JNC Group Writing Review Thread- Immor:Tale
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- Name of the work
Immor:Tale (may change in the future)
- Word Count
nearly 100k words
- Short Description
The Protagonist finds himself brought into a new world with a new body and is thrown directly into a wild escape, since his former body owner just robbed a bank.
Before he had landed here, he had wanted to run away from his problems like he always did. Yet, for some strange twist of fate, he finds himself confronting similiar problems he had to face in his old world. Will he be able to survive in this weird fantasy world, where magic and monsters are long gone and only tales and a rumored immortal from the past remains?- Trigger warnings:
Talk about suicide, mild gore in fights
- A list of questions I would like the reviewers to answer
Please help me identify weird sentences, grammar and help me polish the work in general and better the prose cronstruction.
Also, please give me feedback if parts, dialogues, etc. are too long, cringey, not necessary, etc.- Judges Feedback
The judge liked the premise, but there were too many issues with the prose construction to be publishable.
Download of the PDF:
https://omega.hanami.family/f8t.pdf -
Referenced by A AkayaKaito
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Just looking at the first section—it feels a little too detached—it is written in the first person but lacks immediacy and peril —
Look at this sentence: “One might ask why I am outside the middle of the winter in nothing but sweatpants and a shirt despite the weather.” —that’s written maybe 5 paragraphs in—you already said he's about to kill himself and now in an unironic and very detached way he feels like he needs to justify the way he is dressed?
I tried rewriting some of it below—I am a beginning writer and even if it is not as well-written as the original, I think it feels more immediate
“Why am I even out here? It's fucking cold. My hands slip from the railing, Oh shit—I am going to fall! I barely grab hold of the railing but my feet slip from the ledge. When I finally regain my balance, I look down. Mistake. The clumps of snow I kicked still haven't hit the ground. The cars look tiny. I shouldn't have looked down—should have just jumped. I should have worn a jacket. Idiot!” -
So this morning I read the first 20 pages, which from the page count, is roughly 10% of your story. This leads through where the protagonist leaves the old man's hut.
I can see what the judges were saying about your prose construction. This is pretty rough, and definitely not really in a state where you could polish just a few problem areas and call it good. If you want to improve as a writer, then I encourage you to not take my feedback of examples of individual items to fix but as examples of patterns you should watch out for while holistically evaluating your own writing. I'll try not to focus on every individual issue I saw, but on the larger trends.
I agree with jazzyjeoff that your opening suicide scene feels pretty detached. It goes a bit beyond concerns over apparel though, the entire sequence feels pretty lacking in substance.
The opening of a story should immediately try to hook readers in and make them continue reading. I admittedly haven't read many depictions of suicide in light novels to compare against, nor am I particularly well read about the general mindset of a suicidal person (it's pretty heavy stuff!), but I would assume that a story starting with suicide would try to hook readers in with specific details about the person's life so that the reader empathizes with them and they care about the protagonist finding success and happiness in their next life.
However, every sentiment that the main character shares with the audience is fairly generic and non-descriptive. The closest we get to details is that his parents threw him out, his girlfriend left him, and he doesn't have friends. Even that is fairly non-specific: it doesn't tell a story.
If you know of some stories that depict a suicide, I'd encourage you to review them and see how they lay out a narrative for the character so the reader has an emotional handle to grasp onto. It's not particularly fun to wallow around in this kind of subject matter for the sake of wallowing around in this subject matter so if you're going to include a scene like this you'd better have a clear objective and benefit from including it.
In contrast, the scenes from the perspective of Ade were far more interesting. Some of the dialogue is awkward, but a weird floating computer god who seems to have arisen out of a failed experiment is a much better hook than the suicide business. In fact, given that Ade is can apparently observe and feel the feelings and thoughts of everyone around him, I wonder if it doesn't make sense to simply cut out the perspective of the protagonist entirely from the prologue. Simply open with the scene of Ade arising forth from the computers, have him wander out and find the protagonist, hear some enough of his thoughts to get the gist for his situation as well as his wish, then the rest proceeds as expected.
This also avoids the cutting back and forth between perspectives, which I found random and distracting. At the first cutaway for example, I had no idea if the protagonist had killed himself, if we had jumped ahead in the future, if this was happening in the building underneath the protagonist, or what.
I also even wonder how necessary the suicide aspect is. Couldn't the protagonist simply be sick and dying in his apartment as Ade floats in through the walls and have roughly all the same thoughts and wishes, but without needing to worry about triggering people?
I also would have moved the first scene of Chapter 1 back into the prologue so that Chapter 1 focuses entirely on the thieves fleeing from the bank heist.
