ex.

*click here for the story*

 

Plot: ★★★★ (4/5)

The plot is essentially that Kris wants to kiss Chen. There's a clear, defined conflict (Kris wants to kiss Chen, Chen doesn't want to be kissed) that ends in a good resolution (not particularly powerful, but really not bad). My main problem with the plot was that you wasted it with flat characters and made it really skeletal. There wasn't anything interesting about the plot - okay, Chen gets drunk or something; okay, they hold hands. Whatever. There wasn't much of a , there wasn't much tension.



Characterization: ★★★ (3/5)

What I can see is that Kris is cocky, , and somehow a gentleman. This could possibly make an interesting character/character development (either he's but controls himself which adds depth to a character, or he learns that there's more to life than ). Instead, you played it off as almost two different characters; early Kris, who basically wanted to kiss Chen and do all sorts of skinship things, and late Kris, who randomly became more shy and less . There was no bridge between these two personalities. It just seems like he became a different character.

Chen wasn't as bad. I could at least follow his thought process between not liking skinship and being okay with it. I did feel that he must have had very weak morals in order to get convinced that quickly, though. If he had dated Kris for eleven months and firmly kept his "no skinship" policy, it would probably take a lot longer than a day or two to convince him that skinship wasn't that bad.

It did seem very out-of-character and just plain weird for Chen to get drunk. It seemed more like you were trying to go for a drunken confession cliché or something and screwed Chen's character over along the way.

Both characters are a bit flat, but it's a fluffy romance fic; in that setting, they're characterized pretty well. Character development needs work.



Flow/Grammar/Spelling: ★ (1/5)

A lot of your problems with "flow" come more from problems with grammar than anything; that's why I'm lumping them together.

The biggest problem I found were tense changes. Most of the story is written in past tense; "he happily responded", "he pouted", "Chen formed", etc. Whenever you talk about anything internally, though, you switch to the present. Don't do that. If you're writing in past tense, internalized still happen in past tense.

Examples:

"Chen smiled. There are no words to describe what he is feeling."
This would be better as "Chen smiled. There were no words to describe what he felt".
In terms of flow, "there are no words to describe what he is feeling" is also awkward because it uses a lot of unnecessary words to get the idea across. It's also in a passive tone of voice (there are) which makes the action seem less immediate and more detached. "What he felt couldn't be described by words alone" would be a better sentence, I feel.

"He may be disappointed, but disappointment fades and love remains."
This would be better as "He may have been disappointed, but disappointment fades and love remains."
In terms of flow, this is also an awkward sentence. At first glance, it's hard to understand - what does he being disappointed have anything to do with love remaining? It would probably be better as "He was disappointed, but over time, disappointment fades. Love does not."

Outside of pure grammar - you use passive voice a lot. "Admiration is starting, love is growing, and his blood is rushing." Like I mentioned before - passive voice takes away the immediacy and impact of an action. It's good to use sometimes, especially if you're trying to make something less obvious and impactful. In the cases I listed above, active voice would be more appropriate.

I'm going to guess that English isn't your first language, because a lot of your wording is very awkward. I'm not certain if there are actual grammatical errors, but there are definitely incorrect idioms and sentence structures.

You add a lot of asides to your story (the bit about DeeOh's, or the insights into the characters). You also add them in the middle of somewhat-not-related things (I'm specifically thinking about the random DeeOh's interjection). Exposition like that should be given a paragraph of its own, or otherwise distinguished from the rest of the story. The sudden casualness (as well as the air of you suddenly addressing the reader instead of telling the story) destroys the flow of the story. It makes everything disjointed and ruins and possible emotional impact of the story.

When there are two males in the main focus of the story, using "he" gets very confusing. You tried to solve that by using their names to differentiate. In passages where the POV changes between Chen and Kris, though, even one "he" can be very confusing. Don't change POV in the middle of a paragraph. If you must, start a new paragraph. I often find that it's better to hold off on POV changes until the next chapter or section of the story. In other words, if you're talking about how Kris sees Chen in one event, then talk about how Kris sees Chen. Don't talk about how Chen sees Kris, and then how Kris sees Chen seeing Kris, etc.

