Story: Songs We Wrote by Icha_Sya
Reviewed by: Curione
Finished: 2/11/13

As usual, disclaimer. This is only my personal opinion and it's not the law. Take from my review what you will but no need to explain anything unless it's really something you need to get off your chest. 

Title

Reading the title, I had thought it would be about maybe, a girl or a guy pining away for someone through the medium of a song that they had written with that person in the past. And obviously, the story isn't about that. I guess the problem I have with the title is at the moment, there isn't evidence of songs we wrote. There's only one song which Jonghyun wrote on his own and Yunmi certainly hasn't written any songs, only stealing one of Jonghyun's and infringing on his copyright playing one of Jonghyun's written songs. Of course, the story isn't finished yet, so the title still has the potential to be relevant. I guess this is a reminder to remember to link the story back to the title, and personally, for me, I hope this is done soon!

Characters

For me, the saving grace of this story is really  the believability of the interaction between the characters, in particular, the awkward sweetness between that of Jonghyun and Yunmi.

Sure, the characters a very stereotypical of a school-drama. Yunmi being the popular maiden fallen from grace, Jonghyun being the sweet boy next door main love interest, and Kris being the popular bad boy ex possibly also the third party relationship pooper. But actually, I think that's fine. It works. And the good thing is, despite being stereotypical, they're not entirely two dimensional. I mean, Yunmi has her own problems being a rich kid with the pressures and stuff, and Kris does have a reason for being mean to Yunmi (imagine if you were a popular guy with a reputation to maintain and someone screwed up your future).

However, that said, the story is still in its early stages and I really hope that there won't be any unnecessary character development. What I mean is going overboard with making the characters break out of their stereotype - for example, Jonghyun is a sweet, ditzy guy now. But later in the story, his character develops to become jealous as well and I don't know, maybe he tries to eliminate Kris.

Okay, maybe that's a little extreme. I guess what I mean is that I don't really want to see like, Yunmi later becomes this advocate for anti-bullying in school where she later stands up to Kris and all the girls who are bullying her and becomes an advocate for female strength of something.

It isn't wrong, but really I think keeping the focus on how Jonghyun and Yunmi's relationship grows would benefit the story way more. If Jonghyun and Yunmi have any character changes I want it to revolve around the fact that they have met each other. Based on what I've read so far, I predict that Yunmi will learn to trust people again because of Jonghyun, and I really hope that this is what does happen. But as it is, I don't really need character development - they can stay as hopeless and stereotypically flawed as much as they want. Yunmi can still be timid and cautious when trusting people, just that she's a little more willing to try now. And hell, Kris can remain a bastard for all I care. Just make sure that the story keeps its focus on the characters and the way their relationship develops please!

Plot

So far, the plot is smacks me of 'Dream High', 'Nodame Cantabile' and maybe '5 Fingers'? If that's happening, then I would say that the plot probably isn't very original.

In fact, it's rather cliché, but hey. It's good this way.

But like I said earlier, it's still early in the story. So please, please, please don't spoil this and be tempted to put in a million and one plot twists. Like I don't know, someone getting amnesia, Jonghyun actually turning out to be bad or Yonghwa suddenly becoming the third-party love interest helping Kris in trying to break up Jonghyun and Yunmi.

Hey, don't laugh. I'm sure it happens and probably has already happened.

I hope that this won't happen, and instead it will follow the route of what I deduce the author is trying to do: keeping the plot cliché so that there is a focus on the writing. I prefer it that way. The plot is good as it is, or the way it seems to be unfolding.

However, speaking of writing...

Grammar

In this part, I'm only going to give examples of the mistakes made or things which I found bugged me (all these that I'm going to point out are in chapter 2 by the way). If I correct everything according to my opinion, this portion would be even long than it already is.  

For grammatical mistakes, I would just look out for tenses. Your normal mistake is to confuse when to put past and present tense inside a sentence.

Sometimes, the mistakes are a bit more forgivable, like:

... yelled both Jonghyun and Jungshin, which made Minhyuk jumped on his stool.

- ... yelled both Jonghyun and Jungshin, which made Minhyuk jump on his stool.