I found the pacing of Chapter 1 to be really weird. That entire first sequence from the third perspective where the original Shima died was completely unnecessary and distracting. I had read your blurb, so I knew that the protagonist was going to wake up in the middle of a heist, but I had no way of knowing which character they would wake up as, or whether any of these characters were going to live more than a page or be important to remember. Meanwhile, you're shoveling quite a few details the readers way (e.g. full detailed character descriptions, complete with hair and eye color), which narratively slows down the pace even though this should be something of a frenetic action scene. I'd have rather preferred that you simply started it from the perspective of the protagonist waking up in Shima's body and then figuring out what was going on, or perhaps Ade witnesses a very abbreviated form of the events as he descended down.
I did like the "Time to test if magic actually exists..." line (though I would have used "see" rather than "test"), but most of the rest of the dialogue didn't seem natural to me. I don't know of a good way for you to spot this sort of thing if you aren't already.
Perhaps reading the dialogue out loud would help. Or if you imagined there was a small, sarcastic, and smug person present whose only job was to poke holes in what the other characters were saying. For example:
"They caught us too fast, that was not planned!"
"Well how fast were they supposed to catch you according to your plan?"
It's not like the dialogue was wholly bad, often it just had bits or pieces that were unnecessary or ruined the realism of the rest of it. If we rewrote the above example so it was something like:
"They've caught onto us too quickly, did somebody leak our plan?"
It portrays roughly the same sentiment while also advancing the audience's understanding of the situation beyond what we already know by virtue of this clearly being a scene where thieves flee from the authorities with their stolen goods (e.g. the possibility that there might be a traitor in their midst).
The action scene felt pretty flat because there wasn't enough imagery of what was happening. Like they're killing the pursuing officers but you could have maybe described one of the cars going out of control and smashing into a light post or something. I get the protagonist's vision is somewhat blurry but simply hearing screams and seeing the occasional bolt flying into the truck does not an action scene make.
I really didn't like the protagonist throughout most of the 10% I read. He (or she, as we found out? They?) just felt like they had zero agency. Yeah, I get it, they woke up in an unfamiliar situation and were confused, and it's not like I'm saying they should embrace their lot and life and start killing people, but the sooner you as an author can invent some way for Shima to get over their situation and doing something that can impact the plot beyond talking to people, the sooner I as a reader can actually invest myself in the outcome of their actions.
It just isn't fun to read about a protagonist who is stuck in a "Gee, is this perhaps a dream? What's going on?" mode. Even if they don't have the ability to immediately fix their situation, they should at least be making internal plans on what they should do to the moment they do.
This is a nightmare, as soon as they stop the truck I think I'm going to make a run for it and hope they don't shoot me in the back...
I encourage you to read other light novels with similar situations where the protagonist suddenly ends up in a new body and look at how quickly they move to get over their initial "Woah what's going on?!" reaction, especially if they are in a life or death action sequence.
I also wasn't a fan of how long you withheld names from the reader. In fact, in the 10% I read, I don't recall learning a single other name aside from Ade and Shima. It's just uninteresting when we're describing everyone long term in terms of their appearance when a name could be freely given. It doesn't even have to be a "Hi, my name is Gary, in case you forgot," Shima could pick up on other people's names passively using dialogue between the driver and the blond boy.
"Hey Gary, forget Shima, the stone must have scrambled his brain!" the woman driving the truck yelled back over her shoulder.
"I don't need you ordering me around Catherine, I'm working as hard as I can back here!" Gary snapped back.In fact, your reluctance to even mention Shima's name earlier had a direct, negative, impact on your plot:
"Sorry, Shima, but this is where we part." the blond guy smiled at me and removed the plank between the vehicles. "The plan was from the start to get you captured, but well, if you do not remember that part... maybe you will later. If not..." He let out a sigh. "Good luck! Just don't tell them were we went or where we live. Not that you would remember that anyway." Shima...? Was that the name of this body?
This should be a dramatic moment of betrayal that your protagonist should be immediately and viscerally reacting to, but instead they're getting distracted because nobody has used their name up to this point. Moving that entire realization earlier or at least him deferring to thinking about it until after the truck has crashed is hyper necessary to heighten the drama of the moment.
The crash sequence took way too long and was a bit goofy to me. For one, its impact was undercut by the big summary to date paragraph that came directly before it started. That sort of recap would be better served after the protagonist has woken up from the crash. For another, I'm not sure why a rock was taped to the accelerator when cruise control exists, that'd be way more realistic, and it's not like the protagonist would know how to turn off cruise control anyways.
