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Shizuko Aoki's life was difficult, but with the help of her brother, her odd behaviors vanished. But soon, her life, and the lives of others like her, will be forever changed by the tides of hatred, fear, and bigotry, both from within and without the community of the 'connected' people.
(My first book, Ravenna, was a bit of a disaster. My apologies for any trouble.) This is my first real story, but please feel free to give the harshest constructive criticism necessary. I will be glad to offer any answers to your questions, and I hope to have the rest of my work soon. Thank you all for your help! Your criticism is greatly appreciated!
To be honest, this really doesn't do very well. In short, there's some significant issues with your editing, your perspective and some aspects of your setting.Firstly and most importantly, this needs paragraphs. I'm not sure if most have somehow vanished when you uploaded this or if they weren't there to begin with, but you need to indent your paragraphs. It seems like it's four pages before we see the second paragraph of this story and it's almost unnecessarily unpleasant to read as a result.The opening of this feels very weak and loose. You skip from wandering the streets worrying to going home in four sentences, which is too short. Personally, I'd consider tweaking it around so that this begins with her sneaking into the house. It'll feel more immediate and it'll make the confrontation over the exam feel more unpredictable and surprising.This quite simply shouldn't be one long scene. It needs to be divided up into several scenes for each scene that's in here. We've got Shizuko vs her father, the meal, the conversation with her brother etc, but they're all being treated as one single item. It's confusing and it's just not good story-telling.You've got a bad habit skipping over events when you want to get to the next bit of the plot. We get this very crude bits of plastering giving us the rough details of what happens between Shizuko getting her meds and the finale, rather something more nuanced and immediate. Try not to give us these details in such direct fashion, but rather work them into the story you're telling.Over all, this chapter would work much better if it was two chapters, with the second set after Shizuko starts taking her meds. You could deal with a lot of the changes in a far more organic way, simply having a scene in each chapter to illustrate the difference in her demeanor before and after the medication.Your perspective is very distant. We get a lot of did's and felt, but no real entrance into these things. You need to delve into your character and look at this story from her eyes. For example, at 30%, you talk about 'her peace suddenly broken by her brother walking into her room'. How does this make her feel? How does he break her reverie? How does it feel to have him walk into her sanctum? What's it like to be surprised like that? These are all questions that could fill a paragraph or two and really give insight into your characters.One thing I found annoying is that there's no real japanese vibe to this. It's just a set of characters who happen to live in Japan. You don't need to fill it with details, but something to make it feel Japanese is definitely needed.One thing that really strikes is that Shizuko doesn't bother trying to find out what's going on with her. She spends what seems like half a year being medicated for something she doesn't bother to investigate at all. It's really weird and definitely something you need to acknowledge if nothing else.Overall, this feels like it should be a lot longer, simply because so much more information needs to go into this. You need to go back and really get into Shizuko's head
To be honest there's not a lot here to comment on. No one's really doing anything characterful here, they're just acting in their best interest. You need to have things happen where your characters act on impulse and show their less than perfect sides.One element that really stood up here was that Shizuko is extremely passive. She's not taking action to interact with this story. Instead she's just being tugged by events and she needs start taking some control over her life, even if it's in some small way.
Okay, firstly, you need to start paragraphing off your dialogue. Whenever a new person starts speaking, this should be a new paragraph. It's just the laws of grammar and it makes the whole thing a lot more readable.If there's one suggestion I would make, it's that you need to start inserting some contractions into your dialogue. There's a noticeable lack of things like 'it'll' and 'I've' in the dialgoue which makes it all feel a little stilted.
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