This week we have four competitive entries. Don't go looking for mine, I decided to enter mine as leisure just because I failed at my premise and kind of botched it.
The three (!) leisure entries will be posted tomorrow so people have a good chance to soak in the competitive ones first. Overall we had 7 different entries this week for those not good with math (or maybe 6 really <_<) so that's not too bad for finals time. I'll make a fun prompt for next week and make sure everyone is on the same page for writing time =).
1 - this sounds like it was either written by a 6 year old or FOR a 6 year old. now, writing children's stories is a unique art that requires some very specific talents. nothing about the story was particular compelling or interesting but it was short and to the point so that it didn't become bothersome. I did feel like it lacked imagination for what it was supposed to be. additionally, you did that annoying thing (which I remarked upon much last week and will probably continue to do so for every week to come) where people play with the prompt except they don't bring anything interesting to the table. please, people. PLEASE. if you don't have a very interesting idea that you are able to execute well just stick to the prompt.
2 - okay this was not an adventure. this was more like the first chapter of a battle shounen. with the main characters needlessly having asian names and everything! I'm guessing the next chapter starts with Kotaro waking up somehow unharmed and then going on to, I dunno, punch more things. okay, let me explain why this wasn't an adventure. first of all, there was no journey, goal, or trials. you didn't even follow basic narrative structure, come to think of it. there was one line of exposition and then we were dropped into a constant conflict. if there was a climax in there I couldn't identify it since the entire story was just bland action. with written stories you cannot get away with that. there is nothing interesting about some guy going around punching a bunch of people. if you were writing this story again my advice would be to spend more time in the beginning establishing the characters. don't pointlessly give the sister powers if she's never going to use them. have the story revolve around the exploration of the tower and advancement of the plot, THEN there can be a battle. also, the thing about the knight dude making it so that the archangel couldn't attack him but then Kotaro punching him anyway was insanely cheesy. please don't do that. resolve power-ups are not an effective narrative technique. lastly I need to comment on how bland ALL of the characters were. none of them seemed to have any personality traits except for the villain, who was basically a cardboard cutout "evil" guy. was it ever explained why he did any of the things he did? why did he hate Kotaro so much that he wanted to make him eat his dead parents? there was no point to anything that he did and so, ultimately, no point to the story. There were also tons of technical errors which I could have forgiven if not for the massive list of additional complaints.
this story is literally fanfiction of a tabletop RPG played on AIM by board 8 users (and I'm not making this up) and Hunter is MY character I created and the writer did not get my express permission to use him in a story
3 - 2097 fanfiction huh. okay I'm going to try hard to ignore the fact that you changed two of the aliens into humans and added a filler character just for the purpose of killing her off. I really did not like the first person writing style at all. especially during the action scene it came across as really silly the way Hagen was talking and yet there were people getting splattered all over by this giant monster. what it did was create this disconnect where people were needlessly dying and I knew the main character wasn't in any danger.
all of that being said, I can't particularly blame any of the authors for the quality of their work. they probably felt somewhat trapped due to the low cap for the word count this week's submission. instead of making more strict guidelines as I suggested last week, Chris instead just removed the lower cap entirely which actually made the requirements less strict.
keeping in mind that a standard adventure is probably going to have a higher word count due to involving a journey and trials as well as some sort of climax, I would have gone with 7,000-9,000 this week. instead we got 0-4,000 which meant all of the adventures had to be written with a very small word count for the amount of content that needed to go on to make them effective.
From: saveus_Maria | #014 all of that being said, I can't particularly blame any of the authors for the quality of their work. they probably felt somewhat trapped due to the low cap for the word count this week's submission. instead of making more strict guidelines as I suggested last week, Chris instead just removed the lower cap entirely which actually made the requirements less strict.
keeping in mind that a standard adventure is probably going to have a higher word count due to involving a journey and trials as well as some sort of climax, I would have gone with 7,000-9,000 this week. instead we got 0-4,000 which meant all of the adventures had to be written with a very small word count for the amount of content that needed to go on to make them effective.
