Feedback for Itsuke's The Promised Rose

[Itsuke]

I was told to make another thread as seeing my other feedback thread has not been touched for a year and I don't want to do what it is called 'necro-posting'... or something like that.

Feedback goes here for my new story and I look forward to them! I desire nothing but to improve myself, so bring it on!

[SaurianGuy]

I am interested in seeing what happens next but it feels like you were fusing three different chapters into one and its kinda noticeable with its pacing. You also lost me when you keep on adding details on top of details that you just introduced. I think it would be better if you withhold some details like the role of the Honor-guard until later and expand your current details like the story's world and the characters in it.

[KitheOfEvrark]

Well, you said to bring it on so here it goes.

Third Silver Moon 0477, 13th of Merkerdo, Village of Dawnstone

This really doesn't give the reader much relevent information. I have no idea at this point what Third Silver Moon means as part of the date. Without knowing what the months are in your story, "13th of Merkerdo" doesn't help either. The setting needs to help the reader imagine the scene. "Village of Dawnstone" is more helpful as it tells that this is happening in a village and the name of the village.

They threw a knife at him and Tuck had turned in time to avoid it.

Two things wrong with this sentence. First, having the pronoun (him) before the antecedent (Tuck) is odd. Changing "Tuck" to "he" or putting Tuck first would help this.

The second thing wrong is that you switched tense part way through. You need to either take off the "had" from "had turned" or say "had thrown" earlier.

They were skilled, no doubt, but he was Sir Tuck Farlow,

the Blackspear, a man of the Honorguard, a group formed of extremely skilled

spearusers known as Sentinel, trained to do one thing: protect the King. To be a

Sentinel was to be a Knight of the Honorguard, for only the most accomplished

and talented of Knights could become one. Tuck was only in his twentieth year,

having joined only two years ago, which was impressive enough. Thousands tried,

many failed. For seven of the best were to be chosen.

You mentioned his name already so doing so again is a bit redundant. The description of the Honorguard could be cleaned up a lot. The description could be as simple as "...he was a man of the Honorguard, a group of elite fighters trained to protect the King." Something like this would get rid of the comma spamming in that sentence as well. Since you say that only seven of the best were chosen, you don't need to include that "only the most accomplished and talented knights could become one" or that "Thousands tried, many failed." The that seven are chosen shows both those things.

The leader growled, "I though not this to be difficult..

I am very disturbed that Tuck seems to be murdering Yoda. Since the assassin talks normally the rest of the time, this sentence seems out of place.

Like Sir Byron Valentine's victory against Maegary Swordsbane with his famous

sword, Sorrow's Wail.

We know nothing about Sir Byron or Maegary Swordsbane or his sword. This doesn't add anything to the story except word count.

Karth howled and

made a well-maneuvered move that caused Tuck to drop his shield.

I can't picture what this well-maneuvered move might be. More description would help here. What kind of move was it? How did it cause Tuck to drop his shield?

Sir Beric turned to the men behind him and shook his head at Tuck.

If he turned to the men behind him, how was the head shake directed at Tuck?

This was not good. Joining the Honorguard meant forfeiting claim to Rhyden and the next in line would have been his younger brother, Edric Farlow, but Beric would be next in line if anything happened to Edric and Tuck knew his cousin wanted nothing but the seat of Rhyden, for he once admitted to him that he would do anything to seize it.

Too many commas. This would probably work better if split into multiple sentences.

If that happened, then Prince Naerys was in

line... that meant she might be in danger

Pronoun without an antecedant. We have no idea who "she" is at this point.

He vaguely recalled drinking something while unconscious.

How could he recall it if he was unconscious?

A trick question as many knew of his humble origins and the songs say he picked up a pitchfork as his first weapon, but that was not true.

This sentence is awkward. Splitting it into a couple sentences could help. Something like, "this was a trick question. The songs of his humble origins falsely claimed he had picked up a pitchfork as his first weapon." could work.

