[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited July 06, 2006).]
You might want to put up a few comments
The first couple of chapters give an idea of what is happening with the story expanding the back story as it goes.
So it's dark - big deal. Why should I care that it is dark all the time? Because the MC (don't know who that is) misses the sunrise. Why should I care that the MC misses the sunrise? - reminded him of home? is that home gone? Did he watch the sunrise as a child or wrapped in a blanket with his wife? Was he a farmer and rose before sunup to milk cows and watched the sunrise as he walked back to the house? I have no reason to care that he misses the sunrise.
Black filth spewed from the Rift and destroyed the land - bummer. I like the tone of this sentance ut it almost seems out of place. The beginning has an undertone of levity to it that this phrase contradicts. The following bit about "screwed up on a grand scale" screams young punk but much of the rest is poetic. What is the tone you are trying to set here?
These thirteen lines could be fleshed out into something much grander but it is your writing and you need to decide what you want to do with it.
Good writing!
I'm all for giving background (concise, with nothing not absolutely needed to understand the scene), but this is a lot, and I don't think you need every last bit of it. How about collapsing it to your 2nd paragraph, and then giving us the specific time, place, character, what he's doing right then and why we care.
What you have so far is summary, which is fine for the parts you don't want to show; but the shown part is most of the fun.
louiseoneal1972@yahoo.com
I suspect it was the number of exclamations that gave rise to the question whether this is serious or not. Internally, my inner reader was shouting those sentences. I couldn't help but find humor in it and I'm guessing humor wasn't what was intended.
One person who critted me early on said that one should rarely use exclamation in dialog, and never in the first five pages, and if it has to be used in the narration, no more than once in an entire novel. Perhaps an extreme view, but it helped me question my usage.
. I would go a stage further. If you started with 'It was always dark, ever since we had lost the war' rather than a random utterance, I feel that immediately pulls me further into the world of the MC, as though I've just dropped into the story in the MC's mid-thought.Again, I think the other fragments you've used exclamation marks on are superfluous, and my opinion is that you would be better advised to give the reader more credit in reading around the words you write in such situations.
At the very least, if you don't tell me instantly why the characters are going to the Rift, then it leaves me wondering, intrigued, more likely to read on. Are the characters trying to close it, enter it, or something completely different that I hadn't imagined.
Hope that helps.
Teph
[This message has been edited by Tephirax (edited July 06, 2006).]
(Well, add the fact that my first posting here was a post-apocolyptic thing about darkness, and the comments I recieved made me dig deeper into my scene, find better descriptors, and be generally more aware of how many different kinds of ways there are to say "It was dark." And how many different things that statement can mean.)
I don't care for the phrase "ever since." It always sounds like slang to me, even if it's not.
You use a lot of repetitions of "had", which could be eliminated with minor tense changes. The piece would read stronger, as well.
I like your idea here, that the narrator admits his/her mistake, and is powerless to fix his/her mistake without a lot of help from other people. I'm intrigued by your later description of the rest of the plot, and I think you've got the makings of a good story.