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Eukara Vox -> RE: The Krystal Diminishes - comments and criticism (8/22/2008 3:24:21)
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Chapter 3
quote:
The night in Vivios Forest was often described as beautiful. The forest itself was very tall, at least one thousand five hundred feet. There were not a lot of branches until two hundred feet from the top, so what light got through the canopy made it to the forest floor. The trunks appeared to be different shades of green, as the leaves in the canopy filtered the white moonlight to be green.
Every sentence starts with The _______. Unacceptable for a writer like you. Vary it up.
quote:
There were not a lot of branches until two hundred feet from the top, so what light got through the canopy made it to the forest floor.
I do not like the structure of this sentence. It is actually too simple, believe it or not. First of all, beginning with “there were” is weak, too basic. Knowing your style, something more like “Patches of moonlight scattered across the forest floor, slowly changing pattern as the sparse branches high above in the canopy swayed in the breeze. A man could climb nearly all the way to the top before reaching the first branches, which pushed into the open air two hundred feet from the canopy top.”
quote:
The trunks appeared to be different shades of green, as the leaves in the canopy filtered the white moonlight to be green.
The words need to be re-arranged somewhat and romanticized, if that is even understandable. And it must connect to the previous sentence(s) however you edit them. “Moolight filtered through the canopy leaves, casting a greenish hue, turning the normal brown of the tree trunks several shades of green.”
quote:
A man stood alone in a relative clearing. There were no trees around for fifty feet, which in this forest was quite rare. The moonlight illuminated his light blue skin, black hair, and the ebon clothes of a vampire hunter. His dark brown eyes glowed in the darkness in a color that cannot be accurately described.
Based on the potential bulking up on the beginning, the simple sentence in this paragraph is actually good. It takes you from the mysterious and somewhat daunting setting to the center of attention.
quote:
There were no trees around for fifty feet, which in this forest was quite rare.
Now we go back to drawing attention to the setting. You talk about the moonlight illuminating him, why don’t you use that same concept to alert the reader to the clearing. Describe the full fall on moonlight on the leafless floor of the clearing, giving him an unnatural feeling of vulnerability in this particular forest. Cause the moonlight to slowly fade into shadow at about fifty feet into the dense forest, and have this detail recognized by the man in the clearing. Knowing what I have read about him, that would be a detail he takes into consideration.
quote:
His dark brown eyes glowed in the darkness in a color that cannot be accurately described.
The repetition of dark is distracting.
quote:
The man heard a rustling sound from the bushes nearby. Fearing that more were around, he literally vanished from sight.
I think a little more detail is needed here. “Fearing that more were around” is vague, though I assume you mean more paladins. You may want to add something here.
quote:
The man in black cautiously faded back in, then walked another three hundred yards or so before stopping. He whistled out a call, and a beautiful hawk flew down from the trees and perched itself on his left shoulder.
I don’t think you can fade back in, as fade means to disappear slowly. I would use re-emerge, phase, or something else along those lines. Don’t just say he whistled, describe it. Make it personal, something that pulls the reader and makes them hear it. Sound is a very important part of setting. Was it a trill, a low call, a high pitched call that ended flatly? Often, people who tame birds of prey have a very specific call trained into the bird.
Again, I will complain about the similarity in sentence structure. Such a high percentage of your sentences start with a noun or pronoun, accompanied by -the- and -a-. I know you don't want to sound Yoda-like, but there has to be a way for you to vary your sentence structure, maintain the integrity of your story and avoid Yoda syndrome.
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