The One, by @jakeyboi98
Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to read your book. Please, keep in mind that my reading of your story is by necessity a subjective opinion. Your story is beautiful and important to you more than any other story you could have been telling. How I perceived it is very much a matter of my preferences.
I read 10 chapters of your story available at this time.
I usually don't comment on covers, but I really dig yours. It's unusual, has style, and, I think represents the book better than any other presentation bits (title, logline, blurb).
You have 25 book tags and they are focused around things that narrow down your genre as sci-fantasy, as long as showing specifics of your story (spacetravel). What I feel is missing is highlighting your audience (perhaps, MG or teenfiction), and more tags that highlight mood of your story, in addition to fun. I feel that you can look into adding tropes/buzzwords instead of tags for unrelated popular shows like starwars, startrek and the name of the species that is only found in your story.
Your title is a bit ambitious and it doesn't jive well imo with the only mood tag you are using (fun) or events in the story that are maybe middle grade adventure, maybe teenfic. It implies a more traditional hard sci-fi philosophical bend, a retelling of a cross-cultural myth of how the first man was created and how his life went.
For sci-fantasy, I would have looked first and foremost at how much the story stimulated my imagination and how important your main character had become to me; how much I wanted to figure out what's going to happen to them, the setting that told me that 'it could possibly happen this way', and if I would be able to remember your story a few months from now... but because of your primordial theme, I was looking at how you play with the world mythologies, what you draw on philosophically, etc.
Your blurb is short, so it was hard for me to see from it if I am looking at a space opera a-la OST Kirk with an alien side-kick rather than a full crew or an Adamic retell on the nature of men with an alien as Eve in the 70's-80's sci-fi films tradition (Gattika, Blade Runner, etc).
My suggestion is for you to imagine your perfect audience and write a blurb that would attract precisely those folks, verus a bit generic promise of good fun for all.
Something that can be helpful on this quest is a logline in Wattpad's standard 'who must do what, in order to achieve what, despite what' format. I highly recommend taking a crack at it and kick off your summary with that.
Your question to me was how the plot was holding up. In the 10 chapters I have read, I liked the progression of the events: One escaping with an alien, finding allies, reveals, betrayal and another reveal. It's a good, fun set up.
I also like your cast. It reminds me of classic archetypes in the videogames where you build your own party from a selection of characters, or any number of movies/serials that have a small crew's adventures. One is an appropriately blank slate protagonist for this set up. I wouldn't be surprised if One was later revealed as genderfluid.
The only trouble I had with the plot development was the first two and half chapters, which were a dense lore narrative. The first occurence of dialogue is middle of chapter 3, and it is roughly where the story starts. What I would suggest doing, is using the time-honored sci-fi tradition and boiling down these two-and-half chapters into the intros like in Star Wars. If you look at those, they are about 80 words, 2 or 3 paragraphs long, and give us just enough to understand the role of the character we see first in their world and the situation they find themselves in.
The biggest stumbling block for me personally, and why it took me so long to read your story, was the narrative voice. I have a hard time immersing myself into the story and staying with it, and below are some thoughts as to why. They come with a disclaimer that this is an individual impression.
You chose omniscient pov as a vehicle to deliver your story. Omniscient pov is a traditional form of delivery that is rarely used on Wattpad, but it can be effective.
However, to make it effective, the omniscient narrator has to be a behind the scenes character with their own strong, immersive voice.
In your story, the narrative voice doesn't work to keep me reading, personally, but, and it is a big but (!) if you have an audience who is used to reading in a similar voice, and you are addressing yourself to them, it works. So, what I specify below as potential areas to work on when editing, is very much based on my experience as a reader.
In my view, what makes your omniscient voice harder to read are repetitions and over-explaining.
Repetitions: both with the dialogue and descriptions, you tend to repeat things twice, and, sometimes, using the same word. Examples from chapter 3 include the duplication of word iridescent in the same paragraph to describe the same wings of the butterflies twice; and the dialogue between One and TA-84, where One asks why TA helped him, receives an answer, asks the same question again with a bit more words, and, again, receives the same answer in slightly more words.
Over-explaining: it feels to me like in almost every line your narrator wants to make darn sure I absolutely got what they were trying to say. The emotional states and tone of voice are described unfailingly after each dialogue line. The actions are conveyed in sort of recaps, rather than lived-in experience.
Both of these are what breaks immersion for me, making me feel I read for information, not for pleasure.
I see in your notes that The One is a novella that you plan to rework into a novel. There are a few things you can try experimenting with when you are working on it, imo.
You can try going MG route, keeping the voice omniscient and some of the explanations, as it is more common when writing for preteens. In this case, dialing down on the blocks of text without dialogue is a great idea.
You can experiment with your omniscient voice and give it more personality, and rewrite in that vein, so the connection is created to the narrator and their style holds attention and is playful to read.
Finally, you can use a POV that is more common on Wattpad, first or third person, with One as the protagonist and POV character. In this case, everything will be viewed through his eyes and emotions, taking out repeats and over-explanations, aiming to convey his experiences as directly as possible, and folding in everything he observes into an emotional backdrop.
I realize that this review veers away from how I normally review stories, but I felt that the focus on the narrator is the biggest item for you to decide on and experiment with on your editing journey.
Good luck with developing your story and I hope these notes are (a little bit) helpful!
