Writing Tips and Reviews

When the Stars Align is a Literary Disaster

Before I continue, I am aware that the story is no longer available to read and it has been a year. However, there are some changes I'd like to make in my review that gear towards a... new way of thinking. I read through it and found myself very... emotional towards it. Instead of just putting it down, I'm going to offer ways how to improve it. Let's begin.

As a side note, if I have to come from the future to explain YOUR world-building because the audience is confused after YOU FAILED to do it, YOU FAILED.

Chapter Three: It's a rough start

As I did with the original review, I will start with the third chapter. 

"It's Monday. The worst day of school, and the first. Do you know why? Because we start the year with geography and I hate geography. Even though it's my very first day of school, I can tell I'm going to hate it and my dumb teacher told us to take notes since we were starting middle school..."

Getting into the head of a character is important, and I am glad we are seeing their thought process. However, I do not feel attached to this character. It is important to introduce a character in a light that will make the audience care about them. This does not make me care; it makes me want to throw them out the window for being an annoying brat. Maybe that is the intention, but whiny protagonists tend to get a bad reputation unless they grow later in the story. An example is the protagonist of "This Is Why I Hate You," where he insults people he hates and then puts himself on a higher level than them. A character like this can be done well if given enough time to grow, does this character grow? Well... we'll get to that.

Let's take Harry Potter as an example of how this can be done well. The first scene introduces us to Harry and what kind of person he is along with his family. We learned later on that he's a wizard and what that means. We find out about Hogwarts and the rest of the book is about world-building. Imagine if the story started in Hogwarts but we aren't given Harry's name until a later chapter. We have no idea what relationship he, Ron, and Herminie have but we're supposed to know they're friends. And the words "wizard", "Hogwarts", and "magic" are never spoken until the end of the book. That's only half as bad as the introduction to "When the Stars Align" is.

I'd also like to say. If you can avoid repeating yourself, then do it. It was the first day of middle school. There.

"Why study the Solar System from this puny classroom instead of venturing out and exploring it the reasonable way???"

I'd like to explain something, these characters are dragons, they are beings who can shapeshift into human and dragon form and keep their powers in both. But I'd like to ask you if you knew this from the introduction. Don't worry, the first two chapters didn't explain it either, so I'm not cutting anything out. The flaw is that we aren't introduced to the world and characters. We don't even know the main character's name and yet we're supposed to know that they're a dragon. This is why it's important to explain the basics, you'll lose the audience if you don't. And I wouldn't have a problem with this if we were told they were dragons later on and it wasn't also treated like we knew it the whole time.

As boring and "uninteresting" as basic explanations of your world seem, it's a necessary component in writing. I know these characters are middle-schoolers and 13 because I read the last chapter. And don't try to say "it's a mystery" because when you tell us about the world, you treat it like we knew it all along. "I knew it" doesn't mean "everyone knows it". That's THE POINT of an introduction.

"Anyways, I wasn't going to take notes on something this boring."

I believe it would be a good idea to take notes, the audience could learn about the world and it won't feel forced. And since this is the first day of middle school, it would be a good idea to have class introductions as well.