Critting

I've be doing some critting this week over on Absolute Write's Share Your Work forum. I've been doing some pretty extensive crits, and I guess I'm just curious as to how some of the writers are going to take what I've given them.

Not that they have to take anything of what I've said, of course. Everyone knows their own stories better than anyone else (at least, they SHOULD know).

So far, one writer agreed that his descriptions were overwhelming the story, although he didn't take too kindly to my not liking omniscient POV. (That, of course, is a personal thing which I didn't make clear in my original crit. My bad.) Another liked what I had to say about her prologue, and was going to keep it in mind. She's already posted a revision (which I haven't gotten to yet).

I critted another 2 stories (whew!) today. One was about dragons. I felt this writer started in the wrong place, opening with a last-of-its-species dragon. I mistakenly thought this was the MC until I read on, where he talks about people in a nearby village (and one person in particular). When he has this particular person look up at the mountain and see what he thinks is a dragon - yup, I think this is where your story starts, because something is going to happen.

Another one was an excerpt from further into a story. It was interesting, but I felt this author used too many run-on sentences - including the very first one! (This wasn't from the opening chapter, but somewhere in the middle of the book.) I just finished reading a book - which I should post a review for - where the author did pretty much the same through several portions of the story. Drove me crazy. And another odd thing was that a number of questions that were clearly questions didn't end in a question mark.

Crack that whip!

Meh. I know it's not something to get completely overwhelmed by, but I did find it irritating, thinking "Question mark! Question mark!" over and over.

I'll probably post that review tomorrow. It's a debut (I love finding new authors, don't you?), and I still found the story pretty good.

~Nancy Beck