Young Writers Society

Sorry. This isn't a book anymore. It wouldn't let me delete the book. So I just did this.

hi there

I see you're new to YWS, so have a great big welcome from me everyone's really friendly and they give some fantastic advice. Something you probably won't know yet because you're so new, is that generally it's expected that you review around 2-3 pieces of other people's work for every one post of your own, so everyone gets feedback and feels loved

I have to say, I haven't read your piece because really I just wanted to point out that within an hour or whatever you posted chapters 3 to 13 all in one go. Hmmm - I wouldn't advise this. It looks a bit - you know? Put up the next one, and wait a bit for some reviews to come in, do some reviewing yourself. Give us a chance to want some more of your work!

Happy writing

~*cottonrulz*~

Hello, come to review for review day.

I like the start of this nice and simple, it goes well with your characters voice, not saying your character is simple. Your description of the world around him is simple yet effective but I think you really have the potential to expand a bit more. For example when he is waiting, I heard that policemen really like to keep you waiting for ages to soften you up for interrogation,you could accentuate and draw out the wait, show that it was a very unpleasant experience for your MC.
Although I love your use of 'Waiting' as a one word sentence, great stuff, adds so much.

The entrance of the cop and the dialogue is good. I think in general you could use more descriptive words but your dialogue is great.

I think you could separate 'two hours later...' into a new short paragraph, just for drama
I don't really have much else to say apart from the fact that this is a pretty good little chapter, I love the use of multiple policeman and you are very good at dialogue.

Hey aj!

This chapter was just a whirlwind of dialogue wasn't it! It's all very important and good, and the dialogue itself is relatively realistic (though there were some places that seemed a bit off; like things that these two people wouldn't have said to each other given the circumstances, but then again I don't know much about police interrogations for murder suspects). There seems to be a lot of the prose side of things missing, though.

First, after a couple lines of dialogue we completely lose any form of prose (including voice tags - said, asked, etc) outside of dialogue. While there isn't particularly a problem with that, it's far more interesting to see what is happening around the conversation between these two men.

Include some actions. They'll be small actions, like facial expressions and changes in posture, but they help to build a realistic scenario. And they also give off aspects of a character's personality and how they're feeling. For example, Travis will probably be far more relaxed during the interrogation considering he is an expert liar and has been in this position before. Although, when they start talking more in depth about his relationship with Lucy, his posture might change as he gets more tense or upset while thinking about her again.
Here and here are good articles about writing dialogue, and including more prose around dialogue in a story.

The last thing I want to mention is that this chapter seems like it would work well combined with the previous chapter. Oftentimes shorter chapters work well for a story, but as this directly follows the events of the previous chapter without there being a major cliffhanger or anything they could work just as well as one chapter. Glancing over the lengths of several of the chapters that follow, it seems like that could probably be done with a few of the chapters.

Again, nice job! Keep writing!

-Lauren-