TITLE: (5/5)

Without even reading anything, I am already hooked because I (personally) love love LOVE fake dating stories, so you got me! The title easily tells the reader exactly what this story will be about, and if they’re like me, they’ll definitely be interested!

FOREWORD + DESCRIPTION: (8/10)

Your description is simple and straight to the point. The fact that this actually does happen in real life too makes it all that much better. You give a leading into what the story will entail, setting the scene and what’s going on. As with your previous story, the gifs of the characters is unnecessary. The trailer did an amazing job of adding to your story and showing the characters, and while it didn’t show the supporting characters, I, again, believe that you should leave that to when they come up and how you display them in your story (although I do love how you used Zac Efron).

GRAMMAR + PUNCTUATION: (11/15)

In prepositional phrases, you always need to have a comma after it before continuing with the rest of your sentence. You can see this in your description where you have both “in Korea skinship… in America they’re…” You should have a comma after both countries in those examples because they’re prepositional phrases. Prepositional phrases tell you ‘how’, ‘when’ or ‘where’, for example, how did he order the papers? “In an orderly fashion, Chanyeol organized the papers”. When did he order the papers? “In the morning, Chanyeol ordered the papers in alphabetical order.” Where did he order the papers? “In the break room, Chanyeol ordered the papers.”

In chapter one, you have written “there were always tons of skinship and bromance moments between the two of them.” While this may be true, the way you’ve worded it seems very odd to me, and thought it may apply in this situation, I would try to stay away from the word ‘bromance’.

Also in chapter one, you have this sentence: “From holding hands, hugging and little pecks on the cheek to feeding each other.”

The way you phrased the entire paragraph seemed awkward, so consider changing it to “In America, people aren’t used to seeing two guys showing affection and doing things that have always been a part of their daily lives in Korea like holding hands, hugging, little pecks on the cheek and feeding each other. Unless they’re in a relationship, of course.”

You should also look into splitting this paragraph into two separate paragraphs. Start a new paragraph from ‘one day’ since it doesn't exactly relate to the previous statements.

It’s very rare to hear someone speak “I am a senior.” When you are writing dialogue, write as one would speak. Eg “hey guys, my name’s Mike and I’m a senior this year!” People are not machines with perfect literary articulation.

Again, you have some problem with commas before conjunctions in compound sentences. “Being a gay couple in college can be hard sometimes but you guys do it so naturally”. There should be a comma before the ‘but’.

An easy way to remember this is the acronym FANBOYS. FANBOYS stands for ‘for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so’. If you are combining two simple sentences with one of these conjunctions, don’t forget to put a comma before it!

More commas! “says Chanyeol , ” as well as “man , you two are amazing.”

Instead of using an ellipses to indicate Baek being cut off, use a hyphen. Hyphens let people know that the speaker wasn’t done whereas ellipses usually indicate trailing off.

Try to insert more phrases between your characters’ speaking lines. While it is just two people speaking and it is easy to follow, there are too many quotes one after the other. Even a single sentence like ‘Chanyeol looked at Baekhyun pensively, eyebrows screwed together while he thought,’ will fit into your story seamlessly.

As well as after the ‘don’t think of it as a kiss’ sentence, you can have “Chanyeol looked at Baekhyun with dead eyes, choosing his next words slowly and carefully.”

Your propositions! Chanyeol gets kissed on the lips and Baekhyun won’t judge if he plays on both teams. They’re singing on the campus’ stage.

All in all, DON’T FORGET TO PROOFREAD YOUR STORY! I know that it can be hard sometimes because you REALLLLLY don’t want to reread it, but it does wonders and you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble if you happen to find a mistake.

CHARACTERIZATION: (15/20)

Chapter one, when Mike misunderstands their uality, Chanyeol should be more vehement in trying to deny it if he really doesn't want to be seen like that. He seems to just not care very much and only be slightly trying to deny it.

Mike leaves kinda oddly and suddenly after questioning baekyeol. Can you imagine having a conversation with someone about a party, and then suddenly they say ‘oh, gotta go.’ It’s very abrupt.

