First story - feedback welcome!

Hi all! I hope you're having a great New Years Eve. I recently posted my very first story and would really appreciate any sort of feedback. It's a gay literotica about two guys in college, and I've already got a lot of it written out but would love to know what people think so I can start making changes if needed.

Thanks.

https://www.literotica.com/s/settling-in-ch-01-2

A really good start

At an abstract level, this story works really well. Cute, shy boy meets boisterous, gregarious-but-also-gentle giant. There’s good tension building with regard to Greyson’s orientation, and Noah’s nervousness to push for answers. It’s a great premise, and you’ve set yourself up well.

At a scene level, there’s some mistakes. You included a flashback a little ways into the story and it feels like you didn’t have a good reason for it. It feels like you included a flashback because sometimes movies have flashbacks. Flashbacks work great when you set yourself up with an unreliable narrator, or give the reader an incomplete set of information. You string them along without giving them some crucial piece of information, which the protagonist either has or has forgotten, and then use your flashback to drop the bomb.

Jacob was the one who murdered Felicity, and Shawna knew the whole time! That means that… oh no!

You should generally stay away from telling stories out of sequential order unless there’s a good reason. Nothing would have been lost if you started the story with Noah, on his back, stroking himself to the Instagram feed of his soon-to-be roommate, and then skip forward to the day.

Also at the scene level, you have something I like to call ‘literary dialog’, or dialog that only ever happens in stories. For example, Greyson initiates the conversation about girlfriends at home seemingly without considering that Noah’s response might include the same question in return. If Greyson clearly didn’t want to talk about his recent painful breakup, which you explicitly state he doesn’t, he wouldn’t have brought up the subject in the first place. That being said, there’s absolutely no reason Noah couldn’t have started that conversation and you get to the same point. You more fluidly establish the same information for your characters without creating stilted weirdness.

A different example is the number of times your characters use each other’s names. I dare you to spend one day, around friends and family, and count how many times people use each other’s names when they’re face to face. It’s basically never. It’s one thing when Character A is in the next room and Character B is trying to get their attention, but it just doesn’t happen in normal conversations.

It feels like you used the names that way to sidestep needing to include dialog tags like “Noah said” or “said Grayson” at the end of a sentence. That’s what narration is for. It is the job of your non-dialog narrative to explain the important details, like who says what, as they happen.

Those are small problems. Nitpicky problems that separate good writers from great writers. For the most part, your scenes work well and your dialog is great. The big problems come with the mechanics of writing. The nuts and bolts.

You have a lot of inconsistent tenses.

He gave me an intense look in the mirror, and for a second I don’t know what to say.

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The first part of this is in past tense, and the second part is in present tense. This kind of bouncing back and forth is a difficult habit to break, because sometimes the word you want for its aesthetic (either visually or aurally) isn’t the word that fits.

He gave me an intense look in the mirror, and for a second I didn’t know what to say.

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You have a lot of commas in places you don’t need commas and places needing commas that don’t have commas. I’m sure there are good resources out there that can explain when to use a comma better than I could do briefly. What I found to be the most useful was to read other people’s writing critically, exposing myself to a wide variety of examples, and learn from the mistakes of others. It’s easier to see incorrect comma use when it’s not your writing.

You overexplain body parts. I saw with my eyes. I stood on my feet. I licked my lips with my tongue. In almost every case, the body part involved with particular verbs can be implied. You can only see with your eyes, taste with your tongue, and you can only hear with your ears. Telling us your eyes see something is meaningless. Just tell us you see it, and the inclusion of the eyes is understood.

Also, in the first line of the story, you tell us about the “roar of the U-Haul we rented”. You can’t own a U-Haul, you can only rent them. The renting is implied.

Chekhov’s gun. You included a lot of information, especially in the beginning, that does not appear to matter. That Noah took boxing. That the father’s hugs are infamous (also probably an incorrect word choice). That the father’s name is Joe. That Ellie is the younger sister, or that she’s sixteen, or that she has violet hair. You could have just written a scene where Noah’s father and sister help him move, and the reader will have no problem filling in the details you leave out.

By including them, however, you make the reader pay attention to them. In the back of our mind, we’re holding on to the father’s name just in case someone shouts “Hey Joe” later in the story, so we will remember who Joe is. As near as I can tell, Joe doesn’t matter. His role in the story is perfunctory.

Cut out everything that doesn’t matter. Be as ruthless as you can stand, and your writing will get better. Simpler sentences are easier to read.

Run on sentences A sentence should generally attempt to convey one concept, or one concept and a tangentially-related concept. When you start introducing tangents to the tangent, or parallel tangents, you’ve created a run-on. Sometimes I spend 30 minutes while I’m writing trying to figure out the best way to put three or four concepts into consecutive sentences to convey the information. It’s an art form.

The hyphen In a couple places, you use hyphens to convey pauses. Don’t. Hyphens are for concatenating words in a sentence that otherwise would read separately and convey different meaning. In dialog, use ellipses for a pause or a stutter, or someone trailing off. There should never be a pause in past tense narration. Pauses in present tense narration are possible if you’ve set up the story to be happening in real time, stream-of-conscious, but otherwise they should be avoided.

Unnecessary adjectives and adverbs This is tough to point out specific examples of because the problem isn’t with any one particular instance. The problem is that, on the whole, too many of the nouns and verbs have modifying descriptors attached to them.

He slowly put the very dark chocolate-covered raisin onto my wet, waiting tongue while I sat, bound tightly to the chair.

In this example, there’s nothing egregious about the use of slowly, very, wet, waiting, or tightly, but when you put them together, it’s too much for one sentence. Obviously, this example is hyperbolic and not indicative of your writing. I wrote this to be over the top as an example.

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Those were the things I found, and bear in mind that I have been guilty of every single one of these mistakes myself. Some I broke the habit completely, and some I still make to this day when I’m not paying attention. Every writer on this forum offering feedback has been guilty of these mistakes at one time or another.

Your writing is something that should evolve. It’s not a matter of checking a series of boxes to make sure you don’t include this mistake or that problem. Nobody can do it perfectly.

One more note

This is easy to overlook (as evidenced by the fact that I forgot to mention it). A great story is like great delivery pizza. It's hot and delicious, and you'll want more later. You may even save some of the leftovers for the middle of the night when you wake up hungry. Great story and great dialog are what readers will remember later.

Great writing is like the delivery car. The best a delivery car can do is not get in the way, or put differently, to be transparent. A perfectly written story (from a mechanical and grammatical point of view) is like having a Ferrari bring you your pizza. Yes, the Ferrari might get it there quickly, but it can't make the pizza taste good.

Conversely, a junker with a bad exhaust leak can ruin a pizza's flavor, or break down and the pizza is cold by the time you get it. There are also diminishing returns with writing. Once it reaches a certain level, basically no one will care about it. It ceases to be a factor in the quality of your story.

Bad writing can ruin a great story, but great writing can't fix a bad story. Writing is easy to fix. Storytelling is not. You have a great story. Keep up the good work.