Requested By: cheery45

Story Title: Loving you kills me

Reviewed By: Midnight-B2UTY

 

 

01 Title [1/5]:

It’s very cliché-sounding. I haven’t seen many titles exactly like this, but it just sounds so cliché. I’ve heard phrases like this a lot. It just sounds so overused. And really cheesy, too.

 

It’s also not properly capitalized. In titles, you would:

-       Always capitalize the first and last word.

-       Always capitalize the nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and subordinating conjunctions (words like “although,” “because,” “when,” etc.).

There are a lot more rules to capitalization in titles, but that would take a long time to list. I only listed the ones that apply to your specific title, but if you want the rest of the rules, click here (there really aren’t that much). Your title should be properly typed as:

Loving You Kills Me

 

Please keep in mind that titles are very important; first impressions are very important. That’s why it’s really necessary to have an eye-catching title. You don’t want to choose a title that everyone else has; you want to choose a title that will make the person go, “Wow, what’s this story about?” but your title didn’t do that for me. As I’ve stated earlier, it was a bit cliché-sounding.

 

I only gave you one point because it was related to your story, which is good because some authors choose titles that having nothing to do with their fanfic.

 

02 Design [/5]:

You don’t have a poster. I suggest you get one. I mean, it’s not mandatory, but just suggested. After all, first impressions matter, but although they matter, they’re not as important as your actual story.

You have a background, which matches the story, but is a little too much; it’s almost, like, overcrowded. You want to have a simple background that’s not distracting.

 

03 Description/Foreword [6/10]:

There were a lot of aspects to your description and foreword that I really didn’t like all that much.

Firstly, let’s talk about the font-sizes. I don’t think it’s necessary to make them that… huge. It looks sloppy and unprofessional. You want to stick to sizes fourteen and sixteen, whichever you prefer more (I’d prefer fourteen).

 

Now let’s talk about the pictures for the characters. Some of them aren’t clear, Joon doesn’t even have a picture, and Shin Woo’s picture doesn’t show up. You should try to find the most HD pictures you could.

Using low-quality pictures like that make you, again, look messy and sloppy. You should also space your descriptions about better. Use a divider to separate each character’s picture/description with another character’s picures/descriptions.

 

Moving on to your actual character descriptions, you want to keep your description/foreword as simple as possible. If you write too much about your characters, you could:

a.)   spoil your characters’ personalities and feelings.

b.)   bore the reader before they even get to the first chapter.

c.)   scare your readers away with the many character descriptions.

You don’t want to give their personalities away. Don’t tell us that Kiseop is a heartbreaker because of a girl. Don’t tell us that he’s sensitive on the inside. Don’t tell us his list of phobias. Don’t tell us Dong Yeon is fake and ty. You want us to find that out when we read the actual story.

 

Just keep in mind that you want your descriptions to be short and vague so you don’t spoil anything, but interesting to make the person click the “Next” button.

 

Also, I think the one sentence you have in your description is very exaggerated. What happens when 2 people with interesting personalities meet the most popular guys in Korea?! Eli and the other members of U-Kiss you have in your story are just flower boys who work at a café. Sure, they’re popular with girls and people who go to that café, but I highly doubt they’re “the most popular guys in Korea.” They’re not even famous idols or anything; they’re just… guys who work in a café.

 

04 Plot [14/20]:

I think your plot is a bit unrealistic. Like, for example, when Eli hired Joon and Shin Woo to work at the café. That was just so unprofessional and unbelievable. Who would ever hire a stranger without having them fill out a résumé? Eli could have been hiring a murderer or a robber for all he knew!

Just because Joon saved him that one day, doesn’t mean that he’s a good person. Some people just act sweet and heroic, but really aren’t that way. It was just so unrealistic. Eli didn’t ask Joon if he had any experience, they didn’t discuss paychecks, they didn’t discuss anything.

I understand that this is fiction and that fiction isn’t supposed to be realistic. However, you should be able to draw a fine line between fiction and reality. Don’t cross that line.

 

Moving aside from the believability of the plot, I think your actual plot was okay. It was funny, and there were a lot of moments that made me smile like an idiot. Some of it was a bit cliché, and I’ll go over it in the “Originality” section. It also moved too fast, but I’ll go over that in the “Flow” section.

 

05 Characters [12/20]:

What I’ve noticed with your story is that you use dialogue… a lot… a lot, a lot. You don’t use dialogue tags to help the reader visualize what’s happening. You just simply… use dialogue. That’s just a big no-no for me. You see, you cannot solely rely on dialogue to write your story. You had no depth to your characters, no depth to your plot.