While I do understand that much of your story is based around baekyeol being the ‘famous gay couple’, it’s really weird to me that they were introduced like that. “There’s my favourite gay couple!” I know you probably had no intentions of doing this, but I find it a bit insensitive for it to have just been pointed out like that. They’re a couple regardless, the fact that they’re gay should make no difference.

Whoa, Jongin’s intro was really sudden for me! I also don’t think a gay couple would make campus-wide news, but this all plays to your story, right?

Jongin is a nice guy. He comforted Chanyeol when he needed to, let him eat his pizza and ice cream, gave him some wonderful advice, but I don’t think Chanyeol and Jongin were that close at all? In the previous chapter, Chanyeol seemed to want to just get away from Jongin (although to understandably confront Baek), but then he just went to Jongin’s room and let out all his emotions. He literally told Jongin his life story.

You don’t need to change this at all. In fact, I love it! You put secret buddies. Chanyeol and Jongin are SECRET BUDDIES.

I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

YO.

THE KAIYEOL KISS THO.

WHAT A GOOD FRIEND BUT WHO KISSES SOMEONE WHO WAS CRYING LIKE TWO SECONDS AGO SO ABRUPTLY.

Uhh, I understand Chanyeol wanting Baekhyun to love him back, but in chapter six and seven, damn is that boy insistent! He really pined after Baek, and that was a bit much for me.

There were a lot of parts of Chanyeol’s personality that I didn’t like. Yes, he is a sweet boy, but he had a lot of huge mood swings and changed his opinions and views in seconds.  

PLOT: (17/20)

I felt like the story developed rather quickly. In the time span that it took, I felt like it was unrealistic how all the relationships built. Be it from Chanyeol’s sudden realization that he was in love with Baekhyun or how Jongin decided on the spot that he was going to confess his undying love to Jongdae, it all felt rather shallow to me.

The plot itself is an amazing one. Fake dating is an AU that can almost never go wrong, and you’ve executed it quite well.

FLOW + WRITING STYLE: (7/10)

Don’t be afraid to use the formatting! Using italics and bold can really emphasize words that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to emphasize without them. In the first chapter, Chanyeol says “hell no. Hell to the no!” These two sentences are great on their own, Chanyeol shooting down the idea with no second thought, but you need to hold the reader’s hand and let them know what you intended. “Hell no. Hell to the no!” Like that, you tell the reader exactly what they should be focusing on and how Chanyeol is speaking.

Also, don’t bold the titles of your chapters when they’re mentioned in the chapter. It’s nice to see that you put them in, but it’s unnecessary and doesn’t add much to the story.

In your second chapter, after Baekhyun enters the room, it jumped to the party. I thought you would have kept going with Chanyeol being overwhelmed. Try some smoother transitions to let people understand the scene.

Lmao I loved the joke you put in with ‘Chanyeol is not even thinking straight right now (literally)’. Little things like that are perfect and I love seeing them just inserted into the story.

Your entire story fits together well, but you have some areas where the story jumps from one scene to another. You don’t give the reader much time to brace for a scene change, and it can take them a second to understand what’s going on the situation. You have a distinct writing style, and it’s very good to see you sticking with it!

ENDING: (8/10)

I feel like you rushed into the ending. Having Baek tell Yeol that he secretly was in love with him the entire time was definitely a valid way to end the story, but it was very sudden and had no real basis.

The ending was a sweet one, and I see how you tried to make it seem more like the real world where Baek and Yeol are part of an idol group, but that idea was sort of far-off. I think you could have definitely expanded on a lot of your ideas, making both the chapters and the story itself longer.

ENJOYMENT: (7/10)

As said before, I love baekyeol and I love fake dating stories, but with the speed that you wrote at kind of put me off. I enjoyed how they still got together at the end and there were some wonderful jokes and specific words you used that really got me worked up, but other than that, that’s all.

TOTAL: (78/100)

You definitely still have some of your grammar and punctuation to work on and your story transitions threw me for a loop, but your story is well constructed! You made sure to include Baek and Yeol’s height difference (something that to this day still makes me smile) and incorporate some of their real personalities into it. You ended it well, and even without having read the prequel or sequel, it’s a great standalone story that presents itself well. Make sure you double check your chapters before posting them!