Yeah this is never going to have that high of a count unless it is a longer 'assignment.' I mean adventure is such a general term and I think you really shrink it down to next to nothing if you think it needs to be longer than any other type of story.
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http://firsthour.net/screenshots/suikoden-2/suikoden-2-luca-blight.JPG The Cult of Personality.
1. I can't really get into this. It just really seemed very unimaginative. Almost like someone who saw a few cheap space fighter flicks decided to write down one of the scenes or something. HOWEVER, it also kinda sounds like it could be one of those chapter things from disgaea. There are issues where i don't really know who the mc is and why I should really care about. Since this one is short I read it over a couple of times, and there seems to be a problem with the way it flows. Just something about how a lot of the action has things like "there was, he had, as the, or stuff like that."
2. If I had to genre this I guess I'd call it a Thriller. But... it wasn't very exciting. I don't care about the character... even if he's in a pretty crappy spot I can't really enjoy starting in the middle of something without finding out more relevant info in the near future. So I don't really know what's going on until the very end, I essentially lack any background information I would need to appreciate this story the way it's presented to me.
3. This started off pretty well, then people started randomly dying and it almost became an unintentional comedy. I have to say most of the time I really dislike when people use first person, it really limits perspective for a story, so unless you have a really good reason to use it, I suggest you don't.
4. First, on a technical issue, in the first paragraph when you have the "every..." like 3 times? Drop the every, and condense that to be a short as possible. Okay I was with this until the catgirl. For the entire first half of the story though it just seems like a day in the life. Then there's breaking the fourth wall...and a master ball... while this one has some development and setup, I'm not sure how much of it was really needed. This is the hardest one to judge because its also the one I take the least seriously based on the content.
Rankings 1>4>3>2 1,4, and 3 are almost interchangable.
-- Chrono1219 The beautiful genius who graduated from Harvard as a child and has an IQ of 1.3^googolplex.
4 - remember what I said to the person who wrote entry 1? same goes for you. unless you have something insanely groundbreaking to show us, just stick with the prompt. as a result you ended up wasting about 30-40% of the story on a setting that wasn't relevant to the 'adventure' at all. additionally, anything that could have been considered an obstacle or challenge was glossed over in favor of Chase just going to different places and talking to different characters. I'm not even sure what the point of the three dawn gems were and he found them in less than one paragraph. the final confrontation was very anti-climactic, and not in a clever way. the entire story lacked any sort of tension or climax, making it feel like the main character getting home was a forgone conclusion and we were basically just going through the motions waiting for that to happen. it was still the best entry this week, but there were plenty of flaws that could have easily been fixed with more upfront plotting. try to come up with more unique ideas for the setting yourself instead of borrowing already existing things. additionally, you need to learn how to make the situations in the story actually come across as obstacles, otherwise everything you write is just going to come off as boring.
First off: the title is Adventure Genre? That is terrible! I jest, because I know that is surely not the title of this work, but all the same I question what that phrase was doing there, and why that was the first thing I read. Then I actually read the work and then I figured out why that needed to be there: that was hardly an adventure at all. It was a cute little story about a simple car ride to school reimagined into a space cargo transport mission, but it didn't really encompass much more than that. Technically it fit the theme, but as a bare bones piece it lacked the feel of a real adventure as it was over before it even started.
I felt like you were building up to what you thought was a clever twist, but I'm afraid it wasn't; in fact, I saw the twist coming as soon as I read the name "Suz An'". If you were going to go this route I would've suggested you not try to mask it at all. I would have made it clear from the beginning that the Alpha Accord was a Honda Accord, that the asteroids he swerved to avoid were potholes, and that the ambush was a busted traffic light or a detour sign or what have you, alternating between the imagined adventure and the actual event. Not every story needs a twist, so if you're going to do one make it good.
The Positives:
- Well-written - Direct
The Negatives:
- too short - uninspired - lacked the feel of an adventure, even if it technically was one
Ways to improve:
First off, you could benefit from slowing down while you're writing, and stepping back and examining the piece as a whole once you're finished. There were a few typos here and there: an "Un fortunately" here, and a "he could see make out" there, also a missed period (heh). Luckily it was nothing that hindered its readability, but proofreading would help all the same. You didn't try to establish any kind of emotional connection here and that actually might have worked in your favor. At the end of the story, I was like "oh, it's a dad and his daughter, Susan- how cute." It was a pretty shallow reaction, but it was a positive one rather than something that made me cringe, so well-done.