This is a little tricky and I spent ages trying to find the exact rule because I know this rule as a native English speaker and know it's right but have no idea why. Apparently, the rule is that 'jump' has become an infinitive without the 'to' and is not a verb. As such, the rules of parallel tense do not apply here. Some others call this the 'double negative' rule. Yeah... tricky, so I won't exactly blame you for getting this wrong.

But at other times, you did the exactly opposite and didn't keep your verb tense consistency. Just a few sentences later we have this:

He smiled as the other three could only gape and blinked at their kind, yet scary leader.

- He smiled as the other three could only gape and blink at their kind, yet scary leader.

'Could' is a modal auxiliary verb, which means anything else becomes the bare infinitive, so 'gape' is correct, but when conjugative verbs, you need to use the same tense, therefore 'blink' and not 'blinked'. I don't really understand why you could keep your verb tenses consistent (albeit mistakenly) in one sentence only to lose it a couple sentences after. So be careful!

Another thing is to look up a bit on future tenses. Future tenses are not not completely separate from using past or present tense, but rather a subset of each. So in this case, since you're using past tense, you would need to use past future tense. An example:

Meanwhile, Jonghyun was busy wrapping his bruised finger tips with sticky tape so that his fingers won't hurt during future practices.

- Meanwhile, Jonghyun was busy wrapping his bruised finger tips with sticky tape so that his fingers wouldn't hurt during future practices.

Won't hurt is future present tense - 'will not' . 'Would not' needs to be used instead. 

Now one last sentence before I leave the grammar alone.

"I can't believe that one of my band mates who actually look cool playing the guitar had no social life,"...

- "I can't believe that one of my band mates who actually looks cool playing the guitar has no social life,"...

Firstly, 'one of my band mates' is singular and therefore needs a singular verb (Singular verbs are the ones with the 's'es. Don't ask me why I have no idea either). Secondly, the 'had' should be in present tense because using 'had' means that Jonghyun has gained social skills but that makes no sense in this insult. Usually, switching tense in a story is a tricky thing but contrary to popular belief, does need to be done. The usual advice is to take note of the time - did the thing happen in the past, is it happening, or has it not happened yet?

That said, most of your grammar mistakes (except for the second one which is a simple error of parallel tense), are that of advanced grammar mistakes. Most of the time your tenses are quite consistent and doesn't affect the reading flow of the story and if not for the fact I was reviewing, I would not actually be bothered by this at all. Still, do proof-read. I spotted a few mistakes that can only be careless ones (like forgetting to capitalize the first letter of a name and calling Yunmi a young 'master').

What did bug me quite a bit however, was sentence structure.

At times, it's a minor thing. Like the last example I mentioned. Although it's grammatically correct, I would suggest to write it this way instead:

- "I can't believe that one of my band mates, the one who actually looks cool playing the guitar, has no social life,"... OR "I can't believe that one of my band mates has no social life,"...

Because there's only two band mates who play the guitar, so having that additional line 'who actually looks cool playing the guitar' feels awkward unless Jungshin is being snarky and also indirectly insulting Yonghwa which can be done with the addition of 'the one'. If not I'd just take it out so Jungshin is just saying that he can't believe one of his band mates has no social life, which is insinuating that someone who associates with him couldn't have no social life, because he doesn't hang out with losers (or something like that). You see that with just some slight changes, the whole meaning of the sentence takes on much additional meaning, and the reason I give these suggestions is because 1) it reflects the character of Jungshin better and 2) the flow of the writing becomes a lot smoother. But this is just my personal opinion and even if you don't change it, it works the way it is.

 At other times thought, it's a major source of confusion. Let's example the example below:

Students who were waiting for their next class and were talking with their friends by the high glass windows, stopped and started to stare at Yunmi as she walked passed. Some were even whispering behind her back. The atmosphere changed and the sound of her stilettos made in contact with the marble floor could literally be heard until the end of the hall.

Surprisingly, if you actually read it part by part, it makes complete grammatical sense. However, it's extremely confusing to read and seems wrong at first.

The simplest way to write it would be, 'Students who were waiting for their next class [] with their friends [], stopped and started to stare at Yunmi as she walked passed. Some were even whispering behind her back.' All the things I deleted were unnecessary information that when placed in that manner, only confused. This is a lot clearer.

