TITLE

I see the symbolism of the title in the story now, and how you managed to relate it back to angels and feathers. It was good and holds a nice meaning to the entire story in general.

FOREWORD + DESCRIPTION

Your description is sweet and it gives a cute opening. You introduce an interesting idea and make me want to read more. The one thing I have to say is that I don’t like how you’ve pushed it all to the right side and then separated the words into their own separate lines when they shouldn’t have been. Your description works much better as one single paragraph, and splitting them into different lines seems awkward.

GRAMMAR + PUNCTUATION

First off, in the first paragraph, you’ve missed some commas. You’ve written “he shouted as he stared at her looking for the answer waiting for her to speak but she didn’t.” You have many things going on, and to have it written properly, it should be “he shouted as he stared at her, looking for the answer, waiting for her to speak. But she didn’t.” You should also try to split this into more than one paragraph considering that separate dialogues garner their own paragraphs.

Your next few paragraphs switch back and forth repeatedly between past and present tense.

“I was eight years old when I was moving to Korea.

I don’t like it –not even one bit. My mother is always trying to convince me that I was going to like it there.”

There is more, but I’m going to work with these few sentences first.

The hyphen that you have is used incorrectly. Hyphens should be attached to the first word, with a space before the next word. Not vice versa as you have done so.

Since the move is not currently happening, then it is safe to assume that you should be writing in past tense. As such, your sentences should appear like this:

“I was eight years old when I moved to Korea.

I didn’t like it- not one bit. My mother was always trying to convince me that I was going to like it there.”

Debt is one of those weird words to deal with when you want to talk about it in a plural form. It’s either “he left us with a lot of debt” or “he left us with lots of debt”. Debts isn’t a word used very often.

You use some of your punctuation incorrectly. You use hyphens too often when they should be periods, and you’ve used a semi-colon when it should be a comma. If you can, stay away from semi-colons since they’re difficult to use properly unless you really know how they work.

“Yixing dear you don’t have to be like this when we move out you can carry with your normal life and be a kid” has missing punctuation. Since it is his mother addressing him, the first part should either be “Yixing, dear,” or “Yixing dear,” depending on what exactly she calls him.

The full sentence should be written like this:

“Yixing, dear, you don’t have to be like this. When we move out, you can carry on with your normal life and just be a kid.”

Since English is not your first language, there’s a lot of very awkward wording throughout the story. You’ve phrased some of your sentences very oddly, and while your point definitely does get across, it is difficult to fully understand. Your missing punctuation also makes it difficult to understand what exactly you’re talking about since it’s not easy to follow.

“Huizhong’s husband, a friend of his and I, their kid wasn’t there because he was at school, were outside the building unloading the van because there were a lot of bags and boxes because my mother and Huizhong decided to go and buy additional stuff that we needed for the house.”

That entire paragraph is very messy. It’s one sentence and it is a very long run-on one. Firstly, I didn’t know where you were going with it at the beginning since it’s a very oddly worded phrase. If I were to do it, the paragraph would be written like this to make it clearer:

“Huizhong’s husband, a friend of his and me (their kid wasn’t there because he was at school) were outside the building unloading the van. There were lots of bags and boxes since my mother and Huizhong decided to go and buy additional stuff that we needed for the house.”

I know that it’s part of the story and all, but an eight-year-old definitely does not have the capacity to hold and carry two full boxes of porcelain dishes and other miscellaneous items. They would drop EVERYTHING instantly.

You have ‘sempai notice me’ written down and it’s actually ‘senpai’. “Sempai” is a common misspelling that I believe was popularized by Pewdiepie.

OKAY. I’M SAYING THIS ONE BECAUSE I MYSELF AM CHINESE. YOU HAVE LUHAN SAYING “Lay, what gè is saying is right.” AND WHILE I UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU WERE TRYING TO DO, I HAVE TWO THINGS TO SAY ABOUT THIS. 1. Luhan doesn’t actually call Xiumin his older brother. While Minseok is older than him by a month, Min often calls Lu his older brother. 2. The proper pinyin is gē. There are four intonations in Mandarin Chinese and the different tones mean completely different things.

Someone who is in the pharmaceutical field, as Xiumin is studying to be, is called a pharmacist, not a pharmaceutic.

You also don’t capitalize your words properly. After exclamation marks and question marks, you need to capitalize the word. You can’t keep going as if they weren’t there.

For ‘to start a new’, anew is one word.

CHARACTERIZATION

I was going to try to get further into the story to really understand the characters, but Yerin’s situation was just unveiled and I felt like I had to say something. Yixing’s character develops a bit oddly and completely behind the scenes. In the beginning, you have him talking about how he didn’t want to come to Korea, how he wanted to stay in China, how he wouldn’t like it here, and then you just never mention it again. It’s as though he suddenly decided that Korea was the best place he could ever be and China was so far back in his mind that he may as well have not even been from there besides the fact of Luhan and Xiumin.

