Jump to content

Guenhywvar- Prologue- untitled- 14th/12/11- [V]


Guenhywvar

Recommended Posts

Attached is the prologue- It is around 7,700 words, and so I am sorry for the long submission, but all three scenes are needed- I won't mind if you don't critique all of it, as I know it is 2,700 odd words above the limit, but it felt odd just leaving it halfway through a scene.

The prologue follows three different characters: Enthisa (A God to be), Hinther (Turmoil- every magician at the time has a nickname), and Athir(Dragon).

The first scene is the background to the creation of the world in which the characters reside. The second two scenes are about the war (haven't named it yet, but possibly the Chaos wars- although that is too clichéd.)

I hope you enjoy.

There is slight violence in the prologue.

Edit- I thought I would add that this is a first draft, and that any typos/grammar mistakes you spot are welcome, they will make my life easier at a later point.

Regards,

Guen.

Edited by Guenhywvar
Link to comment
Share on other sites

First off - you've got a detailed world with a history and cosmology that feel very thought-out. That's excellent. It feels like you have good skill with world building and big grand epic ideas. Awesome!

Second, the writing is rough in spots. I took notes as I was reading and I'll paste them in now:

Quick question - are you British? Some of your spellings seemed British.

" , If this is the price, was it worth it? The destruction of an entire civilisation, just because of the overuse of magic? Soon though, we will start anew, and then we can stop something like this happening again." - First sentence, awesome and evocative. Second two sentences were a bit info-dumpy, less what someone might actually think.

Your dialogue needs some work. For instance, on page two someone says "Nope" which is very jarring in this setting. Try reading all your dialogue aloud and asking if anyone actually speaks that way.

Similarly, you use a lot of "said book"isms. IE instead of just saying "he said" you'll say "he moaned", "she responded", "voice sung", etcetera. "Said" or "asked" is basically invisible to the reader. Anything that replaces "said' sticks out. Save it for when you really want to call attention to how they are saying something.

The five siblings are hard to tell apart. That's probably inevitable at this part of the story. You're mentioning the meeting happening at noon, then they are doing magic and the sun is setting. Are they really doing magic for hours? Make me feel the time passing!

Biggest flaw with this scene is I do not understand why the world has to be destroyed, nor why these people are right or wrong to make that decision. Are they gods? Just powerful mages? Crazed mad wizards? Later they show up as the gods of the new world, on the side that we are supposed to root for, and - ugh, I just think "wow, these guys murdered everyone they knew because they had decided there was no way to save them". We have words for people like that and they are not nice words. Either play this up more - point out that the Gods are actually evil murderers - or give the reader more understanding of why they are doing what they are doing.

"The place where the Daemons were banished to, outside the twelve worlds, or Realms that were governed by the Gods, that they had created, and looked after, nurtured the life on their two worlds." - I don't understand this sentence. Actually I'm confused about your worlds and realms and things.

"Oh, how she hated death; it was a pointless waste of life." - this is an unintentionally funny line. At least, if it's supposed to be funny it's defusing the carefully built tension of your scene, and if it's not supposed to be funny, it comes off as odd.

“Yes, it is still located in the same mountain range, the Mountains of Magic, that you remember, they still reside there, training our magicians as usual" - there are a couple of other places where you do infodump in your conversations. People don't talk like this. Have you read this blog post from Brandon about stilted dialogue? http://www.brandonsanderson.com/blog/459/Ten-Elements-of-Bad-Storytelling-6-%28-Warbreaker%29

“What do you mean you are as strong as me in magic? " - He didn't say magic, why does she assume he means in magic? Also next two lines of dialogue would work better as internal monologue - something she thinks but does not say.

Is Athir really dead? If she is, then you've spent a lot of pages seting up characters and the only sympathetic viewpoint you wrote is gone. Also her death seemed really anticlimactic - I wasn't sure she was dead until the end.

I would remove the prologue. Save that information for later. It actually would make Hinther's words about the Gods destroying their own world stronger.

I'm very confused as to why there were 5 "Gods" at the start and 6 later. There were 5 elements represented, if there's a 6th element that is bad or banned you should make that clear.

Your story is vivid. Your writing is rough in places. Your narrative writing will not take too much work to clean up but your dialogue needs work. Most lines sound stilted. We don't write dialogue the way people really say it - we leave out most of the "uhs" and "you knows" - but we also don't want to write dialogue that doesn't sound like what people would really say.

Anyhow, I hope you found this useful. If it's not the sort of critique you find helpful let me know so next time I can be more in tune to you.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nope, that is the sort of critiquing I was kinda looking for, what works, and what doesn't.

First of yes, I'm English.