Dialogue is a great way to express a character’s feelings, yes, but they aren’t the only way. I think the best way to express a character is through their actions. That’s why I recommend you use less dialogue and more details. I’m not telling you to not have any dialogue at all. No. What I’m saying is to have less dialogue.

 

You need to include more details, more imagery, more emotion into your writing. Your writing seems very two-dimensional. There’s no… feeling; no… passion. You have to try to understand the character; to write about them with great detail and emotion as if you were really in their shoes; to let the reader feel the character’s pain or happiness.

 

What’s good about your characters is that your characters stick to their roles. Sometimes, authors would make this super cute innocent girl act all witty and sarcastic, which isn’t right because that’s not part of her personality. I like that you don’t do that. Your characters do things that they should do and say things that they should say. Their actions match the personalities you had given them.

 

06 Originality [6/10]:

The flower boys working in a café isn’t all that original, but I like that you gave your story a lot of twists to make it your own.

Joon’s character is really interesting. I like that you leave his/her gender really mysterious. But having your readers vote in a poll of what they want him/her to be kind of just ruined the excitement of finding out through the story.

Don’t do polls like, “Who do you want ____ to end up with?” If you ask that and people vote, it just spoils the entire plot! I like reading stories because I like the excitement of cliffhangers, the feeling of curiosity about what’s going to happen next, but when I see polls like that, the ending isn’t surprising anymore and that just ruins the whole excitement.

 

Now I’m getting off topic. Okay, back to the originality. I think your characters are a bit cliché. I mean, you have the flirty player Kiseop, the happy-go-lucky guy/girl (?) Joon, the “badass” girl Shin Woo, the clingy girlfriend Dong Yeon, etc. They’re all characters that I’ve seen before – many times, too.

 

07 Flow [2/10]:

I think your story escalated really quickly. Like… really quickly. Let me give you an example from chapter one of your story:

“DUDE! Leave that guy alone!”

I saw a person standing there wearing a black hoodie, long black pants and a pair of black and white sneakers. I think he was a male...? He was smaller than an average male.

“What do you want!” He spat in the peron's face

“What do I want...I want to fight you!!!”

He suddenly went flying in the air and in 45 seconds he had defeated the guy who was double his size.

(I shrunk everything and changed the font to all black because it was hard on my eyes.)

 

Eli had accidentally bumped into the guy, apologized immediately, but the guy literally just punched and kicked him right after he had apologized. And then just a few lines after that, Joon came (which is the scene I had pasted up there). And then they started fighting.

It was just so… fast. I understand that fights happened fast, but this one was rather… stupid. Eli had accidentally bumped into the guy. Eli had apologized immediately afterwards. But the guy suddenly decided to turn into the Hulk and start beating up Eli. That was fast. Like, really fast.

 

The flow felt twice as fast than it should have because you don’t use a wide amount of details. That’s where I get into my next point: Another thing that really affects the flow of a story is the sentence structure. It’s good to include a lot of complex, compound, and simple sentences; to mix them; to use a variety of them. If you read your sentences, they barely have any details.

There are a few adjectives, but not really well-written. What I mean by that is that you just told us what he was wearing – you didn’t use any details, any emotions in your writing; it was all very blunt, very straightforward, very two-dimensional.

 

Then, as I stated earlier, you didn’t have a lot of details. This sentence was especially bad: He suddenly went flying in the air and in 45 seconds he had defeated the guy who was double his size. While most stories I’ve read went really in-depth with their fight scenes by including adjectives, adverbs, emotions, sensory details, imagery, and writing paragraphs worth of details… you wrote just one sentence.

Because it was just one short, simple sentence, the words flew by very quickly, affecting the entire flow. It felt too rushed, not detailed enough.

 

There are many more instances where the flow was really fast, but that would take literally forever for me to explain. I’m really so sorry if I sound so rude and repetitive. I just really need to make sure I got the point across to you.

 

08 Grammar/Vocabulary [7/15]:

Although you said you may have a lot of spelling errors, you really don’t have any; the ones that you do have are little typos, probably because you said you were a bit careless.

Spelling Errors (“yours/correct” format):

Chapter 3:

string/staring;

whinging/whining

Chapter 4:

down/don’t;

to hard/too hard

Chapter 5:

rtables/tables;

wason/was one

Chapter 7:

strains/strands;

cluthed/clutched

Other than those meaningless typos, your spelling was pretty much perfect. But the real problem isn’t spelling – it’s grammar. You have… a lot of grammar mistakes.

