(July 2015)

Title: Distinctive Identities
Author: LuhanL

Reviewer: eleutheromaniac

Title: (5)/5
The connection between your story’s title and the content itself is very clear, which is always important. It has a nice ring to it that immediately piques my interest and I believe that it would stand out when potential readers are scouring for fics. Nice job.

Description/Foreword: (4)/10

When I write a review, the first sections I type are always the ones regarding title and the description/foreword—obviously because they’re the first elements of a story that a reader is ever really exposed to. That being said, these sections can either make or break you in terms of success: if they’re good enough, you get readers; if they’re not, you get nothing. Your title is promising, but I think that your description/foreword could use some work.

A large portion of the problem is your grammar. I don’t want to focus too much on it in this portion of the review, but I do feel obligated to point out some of the mistakes so that you can go back and fix them.

• “She leads a life laden with endless of partying and getting tipsy after drinking.”
  Not only is it clear that you’re missing a word here (between “of” and “partying”), but saying “getting tipsy after drinking” is a definite turn off for me. How else would you get tipsy? Not only does the wording seem redundant, but it also feels childish. I think that you could paint a better picture in the minds of your readers by perhaps talking about how she loves the “high” feeling of being drunk? Or tying it into her flirtatious nature and mentioning some kind of drunken endeavour? Something like: “She leads a life laden with nights of endless partying and drunken kisses in a stranger’s bed.” Be more colorful with your imagery because otherwise it seems very blah—which you most definitely do not want when you’re describing a party girl. Form follows content, you know?

• You’re using your em dashes wrong. There are moments when a punctuation mark isn’t even required and the inclusion of one anyway completely ruins your flow.

• There are multiple tense issues right off the bat. You’re switching between present-tense and past-tense throughout the entirety of the description.

• In the second paragraph in particular, you include these super frequent transitions that detract an awful amount from the description’s flow. Transitions like that are fine—when used in moderation. By using such similar sentence structures with practically no spacing in-between, your syntax becomes very bland and choppy.
   

Though these may seem like small instances, you want to make sure that your description is as perfect as it can possibly be; when a reader is scrolling through thousands of fics trying to pick just one to read, you need to make sure that you keep them reading and don’t turn them away by bland word choice and fixable tense issues.

In regards to character profiles, there often isn’t much information given that can’t be inferred from what  you had already written in your overall summary or what will occur later in the story. The only thing revealed to the readers is that Jong In has another personality—Kai—and that definitely could’ve been used as a plot point later on in your story. That little detail could’ve been a great moment in your fic and it really that you took it away from yourself.

(Also, the pictures you used—while incredibly aesthetic—are super huge for no reason. It seems like they’re there just to take space, really, and I can’t understand why you’d want to do that.)

From the title alone, I think that readers would have been able to deduce on their own that DID might play a role in this story—but you’ve taken that away from them by revealing it yourself in the foreword. As an author, you need to be careful when you name a specific ailment in your stories. Yes, it can add much-needed detail, but at the same time, it can lead a reader to do a simple Google search and maybe find out that your story is full of misinterpretation. Or even worse: someone with DID could actually stumble upon your story and feel horrible about a possibly “stereotyped” version of their sickness was portrayed. It’s less likely with DID, I think, since the reported numbers of diagnosis are fairly low compared to other mental illnesses, but do be careful.

I firmly believe that in the case of descriptions/forewords, less is always more. Don’t give your readers answers, make them curious. Part of the magic of storytelling is leaving your readers on the edge of their seats.

Plot: (9)/30

I feel like the idea of you story shows a lot of promise, but the execution you’ve gone with detracts a lot from its potential. A lot of the problems come from your portrayal of your characters, so that’ll be covered more in the next section.

Speaking about the plot exclusively, there were certain details provided that left me questioning the story’s believability. Most of these issues revolve around the ages of the characters. Since they’re high school students, they’re obviously minors—but we never see either character’s parent throughout the duration of the fic? Jongin’s living with a mental illness so it’s unlikely that all of this is happening without his parents noticing. Na Ri is acting as though she’s Na Na’s sole caretaker although an adult should probably be involved. How are they getting drunk (and in Kai’s case, bringing women home) without getting caught? It adds a sense of falseness to your story.

