Review for violin: One Person…

Title: 4/5

As of now when I am reviewing this, it is seemingly unclear since there are only two chapters. However, I do think that from what I have read so far, “One Person” is a very suitable title for your story. I would rethink and tweak it a little, however, since as a reader I would not necessarily click on such a common title. Also, I would advise against capitalizing your title, as that becomes unnecessary and excessive.

 

Description: 5/15

You have a nice two-line excerpt and character descriptions, but that does not give readers a good preview to the story. While the dialogue you included can allow readers to assume a portion of the plot, it is really too vague for some people to be interested in going to the first chapter. Describe what is going to happen a little more, but not too much (otherwise you’d give the plot away), and then end it with the lovely and suspenseful lines you have so far.

 

Originality & Creativity: 18/20

You only wrote two chapters so far, but I find it very interesting! It is original; you could do so much cliché – for the lack of a better word – stuff with fanfiction but the two of you chose a plotline that is not common at all. The character combination I also have never seen before.

 

Flow: 4/10

I like how you switched point-of-views between chapters. The problem I have with the pace you are providing to the story is this: when Tiffany accepts the job, there are just about no premises as to why. Did she need it? And if she did, enough to leave the sister that she loves so much? To readers, it would not make enough sense. I don’t mean to say you have to spell everything out in the very beginning; you do only have a few chapters, but if you could provide backstory to improve it, that would make the plot much clearer and interesting.

 

Grammar & Spelling: 5/15

There are several mistakes throughout what you have written so far. I do not want to correct every single error for you; I will just be naming a few examples for you to be able to follow and then edit accordingly if and when you read over your own writing (which I highly recommend to any writer).

In the description:

Do you forget what you promise to me?

should be:

Did you forget what you promised me?   

 

Chapter One:

Jieun looked at her table where documents and files are piled up, she sighed “I’m sure I will not go home today…” She opens the documents and looked at the case that wrote in the document.

changed to:

Jieun looked at her table, where documents and files are piled up. She sighed, “I’m sure I will not go home today…”

She opened the documents and looked at the cases that were written inside of them.

When you are writing, try to stay in the same tense. If you don’t want to cause confusion with yourself and with the readers, make sure that you stay consistent (in this case, change the verbs all to the past tense).

Her eyes were about to burst tear but she hold it not showing her weak side in front of Myungsoo.

to

Her eyes were about to burst into tears, but she held it, not showing her weak side in front of Myungsoo.

You also have some punctuation issues. With a clause similar to “but she held it”, you need to add commas, or split it into two different sentences. I recommend staying with what I have changed it to; the use of “but” gives more emphasis in this situation.

 

Chapter Two:

She has to left all her brightness because her duty is to protect her country from the dangerous.

to

She had to leave all her brightness behind because her duty was to protect her country from danger.

“Dangerous”…what? What exactly is dangerous? You cannot end a sentence with an adjective like this. Since I did not know what sort of dangerous things you were referring to, I could only edit it to the noun form. When you’re actually changing it, you can use “dangerous” but add a noun to the end.

With “had to leave”, when you have a phrase such as “had to” or “has to,” you need to leave the following verb (in this case, “leave”) in the present tense.

One thing I notice with your writing is that you have a tendency to use commas in the wrong context, and that you don’t when they are needed (as with the correction in ch.1). For example, in the following sentence:

Now she just lives at The Black Organization hide-out, it was old mansion that full of cobweb and the dry leaves.

This should be:

Now she just lives at the Black Organization hideout; it was an old mansion that was full of cobwebs and dry leaves.

Note the change of the comma to a semi-colon. When combining two sentences as you tried to do with a comma, the semi-colon becomes necessary.

Also, this is just a sidenote. When you are writing the names of organizations, you usually do not capitalize “the”. I’m not sure if this applies to yours, just in case it might be a sort of “special” organization?

Overall, I would pay the most attention to your verb tense and how they agree with nouns. Watch out for usage of commas and also how you should set up your paragraphs according to when the subject changes, just as you would when the speaker changes in a dialogue.

 

Characters:  9/15

So far there seems to be no differentiation between characters. They’re all sad in one form or another; they’re all resentful or harbor some sort of horrible feeling. They don’t seem very unique as of now. I hope that you will add lots of character development in future chapters!

 

Enjoyment & Extras: 8/15

The poster matched quite well with the current development of your story. However, as a native speaker of English, the intrusion of your errors within the story made it quite difficult for me to focus on the actual plotline.

Score: 53

-- Notes: Sorry if I seem overly harsh. I understand that English might not be your first language, but there are definitely people who would (regardless of whether or not English is your strength) bash your grammar issues; because of this, I believe that I have to be harsh to improve your writing. There really isn’t a simple way to learn another language to perfection, but practice and reading stories of native speakers would help out a lot. Keep writing! --