(December 2015)

Title: Erlebnisse
Author: paperdaisy

Title: (5)/5
My first impression of your title was that it was absolutely gorgeous even though I had no idea what it meant. Amber and Tiff both read your story back in August when it was decided that I would be the one in charge of your review, and even though an entire semester has passed, the title of your story was easy for me to remember even. I was honestly kind of surprised when I scrolled to the foreword and realized that there was no definition of “erlebnisse” anywhere to be seen, so I was happy when I saw that you included it at the beginning of the story itself. (And ugh, I love other-wordly on tumblr—nice choice.)

When I finished your story, I scrolled back to the top of the page to make sure that your title had a direct correlation so your story, and it hurt a lot more. Your story resembles the definition of “erlebnisse” perfectly and I can honestly imagine no better title to match your fic.

Description/Foreword: (10)/10
I’ve always been more intrigued by simple descriptions rather than lengthy ones, and after reading yours, I was instantly overcome with excitement. Your summary aptly describes the fic in its entirety and your diction sets a nice prelude for the storm of imagery and symbolism that awaits your readers when they begin to read your story.

The only thing vaguely worth mentioning is more subjective than not: the font of your excerpt is the same size as your review credits, and since the excerpt relates to your story more directly, I think it would make more sense if it were a little bigger. This is a completely minor thing though. The excerpt that you chose is a good reflection of the symbolism that you incorporated into your story and—like the description—it serves as a good snapshot for the general essence of your story.

Plot: (29)/30
It’s been a while since I’ve read a story so intricately structured. From the very beginning, it was clear to me that Jongin was dead and Kyungsoo was writing next to his grave based on the “I’m sitting next to you” and the nostalgic tone of the story. While such an early revelation might kill some excitement and spontaneity, your incorporation of imagery, symbolism, and what my favorite English teacher used to refer to as “form follows content” definitely made this story unlike any other I’ve read before.

When evaluating your storyline, I suppose I’ll start with the fluidity of your plot. Although it sometimes seemed as though the story was progressing slowly, looking back, it correlates directly with the flow of time as Kyungsoo and Jongin age. The gradual build-up of symbolic images hits a perfect when the story reached its end and the importance of each description was brought to light. I especially enjoyed the way that the symbolism of parallel lines and the number eight were intertwined with one another and how you chose to explain their dual nature in the concluding paragraph of your story. While the number eight held a large degree of weight based on the story’s events alone, the allusion to the number eight as also being an infinity sign did not go unnoticed and I’m pretty sure a little piece of my heart cracked each time Jongin and Kyungsoo “lost one of their eights”. After re-reading the ending, I also realized that the outline of your story creates a perfect circle: it begins with Kyungsoo at the grave and the thought of parallel lines and ends with Kyungsoo leaving the grave and the comparison between parallel lines and figure eights. Thinking about how the number eight is composed of two circles that meet each other for a moment also summed up the overall image of your story very well and now I can’t stop thinking about geometry.

The nature of your story felt incredibly real to me, and the events described were ones that I could imagine actually happen during someone’s lifetime. Whenever the existence of homophobia is acknowledged within fanfiction, I think that a little piece of me gets excited just because it’s something that many people tend to overlook so that they can ship their pairings in peace. That point aside, the conflicts between the characters felt wholehearted in the sense that there were multiple sides to each story and no “right” nor “wrong”: just like many conflicts that people tend to experience in the real world. Examples of this are littered throughout the story and include Kyungsoo’s decision of the poetry slam over the dance recital, his choice to date Yujin despite knowing he didn’t love her, and Kai’s insistence that everything “never happened”.  It’s very clear that your story is character-driven, so I’ll talk more about this sort of thing in the next section. However, the solid relationships between your main characters and the tangible tension that persisted between them throughout the duration of the story is truly an incredible feat.

After talking to Tiff (ioyrene), who strongly believed there was something off about the ending, we concluded that things didn’t feel as though they had come as full circle as they should have. An hour-long discussion later, we were able to figure out that it was because it wasn’t actually a circle (and since it wasn’t, it just felt repetitive/redundant).

(We feel dumb and not worthy of being co-owners of this shop because we figured out that if something didn’t feel like a circle, it wasn’t a circle.

We’re super smart.)

There are two “beginnings” to your story: the letter to Jongin and the bit about parallel lines. At the beginning, Kyungsoo’s letter occurs before the analogy to geometry and at the end, the same pattern is repeated. The problem with that is that it removes the feeling of symmetry and balance from your story. This could easily be fixed if you transposed the initial paragraph about parallel lines (“If all strangers in the world…”) to the beginning of the story rather than opening it up with the letter to Jongin. Doing this would create symmetry with both the parallel lines paragraph and the opening of the letter, allowing the circle to truly be complete.