It hurt him deeply and he wanted to go find her, but it might have looked suspicious and he trusted Nanna, so he waited, waited and waited.

This is another instance where splitting it into two sentences might be better.

Tuck felt nothing but searing pain, as if somebody was constantly

stabbing him with hot pokers, he felt his consciousness fading as darkness crept

into his heart.

A semicolon after pokers would work better than a comma.

The story kept me interested, but there were a lot of extraneous details in there. I would make sure to proofread your work as well as there were times I noticed where you made simple spelling mistakes. With some clean up I think this story has some potential.

[Itsuke]

Thank you for the feedback, it is well-appreciated. I have cleaned up some things and edited the prologue. Let me know what you think!

Meanwhile, I'll be working on Chapter 1 and may have it posted this weekend or the next. We'll see. Good day to you all.

[Shuuda]

I've been reading what you've done so far, and I feel like I should make some comments on what I think of what I've read. To be frank, it's bad. Terrible in fact. There's no way I want to soften that up for you. I'm just going to write the comments as I think of them, so they'll be a bit messy.

Firstly, the story contains some absolutely groan-worthy lore. "The Dark One", "the Stone of Light", "Blackheart". As offensive aqs this might sounds it feels to me like you barely spared any effort when it came to thinking of concepts and names to fill your world with. These names are so generic it's impossible for me to be interested in them.

I also can't stand the strict black and white sense of morality you've imparted to your world. This character was irrideembly evil, but another is too perfect for perfection. The first paragraph felt like you had taken all the bad, cliche bits of a Fire Emblem game and present them as an original story. There's no attempt in the story so far to paint Tuck as anything other than noble and heroic or his opponents as anything other than right evil sods. You insist on giving everyone aliases designed to tell me to root for. To be frank I'd say you're treating your readers like idiots who're unable to decide for themselves.

I don't really feel like I'm reading about any interesting characters here. Instead I'm seeing a cast of worn out sterotypes with nothing new or three dimensional about them. It's really at the core of what made this bad to read.

Oh, and "Marian or Robin", really not clever in any sense of the word. I really rolled my eyes at that.

The scene with assassin was pretty terrible. Firstly, why would a killer care to give his name to the person he's trying to kill. It strikes me as one of those things ripped from DBZ or Bleach. They don't appear to be very good at their job, since stealth killers probably wouldn't wear a uniform or any sort of distinctive clothing. It's just more cliches. The first paragraph in this scene is needlessly long, you really should have broken it down into at least a couple more. You spend too much time writing about what a dazzling person Tuck is, even during the middle, which really kills the tension of the situation.

Quite a few of your descriptions are really weird. For example, you describe Blackstar (also rubbish name) as being "blacker, blacker than Tuck's own spear", which is really a uninspired image. Then you go on to say it has a shade of purple without saying how this object could be too different colours at the same time. Is it patterned, or iridencent, or something like that? You also describe Boyle as having "chocolate-like eyes" as though to imply his eyes share similar properties with chocolate (in which case I want them in a bowl of cereal). You could have just stuck with "chocolate" or better, just used a word like "brown" or "hazel" etc, an actual eye colour... you know.

There is tonnes of infodumping in the first chapter as well, such as when you feel the need to give us a lecture on how bastards are treated in the country. Instead of boring me with the history why wouldn't you have just shown the prejudices by having your character interact with others and having their treat of him be the indicator? I suspect you put all that information there for the purpose of making us sympathise with your character (hint: it didn't work). I consider it cheating to just tell us how badly the world views him, only to be able to have him go play with the nice girl next door as if his heritage doesn't matter at all.

The first chapters would likely be pointlessly short if you were to remove all of the infodumping, which would highlight the fact that NOTHING of importance happens in the chapter.

I might try to add more once I've had some more time to put my thoughts together coherently. I doubt however, that I will find any redeeming features in what you've written so far. I'm sorry to say that it's all very generic, in a very bad way.

