The Guy I Thought I've never met before
http://www.asianfanfics.com/story/view/677559/the-guy-i-thought-i-ve-never-met-before-angst-drama-romance-originalcharacter-exo-luhan

About: Luhan(EXO)+OC, experiment, family

Katrina
Finished 7/26/2014
Note: I apologize for the long wait. Thank you for not canceling.

Title: 1/5 It might relate to your story later on, but even so, it doesn’t seem like you put any thought to the title at all. Not only is it not eye-catching at all, it lacks creativity. I can probably find a whole bunch of stories with this title. It doesn’t show anything special about your story.

Foreword: 5/10 First off, your foreword has some incorrect grammar, but that’s not the problem. My problem is that your wording sounds weird, and in turn, it doesn’t make your foreword interesting. I don’t feel any need to read your story. First of all, “Kwon Yaejin is a very innocent yet fragile girl” reveals much of her personality, but that’s not what caught my eye. It says “is” but at the bottom, it says that she’s also a cold city girl, which makes her sound very bad-, but bad- and innocent don’t go together. Besides that, your foreword reveals a lot of information. Below, I’m going to try to fix it to make it sound nicer.

“Kwon Yaejin was only sixteen years old when her parents and other relatives passed away in a car accident.  Everything happened so fast that she couldn’t even react. In one move, her entire life was turned upside down. Everyone believes that it was just a common accident, but her heart tells her otherwise. She knows that someone out there planned for them to die that day. Now that she is grown up, she is ready to follow her heart and find the murderer that destroyed her life.”

I think that’s all you need. Of course, the description I gave you can still be tweaked. I didn’t make it perfect all the way, because how would you learn then? Besides the description, the sentences below aren’t exactly needed, because your summary gave enough information. Besides, they look really out-of-place. It feels like you just threw them in to get more attention.

The excerpt at the bottom is also unneeded because it gives away so much information and takes attention away from the foreword. It makes the description look weak.

To sum it all up, your entire foreword has too much information, which makes it look uninteresting. 

Plot: 11/20 Your foreword told me that this story would be a mystery about a girl who sets out to find her parents’ murderer. Your actual story told me otherwise. Instead of an innocent girl, like what your foreword told me, I get a hardcore woman. Your foreword led me to believe that Yaejin is just a normal girl who lives in a city and is plotting her revenge. Maybe this comes in later on in the story, but right now, all you’re focusing on is background information.

Speaking of that, you give us five chapters of background information instead of focusing on the actual plot. You should’ve given us glimpses of the background as the story progresses, so we, as the readers, can create our own image of that world. Instead, you give us everything right away, and it’s not a mystery anymore. I can’t even tell how your plot will develop. All I can see is that Yaejin defeats Spencer in the end. I don’t see any twists to liven things up because you already exposed the secrets.

Your plot seems interesting, but you didn’t start it from the right angle. Basically, you are trying to build a house (write a story). Instead of starting with the foundation (the actual plot that then branches off and lead to other stuff), you start with the walls. Without a foundation, the house will collapse. Your story won’t collapse like that, but it is just lacking pillars to hold it together, because it’s really unstable.

Specific Advice: Your plot is not that cliché since it has a mysterious element to it, but you just don’t develop it well. You focus so much on background information instead of starting with the actual plot. The experiment seems interesting, but you should go further into depth. How do the blue things work? Do they change the cellular structure of Yaejin? That’s the type of information that you should reveal, not how she got separated from her family.

Characters: 15/20 Your characters aren’t really described that well. I can feel Yaejin’s child-like innocence, since she is a child, so that’s one good point. However, Spencer and her brother act pretty weirdly. They don’t feel real. It’s like you’re trying to make them realistic, but you’re just not there yet. Instead of having her brother obsess over her, have him think about making it out of that place. Don’t have his entire mind focused on his “baby girl” because this makes him feel more like a puppet instead of a real boy. His emotions feel fake.

I can see Yaejin’s personality developing but right now, at the point, I don’t see much, because you focus so much on plot. You focus too much on trying to get the plot to the right angle instead of giving more insight to your characters. For example, during the experiment, instead of saying that she feels stabbing pain, tell us what “stabbing pain” is. Does she feel like her arms are being set on fire? Does she feel like she wants to die? Don’t just have her screaming there or just write that she feels pain.

Grammar and Spelling: 12/20 You switch tenses too much that it’s hard to read your story. You write your actions in past tense, but your characters’ thoughts in present. Pick on tense and stick with it for the rest of the story.

Another common mistake is your run-on sentences. When separating two full sentences, you should use a period or semi-colon instead of a comma. Sometimes I see three full sentences squished into one, which is incorrect. Once, I saw a whole paragraph full of run-on sentences that were separated by commas. Don’t use commas because they don’t work that way.

I feel like your vocabulary is a bit weak. Sometimes your sentences sound odd because you’re using simple words over and over again, without any variety. Since you’re from the Philippines, I’m guessing your native language is not English? Try to use different synonyms.

Flow: 6/15 (Specific Advice) This is not slow at all. In fact, it’s too fast. You skip from one event to another without even explaining anything. It’s like you just want the plot to move, so you force it to move. Take your time, explain your stuff, establish some background information as you go along instead of squishing them all together, and then move on. It seems like a slow process, but it isn’t. What you’re doing right now is introducing an event and then jumping forward without stopping. Take your time. If you don’t write this story, the world isn’t ending, so don’t rush.

Enjoyment: 3/5 The lack of an established plot and the severe tense changes really threw me off.

Structure: 4/5 In dialogue, the comma goes inside the quotes. For example [“I like you”,] should be [“I like you,”]. This goes for your foreword as well.

All numbers lower than 10 should be written out in word forms in a story, so “2” would be “two.” In your foreword, you wrote “3” like that, which is incorrect.

Otherwise, your chapters are neat and organized, but you can lower your font size, because it looks pretty messy. Since that’s more of a personal preference, I’m not taking any point off for that.

Overall: 57/100 Your story is lacking an established plot. You started with a super long prologue, basically, but even with five chapters, you still don’t have anything to match what your foreword says. In this way, the foreword gave too much information. Besides that, your tense changes are too much. Every word in each sentence is in a different tense. Look over your work once you’re done