Writing Tips and Reviews

Review: Crimson Covered Petals

Here's another request to review a story, it's luckily not horrendous like the last few I did, those are bottom of the barrel quality and I would be surprised if someone could top how bad those were and on accident. Stories that are bad on purpose are typically just boring, it's when the author thinks they're a good writer and falls flat on their face when it's so bad it's good or really fun to make jokes about.

With that said and done, we'll be looking at "Crimson Covered Petals" by Tenny. I just want to look at the first chapter since these chapters are quite long and I don't feel like doing more than one today. I will also be ignoring grammar mistakes or wrongly worded sentences since English is not a native language like with the last two writers, those two have no excuse.

-Chapter One-

"The current king Sigrid was on his way to meet his personal adviser and fortune teller."

Already there's a problem, "current" is a present tense word and this is a past tense story. I'll just plop down a reasoning as why you shouldn't do it and move on.

**I'd suggest not, on two counts. First, "currently" adds almost nothing to the meaning beyond what a present or present continuous tense verb already establishes. It emphasizes the time so weakly that it doesn't make up for bloating the sentence by an extra word.

Second, it is normally a tiny bit odd to combine it with a past tense verb: "He was currently working for Acme Corp". You'll probably catch native speakers doing it but you'll also catch editors weeding it out. If you must emphasize the time, you could say, "at that time", but that's three words of bloat for very weak emphasis.

An exception would be in indirect quotations, where you mechanically put verbs into past tense. There's nothing odd about "Acme Corp said he was currently working for them." It's still not usefully adding to the meaning though. **

"Where his adviser was already waiting for him."

This goes into bloating the sentence, I get people like to reach a word count, but this not how you do it. The "already" is not needed.

"He could see that he has predicted something."

I'll get into this more in the conclusion section but this breaks the flow of the sentence. Tenses should not be switched in the same sentence. "He could see that the adviser had seen predicted something." This is also something I learned when writing essays, you need to be specific on who is talking or the reader will get confused. Read this, "she said to her and grabbed her collar, she then threw her to the side." That's hard to keep track of. Now read this, "Ishtar said to Mash then grabbed Mash's collar and threw her to the side." It's both shorter and easier to read.

"Theodre. You look like you have seen the future. Care to share it with me?"

Here's a problem prevalent in this story, we get dialogue but it's hard to know who's talking. When you write dialogue, you need to state who's talking at least one. "The king said" is all that's needed.

"Skip to next year."

I just want to say you could replace this with "a year later..." and it wouldn't need this break. And when I said this is the Sparknotes of a story, I mean it.

"Congratulations, my king. Two healthy boys have been born."

I don't know who's talking. This is why you need to state it before or after the dialogue, this could be a maid, a knight, the queen, the adviser, or anyone really. But already a problem, this is the only mention we get about the boys before one disappears. Not really a good sign.

"He stays still, memorizing the new vision he gets."

You stop that, "he stood still, memorizing the vision he had gotten."