Katawa Shoujo Forums

Deleted cuz it was awful

So, is he speaking this entire time? Cause its all in quotation marks. Also, there's no period at the end. Besides that, its too short to really say anything yet.

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Irdorath wrote:Point the mistakes, I'm sure there's a ton of them.

"Point the (out any) mistakes..."

Prologue: (Use bold/large font for your chapter heading.)
School for the disabled. (Sentence fragment.) I knew that it exist(ed) because as a kids we were always betting if on whether the ambulance that passed us was going there. I even went there on for a festival with my friends 2 years ago. And then something named laryngeal cancer happened. (There are better ways to reveal this than flatly stating it four sentences in. Also, in an internal monologue, he wouldn't think 'something named' to himself, because it's a huge deal for him. That'd be like Emi thinking 'and then something like a car accident happened.' It's not a something, it's a massive and permanent disability.) Yay, I can't talk because they (who?) cut out my laryx(<-spelling), and we (who's 'we'?) don't have money for the prosthetics (be)cause my parents are always drunk. (There are better ways to reveal this than flatly stating it five sentences in.) Good thing I won't live (with) them anymore. (Also, how can they afford this school? It's not cheap. Well, Hanako managed, so I guess anything's possible.)Well, time to stop bitching and cross this damn gate. (What gate? So far you have yet to tell us where we are, what it looks like, or how our main character got there. Or even his name. I assume it's a he, actually. Who knows?) Actually, no. I need more time to think about stuff. (So, we're not crossing the gate?) I think about my friends for some time, and then something hits me. (Use a colon or semicolon here.) In middle school there was an epileptic girl a year older than me, she might be going here to attending this school. I wonder if she'll tell me what was has been happening these last 2 years. (What's her name? How well did our mystery protagonist know her? How does this information factor into his new-found outlook on disabilities?) Time to go to class, I'm already 30 mins late. (So we ARE crossing the gate!)

WHEW! Okay, so I might have gotten carried away. In retrospect, this might come across as a bit mean, but I honestly think that the fastest way to improve is to have someone point out what needs work. In your opening paragraph, you give us a significant amount of backstory, but you never take the time to establish how the character feels about it aside from a sarcastic 'yay'. You're giving us details on his life, but never get around to explaining the basics of the setting or cast. You can't set up good drama if you just reveal all of your tricks right out of the gate. You have to build up to it, show how your character feels about these things. Have him get mad! Grind his teeth or kick a rock or something! His parents are assholes! RAGE for a while! Teenagers are GREAT at railing against authority figures they don't respect. And he can't even yell about it! How does that make him feel?

Don't just say what's happening, show it. Allude to it and let us draw our own conclusions. You'll never get anywhere if you just write a dry list of facts about this guy's life without making him act on any of it.

His name is 'Azazel'? Really.

EDIT:

Let me expand on that. This is a Jewish name with not-so-positive associations. You'll need to create backstory explaining why this is so.

In the paragraph you've given us, there are a lot of interesting facts. However, there isn't enough material to help us decide what you're actually doing with them.

I won't shit on OCs, even by less experienced writers—it's cruel to deride something that comes from as personal a place as OCs do—but this is not the kind of writing that the members of this forum will be able to positively interact with.

As Blank Mage's post pointed out, the amount of hand-holding that would be required for us to even start to parse this piece is very much above and beyond the call of duty for us. I don't think anybody wants the responsibility of having to didactically dissect your writing in an effort to guide your improvement, since this would be an unbelievable amount of work. Any participation by the reader would be a form of pure altruism.

By all means, continue to write if that suits you, even in this thread, but unfortunately you are at a point where it is essentially impossible for anyone to provide you any sort of feedback that does not boil down to "strive to write more cogently."

Leaty wrote:I don't think anybody wants the responsibility of having to didactically dissect your writing in an effort to guide your improvement, since this would be an unbelievable amount of work. Any participation by the reader would be a form of pure altruism.

Pretty much. I just enjoy critiquing things like this. It's like revisiting the first level of a difficult video game with all the items and skills you've grinded, and just WRECKING SHIT. It's easy and empowering, and gives me a (largely false) sense of skill. I hope that Azazel is actually a full-on demon, and that this whole fic just goes sideways with the force of a freight train, leading to a climatic showdown as Lilly tries to exorcise him in a blood soaked tea room. (That is a joke. Please don't do that.) As it stands, I think naming an ordinary kid so exotically just indicates chuunibyo.

Keep reading until you have a firmer grasp on literary technique. It's a vague suggestion, I know, but you need more to this story than a character description and biography.

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Deleted cuz its awful

*sorry, effed up the first post.

Just read this. 's alright, but it does seem a little... uninspired right now. Hopefully that will change as you continue
Not going to comment on spelling/ grammar, because other people here do that better than me, but I will give you this handy link, as you really don't have enough line spacings. I've had the problem in the past (thank god the 'renai lets you edit posts).
Also, I'd recommend putting that little aside on names before the bulk of the story, so as not to interrupt the flow. You don't really need to have it right in the middle of the prose.

Onto other stuff:

Irdorath wrote:girl with white, long hair and red eyes, another girl with brown eyes and crutches near her desk

I assume Rika and Saki cameos?

Final judgement for now: Again, 's alright. I'll be keeping an eye on it and I'll be interested to see what you do with this. Good luck and have fun writing

Irdorath wrote:*blah blah fanfic text* (OOC: I don't know Japanese names so I will give names from anime or VNs to OCs) *blah blah fanfic text resumes*

Never, ever do this again. This screams "I don't care enough about what I'm writing to take the time to do some research", which doesn't encourage other people to care either, but the greater sin is the interruption of the piece. Reader immersion in the plot should never be voluntarily interrupted, much less with something that shouldn't even be a footnote.

~Time skip~ is no good either. You can use a separator, such as ~~~~~ if you like that, to indicate a space-time distance between text blocks, but then you'll have to take up the slack in narration. Or you can actually write down some narration to show that in the first place. But don't take this kind of lazy out.

It's.... it's not worse...

Is, ah, is English your first language? I'm trying not to be insensitive here, but, um, it doesn't sound that way. And I feel like my previous advice was largely wasted. I only read it because it reminds me of Full Life Consequences. That's not something you want to emulate.

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Blank Mage wrote: Keep reading until you have a firmer grasp on literary technique.

This is honestly the most useful piece of advice that you are going to receive. You mention reading VN's, but straight up fiction is different because you don't have visual accompaniment. Your writing comes off as very mechanical because you haven't added much beyond the bare details of "A said this, B said that." This leaves your reader without much to go on when picturing the scene themselves. Just like Blank, I suggest reading some of the other great pieces here and looking at what they do differently from your piece.

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