There weren't spelling problems per se, but there were instances where you used the wrong word. It could have been a misspelling or a grammar mistake - I can't tell.

Originality: ★★ (2/5)

I doubt it's the first story about someone wanting their first kiss. It seems like a very cliché premise, and the way it was executed was chock full of clichés. I could correctly predict most of the fic. As soon as alcohol was mentioned, I knew Chen was going to get drunk (or semi-drunk) and he would get all touchy-feely with Kris. I knew that they were going to kiss during New Year's (and that ending was definitely cliché, but it was also really cute, so I'll let it slide).

Essentially, it wasn't that original and it was very predictable, but there was cuteness so I don't mind that much.

Overall: ★★★ (2.5/5)

I actually did end up liking it somewhat, so that got you points. It wasn't well-written, but it was cute. It was also very good idea. I'd actually suggest that you rewrite this in a few year's time, when you've gotten better at writing. I would love to see this revamped, with minimal spelling/grammar problems and written in a way that isn't as cliché and flows better.

At the moment, though, your grammar is a huge deterrent and it's probably making the story seem a lot worse than it actually is.

 

~~~

I hope it wasn't too harsh... OTL

 

 

2nd;

Plot:  (2/5)

Two straight guys are told to film a gay movie together and in the process realize that they're gay, right? This possibly touches on a sensitive topic - do people choose to be gay? If Jonghyun and Key were gay and in denial (or still in the closet), then it could make more sense for them to fall in love with each other. If they actually were straight to begin with and turn gay...that's not a great arena to dive into, because a lot of people would be offended by the idea that it's a choice to be gay. Perhaps both Jonghyun and Key are biual or panual - that could work.

I think you've got details of the filmmaking business all wrong. I don't know what kind of director would forcibly tell their actors to hug and kiss each other the first time they meet, before the script reading, before anything. It just doesn't seem realistic to me. I'm also pretty sure the actors themselves have a say in what movies they'd do - their managers would still have to go through them for permission, tell them to read through the script. Also, no movie director would offer to pay an actor "as much as he wants". It's much too risky, especially if the movie flops.

Besides more "researchy" points, I don't think the plot is all that bad. It's a kind of "star-crossed lovers that hate each other" plot, which has been used a thousand times but still interests people. I'm glad it's not a high school fic - there's a lot of those going around, but not so much "two actors in the film industry", even though I have read fic based on that idea.


Characterization:  (3/5)

They haven't really built characters yet. Both Jonghyun and Key seem to be faceless - neither are willing to act in this movie, both are hot-headed and short-tempered, and that seems to be the entire basis of their personalities. Considering the length, though, I'd say it's okay.

Same goes for Minho and Onew. They just haven't shown up enough to have good, fleshed-out personalities.


Flow:  (1.5/5)

First, don't put a/n's in the middle of the story, even if it's in tiny font asking about the appearance of deer in Korea. If you feel you must, put it at the end of the story - a/n's in the middle are very jolting and tend to destroy the flow of the entire paragraph.

Second, if you're going to write in first person, try and stick with one person. If you can't do that for the whole story, try at least one person per chapter. Don't switch in the middle, and most of all, don't label it if, for some reason, you do. It's really annoying to see a "____'s P.O.V." in the middle of the story, since it grabs the reader's attention and pulls him/her away from the story and into the reality of "oh, someone wrote this." As an author, that's probably not what you want to do. (Things that are more meta or fourth-wall-breaking are a different matter entirely).

Third: You tend to have giant chunks of the story which is entirely dialogue. Sometimes, stylistically, it works. Other times, it just gets confusing and boring - readers don't only want to know what the characters are discussing; they also want to know what's going on while things are being discussed. Remember that we do not exist in this world - it's your job to bring us in.


Grammar/Spelling: ★ (1/5)

