to assume that any girl of your dreams would be good-looking, even if you didn't explicitly say so. Your swooning is enough to get the point across, and your audience is unlikely to conclude that your hypothetical lover is ugly unless you specifically point it out.
I would note that, for a story, this is extremely short. 521 words, to be somewhat precise. At the average human reading speed (300 WPM), that's a little under two minutes. I suppose this is where we get to talk about art being subjective, but something that short isn't exactly what I would call a story. A little piece of writing, maybe. Perhaps a very short scene, or a brief bit of introductory exposition. In fact, that's what this really reads like: the very beginning of a story about a starry-eyed dreamer escaping into a world of imaginary romance. With pretty minimal changes, I would suggest using this as the opening narration for a cute love story.
In fact, I really think you should go for it. You've certainly got a solid base to work from. I would just recommend that you sharpen up your formatting, divert the focus of your descriptions away from shallower features, and trust your audience to be able to put two and two together. If this is the lead-in to a vanilla love story that you've been cooking up, I think we'd all be better off seeing the whole thing, once you finish writing it. Draft it up and get yourself an editor when you're done. I think you'll do alright.
Re: Critique My Short Story
I would say that this is a good foundation for you to keep building off of and that the more you create the sharper and stronger it will get.
There are a lot of technical errors and incorrect idioms. Improving your editing will eliminate some of these mistakes and raise the quality of your work.
1) “When I was little, I thought love was like in the stories.” - Awkward sentence structure. "When I was little" is a really cliche phrase and it's used as your hook. "I thought love was like in the stories" is overly wordy for what it does.
2) “Princes and princesses, true love at first sight, happy-ever-after, that kind of stuff.” In this case "true love" and "love at first sight" are different cliches. "True love at first sight" is not an idiom and comes across as a mixed metaphor. "happy-ever-after" should read "happily ever after" and could be used in quotes rather than hyphenated (you are quoting a phrase that appears at the end of fairy tales).
3) “Of course, people grow up, and my fantasies did too. Well, in a way.” Tone is fine but content is generic. I think you could relate this sentence more to the main character rather than statements like "people grow up".
4) Series of anime cliches followed by "I wouldn’t have been unhappy with waking up to find a naked cutie in my bed.” The cliches are very anime and to be honest, if western visual novel writers are going to contribute to the medium and do it in a refreshing way, it would be by escaping anime tropes entirely. The sentence structure of "I wouldn't have been unhappy" is basically a double negative that is found more in Japanese sentence structures than English ones. I think stronger words could be used than unhappy/happy. Also I am a guy and I have never wished for a "naked cutie in my bed". Well, I have, but I have never phrased it like that and it comes across as feminine thought rather than masculine thought.
Earlier there is also the usage of "Like, physically?" this would be fine if your character was a girl or a very feminine guy, but it comes across as a valley girl. Actually, your introduction tone is so feminine that I was surprised to find that this was a male point of view story. Working on more masculine tone might be a goal, but until then, you may wish to stick to feminine.
5) Series of fairy tale meeting stories. These are alright but lack variance in sentence structure. The ideas are good. The sentence structure repeats way too often and is a bit too simple. Try out more sentence structures, consider spicing things up with some parenthetical remarks (you can add detail or character comments in them), try breaking the flow with hyphens-- anything to keep it from reading a recitation of events.
6) Conclusion. Interesting enough. One thing to be careful of is that you use a lot of "qualifying" language throughout the story. You present us with a lot of false information and very little true information. We have no idea what the main character looks like and where he is or what is actually going on. There are a lot of fantasy settings.
---
My thoughts are is that your style is good and that working on your technical writing is what is going to improve it. I recommend grabbing a copy of "Sin and Syntax" as well as grabbing some copies of description related writing books from your library.
At this point in your writing what matters most is practice and output. Make stories-- as many of them as you can, and put them out there for critique. Go to places like lit.org or try to find good writing boards and get on them. Start getting peer interaction and feedback. Read. You can still watch anime and read visual novels, but reading from a wealth of literature is going to expand your ideas tremendously.
You're good, keep going, and never let criticism stop you from writing.
There are a lot of technical errors and incorrect idioms. Improving your editing will eliminate some of these mistakes and raise the quality of your work.
1) “When I was little, I thought love was like in the stories.” - Awkward sentence structure. "When I was little" is a really cliche phrase and it's used as your hook. "I thought love was like in the stories" is overly wordy for what it does.
2) “Princes and princesses, true love at first sight, happy-ever-after, that kind of stuff.” In this case "true love" and "love at first sight" are different cliches. "True love at first sight" is not an idiom and comes across as a mixed metaphor. "happy-ever-after" should read "happily ever after" and could be used in quotes rather than hyphenated (you are quoting a phrase that appears at the end of fairy tales).
3) “Of course, people grow up, and my fantasies did too. Well, in a way.” Tone is fine but content is generic. I think you could relate this sentence more to the main character rather than statements like "people grow up".
4) Series of anime cliches followed by "I wouldn’t have been unhappy with waking up to find a naked cutie in my bed.” The cliches are very anime and to be honest, if western visual novel writers are going to contribute to the medium and do it in a refreshing way, it would be by escaping anime tropes entirely. The sentence structure of "I wouldn't have been unhappy" is basically a double negative that is found more in Japanese sentence structures than English ones. I think stronger words could be used than unhappy/happy. Also I am a guy and I have never wished for a "naked cutie in my bed". Well, I have, but I have never phrased it like that and it comes across as feminine thought rather than masculine thought.
Earlier there is also the usage of "Like, physically?" this would be fine if your character was a girl or a very feminine guy, but it comes across as a valley girl. Actually, your introduction tone is so feminine that I was surprised to find that this was a male point of view story. Working on more masculine tone might be a goal, but until then, you may wish to stick to feminine.
5) Series of fairy tale meeting stories. These are alright but lack variance in sentence structure. The ideas are good. The sentence structure repeats way too often and is a bit too simple. Try out more sentence structures, consider spicing things up with some parenthetical remarks (you can add detail or character comments in them), try breaking the flow with hyphens-- anything to keep it from reading a recitation of events.
6) Conclusion. Interesting enough. One thing to be careful of is that you use a lot of "qualifying" language throughout the story. You present us with a lot of false information and very little true information. We have no idea what the main character looks like and where he is or what is actually going on. There are a lot of fantasy settings.
---
My thoughts are is that your style is good and that working on your technical writing is what is going to improve it. I recommend grabbing a copy of "Sin and Syntax" as well as grabbing some copies of description related writing books from your library.
At this point in your writing what matters most is practice and output. Make stories-- as many of them as you can, and put them out there for critique. Go to places like lit.org or try to find good writing boards and get on them. Start getting peer interaction and feedback. Read. You can still watch anime and read visual novels, but reading from a wealth of literature is going to expand your ideas tremendously.
You're good, keep going, and never let criticism stop you from writing.
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