>>27735681>>29979188ALRIGHT, here’s the actual feedback, as promised. Sorry again for the wait.
First, I just want to say your writing is overall excellent. You have a strong grasp of narrative pacing, and you understand how to set a scene without letting the descriptions overstay their welcome. That being said, precisely because you already have a good grasp of the basics, this review is going to be significantly more in-depth (and thus nit-picky) than the reviews I’ve written for other anons. I hope you won’t be too bothered by the length. Moving on.
You correctly identified characterization as your weakest point. It seems you have a habit of allowing your voice, as the author, to overwhelm the voices of your characters. By this, I’m not referring to the literal way they speak. It’s important to note that a character’s “voice,” in writing, is not determined by their dialogue alone. Their thoughts, actions, behavioral tics – these all serve to inform the reader of a character’s personality. So when I say you allow your voice to overwhelm the characters, I mean you’re allowing your own interests to leak in and overwhelm your characters’ behavior. It’s a problem exacerbated by your tendency to use dialogue purely as a narrative device, characters rarely speaking up unless it’s to directly advance the plot, and speeding through the resulting conversations.
Melisende vividly describes her thoughts during the scene where she’s punching Akira – her apprehension prior to the action, the feel of sinking her fist into Akira’s stomach, the strange and disturbing, somewhat uncomfortable feelings that arise from it – yet their subsequent conversation in the next scene passes by with none of the same insights into her thoughts. It’s a simple A to B sequence of events, described in pretty but nonetheless uninformative prose. Melisende has quite suddenly gone from a living person to an AI running on the default detective module. Might I make the bold assumption that this is, perhaps, your own interest in the beating scene showing through in the much higher level of attention to detail? You would do well to do a little more showing rather than telling in the rest of your writing. Take, for example, the following excerpt:
>Just like before, the lean hand reached for it and delivered it onto the dripping tongue. The relative lack of blood on it, though, did not seem to appetise the abbess.Simply informing the reader that the lack of blood did not appetise the abbess is a massively wasted opportunity. It is better to describe the abbess’s reaction, giving the reader a glimpse of both the abbess’s personality and, due to the POV, Melisende’s own. There are many ways to express disgust or distaste, but how did the abbess do it in this moment? I get the impression the abbess is meant to appear deceptively childish and playful, given her speech patterns – specifically her sing-song way of speaking, indicated by frequent tildes, and her habit of referring to herself in third person. A character like this might express her distaste in a suitably childish manner, like so:
>Just like before, the lean hand reached for it and delivered it onto the dripping tongue. But shortly after, the abbess’s nose scrunched up as she spat the emblem back out, letting it drop onto her open palm. “Bleh,” she complained, swiping at her tongue with the back of her other hand. It seemed the relative lack of blood did not appetise the abbess.(cont in next post, I passed the character limit...)
