- I like that idea! I'm not in any fandoms, so I don't know much about Pokemon, but maybe you could have a list something like this for your character:
Intelligence/Cleverness (how good they are at devising and improvising plots for Pokemon capture): x/10
Strength: x/10
Speed: x/10
Stamina: x/10
People skills (could they convince passerby to help them?): x/10
They could also be more skilled in catching certain types in certain regions and areas--maybe they've got a 6/10 on aptitude to catch fire types, 2/10 on catching Pokemon in forests, 10/10 in x region (I don't know what the Pokemon regions are), et cetera.
The only thing I'd be worried about is that it seems more like a story where the protag spends most of their time catching creatures, but there wouldn't be much character/relationship development.
Also, don't worry about us stealing your idea! I don't think (at least I hope) that we're not really the type of people to go around plagiarizing every good premise we run across.
- I'll take a look at it. I can't really help much with writing something, though; I always get a bit stressed when interacting with people one-on-one while using the internet. But you could always post your story here, if you end up writing one!
winged-backpack wrote:Hey guys! I've been productively procrastinating my book, and I've written the opening to a short story based on a nightmare I had. It's quite short, so I was hoping you guys might give me a little bit of critique?The girl lay back on her bed. Not quite an adult, not quite a teenager, she wasn’t quite anything. Not pretty enough to be pretty, not ugly enough to be ugly. But she didn’t care. At that moment, all she cared about was the book she was reading, about a murderer and the prisoner she had trapped in her house. She had picked the book up earlier that morning on a whim, and hadn’t set it down since. As a bit of a picky reader, she was excited to see who was going to get out of this situation alive.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t spend all day reading as she wanted to. Since she had started reading almost as soon as she woke up that morning, she hadn’t eaten. Soon her stomach’s yelling was too loud to ignore. She found the end of the chapter, and with the plot still racing around in her mind, she stood up and wondered downstairs. With her mind so focussed on the plot, she didn’t even notice that she’d made it to the kitchen.
Her house was quite large. Her father and stepmother both had good jobs, and so they along with her two stepsisters, one sister and one brother lived in a village. In the middle of nowhere, as she liked to say.
That will be all
- Ooh, what happened in the rest of the nightmare--does she end up getting murdered like the prisoner in that book she was reading? This doesn't really seem like the beginning to a nightmare, which might be good; the reader probably won't really expect terrifying things to happen unless your story is named something like "the evil ghost vampire of doom".
There's only three things that I think you could work on:
-Description
- You haven't described all that much much so far. Some things you might add are the girl's appearance besides "average-looking young woman", the house's interior, sounds/smells of the house and outside, et cetera.
While you definitely don't need to lavish everything in poetic language, you could add some details like "not much light came through the windows; she had to squint at the page" and "the stairs creaked like squeaking mice under her feet as she walked to the kitchen".
- There's a lot that you're telling directly instead of describing. You've got a really clean, almost minimalistic style to your writing, so you probably only need to describe very important things. Just keep in mind to describe instead of narrate when it comes to stuff important to your story.
- Most of your sentences have at least one comma. Especially during action scenes, maybe you could try and add a few more sentences without them.
But that's all I have to say by ways of criticism. When you're finished with the rest, will you post it too?
And stop procrastinating! That novel won't write itself.