Argeus the Paladin
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Ok ok I'm glad there isn't issues with my activity and seeing as I have you guy's attention now I might as well restructure my story.....though don't expect much other than bolded chapters and spacing changes. Then hopefully I will be able to some comments based on my story content.
Even beyond the formatting issue, your writing has numerous problems both major and minor. To the point that, no offense, to everyone who isn't your friends and accept it without second thoughts, the story itself is eclipsed by the sheer number of problems. You might well have the plot that would put Quenta Silmarillion to shame, and yet very few would get through the writing to get through it.
The good news is, none of them is unfixable if you want to. The bad news is, it's going to take a while. The ugly news is, when you're through with that you'll no longer recognize your story. Bear in mind this is absolutely okay: The first draft of everything is crud, and every author worth his salt has to pay up a sum of... let's say 500000 words' worth of old shames and 2000 working hours before he could even get anywhere. Don't panic. Bear with me.
Let's get started:
1) Rule number 1 of writing: Show, don't tell.
Don't tell what a character is feeling, show it through his dialogue and action. Don't tell how awesome a character is, show it through action scene. Don't tell what a character is, show it through describing everything relevant about him. What is relevant is entirely up to the author's - your - discretion.
2) Dialogue is not replacement for proper description. Narmful dialogue is ESPECIALLY not replacement for proper conveyance of emotions. Caps lock and an overabundance of exclamation marks are an emotional scene's most bitter nemesis.
Forget everything the script-based nature of entertainment these days - video game cutscenes, TV shows, even theatrical performances - might have taught you about how sometimes uttering a simple powerful line is enough. This does not work in writing. You don't have gorgeous actors with booming voice, you don't have Hans Zimmer-esque music, you don't have ultra-realistic sound effects, you don't have the camera sweeping around the scene... you don't have anything that makes other media what they are except your words. That's why dialogue alone is never enough; you need to describe, and do so diligently and creatively beyond "The hero has an X, it looks like a Y with a Z attached to it". Your story consists of roughly five-sixth dialogue, a twelfth description and the other twelfth caps and numbers. This is not a good thing.
Now, you might counter this by saying "But my dialogue is good enough! It has soul!" Well... yes, sometimes a good line of dialogue is worth a thousand of description. But we're talking about such things like Gandalf's "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends", or Theoden King's "We shall have peace… when you answer for the burning of the Westfold, and the children that lie dead there. We shall have peace, when the lives of the soldiers, whose bodies were hewn even as they lay dead against the gates of the Hornburg, are avenged! When you hang from a gibbet for the sport of your own crows… we shall have peace.". Not things like "WHAT AM I FIGHTING FOOOR?!?" or "People die when they are killed". The first is dramatic. The second is narmful. Narmful - that is, overly dramatic dialogue are at best unintentionally funny to read, and at worst downright pretentious.
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“I must, I must find a way the Summoner said as his eyes began to shut on their own, I must….I must…..”, “I MUST NOT GIVE INTO THE DARKNESS the Summoner said as he forced his eyes open and took control of his body, I hold the pride of my clan in my heart and that burning light will shine its way through the dark.
Tell me which of the two this line falls in with.
Even worse are the overuse of exclamation marks - you are allowed ONE exclamation mark per sentence, just like a full stop. The writing is supposed to convey every feeling from its own merit, not by any fancy formatting, for one thing. And for the other, well, it is the mark of a juvenile teenager on Facebook or Twitter rather than an author to be taken seriously.
3) Game mechanic is NOT your friend, even in a game's fanfiction. To a lesser extent, character dialogue should never be the only means of info-dumping
In this work and the others you've written, you have the tendency to write as if the world runs on game logic. While this is sometimes acceptable, in most cases they aren't. Even by the tongue-in-cheek standards of AE games, we are to assume game mechanics is just an appropriation of what game-world life is like. Disrespecting this breaks immersion severely. The same goes for massive info-dumping in dialogue that serves no reason but to ham-fistedly inform the reader what you want the reader to know. Both are fully capable of single-handedly destroying the fluid flow of dialogue:
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“That should be good enough for just a nightly ride on Drakkoniss’s motorcycle," the Smasher thought to himself as he locked his laboratory and closed his closet door, "I don’t need any of my nanotech sniper rifles or my bazooka rifles for such a small trip and my gravity generators would only take up space”
Correction mine for ease of perusal.
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“Hmmm…..control of basic elemental energies and unknown energy type, super endurance, superhuman speed, beyond super strength, flight, dense hide shows that the child has a lesser version of my old suit’s defenses, thus making ordinary bullets and weapons useless, but however subject shows possible mastery of using devastating, large scale elemental attacks and creating multiple barriers 10 times stronger than his dense hide the Smasher thought to himself as he approached the Summoner’s body, chance of survival of 59.9999999%, deadly force not necessary unless cornered”.
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“First disembowel the shotgun wielder and begin the fear factor the Smasher thought to himself as he closed his eyes and used his search vision to locate the position of all 9 men in the room, fear factor will slowly set in, causing the enemies to panic and focus fire on the bar counter as I go under the floor boards, silent takedowns will increase fear factor causing the remaining enemies to run out of the bar, giving me easy shots at their legs, chance of survival 99.99999%”
Ask yourself this: Who in real life talks like this? Not even a comical cackling evil overlord, I daresay. Maybe, and just maybe, an incomplete AI program with a malfunction in the speech department. Having a main character do so is the shortest path to breaking down willing suspension of disbelief, even shorter than having a vampire sparkle in the sunlight to a classical vampire fan. And that's not to get into the delicate issue of character sociopathy. The last dialogue alone makes Eragon look like a balanced, normal, compassionate human being, for instance.
These are the three most glaring issues with your actual writing. In regard to the actual story itself, I've counted a few on top of my mind:
1) We have James, Maura and... Hinata. That name has a grand total of zero reason to be there, just as it makes equally as much sense for a couple named Naruto and Sakura to have a kid named... Cunhambebe. Naming doesn't work like that, not even in fiction land.
2) Pacing, pacing, pacing. Throwing one A4 page's worth of writing out and call it a chapter is reserved for first-graders, Gloria Tesch, or a master who really knows what he's doing. The reason? The readers expect that a chapter itself is something in and of itself - it's either one scene or one set of scenes that work well in conjunction with one another. Taking one single scene and split it out into three or four parts works in TV shows and not in writing, because in TV shows there's such a thing as limits in time slots, while there is no such restriction in writing. Let's take your fifth, sixth and seventh chapter - is there any reason to split them up like you did? Absolutely none. It breaks the scene, spoils the pacing and generally invokes the feel of a medium other than writing... for no reason.
These are the most basic problems you need to tackle before your writing would be taken seriously. Rest assured - This is a journey that every writer have to take, bar none.
Of course, whether you would undertake it is your choice. As you said, if your goal is to entertain a group of friends who are used to your nonstandard style, then that is fine. But if you want to get better, to expand your readership beyond this limited group, and perhaps to even one day go pro and earn money and prestige by your writing, you have to work towards it, starting with the points I have outlined.
If I had been too harsh at any point, my apologies. As has been said plenty of times by better authors than myself, writing is a craft dependent on honest, harsh criticism.
I wish you good luck on your endeavors. If there's anything else you wish me to help, feel free to shoot me an PM.
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