Alright, fair warning for anyone now reading this post. If you're familiar with my posting habits around here, then you're familiar with my harshness. If you don't want to be criticized (albeit constructively), then ignore the remainder of this post. That being said, I'll do my best to be helpful and noninflammatory. Despite the fact that this is another Asian Drama, and I clearly haven't read enough of those on here.
Okay, too many chapters to take any specific chapter out and go over it, so I'll pretend it's one fluid story and critique on the overview.
- Asian Drama - No offense, but by writing a story like this on Blogring, you're a needle in a stack of needles. Because of this, you're already getting washed up in a slew of other asian dramas, if only because I can't finitely pick out your story from the others. This doesn't mean it's bad, it just means it will be largely run-of-the-mill by association.
- Non-Descript - Nothing special, average, run of the mill. These adjectives fit the entire writing style. The wording is simple, the sentence structure isn't very stand-out. Not bad, per se, but because you're fighting 9,000,000 other Asian Drama writers for screentime, then you'd do better to go the whole nine yards with writing style. More on this later.
- Emotes and *verbs* - You're writing, therefore your medium is already strong enough to convey everything *smacks* and =.=; can convey without them being necessary. It pulls me from the piece when I see them, and find myself having to re-establish a reading rhythm. I'll touch up on this later as well.
- Zig Zag - Your writing style is zig-zaggy. You shift constantly between being comfortably descriptive, and so vague I need to re-read points to figure out exactly what happened. The level of detail fluxuates, and I find myself feeling the need to re-read entire chapters so I feel sure I understood what exactly happened.
Okay, so now that I've covered several smaller parts, I'm going to describe what I've said in detail.
On
Non-Descript, I explained everything just seems to have that little bit of lacking in it's description. Or the rhythm doesn't flow. For example
[quote=Original Story]
"Hello young lady, would you like to buy some flowers? They're fresh from my garden." She said and gave a kind smile. I smiled back and nodded then took a look around. She had roses, daisies, peonies, cherry blossoms, almost all the flowers you can imagine. Mom loved the color purple. So I bought her a big bouquet of lilacs.
"First emotions of Love" She said, were what lilacs meant.[/quote]
Reading that, it isn't bad, but it's a little disjointed, rhythmithically speaking, and the descriptors are a little difficult to follow because of it. I would phrase it like this:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by NewClassic Edit
"Hello, young lady. Would you like some flowers? They're fresh from my garden." She said, smiling at me. I returned her smile, nodded, and began to look around. My mother loved purple, so I kept this in mind as I looked over the roses, daisies, peonies, cherry blossoms, and any other flower I could want. When I spotted the lilacs, I smiled. I picked several of them, and handed them to the elderly lady.
"Ah, did you know that lilacs stand for the first emotions of Love?" She asked, wrapping the flowers and handing them back to me. I (nodded/shook) my head, paid her, smiled once last while waving goodbye.
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Technically speaking, neither is wrong or right, but when writing, you'd do best to have the eye naturally flow from one word to the next. Anything jarring takes a lot from the reader. It's the difference between staying up until 3 AM reading, and putting the book down until the next day. Personally, I feel like the former gives me a better experience overall.
As far as the Emotes and *action verb!* goes, those can be replaced by actions in the story, or descriptors in the dialogue.
Show, don't tell.
That's all from me, hope this helped out some.