I've gotta agree with the others: this wasn't an adventure. I don't know what I would call it (Sci-fi drama maybe?), but I would not call it an "adventure". When I think of the this genre I think of something involving a quest- one with a journey and a clear destination. I could say the journey was the brief traipse through the tower, and the locations of his family members was the destination, but that's grasping at straws. The destination should be clearly defined from the beginning so that the piece doesn't come across as an ambled mess.
The Positives:
- The setting was interesting
The Negatives:
- The characters were bland - The conflicts were resolved unrealistically - Past/present tense discrepancy - unfocused narrative with too much going on
Ways to improve: Be more direct in your next approach, and stick to the theme of the prompt. There was so much going on in this story I couldn't really get much of it at all. I still don't understand the villain's motives: he wanted to create angels to control angels so that they could defeat other angels, but he also wanted to torture his artificial angels because, as a demon, he hated angels both real and artificial alike? That's really all over the place. And what was up with those circles and texts?
Also I took issue with a very serious flaw in your writing style: the past/present tense discrepancies. Example: "As his mind became clearer, he can feel something binding..." That should have been "could feel something", not "can". Things like that kept happening throughout the piece and I cringed every time I encountered one. If you start a sentence in one tense, you have to keep it consistent. Please keep that in mind.
This piece looks like it was written by two different people... Was it written by two different people, or did you just polish off a rush job ending fifteen minutes before the deadline without proofreading it at all? I'm leaning toward the latter, but the quality difference is just that noticeable that I wouldn't be shocked to find out it was the former.
The Positives:
- Very well-written... half very well-written - You settled on a break-off point. I can respect that.
The Negatives:
- Emotional disconnect - Present-tense narrative - Loads of typos in the second half - In fact, the entire second half is a negative in itself
Ways to improve:
I'm going to say plan the concept out better, and take your time perfecting the entire thing instead of establishing a good beginning and rushing the hell out of the end. Always proofread after you're finished. The first half looks pretty good- only issues I noticed are the run on sentence "I do not know them very well, but there are certainly some combustible elements this Hunter in particular seems unreliable" (should have been a semicolon there) and the capitalized "s" in squirrelly which didn't seem to have any purpose.
It's around the second half that I realized the first-person present tense perspective really did not gel well with this prompt. Also in the second half, loads and loads of typos, grammatical errors, etc. So many I can't even bother pointing them all out. You even forgot to capitalize the "h" in Hunter a couple of times. I think I see where you were going with this: were you trying to make it seem like this was all taking place at the time Schmidt was chronicling it, so during the skirmish with the one beast, Schmidt's writing would come across as hurried and flawed? If so, that would be a brilliant idea if it didn't completely suspend my disbelief. No one would be writing about a life or death experience while the thing is still taking place. Past tense was the way to go here.
What I did like was that you realized you were running out of wiggle room, and decided to end it on a cliffhanger instead of phoning in a terrible ending. What I didn't like is the way you ended it. DID THEY LIVE? I don't care. OR DOES THE STORY END HERE? I kind of want it to. TUNE IN NEXT WEEKS (grammatically incorrect) 2097 SCI FI ADVENTURE TIME TO FIND OUT. I'd rather not. The major problem there is that I don't give a damn about any of the characters. To me they are: boring narrator, Asian boobs, that other guy, and dead Americans. Why would I want to tune in again? Also, I literally facepalmed at *cue cheesy 80s sci-fi theme song*. That was awful.
Overview: This piece has the feel of an adventure, but it lacks a few elements. The antagonist is mindless and the conflict that involved so much build up is resolved in an unsatisfying way.