Speaking of them, you didn’t show how they became friends with Yixing. Yes, Min was Huizhong’s kid, but he had no obligation to actually like Xing and introduce him at school. Lu came out of nowhere too, and having the three Chinese kids bond together was just kind of weird? In my opinion.

I’m not sure how Yixing’s nickname was decided? Did it happen at school? Because at some point you started having Luhan and Xiumin refer to him as Lay, and I didn’t see an explanation for it unless I skipped over it by accident.

Yixing’s affinity towards Yerin came out of nowhere. Yes, you had him marvel at her when he was eight, but she isn’t mentioned very much and it doesn’t seem like he is dying to talk to her with such urgency until he sees her again at school. You also didn’t make it clear that Yerin might have had an inkling of a feeling for Xing since you didn’t focus on her much.

While I understand that they like each other, it was weird how, when Yerin thought Yixing was joking, she was SUPER defensive about her sickness, but then as soon as she knew that Yixing was serious, she was more than happy to just yell it out. They also definitely have not known each other well enough for Yixing to be so deeply attached to her. Yeah, he likes her, but they don’t know anything about each other.  Yixing also should not have told Luhan and Xiumin about her disease so easily, especially if she was already getting beat up because of it at school. A disease like that is a very personal issue and he only should have shared it if he knew that Yerin was okay with him doing so.

You have someone compliment Luhan, telling him ‘that’s the wisest thing you’ve ever said in your fifteen years of life.’ This means that, if Luhan and Xiumin are the same age and Yixing is four years younger than them, that Yixing is eleven. Eleven is a crazy age to be declaring that you’re in love and I don’t think most eleven-year-olds are that familiar with Alzheimer’s unless they have someone in their family who has been personally diagnosed with it, and that does not seem to be the case with Yixing.

You have Yixing get very sick of Yerin forgetting him very quickly. He goes from being absolutely in love with her to not really wanting to have anything to do with her, but for some reason, still not breaking up with her. It’s odd and when he runs back to her, he claims that he loves her after learning that she died, but he said he hated it? So that’s some conflicting messages there.

Cheonsa seems to doubt herself a lot and she doesn’t seem as prepared for Yixing not loving her as much as she said she was.

To be very honest, it didn’t seem like Yixing was interested in Cheonsa at all. It seemed like she was just someone that liked him, and he was considering getting with her. But then suddenly, at the Gallery event, when he sees her with Minhyun, he’s absolutely furious. It seems very weird.

PLOT

Your plot wasn’t super original. You had someone fall in love with someone else, turns out one of them has a disease, they move on and date someone else, but not without a little struggling. I’ve heard it before, and the one difference is that you used Alzheimer’s instead of something else like cancer.

FLOW + WRITING STYLE

I know that you asked for help with your transitions, and there’s not much I can say except for trying to expand the story more to actually fit the pieces together and make the jump from year to year much smaller.

As for the sudden jump from first to third person, there’s nothing I can do about that. That jump is a change that you made on your own decision and there’s no way to make it ‘smoother’. Most stories stick to one point of view, so it’s a lot easier to deal with transitions in that way. A jump from one perspective to a different one, however, can’t be easily fixed. Try to choose one and write the story like that.

You have huge gaps between different segments of your story, showing Yixing at one age and then advancing it a few years, but not making it clear what age he is now. I could have sworn that you made him ten and then said ‘a few years passed’, but based on the observation I made above about Luhan, Yixing was then only eleven.

Make it clearer what age your characters are, even if you have to blatantly put it out there. With stories that span over the years, it’s hard to keep track.

I got kind of confused with the flashback? I’m not sure where the flashback flashed to, and I’m not sure whose flashback it is. That wasn’t really a flashback, in my opinion. Flashbacks usually flashback to months or years ago, and that was a flash to maybe five minutes ago? You could have easily incorporated it into the real story.

ENDING

You ended that story in a way that was very predictable. I thought very early on that Yixing would eventually come to love Cheonsa and I was right. The relationship happened very quickly and how Cheonsa decided not to leave just because of him was very odd since she was originally set on leaving, and I’m sure that a lot of her plans at least education wise would have been hindered.

ENJOYMENT

If I’m to be honest, a few things already turned me off from reading your story. Firstly, the fact that it was an OC x Idol story. I don’t really like them at all and Xiuhan is also one of my least favourite EXO ships, so that one wasn’t very great to read through either.

Again, it wasn’t that original and you didn’t really give me much else that I really loved.

FINAL THOUGHTS

You made a very clear beginning and a very clear ending, and I like how you managed to include the title at the end there. Yes, while it was predictable and the turn of events wasn’t exactly one that I loved, I can see that you put a lot of effort and time into it. Despite what I may have said, your story is good. You have room to improve, especially in your grammar and punctuation section, but that’s mainly because your first language isn’t English. Good job!