You have confusion between "your" and "you're" at some parts, which may be a typo or may not be. Just to clarify: "your" is possessive, "you're" is a contraction between "you" and "are". "Your dog" means the dog that belongs to you; "you're a dog" means "you are a dog".

One of you main problems seems to be capitalization/punctuation regarding dialogue/quotation marks. If you were to end a dialogue with a period (from the second chapter: "Yeah right, you're on your way to becoming a huge movie star.") you should probably start a new sentence afterwards (in other words, not "She said." Something like "She flung her arms out, trying to emphasize the enormity of his future popularity" would work better; "She said" would be better with a direct object, which would then be repetitive and would render the dialogue obsolete).

If you would like to use "she said" (uncapitalized), you would have to end the dialogue with a comma (or exclamation point/question mark). In the example above, the sentence would then become "Yeah right, you're on your way to becoming a huge movie star," she said. I understand that you intended for the dialogue to have been a complete sentence, but weird dialogue rules override that. Just use a comma.

Your comma usage is very sporadic. Use a comma to set apart introductory elements, such as "well". Use a comma to distinguish parenthetical elements (dependent clauses, things that aren't related to the main idea of the sentence; e.g. in chapter 3: "As I was just finishing my hair I heard my phone ring" should be "As I was just finishing my hair, I heard my phone ring" or even better, "As I finished doing my hair, my phone rang").

There are some sentence fragments ("All from Sekyung", for example) which make the story seem choppy. Technically, proper sentences need a subject (the main noun that the sentence is about) and a verb (what the subject is doing). Everything else is just helpful decoration. In some cases, sentence fragments work well in stories. In others, it just disrupts the flow and confuses the reader. I'd advise you to stay away from sentence fragments for the time being, but that's just my opinion.

Some spelling is off - I'm pretty sure you wrote "chose" and one point where it should have been "choice"; you wrote "trying too" instead of "trying to". "Ok" is better spelled out as "okay".


Overall:  (2/5)

It's not bad. There's serious room for improvement in all categories. I think, at the moment, that you should focus on grammar issues. They're disrupting the flow of the story and may or may not be disrupting with my interpretations of the characters as well - if I can't read it, I can't understand it. I'd advise you to get a beta or an editor to help, if you'd like to take your story up a notch. As it is, it's not horrible.

 

3rd;

 

Plot:  (4/5)

I got really confused at first, because I just thought that Sungmin was Kyuhyun's boytoy and Yesung just cared for Ryeowook. Then, I was confused about who had proposed to Ryeowook and who was trying to break them apart (it said Yesung once in the chapter, and then said "Kyuhyun is destroyed" later, which I thought could mean that Kyuhyun was so messed up he'd be willing to sabotage his love's life). The way you wrote the chapters - with very ambiguous pronouns much of the way through, and then a kind of punch at the end - didn't help the confusion.

However, confusion aside, it wasn't a bad plot. There was something of a classic "romance/Romeo and Juliet" undertone, and I guessed that Ryeowook would get hit by a car because, well, road, and that's used so much in those kinds of romantic twists. The buildup, though confusing, was done in a way that brought everything together by the end. There weren't really huge plotholes or loose ends that I could see.

My problem with the ending was that technically, both Ryeowook and Sungmin were at fault for Ryeowook's death. Ryeowook had ran out into the road suddenly; Sungmin could easily plead that he couldn't have stopped in time, and so hit Ryeowook entirely by accident. That would be a possible charge of negligence, I think, but not one of murder. It would be easy to get him off - it may not have even went to court, unless they found suspicious evidence (but it didn't seem premediated).


Characterization:  (3/5)

Ryeowook was helpless, depressed, and emotional - that's all I got. It was a solid characterization, but not a dynamic one, and he just got on my nerves by the end. He wasn't very relatable - he reminded me of those girls in Asian dramas that always get hurt from the stupidest things and always need guys to rescue them. He was boring, but at least he had a personality.