 

Let’s start with the most basic: ellipses (…).

1.    You would use an ellipsis when you omit (delete) a word/words from a sentence. Example: This is a complete sentence that I’m using as an example for how to use ellipses. If you were to omit words from that sentence using ellipses, it would look like this: This is… an example for how to use ellispes.

2.    You would also use an ellipsis for dramatic effect; to show a pause between words. Example: I… don’t know what to say. This is just too… overwhelming.

You seriously overuse the ellispsis. You have a whole bunch in almost every sentence. It’s okay to have a few, but it gets annoying after seeing so many of them.

 

Another thing I’ve noticed is that, sometimes, you don’t punctuate your sentences.

Whenever there’s a question, you have to end it with a question mark. Even when there’s a question, you use an ellipsis. You can, but you have to add a question mark after, like this: Do you see what I’m trying to say…? Sometimes you do that, but other times you don’t.

 

Let’s discuss your dialogue which makes up about your entire story. There are a lot of different aspects to dialogue. Firstly, whenever there is a new speaker, it’s a new parargraph. You already do this correctly, so that’s good. Secondly, whenever there is a dialogue tag (the “he said/she said” stuff), you would not capitalize it.

Yours [Ch.2]: “Can I have a regular cappuccino? The girl asked.

Corrected: “Can I have a regular cappuccino?” the girl asked.

Reason: You always need both beginning and ending quotation marks. Again, whenever there’s a dialogue tag, you would not capitalize. If it was an action like this, “Can I have a regular cappuccino?” The girl looked at the waiter, then you would have to capitalize it because it’s not a dialogue tag.

Click here for more information about dialogue.

 

Next let’s talk about capitalization.

Yours [Ch.2 Title]: Do you want to work at my café??

Corrected: Do You Want to Work at My Café?

Reason: I stated the reasons up in the list in the “Title” section. “To” is a preposition, and therefore would not need to be capitalized (same with “at”). The first and last words are always capitalized. I think one question mark is all that’s needed to get the point across.

You also sometimes capitalize words you don’t need to capitalize in regular sentences. The words “female” and “male” don’t need to be capitalized unless they’re at the beginning of the sentence (in chapter 5). You also capitalized the word “gym” when it was at the middle or end (I forgot) of the sentence. I don’t remember what chapter that was though.

 

What most non-native speakers have trouble with is parallel structure, which is having all the verbs and stuff in the same tense. You, though, don’t really seem to struggle with it that much. You mostly write in present tense through your story, so keep it that way. Sometimes, you write in present tense though.

Yours [Ch.3]: I lead him to Soohyun.

Corrected: I led him to Soohyun.

Reason: Again, you want to make sure all your verbs are in the same tense. You make this mistake again in the chapter when you say, “Joon was staring at me blankly” and “I lead him to Dongho.” It should be: Joon stared at me blankly. and I led him to Dongho.

 

Overall, though, I think your grammar is at least understandable. It’s not confusing and doesn’t make me go, “What?” You don’t really have many errors, and it’s still readable (at least, for me since I’m not really a Grammar Nazi).

The only problem you have is that you should try to expand your sentence structures. Don’t just use dialogue. Use a variety of different sentences. Try to expand your vocabulary, but don’t make it too bombastic/fancy. Try to add more details into your sentences.

 

09 Overall Enjoyment [15/20]:

I don’t really like color-coded fanfics. It’s hard for me to remember which color belongs to which person because I have quite bad memory. Plus, Joon’s color is too bright for my eyes.

Honestly, despite the low score and the strictness in this review, I quite enjoyed your story. I thought Shin Woo and Kiseop were just so cute and adorable! There were a lot of parts that made me laugh, a lot of parts that made me smile. It was definitely very cute, but a little bit too cheesy for my tastes – just a little.

 

10 Grade: 63/110 = 57.3%

I really hope I wasn’t too harsh; I was just being honest with everything. I’m really sorry if I was too mean with my words! I’m just trying to point out as much as I can since you’re in the beginning stages of your fanfic and still have a lot of room for improvement. I think if you just had more details, more depth, you would be an outstanding writer.

Don’t let the score discourage you. It’s just a number, right? Just focus on the things I said, not the numbers I gave.

Thanks for requesting, and I’m sorry about the long wait! This review literally took me hours and hours to complete, so I hope you’re satisfied with it.