My first story

[WilliamShakespear]

Hi, I have just submitted my first story and would appreciate honest feedback and suggestions.

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=439648

Thanks

 

[CWatson]

Well, first off, this is very long story. You've got nearly 40,000 words in this submission alone. That was a mistake. What you should've done was break it up by chapter and post each one individually. You'd have generated more reader interest--a lot of people are wary of multi-part stories, noticing (correctly) that sometimes they're never finished ("Amy's Smile" anyone?), but if you can get them hooked anyway they're yours for life. Plus, when The Reader gets down to the bottom and sees eleven pages total, they feel so exhausted they can't go on. And don't.

Second, you need to pay more attention to your punctuation. Every time someone stops speaking and you have a closing quotation mark, you need to have a punctuation mark inside it.

"Great, please sign here" she said, passing a guest registration book over.

is wrong.

"Great, please sign here," she said, passing a guest registration book over.

would be correct. These kind of details matter because, if The Reader is wondering whether to invest a lot of time and emotional energy in your story, they want to know it'll be worthwhile. They want to know that you, The Writer, know what you're doing, and won't waste their time. Checking to see whether you follow the basic rules of the English language is part of how they do that. To pull a quote from Stephen King's On Writing, "You can't make them like the story, but you can make the story easy to like."

Finally, your opening summary could use some work. Right now it's just a list--and a boring one, to boot (which is the real crime). You should be taking this time to tell us who Charlie is--how he feels, what he wanted from his life, what he actually got, how unhappy he is, why he's unhappy. You should be giving us some inroads into his soul. And biographical details won't do it.

Oh, and, please, get over the ellipsis (dot-dot-dot). I want you to set yourself a challenge: whatever you write next, don't use any dot-dot-dots whatsoever. That'll make up for how many of them you used in this one.

(And, no, I didn't read the story through. To be perfectly honest, because I'm doing a critique, I read quite a bit farther than I would have if I were just reading casually. Under those circumstances, you probably would've lost me before Chapter 2.)

 

[WilliamShakespear]

Thank you. Comments and suggestions noted and appreciated.

Will certainly take note for book 2.