“You’re My First Love”

By: Fellyciach

Reviewer: St-renaissance

1-Title: With genres such as romance, angst, and even historical fiction, titles are a great way to imply metaphor and capture the plot in a creative way. “You’re My First Love” is definitely promising; it hints at new beginnings of characters experiencing a shift in spiritual or emotional area. Whenever we promise the reader locomotion of transformation of opinions and thoughts, so you must not neglect to bring that up or your readers might as well skip to the next story. When titles include nouns, names (people, pets, places) or pronouns, the weight of the meaning will befall on how you choose narratives. For example, Jane Eyre uses a signified noun (name) in the title and moves on to use the first-person point of view; it actually uses the MC’s voice to narrate the entire novel. This may be expected when it comes to nouns/pronouns in titles; remember to keep treating the voice of narration as focused on the plot as possible.

The title is not original, to be honest, nor is it interesting, but it is difficult to stray far from predictable titles in romantic stories. As a reviewer, I go through a lot of stories with similar titles revolving around love and first times. Try to use the description to provide a lovely and grasping synopsis to help make-up for the lackluster title.

Rating: 8/10.

2-Description: Ok, the description delivers the point, but it’s too bland and basic; things that we should keep in mind when writing a synopsis are the protagonist, aims, conflict, and settings (optional). Once we’ve established a foundation, we can start to play creatively and sort out events based on significance—you don’t want to bother with minor events, but it wouldn’t hurt to apply some suspenseful elements to your description. For example, you don’t actually have to mention the occupation or current status of the male character (Suga) whose role is undoubtedly the love interest. You can keep certain details from readers, if it means you’ll acquire some suspense and apply it interestingly to the synopsis. Finally, the actual syntactical structure of the phrases is off; there are certain words that don’t fit comfortably in with the rest of the sentences, like the end of the first phrase and the start of the next should be linked together using a comma. Like so “Lee Ji Eun is an aspiring music producer looking for a job, that’s…” and the following sentence can be abbreviated to appear more eloquent and literary, the phrase “That’s when a fate encounter brought her to someone very special from her past,” could be modified into “Upon a fateful encounter, she’s reunited with a special someone from her past,”.

Rating: 7/10.

3-Plot: You’ve used the first-person point of view to narrate the story, alongside occasional employment of personal and linear narrative. The story opens up with the main character’s journey into the day as she accompanies a minor character to go see her favourite live performance. The beginning does lack a lot of sufficient pillars that are commonly used to support the exposition. However, there is barely any information on the main character’s personal life, preference, personality, or any emotion, really. It jumps from one piece of information to another with no stable foundation or fixed plot/aim; this makes the actual narration choppy and incomprehensible—look back on how the beginning is merely one scene that lacks substantial information on either plot or character. When we build an introduction, we are setting a flexible world for the characters to flourish in, your world needs certain elements to humanise it more sensibly. For example, you could talk to us about the surrounding environment; weather, temperature, political climate, societal etiquette and more, are all shapeable aspects that help stabilise your fictional world.

Initially, try not to rely on secondary/minor characters to carry the development of the beginning, use the narration rather than hundreds and hundreds of dialogue pieces; this will affirm the reader’s trust in your role as a creator. Trust me, using secondary characters and dialogue may be a great way to provide information and background fluff, but it won’t regulate the pace of the story as well as you think it would. For example, Arthur Conan Doyle narrate s the cases of Sherlock Holmes using another character’s point of view while maintaining focus and dialogue on the main character; this provides current telling of events whilst nourishing both major characters’ psychological, emotional, and intellectual abilities. I’m going to be honest here, please don’t be discouraged, but the first chapter is totally unreadable because it revolves around one event and only two poorly introduced characters. This is your first chapter, this is where audience decides whether to continue reading or simply click off, try to re-write it into something shorter and more focused on the environment and introduction of main characters, don’t bother with too much conversation and routinely details.

There is a dire need for suspense and excitement in this story; there’s really not much going on and the story opens up with a single goal that never changes (without applying narratives of quest). This renders the story into becoming one tediously drawn out scene instead of a story with multiple events and characters. Try applying multiple narratives to spice things up, for example, environmental narrative is an excellent method to round up the setting and time. It helps you as an author to set the scene without having to repaint the same environmental elements each chapter, which seems to be a reoccurring issue in your story; most chapters neglect the environmental side and repeat the same adjectives over and over again. As for the narration of the first 10 chapter, it’s rather stale and repetitive; the initial chapters focus too heavily on the main character’s goal to be reunited with her love interest to the point where it comes off as needy and over-used. The flashbacks don’t really help at all because unless you’ve not established your main character well and explored her psychological and emotional reaction to the world, the flashbacks feel intrusive and out-of-place. Instead of chaptered flashbacks, try carrying on with the story while including events from her past that appear comparable to her current situation. For example, she wasn’t that interested in school, so why not compare that to how she managed to fulfill her dreams as a musical person? She lost her father as a young child, why not compare that to how she views men, her crush in particular? You can use the flashbacks to explore how her character changed and developed, if flashbacks remain as ineffective as they appear to be, you must eliminate them to preserve material and space.

So far