HBO Fan Fiction

hboff · Site Admin Joined: 25 Jul 2004 Posts: 4351

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Purgatorio
Posted by Paul Shelley (Bzerker01@gmail.com)
7 September 2010, 7:39 pm

http://halosn.bungie.org/fanfic/?story=Paul_Shelley0907101939421.html

kr1 · Posted: Fri Sep 10, 2010 6:18 pm Post subject:

You've got a pretty solid submission here. I very much enjoyed the ambiguity and switching scenes, although it was a bit confusing at first. Excellent job not making it clear which was real, with only a real hint at the end. The song running throughout the narrative was an interesting touch and made things a bit more surreal, too.

Your prose could use a bit of work, though. There's nothing wrong with it and it gets things done, but it's just a tad boring. There's no real clear-cut way to improve on that besides just keeping on writing, and you'll start to fall into your own.

Good work. Wink

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bzerker01 · Member Joined: 08 Oct 2005 Posts: 3

kr1 · Posted: Sat Sep 11, 2010 9:24 am Post subject:

I'm saying that your prose needs work. The storyline is interesting, and you did a good job with atmosphere, but your prose itself needs some work. It's a little unexciting, but that's something that'll improve if you keep at it.

Littkle things go a long way towards improving this, A big help is the 'show, don't tell' rule that you might've heard before. There's a lot of cases where you write 'Josef did so-and-so', and after a while that gets really repetitive. Avoiding the formulaic 'noun did this' sentence structure goes a long way towards mixing things up.

The best thing you can do to improve your prose, like I said, is to keep writing. Maybe take a look at a style guide like The Elements of Style. It helps a lot with GPS, too, and in general making everything look more professional. Of course, don't follow all the rules there, use what you will at your discretion.
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