Dreamland Review Archive

Bright Eyes (T)

'A boy, a little older than he was, then came staggering into Damien's view, reeling across the place, grasping anything, anyone within his reach.'

So you have some mistakes here. The first two commas are unnecessary, but you could clean up this sentence a lot. You have a few sentences like this, where the words could be moved around and the commas could be minimalized. In my experience, the less commas you use, the more your story flows. That's because commas are pauses, and if you introduce too many commas, you end up with choppy writing. Let's fix that sentence above with this in mind:

'A boy a little older than him came staggering into Damien's view, reeling across the place and grasping anything and anyone within his reach.'

So here I took your commas down from five to one, but the sentence still managed to be shorter. I can't exactly explain a way to do this, but it's simply a matter of rearranging those awkward sentences to make way for a clearer story.

Other than those wonky sentences, you have very few issues. Your errors are nearly non-existent, and your dialogue is perfected. You even have action tags in the middle of dialogue worked out. No problems that I could find other than the formatting, the quotations and the awkward sentences.

11/15

Story Flow: (transitions & pacing)

You switch around perspective a lot, which could be confusing if you didn't handle it so well. The clear, definitive changes and smooth transitions make your story easy to read. The formatting is a little odd, like I mentioned already, but other than that, the transitions of your story are perfect.

Your pacing is slow in the first chapter, and it takes a long time for us to see anything happen. I understand we're getting to know Damien, but it felt like it dragged just a tad in the first chapter there. Once you move on to Jack and then back to Damien, the pacing ramped up a little and it was much better. You might want to consider cleaning up your beginning to have something happen right at the start, just to draw readers in. Other than that, the pacing further on was well done.

8/10

Description: (characters & scenes)

Your characters are well-developed and vivid. You definitely have mastered the idea of providing emotional description as well as physical description. I felt as though you could've added a little more unique description, but that's a preference of mine. However, one thing I will get mad about is the use of your height description, like in chapter two when you say five-feet-ten. First of all, it's five-foot-ten, but that's not a big deal. Second, I NEVER recommend using exact heights in writing. It just seems weird to me, and I find it disrupts the flow with the odd numbers. Maybe I'm just weird, but other readers have agreed with me about this, so it's probably better to just play the safe side and not write exact heights. For five-foot-ten, you could say something like, 'just shy of six feet' or if you really wanted to have it known that he was exactly 5'10", then say 'two inches shy of six feet.' Honestly, it's just more natural, and it makes more sense flow-wise.

As for the scene description, you very obviously have that down. But there is a problem with your incredible description in the fact that it is not always incredible. When the action ramps up, you stop describing so vividly. Some readers and writers stand by doing that, but I don't. I think it feels weird. You should stay consistent with the amount you describe. You could either bring down the initial description, or you could bring up the action description. Or you think I'm making no sense and write that off as an opinion thing. It's your choice. But it's always good to hear what readers think and take it into account—no matter if you decide to change it!

9/10

Originality: (plot & tone)

It's always hard to judge plot when I've only read 10k words. It feels a little wrong to me, because in my book, people have judged my plot after the first few chapters and said, "it's good, it's nothing special" and then when they've read the last sentence of the book, the claim it's the most incredible thing ever. Plot takes time to craft. So that's why you should I say take what I'm criticizing now with a grain of salt: your plot is a little generic. You have the whole boarding school and the typical students. You have pretty surface character issues so far, but that could develop. Like I said, it's not my job to judge that yet. You know better.

Your tone is lovely, but you do slip up in tenses once in a while. You write in past tense, which means you write 'she had, she said, he didn't' instead of 'she has, she says, he doesn't.' However, you slip up very infrequently. Take this sentence from chapter three:

'It's been months since dreams came to disturb her rest.'

So that sentence, you have 'it has' in the beginning, which is present tense. In past tense, should be:

'It had been months since dreams came to disturb her rest.'

As I said, this was infrequent. Happened maybe four or five times, so not a big deal. But I'd go through and try to fix those.

8/10

Final Comments:

Your story is very clearly developed, and your writing is just wonderful. There's the occasional tense slip up and grammar issues to fix, but the big parts of your story are very refined. I see the effort and work put into this story, and I have no problem saying it could be a Watty winner some day with the way it's written. I loved reviewing this book!

Final score:

49/60