“The Imaginary One”

By: JaeKnight.

Reviewer: St-renaissance.

1-Title: Usually, in modern novel, the title breaks free from literary constrictions and returns to unearth the Graeco-roman metaphors of deeply rooted meanings. Now, whether this title is honest or deceptive, it really doesn’t matter because it speaks of supernatural occurrences quite early. The title encourages the reader to embark upon this journey with the established fact that reality and imagination might so often intersect and shape a plot, it’s daring and playful. Also, to a Literature student, it hints of an internal conflict, perhaps indulgence in mental illness and whatnot. Here’s the thing, titles and stories with supernatural themes and characters are so prevalent on this platform that it may not grant you a point for originality, but definitely a point for creativity and proficiency in managing mystery while working with the enlistment of contemporised elements such as the supernatural, mystery, epilogues/prologues.

Rating: 9/10.

2-Description/Foreword: The description is in video format, is that helpful to your readers? It’s definitely creative but it’s not as efficient as text, the video cannot be accessed without internet connection, it draws the reader away from the page and distracts him/her from the story by enforcing an element as critical as the description to be in such exhaustive format. Stories with investigative themes (mystery, supernatural) rely heavily on the description, so it must be as helpful as possible. So, don’t even think about removing the text version because it’s the only thing your reader can hold on to in case the video disappoints. The foreword position has been taken advantage of quite professionally, the preview is helpful and insightful, it’s neatly formatted and though it kills the suspense and plot-twists, it means you will have to compensate for the loss of a golden opportunity to deliver suspense and mystery. However, I can’t wait to see how you work through it.

Rating: 8/10.

3-Plot: The beginning is interesting, the narrative used is the third-person narrative which gives the story a wider image to inspect; environmental, psychological and emotional details are better used with this narrative. It’s also the best candidate for novice writers as it’s safest and doesn’t require a set of limited factors. However, let’s take a look at the environmental aspect of your story, there isn’t one. You’re in control of the narrative since it’s a third-person narrative, you should have complete freedom in asserting a base for environmental depiction. We don’t have any information regarding the character’s home, city, background or anything, it’s best if you choose to display such details during the first chapter. Usually, it’s best to employ the Inward method of description, where you begin by narrating the most general of information and then proceed to dive into details respectively and wisely.

As for the diction used: speech correctness, speech clearness, and speech effectiveness are all aspects which we will inspect in details.

Speech correctness has been delivered; the grammar used alongside the vocabulary do need some work though. The use of metaphor, though surface-level, is appreciated, there seem to be reluctance in proper employment of noun + adjective. Writing a phrase such as “The clean cold wind” is frowned upon in literature because placing adjectives back to back degrades the quality of your work. You can write descriptive phrases like so “The clean wind brought about such coldness” by doing so, you’ve eliminated the unnecessary placement of description and levelled your work properly. During the first chapter, the phrase “...mesmerized by how red the roses are, and how green the leaves were” is both literarily and syntactically incorrect. Naturally, roses are red and leaves are green, so by mentioning the colours as description for the object it makes the sentence appear literary redundant. Also, the change in verbs (are, were) in that phrase is inconsistent and the use of them is incorrect. Also during the middle of the first chapter, the phrase “Her heart throbbed from her chest” is grammatically incorrect; “Her heart throbbed in her chest” is the correct spelling. “Landed her back onto his chest” is wrong because if he’s standing the act of her back touching his chest cannot be verbalised as Landing and Onto unless they’re both on the floor. “Pressed her back against his chest” is correct. I’m only focusing on the first chapter as an example of which areas of syntactic proficiency you need to enhance. I usually recommend using an app/programme called Grammerly, it’s efficient and advantageous for novice writers.

Please Subscribe to read the full chapter