Reviews!

"Journey" - Review

“Journey” by katiebeth_love

I liked the idea of this story, and the dynamic the author set about creating right away.  That fear of losing a best friend to a significant other truly and authentically sucks, and I think katiebeth_love does a decent job at trying to tackle the conflict between being happy for your friend, but also feeling jealous and a bit neglected. 

I skimmed a few of the other comments on the story, and saw a lot of posters had already given pointers on the same things that I was poised to point out – the amount of “tell” in the early chapters. You can sort of get away with this more later in the novel, if you’ve set up enough “show” in the beginning to pull us in.  Even if it just comes natural and you have no idea how to “show” instead of “tell”... don’t get overwhelmed thinking you have to change your whole story. Just go back, and work on the first chapter or two.  If you have a great first few chapters on wattpad, your readers will stick by you and quit nitpicking.

After all, that’s the true secret, isn’t it? To get your readers so invested in your characters that they don’t really care about any syntax or show vs. tell issues at all, because they just want to know what the heck happens to these people.  But in order to get to that point, you gotta start out strong, and show them why they should look past the tell.

Second thing I’ll touch on, is the text speak.  It was actually handled pretty well, especially when compared to how others have butchered perfectly good stories with endless pages of texts between characters that have almost no resemblance to the English language.  I’d suggest adding a little more action between them though.  Let the character get a text, and then show us her reaction. Or let her get up and grab a drink. Or even just flip her phone closed.  Maybe it’s just me, but I like a little something-something to break up line after line of any kind of dialogue – not even just text speak.

Also – I’d suggest nixing the little cast lists at the top of each chapter... Some readers like to be able to create their own mental picture of the characters, and so this gets distracting when trying to read continuously one chapter to the next.  Wattpad allows casts lists on any story now, not just watty’s, so if the cast is important to you, I’d recommend putting it up on the side, that way people can check it out or avoid it depending on what they like to do.

In a nutshell:  Tommy and Charlotte are <3   For example:

“I do have an extra t-shirt in my car... but, of course, you wouldn’t have any pants.”   I loved this line for some reason – it really developed the character for me... humor, kindness, etc. It can all be established in just a sentence, you don’t need paragraphs to explain character develop... just show it to us like this!

This story has great potential, and with a tiny bit of a cleanup, has all the elements that the most popular stories on wattpad have.