(August 2015)

Title: Perfection
Author: KillerGal

Reviewer: eleutheromaniac

Title: (4)/5

At first glance, there’s nothing special about your title that really makes it stand out. After reading your story, however, it’s obvious how important this title is in relationship to your story. The bigger issue that I have with your title has to do with the word itself being overused within the story which makes the title feel less significant. I won’t deduct points for this here since I’ll talk about it more in the “Writing Style” section of this review.

Description/Foreword: (10)/10

Your description was fairly simple and accurately captured the essence of your storyline—my definition of the ideal opening.

The only suggestion that I have for you here is to perhaps list your credits horizontally instead of vertically so that it takes up less space in your foreword. The decision is ultimately up to you though as this is just my opinion.

Plot: (18)/30

The story itself is a nice take on the artist/muse plot, but there were just too many facets of the storyline itself that made it difficult to believe. While the biggest examples of this have to do more with the characterization than anything else, there were still instances of the plot that seemed unrealistic or that simply lacked development.

I don’t think I can confidently say that I know what Kai does for a living. Yes, he’s a painter, but where does he paint and how does that work? It seems as though he paints in some kind of auction hall that never closes and people can watch him and also approach him as he paints, but I’ve never heard of instances like this before. I’ll admit that I don’t know much about art, but because I don’t, it should be your job as the reader to guide me through his livelihood—or at least give me enough information so that I don’t feel so confused in regards to your main character’s occupation. This is a very basic mistake in the exposition that I feel could have been easily avoided.

It also seems a bit unrealistic that Kai smiling and giving paintings to others manages to be the header for every newspaper out there because not that many people are interested in art for it to make national news, let alone headlines. I think that it would have made more sense if you were specific as to what papers the story had been featured on, like art magazines/blogs or something.

And then there’s the ending. I don’t even know where to start with the ending. While I enjoyed the twist that it added, there was no hint of it whatsoever. Yes, that’s what plot twists usually do, but the best thing about a good plot twist is the fact that you should be able to go back into the story itself, point at certain things and say, “Oh man, so that was foreshadowing?”

There was none of that in your story. You literally just threw a bomb at us at the end and it would’ve been impossible to guess at what the ending of your story had meant if you hadn’t given us an explanation chapter (which is a huge form of telling rather than showing, and therefore, I’m not the biggest fan of it). The story would’ve been a lot more believable and resonating if there were hints of Baekhyun being an unreliable “damsel in distress” and if there was a stronger connection between him and Kai. A lot of the story rides on Kai wanting to somehow “save” Baekhyun and we never get a proper reason as to why; it feels like it just happens for the sake of the story.

In your explanation chapter, you say “If you have noticed, throughout the story, Kai had never once asked Baekhyun if he’s sick.” When I read that, I felt like the entire explanation was just one huge cop out. There are twenty lines of actual dialogue in a story with over three thousand words, and a good chunk of those lines are people bidding on Kai’s artwork. Dialogue isn’t really evident throughout the piece at all, but that’s okay, because it comes off as a part of your writing style and it actually works. Sure, Kai still holds about half of those lines, but what kind of person asks a guy he barely knows if he’s terminally ill? That’s such an obscene, personal question to ask, and the fact that Kai decided not to comment on it meant that he was being courteous, so it bothers me that you tried to play off his lack of questioning as ignorance when it could have just as easily been politeness—though I guess none of your character development is that great anyway, so the courtesy might as well have been faulted inexperience. I don’t know. I’m just saying that assuming that someone is terminally ill when they spontaneously bleed into their soup is kind of understandable. It felt like you were making excuses for poor characterization and plot development in an inappropriate way.

Characterization: (2)/20

The explanation chapter aside, I’m sad to say that the character that I felt had the most solid personality was Sehun—and he’s not even that important to the plot. While Kai has his own distinct nature, it fell into the stock of the “troubled artist” and isn’t developed much further beyond that. Baekhyun seems to exist as a sort of false “damsel in distress”—another stock—but Sehun was the most fresh character as the co-worker who’s upbeat and peppy without much of a care in the world. He could arguably fit into the “con man” role, but because you chose to include the moment about him deciding not to say anything when Kai chooses to give the painting of the bridge to Baekhyun instead of letting it go up for auction, it added a bit of freshness to his character.