So effectively, I need to be careful about info-dumping in scenes and work on the dialogue, fair enough, I will work on that.

You're mentioning the meeting happening at noon, then they are doing magic and the sun is setting. Are they really doing magic for hours? Make me feel the time passing!

Fair point, yes they are casting for hours, magic on that scale takes some time in this book, it isn't a wand, poof done magic, it is a construction magic, as you have probably gathered.

Biggest flaw with this scene is I do not understand why the world has to be destroyed, nor why these people are right or wrong to make that decision. Are they gods? Just powerful mages? Crazed mad wizards? Later they show up as the gods of the new world, on the side that we are supposed to root for, and - ugh, I just think "wow, these guys murdered everyone they knew because they had decided there was no way to save them". We have words for people like that and they are not nice words. Either play this up more - point out that the Gods are actually evil murderers - or give the reader more understanding of why they are doing what they are doing.

They are just powerful magi in the book, or at least in the beginning. Then they destroy their world, because of the price of magic, and set themselves up as Gods in their own world.

(The price of magic is energy, it is all sourced from the universe's core, which will produce energy over time as a product of expansion. When this energy is drained, the universe will implode on itself, destroying any life that is in it, and create a new one in its place, conserving energy)

The point of the book I would say, or at least one of the key themes that really got me writing was, 'What is good? What is bad? Are they opposites? Can you justify either? Is it just a matter of perspective? If you regret something, is that enough to make it less evil?' etc...

I will probably go for the latter reason, and really explain more...

I don't understand this sentence. Actually I'm confused about your worlds and realms and things.

The Gods created 12 universes; two per God in essence. Each was put in charge of those two realms to nurture them etc, but they were governed as a whole. These were later called realms, in which one could pass interchangeably between by using soul magic, or using the teleportation chambers.

"Oh, how she hated death; it was a pointless waste of life." - this is an unintentionally funny line. At least, if it's supposed to be funny it's defusing the carefully built tension of your scene, and if it's not supposed to be funny, it comes off as odd.

Not meant to be funny, didn't even realise that...Change to, 'Oh, how she hated death; it was pointless.'?

Stilted speech, info dumps. Got it :)

“What do you mean you are as strong as me in magic? " - He didn't say magic, why does she assume he means in magic? Also next two lines of dialogue would work better as internal monologue - something she thinks but does not say.

She assumes magic because that is what he is referring to, I will make that clearer though.

OK, will change the second parts to thought rather than speech.

Is Athir really dead? If she is, then you've spent a lot of pages seting up characters and the only sympathetic viewpoint you wrote is gone. Also her death seemed really anticlimactic - I wasn't sure she was dead until the end.

I would remove the prologue. Save that information for later. It actually would make Hinther's words about the Gods destroying their own world stronger.

Yes, Athir is dead, but her role comes into play later in the story, so it hasn't all been lost. OK, how would you suggest making the death slightly better? I know it seems to just drop off, but I wasn't aware that it seemed anticlimactic.

About removing the prologue, do you mean remove the whole thing, because it jumps to completely different characters, you don't even meet Turmoil, Hinther, until later in the book. And even then, he isn't openly him, per Se, but explaining that would kind of ruin the plot.

As for the Gods, well:

OK, there are 5 elements, and the original Gods (so the ones that Enthisa, Cekoti etc had considered Gods) were concepts of the elements, there were five of them, hence the alters at the isle of the Gods.

Cekoti etc are all siblings, there are six of them. But Cekoti has rebelled against the other five, wanting all the power/glory for himself, sick of being looked down upon by the other five Gods, all of which are his elders.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

My biggest impression from this quite-large prologue is that surely not all of it is necessary for the story to come? If so, that's a lot of background information for the story. In the prologue, we have the destruction of one world and apparent creation of another, followed by setting up the bad guy, followed by his sister who is destined to beat him -- getting beaten, and dying. It's pretty much a story in and of itself already.

Other than that, by best advice is to trim, trim, trim. If we do need all of that information, cut out the in-between information we don't need. Examples might be exactly how the demons are summoned, or the scenery around the Mountains of Magic and the courtyards there? Do we need to know the exact sequence of spells the siblings cast to doom their world? Do we need to see Athir's detour to the hall of the gods just to ask permission to ask the dragons to join the fight? Do we need to know the details about the older dragons doing their training outside instead of in? Each of those details in and of themselves makes the story more authentic, but together they really bog down the pace of the story. For most of the prologue, it felt as if I was reading info dumps interspersed with actions, rather than actions that set the state of the following story.