At the same time, I feel like you’re really pushing it with the club scene. This line (from chapter one) in particular really bothers me: “...she had a fake membership card and was a frequent visitor after having lied about her age a few years ago.” If she’s a high school student, then “a few years ago” suggests that she was a pre-teen when she first started going to clubs—and there’s no way that a bouncer would mistake a girl just going through puberty for a full-fledged adult.

I’m also left confused by Na Ri’s decision to talk to Jongin privately about the photo she snapped of Kai? If all she wanted in the end was to rightfully overcome the embarrassment that she suffered at his hand, why didn’t she just expose him in front of the crowd? I feel like this decision was spurred on by plot convenience rather than the actual motives of the characters.

Just remember that even though this is fiction, you want to make sure that what’s going on in your story is still believable. At the same time, you want to connect with the reader and make them feel like they have to keep reading in order to find out what’ll happen. This can be done through character attachment, interesting story dynamics, cliffhangers, mystery, etc. With your story, you opened up by telling us right away that Jongin has DID, and there’s nothing to really guess at or pull us in. There’s “drama,” sure, but we already know the truth of the situation, so it comes off as nothing more than bland.

Characterization: (6)/20

I think that the reason why your characters end up falling short is because their personalities come off as flimsy; this is because you claim in description/foreword that they’re one thing, but in your story itself, they seem like another. The biggest example of this would be Na Ri: you originally stressed her as the typical delinquent that goes clubbing, doesn’t care what others think, and likes to mess around with guys. Sometimes she comes off this way, but other times it seems like the “bad girl” persona is a front that she has difficulties keeping up. I think that this impression may stem from you trying to create the sense that “first impressions aren’t always as they seem,” but that trick doesn’t work here because I never got to the point where I actually believed that she was a rebellious kid. Rather than showing your readers the “bad girl” traits throughout the exposition of your story and making us believe them, you listed them off in your description/foreword and trusted that they would stick. It doesn’t really work like that.

A good example of this is in chapter two, when a boy confesses to Na Ri. Although the kid wasn’t smooth at all (like, I could totally understand why she wouldn’t be interested in him regardless of her thing for not dating boys at her school or whatever), the way she turned him down was exceptionally harsh. Taking the paper with his number, crumbling it, throwing it onto the floor, and then making him pick it up? Yeah, totally badass. But then right afterwards, she’s super offended that the reject shoulders his way past her. The moment turns from definite badass to suddenly superficial. She just turned someone down in a very cruel way and then can’t understand why they’d be a little upset? The traits can connect, sure, but you need to spend more time developing their connection.

Another example is in chapter one: Na Ri pretending to be drunk. We’re never given a reason as to why she acted drunk. It just seems like a real divergence from the character in the description/foreword that you claimed her to be (the drink-lover who likes to ually amuse herself with others)—why would she inhibit herself from getting what she wants? Why this time in particular? And if she’s so used to hooking up with guys, why is Cho Rim so surprised by the makeout session with Kai? Later, we see Na Ri worried about Cho Rim drinking too much, and that just seems like another trait that’s been tacked on at the last minute. There are a lot of inconsistencies regarding your main protagonist which is an especially big problem seeing as you’re only in the exposition of your story.

Jongin’s character confuses me as well. When we’re introduced to him in chapter two, he seems like a very genuine guy who’s incredibly worried about what his disease is doing to him. He’s afraid that it’s getting worse and—at the end of his section—he seems as though he’s on the verge of emotional collapse. If he’s so concerned with what Kai is doing that he calls an impromptu meeting with his psychiatrist, why doesn’t Na Ri’s accusations of him set off any alarm bells? Here’s a girl that he has absolutely no memory of, that’s upset that he never called her, and he’s not even a little bit suspicious as to Kai’s possible impact? If Jongin’s apparently the top student of the school, it just seems like something that he should pick up on—even if it’s just vaguely. When he was introduced, I took him as a more cautious, introverted character to foil Kai’s. Seeing him lash out at Na Ri the way he does throughout the story seems very strange to me.

