First of all, I’ll continue writing, no worries here.
Second, I had last Friday the probably best experience of my life as a writer so far. I spent the greater part of three hours with 7 other people and they analyzed and picked apart my story, truly slaughtering it. And it was fantastic. I have listened, asked questions and gotten good answers back. I made tons of notes and gotten even more written into the margins and the lines of printed copies the others brought with them.
It was great to hear that I achieved a few of the goals I set out to accomplish. One was that the story is interesting and interesting enough, pulling you in, to keep you reading the next chapters. It was clear that some would not be interested in fantasy but all around everyone gave me good feedback. So bolstered by that compliment it also was easy to accept that there are many flaws in my writing (as expected).
Since Toreas is an experiment I am going to spell out the major things wrong with it at this stage (and anyone reading this later can still view the history of the revisions). Hopefully this will help other authors as well in some way or another.
Point of view: Especially at the beginning I switched and mixed the point of view. It’s not clear who’s head the reader is in. This needs a rewrite for certain, to clearly state who is currently the active point of view. Also it needs to be limited to one point of view per chapter (exception is one chapter where I break the point in the middle, but there I need a clearer indication).
Show, don’t tell: This is probably the worst for me and I imagine many writers, especially in fantasy. You want to tell everything you see to the reader, but that leads down a path where you talk down to the reader instead of showing the reader what’s going on.
Repetition: Even if something is worded differently, it’s still repeating. Repetition can be very tedious on the reader and give a sense of being talked down to (to a lesser extent than show don’t tell) and also makes the text appear more suited for younger readers, which brings me to the next point.
Know who you write for: You usually know who you write for, age wise usually and often genre specific. So there will be a different content in an adults only book than in young adult or middle grade. Toreas is geared into the young adult to adult area. Probably more towards adult but I doubt and young adult would keel over dead from reading it. By choosing that bracket, I’m making promises just as well as when I set a plot in the story. It’s not all flowers and rainbows, in fact it can be outright nasty at times. But this is what I would ant to see in a story and what I have to deliver if I want to write for the adult bracket. If I wouldn’t want that, then it might be for younger readers.
Tighten the text: I was told that a third of the whole thing could go. Some of it is repetition but that’s not all. Now after being happy that your text is a certain length, you are reluctant to cut, but it has to be done in order to progress from OK to excellent text. My use of the word just is an example there. I got told that I use it excessively and just a quick scan of chapter 17 shows me how useless it often is and how much better the text is with a different word in it’s place or even more often, it just removed. I trimmed it down to a single use in a turn of phrase where I think it has it’s justification. In the same step I have heard that using “finally” is a bad idea and so I have been thinking hard before using that one as well. I’m certain there are more general words but also some that are specific to writers which might come up again and again. But to catch those I believe you need someone from the outside to point them out to you.
Don’t forget the setting: When I say setting I’m not (only) talking about the room or area the characters are in, but a general view of the world, how are they, what is different from every day modern life, whats unusual, but also what might be just the same? Giving the setting more detail will make the world appear more alive.
Of course there are also a lot of grammar mistakes in there, but those come later, once the other things have been ironed out. By that time I will have discarded some of the grammar and added some new mistakes.
So, I know what I have to change and enhance. Now I’ll try to let as much as possible of what I have been told flow into the revision of chapter 17 then get some feedback on it. When it passes, I will spend a bit time to redo chapter 1 and 2 to submit them to the writers group again and see if I improved on it. If so, I’ll keep adding new chapters and rewriting old ones in alternating cycles until I have the entire novel up to a higher standard.