*Magnify*
SPONSORED LINKS
BY ONLINE AUTHORS
Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/my_feedback/action/view/id/4252389
Review #4252389
Viewing a review of: {citem:}
Review of  
Review by Tiggy
In affiliation with SIMPLY POSITIVE GROUP  
Rated: | (3.0)
Access:  Public | Hide Review (?)


Hello papadoc1,

my name is Tiggy and I am reviewing your story as a judge for "Short Shots: Official WDC Contest" . Thanks for entering! Please bear in mind that my comments and suggestions are only my opinion. Other reviewers might see it differently.


I can see where the image prompt came into it, I think, but it seemed like almost as soon as you got there, the chapter ended. I would imagine that the cave features more in the following chapter and you set it up nicely, but here, I was missing the descriptions and details that linked the story to the prompt. It’s a good hook at the end though – the characters got into a rather precarious situation when you left them, and the readers will want to know what became of them and turn to the next chapter. The characters were quite interesting, although you covered a long time period in this first chapter which meant that they weren’t as deep as they could have been. You spent most of the chapter explaining their backstory which meant that you didn’t really get to show that much detail about them.

The conflict at the end was certainly compelling. I wasn’t sure about the way you got there and if all of the detail was really necessary. The structure also made me stumble a bit, the short sections that skipped from one character to another, trying to introduce them all and telling the readers how they were connected. I think it might have worked better to concentrate on just the main characters here, give a little less detail about them but make the events that led up to the ending a bit more pertinent. Perhaps use some dialogue rather than mainly narrative to show them deciding what they wanted to do, maybe argue about it a little, discuss the details. That’s what I was missing the most in this tale, the dialogue to break up the narrative. The descriptions were good and I had no trouble imagining the different scenes, but again, I would have liked you to show the readers what was happening rather than tell them.

I didn’t notice many errors, there were just a few that jumped out at me, for example in the first paragraph,

along with a some fishing line

where either “a” or “some” is redundant (I would omit “some” but that might be personal preference.)

Woo HOO!, Jeremy shouted
Rather than making the speech bold, there should be speech marks around it.

Overall, it looks like you have a good idea for this story but you tried to put too much into the first chapter and ended up mentioning a lot of things without going into enough detail with any of them. If you were to edit this, I would suggest concentrating on a few main events and describing them a lot more thoroughly, before leading up to the end where the couple is trapped in the cave.



A Simply Positive reviewing sig.


*Gold* My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
   *CheckG* You responded to this review 08/22/2016 @ 1:15pm EDT
Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/my_feedback/action/view/id/4252389