However, of course that would mean you lose those bits of description, which you might not want. Then what should we do? Well, you could rewrite it as:  

- Students[], waiting for their next class and talking with their friends by the high glass windows, stopped and started to stare at Yunmi as she walked passed. Some were even whispering behind her back.

However, I personally have a problem with that because the way it's phrased makes it seemed as if the students had not only stopped talking but also stopped waiting for their classes as well - which isn't true. Also, a more minor point is that the first part indicates that there was absolute silence when Yunmi appeared, and yet there's whispering in the second part. So, maybe it'd be better to put it this way:

- Students who were waiting for their next class by the high glass windows, stopped talking with their friends and started to stare at Yunmi as she walked passed. Some []even started whispering behind her back.

Makes a little more sense and is still easier to read. To make it easier still, we can rephrase it to:

- Students who were waiting with their friends for their next class by the high glass windows, stopped talking and started to stare at Yunmi as she walked passed. Some even started whispering behind her back.

There, much easier to read and yet it doesn't lose any of the information that was stated in the original!

Funny I'm picking on this since I'm usually an advocate for long, complicated sentence structures because it just feels more elegant and shows off skill when done correctly. However, the way you do it is confusing mostly because I find that you tend to separate clauses that would flow better put together, and then you put together clauses that would work better separate. For the example above, in the first part, it is actually possible to put the first two sentences together. Let's use my modified version of your sentence to demonstrate:

Students who were waiting with their friends for their next class by the high glass windows, stopped talking and started to stare at Yunmi as she walked passed. Some even started whispering behind her back.

- Students who were waiting with their friends for their next class by the high glass windows, stopped talking and started to stare at Yunmi as she walked passed, some even starting to whisper behind her back.

The sentence might be long, but it's in no way confusing.

However, in the second part of the paragraph, the two parts would read better separated:

The atmosphere changed and the sound of her stilettos made in contact with the marble floor could literally be heard until the end of the hall.

- The atmosphere changed.[] The sound of her stilettos made in contact with the marble floor could literally be heard until the end of the hall.

The first and second parts of this sentences are not dependant clauses so there's no need to join the two sentences together. In fact, the first part of this sentence has more connection to the sentence before and could be written as: Some even started whispering behind her back - the atmosphere had changed.

Also, you tend to be stingy on your commas. Overuse isn't good, but underuse isn't good either - especially if you want to foray into more complicated sentence structures. So your very last sentence should be:

- The sound of her stilettos, made in contact with the marble floor, could literally be heard until the end of the hall.

Deciding when to use commas can be tricky, but usually the rule is that, the parts which you surround with commas like in the case above, can be easily taken out and the sentence would still make sense. I.e. The sound of her stilettos could literally be heard until the end of the hall.

So yeah. I understand sentence structure is sort of bordering on style and is sort of subjective, but like I said - these are suggestions and it's up to you whether you want to take them or not.

Style

I appreciate the attempt at a more complicated style because the story about songs and music and thus a complicated writing style makes sense because it makes the story more lyrical. However, like I said in the above section on grammar, it was done it a way that made the writing seem confused and frequently hard to understand. So although I like that it's complicated, it could have been done better.

Before I end this part, I would just like to say that I loved the writing in the first chapter, but subsequently, the writing in the later parts sort of disappointed me a little. Make of that what you will.

Okay, overall judgement. I'm personally not a fan of high-school-ish drama plots unless the writing is absolutely fantastic. This fic is not of that calibre yet, but it has every potential to be. The writing just needs to have a little more thought put into it to make sure that at least make sure it doesn't confuse the reader and certainly, a little proof-reading might be in order to eliminate stupid mistakes which made me laugh in the wrong kind of way.

Still, if you're a fan of this kind of plot and aren't very particular about writing, then I would say to go ahead and give this a try.

To end off, my personal favourite part of the story:

Yunmi stiffened at the word trust; she had the worst luck when it comes to trusting people. One by one, the people whom she used to trust either left her or took advantage of it.

"Then why should I trust you?" There was a glint of coldness in her voice which made Jonghyun speechless for a couple of seconds.

Jonghyun then laughed, clearly amused by the auburn haired girl who was walking beside him.

"That, is a good question."