So, I want to write a VN... [Feedback welcome]

[Hoyuu]

I've been toying with the ideia of writing a VN in english for some time, but I'm 100% self taught in english, so my confidence in it is not much.
Some people that I had conversations with, said that my english was alright, but writing a complete (short) history in a language that is not my native one certainly seemed like a challenge to me. I had to pause a lot of times because I couldn't think of the word to use, much more times than I do when I write in portuguese.
Here is a short excerpt that may or may not turn into a full story:

Not one of my brightest ideas

I was beginning to wonder if driving a car was something I should be doing with a bleeding stranger in the back seat and a migraine pounding behind my eyes.

It certainly didn't help that mister I-don't-feel-like-telling-my-name, or just "Mr. Stranger" for short, kept telling me how to drive my own damn car.

"Look, you should have taken that left turn", Mr. Stranger said, trying in vain to stop the bleeding with my handkerchief.

"This way is a shortcut", I replied, gritting my teeth.

I will not curse someone who was possibly bleeding to death, I thought, and kept repeating this mantra in my head.

The heavy rain was making things really difficult to see, but I lived in this city for 24 years, I knew these streets like the back of my hand.

I heard some restless noises coming from my back seat, and then, Mr. Stranger groaned. "Ugh, dying of blood loss is going to suck."

"Shut up, you're not dying." And that was a lie, probably. With the quantity of blood decorating my back seat, it was kinda surprising that he was still breathing. Of course, that didn't mean I had to accept it. "Corpses are not allowed in my car."

He laughed, it sounded disturbingly hollow. "You know, you're a pretty alright guy behind that cranky exterior. I honestly expected you to abandon me, or to at least call the police..."

I gripped the wheel tighter, my tongue suddenly dry.

Driving a bleeding stranger at 2AM in a freaking tempest probably wasn't the best idea that I ever had, but honestly, I had a lot of questionable ideas these days.

I don't know, I feel as if the writing is kinda... Dry or something? I have a little difficulty expressing the scene as how I see it in my head, if that makes sense.
What do you guys think? Did this short thing at least got you interest in the story of these two got in that situation?
If I really decide to write the VN in english, I'll definetly try to get a beta, but is my writing interesting enough? Please say if it got confusing or if my english is wonky in some parts, I genuinely can't tell.

[runeraccoon]

Hi there! First of all, you should make your own VN! I actually shouldn't say anything about that, since this NaNoRenO would be the first time I tried to make my own despite being in this forum for much longer, but yeah, I actually do encourage you to make it. :>
Once you get used to the interface and look for yourself how your lines work inside such display, I think you'll start learning to adjust.

Anyway, onto the excerpt you showed for us. Actually that sounds really good. I know what you meant about double over to find the correct words and usage since it's not our mother tongue, but I enjoyed reading this. I could imagine the setting. There was a little bit of tension lingering, the poignant mystery alluring us for further read, and compelling character's thoughts! There are several typos I could spot, like "though" and "questionably", probably more, but those could be fixed in an instant by having an editor or, at least, a proofreader.

What I wanted to point out is that those descriptions fit more of a novel than visual novel. I'm not a legit writer or anything, so please take it from a reader's POV, yeah? Most of these things are notes I keep for myself. XD
So here are my points:

> Half of the VN is the visual
Visual will help you for most parts. It would probably be easier for the format to separate the "dialogues" and the action, especially because character talking and doing something would require different screen. (Two window box when talking instead of one when their actions described, for example.)

> There are other sensory than sight
Especially since VN is visual, visual descriptions would probably clash with the art assets you already displayed. Due to such circumstances, other sensory like what the character hears, smells, tastes, feels, touches, and reacts to would enrich the scene more than visual descriptions. Take your line of "The heavy rain was making things really difficult to see[...]" and imagine in the screen there's a car's window pane being heavily rained upon and the players could only see vague lights and maybe the street ten feet ahead, no more. Now, with such visual, what do you think could improve the scene with that sentence?

> You have a lot of passive (to be + Verb-ing) compared to active sentences
"And that was a lie probably" could be turned into "I probably just lied". It was one of the easiest example I could summon from your writing, but you could probably do a rewrite from the first sentence. Passive sentences being used instead an active voice made the pace suffer from disruptions. With active voices, the flow is clear: A happens. Then B happens.

But in passive sentences, there's another thing happening: C is acting like this when D happens. Unless this is the effect you aim for, it's better to use active voice in VN format. You could use it if you intentionally disrupt the flow, I suppose.