As I mentioned beforehand, I could kind of see where the story was going when I first started reading it: Jongin was going to be dead, Kyungsoo was going to be sad, nostalgia would ensue. At first, I was a little concerned that the story would be plagued by predictability, but I’m happy to say that I didn’t find that to be the case. Not only did your figurative language play a large part in this, but the idea to focus on tension and refusal by the couple rather than the idea of a love that was discovered too late is one that I haven’t encountered very often. The set-up kind of reminded me of the video game Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII in which the player knows from the very beginning that the game can’t end without the main protagonist dying, but when he finally does die, it still comes as a saddening shock. I experienced the same sort of emotions when reading your story, and I think that it really helped to emphasize its nostalgic tone.

Characterization: (20)/20
As aforementioned, your story is very dependent on the development of your characters and their relationships. Though I find that this route makes it more difficult to write a quality story, you definitely succeeded in their characterization and both Kyungsoo and Jongin felt like incredibly real people to me. Just hours before I read your story, I had to write a philosophy paper about how two of the components of individuality and “true” personality are creativity and critical thinking. Your story is a perfect example of this: Kyungsoo and Jongin—two very three-dimensional characters—make sense of the world in incredibly different ways that are unique to their character and serve as a wonderful example of indirect characterization that show that they’ve each truly taken the time to consider their thoughts before they finally admit to them outloud. The best examples of this definitely have to be the bit about Kyungsoo and coffee and Jongin’s thoughts about dreams and death. They each represent a very personalized thought that definitely lingers with the reader even after the piece is finished.

I like how you established the juxtaposition of Kyungsoo and Jongin’s characters from the very beginning with the descriptions of melody versus rhythm, perceptions of button down gray t-shirts, and harmonizing melody versus coordinating movement. Not only does this help to emphasize each character’s individuality (rather than basing their character development solely on the relationships), but it also creates a subtle introduction to the everlasting tension present throughout your story, making it feel all the more realistic. The fights between the characters are fights that don’t seem as though they were created to make a story interesting, but instead they seemed like fights that simply made sense given the differences between the two characters.

Yujin, a somewhat minor OC, was written perfectly: I could feel bad for Kyungsoo having to lie about his feelings about her, but at the same time, I felt bad for her one-sided love story. The build-up of her character was nice and gradual, and I think that the description that stuck out to me the most was: “She came back one night at seven o’clock, and the two of them sat on her bed beaming at each other (Yujin generated the beam, and Kyungsoo reflected it back like a mirror because that’s all he could do for her).” This line really helps the reader to feel pity for her character despite what the situation eventually leads to. I think that one of the reasons why I really liked her character was because she’s probably the one who accelerates the downward spiral of the main characters, and yet, her motives aren’t something that she can be called “evil” for. In my opinion, it’s hard to find characters like that nowadays, so I really enjoyed it.

Grammar: (13)/15
For the most part, your grammar was pretty spot-on throughout the text. There were only minor issues in diction, punctuation, and syntax that I’ll talk about here, but for the most part, they were pretty rare to notice.

Descriptions of hair color (i.e., blond/blonde and brunet/brunette) are words of French origin, so there’s a bit of cultural history that goes into play when these words are being utilized. In this story, Luhan is described as “blonde” which is the feminine version of the word meant to describe individuals of the female . “Blonde” and “brunette” are feminine, while “blond” and “brunet” are masculine. It’s a common mistake, but there’s no harm in pointing it out.

There were some moments when you used the semicolon incorrectly by combining it with a conjunction. Some examples of this are here:

“...brown liquid that didn’t appear pleasing to the eye; and, after a few idle seconds…”

“...drive from their houses; and so their paths continued…”

“...or even how to describe them; but it looked, in a word, fast.”

“...for fear of being isolated; and, now that monophobia had transferred…”

I’m sometimes bad at explaining things, so here’s a link to a comic by the Oatmeal that sums up semicolon usage pretty well. In most cases, semicolons are used to separate two clauses that could each be independent on their own. There are certain instances in which a semicolon and a conjunction can work together in tandem, but going there will make this a lot more complex than it has to be. (Here’s a link to some discussion about that, if you’re curious.)

There were a couple of run-on/borderline-run-on sentences that I noticed littered throughout your text. Run-ons can be alright as long as you’re doing something rhetorically significant in the sentence, so just be cautious when you choose to include them in your final draft; perhaps even ask a grammatically-knowledgeable friend if they think it’s alright.

“The corner of Jongin’s lips curved up in a slight expression that closely resembled a smirk before shrugging and kicking off his battered sneakers, effectively managing to create a small cloud of light dust in the air below him.”

In the case of this example, the problem can be fixed by using more concise vocabulary rather than trying out some rhetoric. When I was undergoing this sort of problem, I relied on the Hemingway App to tell me when I was getting carried away with my sentences. The app strives to replicate Hemingway’s infamous penmanship (short, concise sentences; straightforward tone) when editing your work, so it can definitely help with the run-on problem. Be cautious when trying this out though: if you rely on it too much, you’ll lose a lot of your writing style since the app is designed to mimic Hemingway’s. It’s a good tool if you’re curious about one or two sentences, but I wouldn’t use its recommended edits on a full story.

“The corner of Jongin’s lips curved up in an expression that closely resembled a smirk as he shrugged and kicked off his battered sneakers, effectively creating a small cloud of dust in the air below him.”

In my opinion, some of the odd punctuation/structure issues that I noticed are likely tied to an attempt to achieve more variability in syntax. You’re well on your way to getting there though, and trial and error is always the best way to learn! This site has an awesome list of rhetorical devices that you may be excited about using (when I first heard that some of this stuff existed, I was definitely all over it), along with examples from classical and modern literature. I’ll talk a little bit more about rhetorical strategies in the next section of this review, but do check the site out! It’s loads of fun.

Writing Style: (13)/15
It’s very clear that you’ve already established a distinct writing style for yourself with a very unique voice. There are only a few things that I can say about your writing style that can hopefully improve it by taking advantage of a few rhetorical strategies. I’ll list a couple of examples of your syntax here, along with some ways that you would’ve made the sentence(s) more rhetorically significant.

“It was difficult to put emotions like these into words. Emotions that had pounded his mind and strangled his throat, and swirled in the air at all of the wrong times.”

Initially, it seems as though you’re going for a polysyndeton, but the addition of the comma before the final item in the list ruins the possibility for the sentence to be rhetorically significant. A polysyndeton is defined as “a stylistic device in which several coordinating conjunctions are used in succession in order to achieve an artistic effect”—in this case, the effect would be an emphasis on Kyungsoo’s experience when he undergoes these emotions. By utilizing a polysyndeton here, you remove the “breaks” in the sentence that the commas would have offered the reader and instead leave them “overwhelmed” just like Kyungsoo. At the same time, these two sentences could be joined together and separated by a semicolon in order to keep the flow of thought moving from one thought to another that expands on said thought. My favorite aspect of the semicolon is that it allows writers to continue an idea when they could’ve chosen to end it instead.  Here’s what the section looks like with these changes:

“It was difficult to put emotions like these into words; emotions that had pounded his mind and strangled his throat and swirled in the air at all of the wrong times.”

Another example of syntactic changes that could make elements of your story more rhetorically significant is here:

“His gaze shifted in the direction of the raucous noise, which had surprised him, and landed on Jongin in front of the door, which did not surprise him.”

If you were to use em dashes instead of commas in this sentence, you’d create an “interjection” effect similar to the one that Kyungsoo is experiencing during this event. Em dashes can either be used to interrupt a thought or add on something to a thought at the last minute. Creating visual interruptions is another form of the aforementioned “form follows content”.

“His gaze shifted in the direction of the raucous noise—which had surprised him—and landed on Jongin in front of the door—which did not surprise him.”

While you had many lovely images that truly made your story stand out, there were a couple of descriptions that didn’t quite live up to the cut, and due to juxtaposition with the better-worded images, these tended to stick out a lot more. In  my opinion, most of these occurrences are due to awkward word choice that disrupts the fluidity of poetic language in your story. A couple of instances of this are “forming wrinkles across his small nose bridge,” “and so neither did it have an end,” and “his thoughts slipped through his lips”. In all honesty, I think that the third one only sounded awkward to me because of the way the sentence was structured.

A perfect writing style can sometimes take a lifetime to achieve, but you’re well on your way to being there. I think that what really makes your writing style so unique is the strong voice that you’ve formed in your narrative, and the only thing that can make it better is dabbling a bit into grammar play.

Personal Enjoyment: (5)/5
Reading this was a roller coaster, but probably one of the most enjoyable ones that I’ve been on in a very long time. The gradual build-up of your story led to a true in which every shred of symbolism came together in a single moment to achieve something that sometimes even professionals cannot attain. After reading your story, I’m left with this feeling of numbness, and I honestly think that’s how everyone should feel after they’ve read something so profoundly raw.

Total Score: 95/100

Reviewer’s Comments: When I was trying to make my writing more rhetorically significant, a book that really helped me figure things out was Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. He utilized numerous rhetorical strategies within this book that defy grammatical conventions but work absolutely perfectly in the format of his story, and the story itself is jarring and I'm pretty sure it scarred me for life, lmao. I think that reading it will definitely give you some awesome ideas to advance your writing style while providing a good framework for what can and can't be done since O'Brien pretty much pushes grammatical boundaries to their limits.

I apologize for how long you had to wait in order for me to finish up this review and how little I was able to actually critique you. In my opinion, there isn’t too much that you can improve on, but if you have any questions or concerns regarding anything I said in this review, please don’t hesitate to let me know!