What was gained from every sentence of that crash sequence? What did the reader learn? If the sentences aren't adding value, then maybe that's a sign that the scene could be simplified or cut entirely. It would have been far better for the truck to go immediately sailing off a cliff and the protagonist fainting before the impact than this weird sequence containing two separate instances of the protagonist trying to hit random buttons to get the truck to stop.
That sort of thought exercise would have helped you see some of the problems back in the prologue as well.
I didn't finish Chapter 2 before I hit the 10% mark, but I was wondering when you were planning to give your protagonist a break. They've had a pretty rough time between the suicide thing, waking up in a heist, and being betrayed by the only comrades their former body seems to have had. Now you're throwing them into a situation where they're clearly out of their depth and lying to an old man? You gotta slacken on the tension front from time to time or the reader is going to get exhausted, let them get to a point where they can rest and figure things out, then you can ratchet it back up. I feel as though that entire Chapter 2 would have been better served with the protagonist waking up in the safety of the old person's hut as he talked to them and answered their questions before perhaps inquiring about what they were doing all the way out here with some lying and such going on.
I also felt like the rate of typos increased significantly starting in Chapter 2.
It's hard to talk about the prose since it's this somewhat nebulous thing you pick up from reading a lot of novels and paying attention to where they flow well and where they don't, and why. I know for my own work, I mostly just read it back to myself and think about "does this feel like a novel?" but if you haven't developed that magical intuition that's not particularly helpful advice.
I did notice there were times where you described things in too much detail (as mentioned earlier, the detailed character descriptions in the middle of the getaway action sequence) but there were other times where you were far too stingy on the details (e.g. when the blond boy ordered the muscular men to "open something with a loud creaking sound before our truck," you couldn't have simply said that they opened a gate, even if the protagonist couldn't see it through the truck?)
Playing around with how much information is shared and where in the text it is shared might be helpful. Also helpful would be varying up some of your verb usage. A lot of your characters always seemed to be shrieking or screaming, but that's a very particular emotion and if they're constantly in that mode then it gets old fast.
I also wonder if some of your dialogue could be more give and take. One example I saw from Chapter 2 was when the old man was talking about his abode:
"I'm sorry, but if you want to take a bath, you have to do that in the city. Since the laws for historic buildings say we aren't allowed to change anything in here, we only have the bucket with water from the well."
This reads much more naturally if it were something like:
"Hey old man, can I take a bath before coming in? I'm covered in mud here!"
"I'm sorry, but if you want to take a bath, you'll have to walk all the way back to the city. As much as I would enjoy one, I'm not allowed to add a bath to this dwelling."
"Huh? Why not?"
"The local laws have deemed this to be a historic building so I'm not allowed to make any modifications to it. You'll just have to do with a bucket of water from the well," he said, handing it over to me along with a rag.It feels more like a flowing conversation than just characters saying things to one another. You can vary it up too, with your protagonist thinking about what was said and making judgments about the other person or their actions before responding.
I feel like that was a lot. I clearly need to get better at writing feedback. Please let me know if you had any follow up questions or concerns.
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Thank you for your time, your very fast answers and the tips.
Yeah, many problems you two list are something I had in mind, yet I had been unsure wether it was just me being too negative about everything again or a real issue.
Thanks to your feedback there are now more changes I am going to make in general, not only to the start (which is the worst part imo) but some other changes in the later parts of the story.And... please bear in mind that my native language is not english and the program I used was not designed for anything but german, even though an english package had been included. Meaning that typos and false grammar might be a bigger problem, even though I checked multiple times already. I am working (again) on it, so it will get better in the future hopefully.
If for some reason you want to continue reading this trainwreck and give more critique, I would be very glad, since I need every help I can get.
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@AkayaKaito You might want edit a chapter and ask for folks to look at that. It is a lot of work for someone to read something and then write something constructive to say. Believe it or not, I put an hour into just the little bit I did on yours—I enjoyed writing the mini-scene, so don't feel bad!—But just know that it does take time and energy—so find your chapter—work on it—and ask if it reads better. If it is better, apply it elsewhere, if it’s not better keep working on it until it is better.
And do your best to enjoy the journey! You created something that’s pretty neat!(And if you really want to thank me read this and say something really nasty and perceptive!
https://forums.j-novel.club/topic/7981/jnc-group-writing-review-thread-the-two-minds-of-cassandra) -
@jazzyjeoff
Sadly I do not have many people to proofread it, and only one of them who did was english native. So... uh, yeah, thats the reason I wanted to upload it in the first place.And I already have started reading your work yesterday. I had once played with the thought of making something similar to your two minds, but abandoned it since writing two minds at once is too difficult for me, so props to you