The Positives:
- Well-written, and It flows very well - Two engaging settings
The Negatives:
- Too long - Sort of esoteric - Wasted way too much time establishing the setting in which the adventure did not take place - The ending is anti-climactic, but at least you realized it
Ways to improve:
Balance things out more. You put a lot of effort into the beginning and middle, and you put significantly less into the end. If there was more to the final battle, you cut it out in favor of the primary exposition. In its defense the primary exposition is rather good, but the it adds almost nothing to the story as a whole, and could have been condensed for great effect. Also don't introduce characters you're not going to utilize, as it makes the whole piece feel more cluttered. The Emperor and the bunny slug were useless, and Bobby was but a foil to establish an emotional connection which was unnecessary and dwarfed by the existing connection with Laura.
If the disagreement with Michael regarding the writing project was supposed to be significant, you should have emphasized it more. Example: "Mike wanted to do some kind of satirical piece that broke the fourth wall and openly made fun of itself and the genre, while Chase thought he has a better idea: writing something that would be taken seriously. As neither of them knew the definition of the word 'compromise'". That one bit of dialogue reflects the entire story, and it wasn't accentuated enough so that others might understand it freely. Others also might not get the references to Tiberius Beekiller, Doom the Gyarados, or the bunnyslug, so writing them in for the sole purpose of establishing the outside connection thereby breaking the fourth wall may have been a mistake.
Overall, I feel like this project was too ambitious for the prompt, and that you were limited by the word count restriction. If this is true you probably should have ran with another, more direct idea. Another alternative would have been to clip this, or split it into two parts, with the opening half as the Competitive Entry and the closing half as a Leisure Entry. As you did neither of these, you ended up with something that had great potential but ended up merely good. Good is not good enough, and you can do much better!
Subjective Rankings:
The first half of Entry 3 > Entry 4 > Entry 1 > Entry 2 > The latter half of Entry 3
Objective (Official) Rankings:
Entry 4 > Entry 1 > Entry 3 > Entry 2
The second half of Entry 3 just brings the entire thing down. That could have been an easy #1.
Not at all, I just have other priorities! Next prompt isn't even due up or anything (this one was done early for fun and look how that turned out) and feel free to post your own story, as I can't be bothered at the moment.
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http://firsthour.net/screenshots/suikoden-2/suikoden-2-luca-blight.JPG The Cult of Personality.
I specifically avoided saying when the deadline for this was for a reason, expect the prompt (as well as my rankings!) in a few days. Until then continue to grow as writers in your spare time, my blossoms.
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http://firsthour.net/screenshots/suikoden-2/suikoden-2-luca-blight.JPG The Cult of Personality.
XD I completely forgot about this. First idea was more in line with your standard "off on a journey" adventure genre IN SPACE, so with my backup I went with escape from somewhere instead. I also had a 3rd idea of a Scrooge McDuck fanfic, but went with my 2nd Kamen Rider idea instead.
Spot on critiques about mine, I'd say. I do have tense problems, since I skipped learning the basics and learned from conversations and TV, and most of my English's based on faulty instinct. Working on it!
Main problem (horrible English aside) with mine is that it's a piece of a huge ass puzzle. Kotaro breaking free of Furcas' control? Yeah, Furcas' project was sabotaged, but that's out of context. Also, first draft had Kotaro lose to Furcas, and Furcas hunting down the sister, but since he's got angel powers, why not put in a Deus Ex Machina victory? Seems fitting. And yeah, Furcas just really hates Angels. Even dead ones and ones completely under his control. Kotaro was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Bland characters? Doesn't really feel like it to me. Then again, might be author bias since I know what they're going to be. Well, fleshing out characters are always good.
Also, I submitted an unedited entry (I had to cut around 1500 words to make it fit), but guess it'll never see the light of day. Suffice it to say, both Furcas and Kotaro are dead dead, and Kotaro is a decoy protagonist.
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My Little Phineas and Ferb: Summer is Magic! Aww, I lost to SuperNiceDog, Winner of the Rivalry Rumble Guru Contest
The demons added them in so their hosts can tell which are enemies and friends at a glance, and if they still pose a threat or not. They also gave a basic database to draw info from as well.
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My Little Phineas and Ferb: Summer is Magic! Aww, I lost to SuperNiceDog, Winner of the Rivalry Rumble Guru Contest