It still doesn’t matter though since Sehun’s pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of the storyline, haha.

There was literally no trace of Baekhyun being manipulative. The only real character trait we get in the story itself is that he’s persistent. As I mentioned in the previous section, hints of foreshadowing should have at least been dropped. Since Baekhyun didn’t really develop as his own individual, it was difficult to really see a connection between him and Kai without you forcing it onto us. You could have talked more about the effect that Baekhyun’s perseverance had on Kai. Instead, we get Kai giving into Baekhyun’s insistences, the former finding out that the latter is sick and probably dying, and then Kai giving Baekhyun a painting and admitting that he cares a lot about him. The development of their relationship was practically nonexistent.

The writing style of your story matches Kai’s personality quite well, so you had a wonderful opportunity to use Baekhyun as a character foil which would have naturally developed their relationship further. It’s a fairly simple approach, but it would have gone a long way.

Grammar: (11)/15

Your grammar was pretty solid for the most part. The biggest issues I noticed were misplaced commas and typos.

I always advise writers to read through their work before they post it anywhere to get rid of easy-to-fix mistakes, so make sure that you do that next time. At what point you said “tittle” instead of “title” and there were other times where you had tense mistakes that also seemed like they were typos just because of the inconsistency of their appearances.

The comma issue was unfortunately a lot more prominent than I would have liked. I feel like commas are the easiest punctuation mark to misuse, but the amount of times commas were missing/where they didn’t need to be within this story ended up irking me even though I’m usually able to ignore it. The example where I noticed the biggest mistake is here:

“What he failed to realize is that Kim Kai is just a manifestation of Kim Jongin and by destroying Kim Kai Kim Jongin had also inadvertently and subsequently destroyed himself.”

There’s a lot going on during that sentence and you don’t need comma absences to make it even more confusing for your readers. Do be careful in regards to that.

I also spotted one or two convention errors; make sure that when you’re using a number within your story, you type it out instead of using the digits (i.e., “eighteen” instead of “18”).

Writing Style: (9)/15

It’s clear that you possess the makings of your own unique writing style—the pieces are all there—but it definitely needs a little more refinement in order to be truly polished and as captivating as it can be.

While some of your lines read beautifully, there were certain moments when they just came off as awkward. For example, saying, “The ambiguous and melancholic aura oozes out of him the way vanilla oozes out of cream puffs” is kind of cringeworthy. The recurring “special sauce” comments came off as strange as well since it doesn’t seem like a comparison that anyone would really make.

The syntax of your story is kind of boring as well since there are at times when the structures of your sentences felt noticeably repetitive. I noticed that there were a couple of times where you could’ve inserted an em dash, so I suggest reading up on the implementations of that particular punctuation mark and perhaps consider using it in your own writing.

I don’t think that I’m the only one that perks up a little when the title of story is directly referenced in the story itself—it typically means something important is happening and adds extra emphasis to the ongoing plot. It’s not difficult to understand the weight that the search for perfection holds on Kai’s shoulders, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to repeat the word thirty-five times in such a short story. Since you chose it as the title of your piece, it holds a lot of extra weight and should only be used when something particularly significant is happening in the plot because it’ll make something rhetorically significant occur in your writing. I believe that you used the word way more often when you needed to when there are plenty synonyms available that you could’ve used. In my opinion, “perfection” should have only been used in the scene towards the end in the paragraph that begins with “He paints shakily but never stops…”

As I said before, it’s very obvious that your writing style is beginning to emerge. It’s not very often that I see authors rely on such little dialogue, and I’m confident that with enough practice, it’ll develop into something fantastically mesmerizing.

Personal Enjoyment: (3)/5

I probably would’ve given you more marks for this if you had hinted about Baekhyun’s true personality somewhere within the storyline itself instead of having to resort to an explanation chapter in order to establish him as the unintentional bad guy. I was really shocked by the ending—which is a good thing—but it’s clear that characterization is definitely your weak point.

Total Score: 57/100

Reviewer’s Comments: While the downfall of your story definitely came to the flaws in your characterization, I have no doubts that you have the makings of a great writer within you. Your writing style really interested me since it’s something that I really don’t see all too often and I know that it won’t be long before you perfect it and share truly beautiful stories with the rest of us.