[Itsuke]

Please, I welcome your thoughts, however criticizing it is. I started this story as a way to improve myself, my skills if any. Your comments help more than you know. It is what I need and more like it is helpful. I'm aware there will always be those who may like my stuff and those who simply don't, so I appreciate your not 'softening it up' for me, thanks. I am merely ashamed for not seeing it.

Because frankly, you are right. I'll put a hold on what I'm doing, take a step back and re-think things thoroughly. I should have done that in the first place.

I look forward to your next thoughts (if any, hopefully). Elaborate much, if you can.

[Shuuda]

To add a bit more to one point I made, when I mentioned making your world like a Fire Emblem world, what I mean is firstly to the way that the countries were set up. If kind of feels from the first few paragraphs that you were going for the whole "country x founded by noble dragon rider, and country y founded by wise sage woman" and so on. That sort of thing might be acceptable in a hand held video game, but for a written novel there really needs to be more consideration put in. Nations and governments tend to be a lot more complex than that.

Speaking of the whole first two paragraphs, I'd recommend against trying to do that sort of prologue, the sort where you try to give a long history lesson about the world. The readers don't need to know everything about your world at the very start. Instead, they should be reading the story right from the start, getting the lore when it's relevant. The thing is, I knew I wasn't going to like this story the moment I read those paragraphs, because you basically exposed the shallowness of the world before you introduced me to anything else. I don't think I would have found the story as frustrating as I did had you have just skipped ahead to the place were things started to happen in the plot.

It's a bit of a pitfall for new fantasy writers to think they need a prologue or that the there needs to be histroy lessons introduced at the start. As a general rule, I'd say that readers won't care about the world or the backstory of your characters until they actually care about the characters.

I'm glad to see you're taking this on the chin, since I worried that I might have worded things a bit too harshly.

[Itsuke]

To add a bit more to one point I made, when I mentioned making your world like a Fire Emblem world, what I mean is firstly to the way that the countries were set up. If kind of feels from the first few paragraphs that you were going for the whole "country x founded by noble dragon rider, and country y founded by wise sage woman" and so on. That sort of thing might be acceptable in a hand held video game, but for a written novel there really needs to be more consideration put in. Nations and governments tend to be a lot more complex than that.

I see what you mean. I admit at first I was going with a Fire Emblem-esque world, but then I decided to go further than that, broaden my horizon and whatnot. There will be still some Fire Emblem stuff, but not by much.

Speaking of the whole first two paragraphs, I'd recommend against trying to do that sort of prologue, the sort where you try to give a long history lesson about the world. The readers don't need to know everything about your world at the very start. Instead, they should be reading the story right from the start, getting the lore when it's relevant. The thing is, I knew I wasn't going to like this story the moment I read those paragraphs, because you basically exposed the shallowness of the world before you introduced me to anything else. I don't think I would have found the story as frustrating as I did had you have just skipped ahead to the place were things started to happen in the plot.

It's a bit of a pitfall for new fantasy writers to think they need a prologue or that the there needs to be histroy lessons introduced at the start. As a general rule, I'd say that readers won't care about the world or the backstory of your characters until they actually care about the characters.

Hm... Duly noted.

I'm glad to see you're taking this on the chin, since I worried that I might have worded things a bit too harshly.

Well, at first I was really embarrassed and a bit angry, mostly at myself. I never intended my story to be portrayed in such way you described and realized I simply was not thinking. It opened my eyes to see my technique was lacking and simply wrong, not liking that I was inconsiderate to my readers. I wrote both chapters a little under 4 hours and just posted them as soon as I was done. Yes, I know, stupid. After thinking hard on this, I decided to go really slow, take my time and go through my work until I feel content. Your words might have been a bit too harsh, but it was for good! How else would I learn? I am thankful for the opportunity, really.

So, my plan now will be to take out prologue and rewrite Ch. 1. Perhaps, I'll have it done by this weekend if not the next. May you have a great week.

Edited February 14, 2013 by Itsuke