Anyway, apologies for the long response. Feel free to take this not much from a grain of salt. Lastly, I just want to once again encourage you to write your own VN! ' v ')/ Go for it! Join NaNoRenO 2016~

P.S I THINK I SHIP THOSE TWO PPL IN THE EXCERPT ???? ///A///

[Hoyuu]

Oh, hello again :>
Actually, I already made a VN, it took me 3 days, and I did it just so I could have an idea of how renpy works, but that one was in portuguese and I got the sprites, music and GUI from Creative Commons because at the time my art was terrible, lol.

Thanks for telling me the typos you found, I wrote that excerpt on "Written? Kitten!" because the pc I'm using right now is not mine, and it doesn't have Word.

So, about that part with the rain, I actually added that when I finished writing it, because then I thought "Wait, just because I know it's raining, doesn't mean the readers will know since this text doesn't have images yet", so I added that as an afthertought, but you're right, I could've wrote about the sound of the rain instead of the visuals, it certainly would be more adequate if it was on a VN.

Oh, the passive/active sentences! I didn't even notice it, I'll try rewriting this in a more active voice when I get home to compare with this one, thanks for the tip!

I've been wanting to do a more elaborate VN since my first, but I couldn't help but think that having to do the art, writing, GUI and codding sounded like an awful lot of work for just one person, I was kinda thinking about trying to work with other people, but I'm too timid (don't have enough confidence to ask >.>)... I'll try to limit this story at 10k (or 15k max) and see if can make it for this NaNoRenO, it'll be good experience, at the very least xD

Thanks for taking the time to write such helpfull feedback.
Ahaha, I kinda-maybe ship those two togheter too :´D and lol, Mr. Stranger is definetly a "he", but I'm divided in which gender the driver should be, I'm leaning towards making him a man, but a woman would work as well.

[runeraccoon]

I know what you mean about being too timid to look for partners... ; A ;

(PSH HAHAHA MAKE IT A MAN. I love B x B.)

So good luck with your NaNoRenO! :>

[RotGtIE]

Whatever you did to learn English, you should turn it into a formal syllabus for a course. Your writing exhibits none of the usual telltale signs of having learned English as a second language, which is very impressive. Normally, second-language speakers make very different kinds of errors in their writing than native speakers do, even though native speakers tend to make a greater number of errors in works of comparable size. If you hadn't said English wasn't your first language, I wouldn't have been able to guess from your writing. You clearly have some very good quality control going on when you write, and it serves you well.

I think I can see what's making you somewhat uncomfortable about what you've written. I would chalk it up to formatting, plain and simple. You're writing in the novel style, which is very good and something that beginners don't usually get right, but something very noticeable jumps out just from looking at your passage before even reading it - there aren't really any paragraphs. Even though this is a dialogue-heavy scene and dialogue tends to chop up paragraphs into tiny little things, there are still sentences you separated from each other with paragraph breaks which didn't really need to be, and I think that is a habit you have formed which allows you to get your thoughts down on paper, so to speak. The problem is that this creates a stilted effect which takes the flow out of the narrative. This is evident from the first and second sentences in this passage, where there is no real topic change or any particular reason to break these two thoughts apart from each other into separate paragraphs. The result of this is that each sentence sort of gets its point across and then goes right into the next thought with a bit of a sudden transition - I've called this "bullet-point style writing" before, but in your case I think it's not quite egregious to completely earn that title, as your verbiage is delightfully full of detail and personality; it's very well executed. The issue is more about the way it affects your thought process in general when you take a big break between each sentence, which is what might be causing them to not flow smoothly together like they should.

It's difficult to say what should be done about this, because you write well enough that I don't want to carelessly give you any bad advice which would muck up the quality you're already achieving. Your style is great and your use of descriptive language brings a lot of personality to the events and dialogue you're describing, and most importantly, you're hitting that sweet spot where you're neither writing too robotically nor too overly embellishing.

Do you create outlines or summaries of your scenes before you write them? I think maybe the problem might just be that you're trying to get a thought written before you forget it and then hurry on to writing the next one for the same reason, and that's exactly the sort of habit that detailed outlines can help to solve, as they relieve you from the burden of having to remember everything you wanted to write while you're in the middle of building prose. If you've got a plan laid out, you can much more easily focus on the detail and personality in a scene - which you're already doing quite well, stilted formatting aside - since you can always refer back to your plan without having to remember it using only your grey matter. If you're not doing this already, and I'm not entirely sure that you aren't, then it would be the most helpful thing you could do for yourself at this point. That's just what it looks like to me: you know what you're doing, but maybe your attention is split in this way and you need to be able to focus on the prose so that you can put your full energy into it. I think that would fix the issues you're having and make you much more comfortable with the end result once you lean back and give the whole thing a once-over.