My book, plz help?

Ok, I have been working on a dark book over the summer (Sadly only on Ch. 5) about an alternate would where war has weakened the army and the government enough for 2 mercenary companies to have the most pull on the US. The main character, only known by an alias, Nightmare, is 12, and is mostly clueless to the troubles of the world, until his parents are killed by one of the mercenary companies and he is made to join on of the companies in hopes that he will find the person who killed his parents, but it turns out that the person who taught him how to fight had manipulated him from the beginning to make him join the company, use him, and kill him. When he discovers this, about 4 years later, he runs away from the company, taking all the files on him, and his parents. He is joined by his former leading officer, but has been followed be a person in a cloak and hood.

Thats kinda the story thus far in my book, is it good? What should I do in my future writing (Just so you know though, I do have some ideas for the book though, just so you know) and if the story is flawed, tell me your opinion on the little synopsis of the story.

There are so many things I could do better right now... Goes back to reading the Video Games section*

I can't really tell just from the summary. However, in writing, it's best not to use 'ok' instead of 'okay', or use numbers (1, 2, 3) instead of words (one, two, three). Formal writing, and all that.

Gave them our reactions, our explosions, all that was ours For graphs of passion and charts of stars...

Almost any synopsis can be expanded into something great through writing skill alone, but we can't really tell from what you've given us if you've succeeded at doing so. If you want actually meaningful critique, you'll want to post at least an excerpt or two.

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

I had crept up to the home of the man I was hunting, Harris Manson, and looked up to the stalker that was watching my mission, Zer0. We had talked a bit on the way here, and boy was he quiet, though he did talk, it was only in whispers, like he thought he was being watched, but he was nice, he was even nice enough to supply me with some smoke pellets in order to make a fast getaway. He had a cyber-punk look to him, blue hair, and clothes that made him look like he came right out of a tech movie. He stared at me, and gave me the signal to move ahead, and go in from the top. I looked at the large building, and noticed that it was going to be easy to get up there. It was far too flashy, to the point where I could climb up the side, past all of the guards, and snuck in with ease. I took the earpiece that Zer0 gave me and put it in my ear. “Hey Zer0, do you have a visual on the guards on the inside?” I said, and waited for a response, which came rather quickly. “A few, they’re through the door to your right. Take the door in front of you; I’m not seeing anyone in there.” I moved quickly to the room in front of me. I opened the door, and saw no one. “It’s clear here. Where is this guy?” “In the bedroom, 2 doors in front of you, he’s asleep. Just be careful, his door is well protected.” It was simple getting by them, because I didn’t even see the inside of the room, but I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw. I could smell the blood of the past assassins, it scared me, terrified me, even. I slowly moved to the window of the man who would die tonight, or, at least that’s what I thought would happen. I wanted this to be done, as I reached to the windowsill, but it was then, I learned the truth of this mission. I mutated arm exploded through the wall at an indescribable speed, I was out of the way, but not fast enough to get away before it, whatever it was, grasped my arm and pulled me in. The face was…my target? Harris Manson…there was something wrong here, he is NOT human. The man who I was shown looked civilized, and calm. This…thing was covered in veins, and looked feral and very, very dangerous. The nightmarish being slammed me against the wall inside his room and starred me down, but I stayed composed, at least, as much as I could be. The thing asked me who I was, but thing’s voice was so twisted that I couldn’t really understand him. I struggled to free myself of his grip, and screamed in agony. Zer0 must have heard me, he told me through the comm-system that he called up reinforcements. I would’ve told him that I could handle it, but the situation gave me no time for confidence. I kick Harris in the face and while he was dazed, freed myself. I punched him with all of my 13 year old strength. It not only startled him, but the veins disappeared in an instant. I stared, wide-eyed as he fell back into his human form. I took my opportunity to strike, and stabbed him in the eye with a fresh arrow. I pulled it out and stabbed him again in the stomach and punctured his heart. There was that feeling again, I couldn’t feel it quite as potently, but it was there. I frantically pulled the arrow out and backed away, the man was clearly dead, the lack of breath was more obvious then my own shadow. It was about five seconds after I came to the realization that I killed someone again that the women from before and Zer0 had shown up. Everything went blurry at that point, I can’t remember what happened much, but the most I can remember them admiring my “handiwork” if you could call it that. After they noticed me, I promptly passed out from the intense lack of air that proceeded the stabs that made me who I am…well, until four years later, but I’ll get to all that in a bit.