Overall, the characters feel very weak and after seven chapters of reading, I have no attachment to them whatsoever.

Grammar: (6)/15

You had a couple of recurring grammatical errors throughout your fic that honestly made it difficult for me to read at times. There were moments when I wasn’t sure who was speaking or had to reread in order to figure out exactly what was going on because I would get confused by some of your mistakes.

Before I go into incredible detail, I’d like to point out that you have a couple of capitalization errors. They could be typos (it happens to the best of us), but do watch out for them! Also don’t forget to spell out your numbers rather than just typing them in numerically (“eighteen,” instead of “18”) as doing otherwise is considered a convention error. Also be sure that when dialogue switches from one person to another, a new paragraph should be made. Not only is this a rule of convention, but it also makes it easier for the reader to tell when someone else is speaking—especially if the two characters have the same pronouns. A good example of this is seen in chapter one:

“I don’t care,” Na Ri interrupted as Cho Rim shut upon hearing that. “Right,” she snapped her fingers while trying to keep up with Na Ri’s fast walking pace. Cho Rim caught up quickly. “Hey! Speaking of which, watch out for…”

A new paragraph should have been started after the first sentence, right before Cho Rim responds.

Your two biggest issues—grammar-wise—are in regards to your tenses and your word choice. From what I gather, your story is meant to be told in the past-tense, but sometimes present-tense sneaks into your writing. Be very careful that you stick to only one tense or it’ll confuse your readers and detract from your story. A lot of the words you choose to use also doesn’t make sense in the context of the sentence. The most frequent mistake I’ve noticed is that you use the incorrect prepositions in your sentences. For example, in chapter one, you said “...narrowing her eyes on him…” when it should have been “...narrowing her eyes at him…” Other times you make up words by mistaking them for another (also from chapter one: “darkly litted” instead of darkly lit and “themself” instead of themselves). I would make sure that you pay special attention to making sure that the words you write make sense in the context of what’s being written. I’ve never heard a meter stick referred to as a “metre ruler” before, so just be careful.

Writing Style: (3)/15 (syntax/diction)

Before an author can truly develop their own writing style (speaking in terms of syntax and diction), they have to understand the laws of grammar. Unfortunately, you’re still learning your way around the English language, so it’s understandably more difficult for you to get high marks in this section.

Let’s start with your diction. There are times that you use really mature words out of nowhere—which is great—but the way you use them feels very forced. I think that this may come from you using words incorrectly in the first place (as stated in the grammar section of this review). It almost seems to me as though you used one word originally, checked a thesaurus, and then changed it to something “better”. It’s great to add new words to your vocabulary, but please make sure you know what they mean and that they actually fit into the sentence before you use them. At the same time, you repeat words a lot (especially your pronouns) and it makes your writing feel dragging and redundant. Try to find a balance between using new words and old ones while maintaining the coherency of your work.

And though this probably isn’t as big of a deal to others as it is to me, but as a cursing enthusiast, I feel as though it is my obligation to correct you: ing someone is a very different thing from ing with someone. The former means having ; the latter means messing with a person. In chapter three when Na Ri is accusing Jongin of acting the way he is because “she didn’t agree to with him,” it’s just… No.

Syntactically speaking, your story doesn’t flow well at all. Part of this, I believe, stems from the feeling of “forced” diction, but another part of it comes from your constant reliance on adverbs. Try to balance yourself with the different types of words that you use. Variety betters your flow.

Personal Enjoyment: (1)/5

I’m sorry to say that I didn’t enjoy this story as much as I thought that I would. :c

Total Score: 34/100

Reviewer’s Comments: I tried to edit this to sound as concise as I could without coming off as too harsh, but I’m honestly not very sure that I succeeded. I believe that understanding our flaws and working to correct them is one of the best—if not the only—method of self-improvement. Your story is just beginning to unfurl: fixing it up to be the best that it can be is just another stepping stone in the process. Issues like grammar can be easily expunged by hiring a (grammatically knowledgeable) beta reader, and as you continue to write your story, I would just pay special attention to the way you write your characters. You’re on the road to becoming a better writer and I’m excited to see what you have to share with the rest of us! c: