Young Writers Society

General Summary
It's not every day in our lives you find two people in love and their religions are different. Sandro is a handsome guy that ladies around the world fall for; bronze with green eyes, his voice that is charming and musical whenever he sings, his personality that is not like any of the guys who have strong ego and thinks that manipulating a lady's mind is the only best way for a living. He can have any lady he wants but he chose to be with one lady who has changed his life forever Selma. She came all the way from Lebanon to visit her cousins and relatives in Canada. Sandro and Selma fell deeply in love with each other but the only problem is the differences in religion. They never cared about religion, even though Selma is spiritually religious, she has always believed that we are all the same born from Adam and Eve and in Islam we never differentiate between religions, colors, and race. Culture takes a big place in a human's life, if the generations of the families do not allow two lovers to be together, then the love between Sandro and Selma can never exist in this world, until Sandro thought of changing his religion and name so he could stop Selma from marrying someone she does not love. Friends and families never understood the reason that made Sandro change, he even surprised them with the dirty beard style that mostly Muslim men grow their beard, to them he was well known by the French beard or without any beard at all. Sandro who has changed his name to Mohamed, did not care what others thought about him and left Canada to follow Selma back to Lebanon, stopping her from making a mistake and marry someone who can never make her happy like he would, so he kept following her secretly from one place to another, seeing her so sad and acting happiness only to avoid her thoughts about Mohamed/Sandro. At one night she was walking with her new becoming husband; walking and talking acting happy until a mobile phone rang and he left her all alone, she turned her face with a frown looking upward and recognized someone leaving the balcony of a party in a hotel, she thought she was imagining seeing the man she loved so much and let him go so she ignored what she saw and completed walking with her future husband. On the night before her wedding day, she was walking in the morning all alone in the park not knowing what to do about her life, thinking all sadly to herself, then suddenly she saw a guy who looked so much like Mohamed/Sandro sitting on the bench, she walked closely and got surprised that it was him but with different looks, he told her that he could not forget her in a way he changed his religion and his name so she would accept to run away with him and marry him, but Selma has been totally honest with him and told him that her parents must agree about him so she could agree to be with him. Mohamed/Sandro took by her advice and introduced himself to Selma's father with no fear explaining to him his true feelings to Selma. Her family got attached to everything they heard, so they agreed on Mohamed/Sandro to marry Selma on one important condition, that he would never change and he would stay the same and make their daughter live happy with no pain or tears.

I can relate to that!

To mix culture, love, and religion is a tough one.
A lot of youngsters have to face that daily and gets in a lot of trouble with either friends or family
I am very religious and I have friend who are Christian, Muslims, Jewish, Budists, Hinduists, Atistis etc. and I get along with them just fine !! Therefore I know how hard it can be to choose and to avoid conflictes.

Your short story was VERY GOOD! I would maybe change the layout a bit 'cause it gets a little confusing. But I love your unique way to get throug to the reader You are very good at writting and I actually think that you may be better at writting poems

- Give it a try and keeeep writting ^.^

Hey!

So, this seemed more like a narration of what happened. (I've seen so many such cases, some successful, some not so.) I digress.
Anyway, I think the plot as a whole is not original. But you can work on it to create a good story.
How?
By doing it in such a way that the reader feels the story. Right now, you've poured some words onto a page. There is a central conflict but you've not developed it. There are character, but they're like pencil drawings on a page. Fill them with colour and make them three dimensional.
Show us emotions. How sad was he? What about Selma? Did she fight for him? Was he torn about religion? What about her parents.

I think this needs some major editing. Take your time, and work with the intricacies each obstacle presents. And, a multi-pragaraphed format will look nicer. ^_^

Let me know if you give it a complete make-over.

Hi, Soosoo! Isha here to review! ^.^

So, this story has an excellent idea and a neat premise- but I have to agree with Azalea. There was nothing there. You wrote a series of events down- you spilled them all out in chronological order, but you didn't give us any depth. It was: "Even, event, event, event," with none of the emotion that the piece has the potential to contain.

Now, with what you have here- it looks like an outline, not a story, per se. It seems like you've condensed an entire novel in a few paragraphs by leaving out everything involving emotion, character, character development, description and conflict out. Awesome, if this was an outline. For an actual story? Not so much. I stand by the fact that this could be an entire romantic novel, and it would finitely has the potential to be a very good one, as far as romantic novels go.

But first thing's first. Expand on your characters; give them emotions and explain them, use them to fashion the story. Give the characters personalities. Let us see their inner conflict and the whole shebang. Throw in plot devices and twists, show the conflict in that, and expand on what happens between. Did Sandro have to think about what happened, or did was his decision to go back to Lebanon for Selma? Who was this man that Selma was going to marry if Sandro didn't come for her? How did Sandro convince Selma's parents that he was the right person for her to marry? Was there a lot of turmoil going on while he was considering converting to Islam, or was the choice instant? Was he part of another religion previously? What did his family think about this choice? His friends?

There's so much that you could put in here, and so, so much depth that the story lacks. Not to be mention the hundreds of other questions that I could ask about the story.

In other words, I definitely agree with Azalea- this story needs some major editing, but it definitely has potential.

Keep writing and feel free to PM me with any questions or concerns that you may have.

~~Isha

Yeah. You've got the back cover of your story down smack, and that's great, I guess, but now you have to fill in the blanks.

This isn't much of a critique, but the first thing you'll want to do would be to separate this into paragraphs. You're going to scare off half your potential readers with this block of text you have.

This seems less like a story than it does a hasty summary of one. I don't know what you plan to do with this - is it meant as a reference to a novel/short story you plan to write? Do you plan to work with this any more? The way that you portray this is so bland and rushed at the moment that I would deplore the latter.

I don't think I can bring myself to critique your story in itself, because what I want you to do is get rid of all this, start from the beginning, and take your time. My guess is that you had an idea for a story, but you were a bit too impatient short on time to actually bring the story fully to life. Instead, you whipped up a quick sketch and called it done.

But that doesn't work, soosoolw. Stories - especially longer ones, such as this - take time. Fleshing out ideas is not a twenty-minute ordeal, but one that takes months, years, even, to perfect. Keep this in a safe place, but start over, take your time, and explore the minuter details of the story. Where does it take place? What are the characters feeling? Things like these are what you should be looking for. Events will come of their own will; don't force them to.

Anyway. Hope I helped.

-Kafka

You are all right girls, I haven't given the whole story, only the general ideas because this is only the General Summary of the story, since then I made the summary seem as a short story.

I do have more ideas to complete the story but it would be difficult to complete it here, this is why I wrote only the summary. Didn't mean to disappoint you girls, I was just trying to give a general idea about the story. To answer most of your questions, this is when I finish writing the whole story that would be divided in to chapters
Thank you so much for the lovely comments, I really appreciated your critiques, it helps me improve

I was wondering would anyone of you would like to complete my story, from the summary and make it a lovely story that maybe just maybe one day I'll make it a movie, who knows? I have in mind the characters and I can describe to you everything from ideas I have in mind, only if I get an approval from you to help me complete it and I will be writing your nicknames as co-writers of my story. Deal or No Deal?