(July 2015)

Title: When the Night Falls
Author: eunriehyun

Reviewer: eleutheromaniac

Title: (2)/5
There’s nothing particularly interesting about your title that grabs my attention—it seems like another typical title on AFF. There’s no clear connection between your title and your story that really justifies the decision and makes the title feel meaningful, but I’ve noticed that one of your other reviewers mentioned that the two were correlated. Good job on the capitalization.

Description/Foreword: (1)/10

So you changed your description/foreword sometime between when I started reading your story and when I started writing this review. It wasn’t great before, but you’ve somehow managed to make me like it even less.

Do not rely on rhetorical questions. Never rely on rhetorical questions. They’re okay on occasion, but you should never bombard a reader with them. My English professors have always told me that they’re an annoying cliché of sorts.

The typo that irks me most is the “..” catastrophe. Is it supposed to be a period? Is it supposed to be an ellipse? In your case, it’s probably the latter, but it’s something that needs to be fixed nonetheless.

The portion of the description that didn’t change (the first sentence) still holds grammatical errors that are a definite turn-off to make me continue wanting to read. You don’t “loose” your way, you “lose” it. The sentence in general is difficult to make sense of because it’s ridden with typos and has a bad case of strange syntax. I’m not sure if this is part of your attempt to write in “Old English,” but it’s something that really needs to be fixed. The semicolon should probably be replaced with a comma and the whole sentence needs some restructuring.

Ignoring the grammatical errors, the description reminds me a lot of Snow White, so there isn’t really an original concept here that keeps me hooked.

Plot: (xx)/30

I won’t be scoring you for plot because I wasn’t able to get past chapter two of your story. I’ll rant about why more in the grammar section of the review, but just know that you won’t be held accountable for the plot.

From what I did read, however, the plot isn’t very solid in the slightest. I think that the biggest thing that bothered me was Donghae being requested to join the military. Why on Earth would the daughter of a noble family be requested to join the military? That makes absolutely no sense to me and I’m not sure if you explain it later, but I honestly feel that it’s something that detracts incredibly from your story’s believability. You claim that she’s being taken as a debt repaid, but that doesn’t make much sense to me either and that’s probably because it was mentioned once and her father kind of drops his argument. That’s plot convenience right there, and no one’s really a big fan of it.

Characterization: (3)/20

I’m going to give you some benefit of the doubt and assume that your characters became more three-dimensional as your story continued—only because it was said in one of your other reviews, to be honest.

Your story seems to be full of either stock or flat characters that have no true depth to them and do whatever you tell them to do regardless of whether or not it actually fits their personality. Donghae is the rebellious princess. Leeteuk is the knight in shining armor. Siwon is the supportive best friend. There aren’t really any elements that you’ve included to make them feel like more than just stock—which is bad since they’re some of your main characters. I understand that I didn’t read all the way through, but it’s still very possible for you to include traits early on that make your characters feel more realistic. Everyone has their own little quirks: maybe Donghae twirls her hair when she gets nervous or Siwon gets a slight twitch in his jaw when he feels uneasy. Little things that make them feel more human.

I also think that the way that your characters behave sometimes comes off as very flat or for the sake of plot convenience. Donghae’s father was incredibly mad about his daughter leaving to join the military, but in the end, he lets her go fairly easily? You painted this picture of a manipulative father, so giving up doesn’t really seem to be in his character. I also think it’s a little odd that Yoona is so daughter about her daughter leaving—a teary farewell kind of felt like it was coming but it didn’t happen and I found that I kind of wanted it to. Your characters don’t show much emotion, so getting to see some would’ve been nice.

What probably bothered me the most, however, was that in chapter one, Donghae acknowledges that she’s being treated like an object but she’s okay with that? I know that you said she took it in stride because she just wanted to get away from her dad, but I think it would’ve been good if you had maybe mentioned something about her being annoyed by it but not saying anything. It seems a little weird for a girl that’s desperate for freedom to be okay with such dehumanization.

Grammar: (1)/15

I honestly think that I would’ve been able to power through your story if it hadn’t been for your grammar. There are some issues that actually seem genuine—your tenses, your mismatched prepositions, your word choice—but a good number of them seem to result from negligent editing. As an author myself, I honestly can’t imagine publishing a new update before reading through my work first and catching any typos that I know I’m capable of fixing. You have spelling errors like crazy littered throughout your story (most notably, “horase” from chapter one) and I’m sure that a lot of the punctuation mistakes are the result of typos as well (from chapter two, “Why would the child say that.”). These are your easiest fixes, so please remember to re-read your own work before submitting it.

Your word choice throughout the text seems to be very faulty. A lot of this stems from your tense confusion (which I will be addressing shortly) as it seems you try to combine the past and present into a single word.

An example from this is “Her breath caughting up…”

“Caught” is past-tense—“catching” is present-tense. Combining the two ends up creating a word that doesn’t even exist.

Other times, your word choice simply doesn’t make sense? My favorite example of this was “...lazily glacier from side to side…”

Okay, first of all, “glacier” is a noun. You can’t use an adverb like “lazily” right before a noun like that since—as the name suggests—adverbs are meant to describe the nature of a verb. I’m not really sure where “glacier” came from, in all honesty, since I think that what would’ve worked here is “glancing,” but issues like this are littered throughout your story and make for a tiring read. I’m sure I speak for others when I say that when I’m reading for enjoyment, I don’t like having to decode what the author is trying to tell me. It’s one thing to question the plot and wonder where the story’s going to go next, but it’s another thing to question what the author is even trying to say just because it doesn’t make sense.

You also have a habit of using the incorrect prepositions, so be careful with that. An example is “We’ll stop on the nearest village...” from chapter two. It should be: “We’ll stop at the nearest village…”

The biggest grammatical flaw of your story is your tenses. I have the feeling that you were trying to write in the present-tense (judging from your description, at least), but your writing was so...ever-changing that I’m still not confident if the story was meant to be past or present-tense. It detracted an awful amount from your overall story and it’s where I can see you improving the most in the future. Here’s a basic guide I found online, but a simple Google search will pull up many others.

In my opinion, grammar is the basic foundation for any story; you can’t enjoy what you can’t always understand. It can be tough to learn at first, but I promise you that it’ll pay off in the end.

Writing Style: (0)/15

Before anyone can have writing style, they need to have good grammar. Unfortunately, since your understanding of the conventions of the English language is just beginning, you’re nowhere near having a clear writing style; diction is repeated constantly, sentence structures are boring and typical, most of your imagery is clouded by faulty wording to really be understood.

Personal Enjoyment: (0)/5

I didn' enjoy reading this story for the reasons listed above.

Total Score: 7/70 (10%)

Reviewer’s Comments: When I told you that I was unable to finish reading your story and asked if you still wanted me to complete the review, you asked me to be honest with you, so here goes: I had genuine difficulty finishing this story and I ultimately wasn’t able to. With the flat characters and atrocious grammar, I wanted to stop reading before I even finished your foreword. There’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to your writing—but in some cases, that’s in the best position to be in. Getting better will take some time; be sure that you pay special attention to grammar. The most important thing is for a story to be legible. There are a lot of guides online that can help with your tenses, or if you’re looking for more of a quick fix, ask a (grammatically knowledgeable) beta reader to take a look at it for you. I would personally recommend the former, however, since it’s never a bad idea to aim for some personal improvement.