Yesung and Kyuhyun seemed interchangeable. They both loved Ryeowook, they both were a bit cold and not the nicest people on the planet. It seemed that, had the circumstances been different, Yesung could have been the one that ended up being Ryeowook's fiancé and Kyuhyun the one that drove Yesung into bankruptcy. Neither of them were bad or boring characters (especially Yesung - I liked his turmoil over how to deal with Ryeowook, about his unrequited love and his jealousy. He was a dynamic, interesting character). There was, however, a sense that neither of them were really original or interesting while reading simply because they were so much alike. When looked at separately, Yesung and Kyuhyun are good characters. When put together in a story like this, they just became redundant.

I wasn't sure whether to pity Sungmin at the beginning or not (sob stories annoy me, and by the time his father got out of jail, he'd have been 23 years old - that wouldn't count as a "young boy" at all in my book). I felt his jealousy could be understandable, given the circumstances of his past and being used to Kyuhyun so much (emotional manipulation on Kyuhyun's part, perhaps?), but his mental deterioration was sudden and seemed unrealistic. His chapter in the finale made it seem like he'd just cracked after Kyuhyun had told him about Ryeowook and proceeded to become a raging homicidal maniac or something. I think it would have been better if he was more tortured over his decision - somewhat more Magneto than the Joker, if that makes any sense.


Flow:  (2/5)

By the time I got into the story, the lack of flow didn't really bother me. At the beginning, though, it was probably one of the main factors that contributed to my boredom.

Like in the description, you tended to use a lot of fancy adjectives, many that didn't make sense in the context of the story. You also tried to go "poetic", I think, with the bolding and the italicizing and the parentheses. I personally don't mind italicizing, but bolding is distracting and screams that you're trying too hard. Of course, that's a personal  preference, so there's absolutely no need to change it.

The fancy adjectives were distracting - it was as if you'd randomly stuck in random words at times. There were also cases of redundancy - "vexed and absolutely frustrated" basically means "frustrated and even more frustrated". You had a couple noun-verb discrepancies as well, but those could be typos (weeks of loneliness have, not has).

I personally love using parentheses in my own writing. However, I treat these as asides to the audience, and therefore keep everything related to the idea in the parenthesis. Sometimes, it means that I have an entire paragraph (or two) in parenthesis. That's okay. What doesn't work so well in yours is that you put a dependent clause in parenthesis, and then refer directly back to them in the next sentence. If you're going to do that, what's the point of putting the parentheses in? It would be better just to not have them at all.

In the first chapter in particular, you did quite a bit of switching between third-person limited omniscient and third-person omniscient. It got confusing, because some parts were from Kyuhyun's  POV, quite obviously, and then some parts were completely disconnected from his thoughts, seemingly told from the POV of the world or something. (e.g. "the room finds peace again" would be more omniscient, while the things related to how Kyuhyun feels would be limited.)


Grammar/Spelling:  (4/5)

Overall, it was decent. There were weird word choices at times (Yesung "whips" tears off of Ryeowook's face; it probably should have been "wipes"; you use "hence" when "therefore" would work better), and I think there's a couple things about idioms (common English phrases) that were missed (usage of on vs. in vs. as, for example).


Originality:  (3/5)

As I said before, I expected that Ryeowook would be hit by a car, and I expected that Sungmin would have something to do with it, seeing as that's how jealous exes deal with things in a lot of works of fiction. As I also said before, there were serious elements of Romeo and Juliet. However, it wasn't entirely cliché, and there were some interesting points (and it was written pretty well).


Overall: ★ (3/5)

The flow (or lack thereof) and some of the confusion threw me off, but it was still a good read. The ending lines about seven spaces down from the rest of the story annoyed me as well, since they had an emotional effect the first two or so times, but then they just got repetitive and boring. If Ryeowook got less whiny, it would also be more enjoyable - I wouldn't want to tell him to man the hell up all the time.


 

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