There are so many things I could do better right now... Goes back to reading the Video Games section*

Theres the excerpt, any good? I wanted a bit that wouldn't give TOO much away, so there

There are so many things I could do better right now... Goes back to reading the Video Games section*

Unfortunately, it's pretty dang hard to read, so you might want to clean that up.

btw, sry for the triple msg's I am kinda new to the forums

There are so many things I could do better right now... Goes back to reading the Video Games section*

Oh, yea, thats due to the Copy and Pasting, ill put it up again in a sec

There are so many things I could do better right now... Goes back to reading the Video Games section*

...No, the only thing you did was double-post, I prevented the triple-post.

EDIT: Also, next time, please edit your posts...

edited 1st Sep '12 7:33:29 PM by Xamusel

I had crept up to the home of the man I was hunting, Harris Manson, and looked up to the stalker that was watching my mission, Zer0. We had talked a bit on the way here, and boy was he quiet, though he did talk, it was only in whispers, like he thought he was being watched, but he was nice, he was even nice enough to supply me with some smoke pellets in order to make a fast getaway. He had a cyber-punk look to him, blue hair, and clothes that made him look like he came right out of a tech movie. He stared at me, and gave me the signal to move ahead, and go in from the top. I looked at the large building, and noticed that it was going to be easy to get up there. It was far too flashy, to the point where I could climb up the side, past all of the guards, and snuck in with ease. I took the earpiece that Zer0 gave me and put it in my ear. “Hey Zer0, do you have a visual on the guards on the inside?” I said, and waited for a response, which came rather quickly. “A few, they’re through the door to your right. Take the door in front of you; I’m not seeing anyone in there.” I moved quickly to the room in front of me. I opened the door, and saw no one. “It’s clear here. Where is this guy?” “In the bedroom, 2 doors in front of you, he’s asleep. Just be careful, his door is well protected.” It was simple getting by them, because I didn’t even see the inside of the room, but I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw. I could smell the blood of the past assassins, it scared me, terrified me, even.

I slowly moved to the window of the man who would die tonight, or, at least that’s what I thought would happen. I wanted this to be done, as I reached to the windowsill, but it was then, I learned the truth of this mission. I mutated arm exploded through the wall at an indescribable speed, I was out of the way, but not fast enough to get away before it, whatever it was, grasped my arm and pulled me in. The face was…my target? Harris Manson…there was something wrong here, he is NOT human. The man who I was shown looked civilized, and calm. This…thing was covered in veins, and looked feral and very, very dangerous. The nightmarish being slammed me against the wall inside his room and starred me down, but I stayed composed, at least, as much as I could be. The thing asked me who I was, but thing’s voice was so twisted that I couldn’t really understand him. I struggled to free myself of his grip, and screamed in agony.

Zer0 must have heard me, he told me through the comm-system that he called up reinforcements. I would’ve told him that I could handle it, but the situation gave me no time for confidence. I kick Harris in the face and while he was dazed, freed myself. I punched him with all of my 13 year old strength. It not only startled him, but the veins disappeared in an instant. I stared, wide-eyed as he fell back into his human form. I took my opportunity to strike, and stabbed him in the eye with a fresh arrow. I pulled it out and stabbed him again in the stomach and punctured his heart. There was that feeling again, I couldn’t feel it quite as potently, but it was there. I frantically pulled the arrow out and backed away, the man was clearly dead, the lack of breath was more obvious then my own shadow.

It was about five seconds after I came to the realization that I killed someone again that the women from before and Zer0 had shown up. Everything went blurry at that point, I can’t remember what happened much, but the most I can remember them admiring my “handiwork” if you could call it that. After they noticed me, I promptly passed out from the intense lack of air that proceeded the stabs that made me who I am…well, until four years later, but I’ll get to all that in a bit.