Technique-wise, I noticed a lot of complex sentences, where it read as a number of short sentences, all of them strung together by commas, and you may see what I mean in the following quote:

The crisp, sharp air danced around her in the wind, causing her to chill slightly, the snow was settling now after summer. She still remembered when she was brought here with her brother; they used to play every minute of their spare time, after studies of course, in the snow until it disappeared, until she was taken to be trained by the Gods. The mountains were as she remembered them, sublime in the way they rose from the earth, towering higher than the eye could see, and man could climb unaided. The ring of mountains had no easy pass through them, only to climb to a peak, and then back down the other side. Only the dragons could move freely between this place without magic, but they barely left due to training humans and dragons in magic.

Without simple sentences to set them apart, each sentence starts blurring together to me. I tried a small edit for comparison, and I really hope you don't mind this small example edit; I looked around for a spot you had written your own story more succinctly, but couldn't find one.

The crisp, sharp air chilled her as the wind danced around her. The snow was settling now. She still remembered arriving here with her brother. They used to play every minute of their spare time in the snow, until it disappeared. Until she was taken, to be trained by the Gods....

In the edited bit, the first three sentences probably don't all need to be separate, but I wanted to demonstrate how it could be changed.

It was three paragraphs later that the first simple sentence reappeared; the dragon asking, "How may I help you Keling?".

Finally, I'm not sure what viewpoint this is supposed to be using. If it's 3rd limited, the first section seems to jump back and forth. If it's omniscient, then you might want to consider making sure the viewpoint changes between characters are smooth.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Could you clarify what you mean by it jumps back and fourth?- Message me if you want...

Other than that, thank you. I see what you are saying about the long sentences, I don't seem to realise that I do it...I will make the appropriate changes.

As for the amount of information. It's funny that you say that it sounds like a story in itself, that was almost the plan; to expand the prologue into a book at a later time. That said, I do feel like there is too much trying to be conveyed, it was meant to be a summary of the creation etc. To explain what exactly has happened. If this is the case, I might cut out the trip to the Gods for their permission, and possibly trim extensively the Daemons being banished.

Regards,

Guen.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Could you clarify what you mean by it jumps back and fourth?- Message me if you want...

What I mean is that feelings are given from many characters, especially in the first section of the prologue. For example, it starts with Enthisa being sad, and other observations firmly rooted in Enthisa's point of view. Partway through you mention Ranak "finally speaking up, disturbed from his thoughts by the bright light." This is a minor shift to relating the internal thoughts and POV of Ranak. It quickly returns to Enthisa. Then in the paragraph about strands of hair across Luvesi's face, it seems to read from her POV, that she loved order and now would be providing it for the new world. It goes back to Enthisa, then we learn Dyndara is astounded at what they had achieved (which is a note from Dyndara's POV). Finally, it firms again in Enthisa's POV.

These are all fairly minor by themselves, but together it makes me wonder if the section (or the book) is supposed to be in third-limited or third-omniscient (or, perhaps, somewhere in between). I assume you intend it to be third-limited, as a large part of fantasy currently is, but if not it needs to be set to clearly that either I don't notice the transitions, or they are done well enough that I know they are intentional. Right now, these look like slips when you convey what others are thinking and/or feeling, instead of what Enthisa observes about them that would let us draw our own conclusions about their thoughts and feelings.

As for the amount of information. It's funny that you say that it sounds like a story in itself, that was almost the plan; to expand the prologue into a book at a later time. [...] it was meant to be a summary of the creation etc.

You might want to reconsider this, unless something about it is vitally important that wouldn't come out any other way. For example, the siblings as gods in the new universe could be shown via the religious aspects of the characters in the main story. The energy-draining aspect of magic could be something for the Gods to know and the characters to learn (or at least, to inform the decisions behind the scenes). The summoning of demons can easily be assumed by one or two references to the sudden appearance of the demons when they are fought, and the prime summoner could be conveyed with a paragraph or two of deductive reasoning by Athir in her section. That could potentially cut two full sections from the prologue, and jump the reader into a more visceral opening right away, with Athir discovering the sudden use of demons by the opposing army, tearing her own men apart, and she is working hard to keep them healed.

That is, assuming that even the information in that section couldn't be conveyed somewhere in the main story. I don't know for sure, not having read the main part of your story, but let's just say I suspect it could. Of course, I'm not the author; you are. As the Writing Excuses bunch says, take what works for you and leave what doesn't. I'm only one reader, yada yada.

On the other hand, the grand old man Tolkien himself didn't end up published with the creation story -- that he had clearly written -- in the beginning of The Hobbit. Nor, even, in the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. It wasn't until his collection of short stories set in Middle Earth was published did his creation story get published -- and for good reason. Though I read and liked The Simarillion, the stories in there were better treated as separate from tLotR, not as prologue to the books.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...