Edit: Sorry, I am new to the Forums

edited 1st Sep '12 7:35:11 PM by bmsman816

There are so many things I could do better right now... Goes back to reading the Video Games section*

You're introducing two characters through names offset by commas, which makes their introduction seem stiff. Also, I'll skip over talking about it at length in other places, but your tenses are hectic. You switch between past perfect and past tense a lot, and it can make the order of things confusing. This is a massive run-on sentence. Most of these things are separate phrases, and need to be divided. Short sentences can seem like they're clipped and abrupt when you're writing, but they read far better than long, rambling sentences. So all I really know is that he's got blue hair. Making references to other, better works isn't going to do your work any favors, and it makes it seem like you don't have an image in your mind of what the character looks like. It's like you're coming out and saying 'I want him to be Blade Runner and Matrix.' Show what he looks like, don't just tell us he looks like he's from a movies. I chose this for two reasons. First off, it shows the problem with telling instead of showing. All you're doing is telling us that it's easy. Why is it easy? If this person is supposed to be highly trained, he won't need to go through every detail, but the detail should be there—it can't just be 'it was easy'. And I don't even know what 'it was far too flashy' is supposed to mean, so it even fails at telling. Secondly, the tense. You go straight from conditional (could climb) to past (snuck), and that doesn't make sense. Climb should be in past tense too, as they're actions in a sequence. Again, it's telling instead of showing. You're very focused on the action, but the way you're writing this, it's action devoid of any surrounding detail. There's no description of the house, the area around the house, the rooms inside the house—your characters are just moving around in a featureless void. You need to give some sense of the environment they're in—you don't need to bog down the story in exposition, but you should include some of the sensory experience the characters feel, so that the readers can feel the setting through them. If I harp on showing not telling any more I'm going to turn into my English teacher, so I'll point out something else (besides the typos and the run-on sentence.) This is supposed to be an exciting, hectic part, but the way it's written, there's no difference in the prose. If you want to create a sense of frantic action, the writing style as much as the words themselves should reflect that. Shorter words, faster sentences. Less time for description. I get that you're going for some sort of body horror thing, but the critical flaw is that you're not describing what's horrifying, you're just saying that he's horrifying. Also, there's just a logical error here; if he's unable to understand it, he shouldn't know what it's asking. If he's too worked up to understand it in the moment but he later realizes that that's what it said, then you should mention that. Your tense here is all over the place again, and you make what should presumably be some sort of exciting action into a very bland description. This line is pretty amusing, but I don't think it was meant to be. It might be an attempt at irony (thirteen year olds aren't considered generally that strong) but it comes off as cheesy, and is just highlighting the disparity between the character's age and what they're doing.

• Describe the change, don't just say 'he went back to human'.
• I'm guessing the detail about the arrows came in earlier? But what does a 'fresh' arrow mean in this context? There haven't been any arrows in this scene up until this point.
• And on that note, what feeling? Is that something referenced earlier? Even if it is, it should be, you know, an actual feeling, not just 'that feeling'.
• If you're going for first-person narration, the 'punctured his heart' line sounds like he's way too knowledgeable about what he's doing. Some kind of third person omniscient narrator or a very methodical killer viewpoint character could say that, but the way you have it, it's very out of place.

Show don't tell, be very careful about using aphorisms like 'more obvious than my own shadow', and know the difference between then (something happened, then something happened) and than (something has more than something else). Bad use of past perfect tense. For your benefit, a brief recap of perfect tenses: Perfect tenses use variations of 'to have', like had or has. The perfect present tense expresses an action that is complete. For instance, 'I have eaten' means that you're done eating. The past perfect tense expresses an action that was completed at some past point. For instance 'I had eaten when you called' means that you were done with eating at a certain point in the past. In this cast, 'had shown up' should be 'showed up'. Also 'the women from before and Zer0' is awkward phrasing. Also, again, you're not showing how these people got there, you're just telling us that they were there. I get that there's sort of a detached sarcasm going on here, but it's not helping. It took a second read through the sentence to make me realize what was supposed to have happened to him. Instead of saying 'But Harris' hold had crushed the breath out of me, and I passed out', you've got a prepositional phrase with two clauses hanging off the end of that, and that mess trails into another sentence. And that's just the grammatical problems. Was it really the stabs that made him what he was? Would someone who's had the air crushed from their lungs be able to kick their captors, get free, and stab them twice, then watch them die before passing out?

So after that, let me make some broader remarks. The setting of the story doesn't seem all that realistic—which isn't inherently bad, but if you want to make something dark, cartoony isn't really the way to go. I'm talking in terms of verisimilitude (or real-feeling, if that's a bit too much of a vocab word), not literal realism, by the way. Even by spy/action genre conventions, a teenager doing all this sort of stuff when he's thirteen or sixteen seriously pushes the bounds of believability. I'm not saying that a child soldier can't be done well, and military training at a young age has been a thing military societies have historically done, but it seems more like you want him to be a teenager for the sake of a teenage action hero.

Your writing style could use a lot of work. You're almost certainly tired of me saying it, but you have a bad problem with including only the barest of details. You need to work on your descriptions, so that you can put an image into the reader's mind (and not just visual imagery—any sort of sensory imagery is important) of what you see in your mind, and not rely on references to other works to get your ideas across. The other big flaws I saw were issues with sentences running on far longer than they should, and difficulty with verb tense. Try to keep these in mind when writing. Commas aren't used for joining two sentences. I think that you might find it easier to notice your own flaws if you spend time revising. Revisions aren't fun, but they're the difference between a sketch and a painting when it comes to writing.

But with that whole wall of text being said, keep it up. You're not going to get better unless you keep writing. Practice is hugely important. But so is being aware of your own shortcomings—practicing the wrong way doesn't do you much good. If you keep trying your best and trying to improve though, you're bound to get better. No one is just naturally good at writing and can write well without working at it. Hopefully in a year or two, you'll be able to look back at the stuff you're writing now, and you'll be able to laugh at how much worse you were. I get the idea that you're kind of young from what you've written, and if that's true, don't let criticism discourage you from writing.

So for the massively condensed version: it's bad, but don't let that stop you; keep going, but don't get complacent the way you are.

I know I come off as harsh, but I just want to see people getting better.

That's okay; we all were at one time.

Now... please bear with me, since I would not call myself good at reviewing by any means.

First off, I'm noticing some technical issues that are making it a little hard to read, but I'll get to those in a second. That mega-paragraph you used to have seriously distorted the pace- the actual text moved along very quickly, but the paragraph gave the impression that it was moving very slowly. While it can be excused that you didn't describe what Zer0 or the narrator look like since this is from later in the story, I feel like it needs more to it. You said it was The Reveal; that means you intend for it to hold some weight, but I unfortunately can't tell what's being revealed. Disregarding the paragraph thing, the entire thing moves so quickly I can't tell what's supposed to be important. After the action cools down, you need to balance it out by putting in more thought or description that shows how this event changed him and why it apparently made him who he is.

I also think it needs some more touches of the narrator. There's very little description- I can understand why you did that, since he's apparently a Child Soldier, but he was probably trained to look for certain things such as security holes or patterns that he, as a child can take advantage of. Alternatively, the training might not have set in and he's still getting distracted by other things.

There's a lot more things that I'm sure I missed. I PMed all of the technical issues that I noticed.

And, one last thing- assuming 'Zer0' simply told the narrator his name and hasn't written it down, how is he supposed to hear it as 'Zer0' instead of just 'Zero'? To be honest, the latter is more annoying to look at than the former.

EDIT: Or I could get ninja'd. Kotep has pretty much said all I wanted to say, plus more that I agree with.

edited 1st Sep '12 9:55:21 PM by CrystalGlacia

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

Thank you. It is mostly just a rough draft, and tihs is my second real attempt at writing a book, my first one ending in disaster. The reason for the constant past tensewriting is due to it being told from a memory mostly.

The name Zer0 was a bad idea from the start, I realized that, I still need to edit this. The rushed and non-descriptive form is due to it...wait, no, thats just me. I tend to think a bit too fast, and write the ideas down before I flesh them out.

Kotep, thank you for your VERY constructive little...is review the right word? It was helpful, and really helped me notice some of the things that really dodged me ay first.

Thanks Crystal btw, for the PM, yes, I do use commas alot, I tend to do that, its weird, instinctiual maybe. The typos are my fault entirely, I get ideas and type thme when I can...Even at 4 Am. The "feeling" was shown earlier, and it has to do with the plot, but I am not at the point yet

Edit: Also, befoere I forget, i adress this already, but that methodical killer thing just made me think to yell you this, at the begin theres a flash forward to just who is telling the story, in other words, much, much, much deadlier Nightmare. He had become much more dark, reserved, and over all Emo Sasuke-like than his original counterpart. That comes with a Methodical Killer mindset and fries on the side.

edited 1st Sep '12 11:13:36 PM by bmsman816

There are so many things I could do better right now... Goes back to reading the Video Games section*

Being written in past tense is fine, especially for a book, as it's one of the most common ways to write. The problem is jumping around between past and past perfect (and sometimes present), making it hard to distinguish when things happen.