Hi there ppl, I was just wondering...

Welcome to the site. My immediate impression after reading part 4 - sorry I read this one first because it is listed first -you need to make sure you correct any typographical, spelling or punctuation errors. Even if the story is good, this puts people off immediately. The descriptions were not particularly imaginative such as'The magnificent colours sparkled and twinkled'. I then read part 2, since it has received a 'cherry' (so one of our editors enjoyed the piece) and found this much, much better, although this type of story isn't at all to my taste, I found it quite readable. It has some convincing dialogue and characters. I would like to see some carefully thought out descriptions of the characters and setting to add some meat to the dialogue. My advice is to keep reading other people's work here on the site. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

Key things to watch out for: Over-explanation: "Katie and Jack sat on the sofa together drinking the cheap wine, Molly sat in an armchair eating a mars bar. Jack was hardly talking to her and she felt excluded. When he did speak to her it was in short cold sentences. Katie seemed to notice and kept giving them both quizzical looks. Soon Joe arrived." Unnecessary detail: "She reached the top of the stairs, turned left down the hall and walked out of the front door into the bright afternoon sunlight". Unneccesary adjectives: "Joe came pounding across the drive scattering gravel fiercely ." In all cases, it's best not include details that aren't relevant to the story and don't tell the reader things they wouldn't have been able to work out for themselves. Generally, though, I think this is okay from a technical point of view. The dialogue is a bit Hollyoaks-esque. That's not necessarily a criticism - the people who write Hollyoaks make a decent living - but it doesn't tell the reader much beyond the obvious, so it depends a bit on what you're trying to do with it. The big challenge with this kind of story is to either to make the plot so interesting that people have to read on, or make the characters real enough and interesting enough for people to care enough about them to read on. How do you take it beyond, some teenagers meet some other teenagers and do some kissing and end up doing some fighting, then some bad things happen? This is really difficult to do but some authors have done it well in the past.

I liked the stories (I read all four). The above comments on descriptions are good advice. However, some writers tend to over-describe things (ever read any Robert Jordan?) and that can be bad too. Finding a balance is difficult. I am a new writer and one problem that I am having is controlling my eagerness to tell my story, i.e. only writing the bones of a story, and not putting enough flesh with it. Once you have an idea of how you want to a story to go, be patient and take your time telling it, making sure everything that you are thinking about your characters and setting is told to the readers. Anyway, enjoyed the stories and am going to read through some more of yours now, cheers!

I don't know about being a better or more experienced writer (just really started picking the pen up again so to speak), but I read all four, in order, and liked the story as a whole. Part 1 I found a bit laboured - possbily too much description and not enough action/dialogue for a stand alone section (?), though it works ok as scene setting for part 2. I found odd bits jolted with me in part 1 too - might be down to personal taste, but: 1. Try not to attach too much description to an action, e.g 'She ran her fingers through her wild red hair which was cropped short and spiked up in all direction' might read better as 'She ran her fingers through her cropped, spiky red hair', or you could tag on the hair description to the next sentence. 2. There was some unnecessary repetition in the description of the cellar contents - e.g. you only need to mention the boxes and furniture once and could dump 'The cellar was mainly full of Jacks parents belongings and a mixture of old furniture' without losing anything from the picture painted. 3. Avoid slang when describing a scene, unless a character is describing it as part of the dialogue, e.g. 'Katie had a cigarette in one hand', not a fag. The next three parts were much better - more going on and I thought the tensions between the characters came across well. I wasn't too sure if you really need the last section in part four though - I found it a bit of an anticlimax after the scene with the last friend in the pact.... Hope this is useful Bev

Thankyou to everyone for giving me some helpful advice. This is the first story I have ever writen; we all have to start somewhere. I will go though the story again eventually, as I was planning to do anyway. I just get a little bored reading the same thing over and over again and trying to improve it. Sorry if there are spelling mistakes. I had to swap all my documents from one comp to another via a memory stick and then I didn't know which had been spell checked and which hadn't. I should have done them all again really. It was idle of me not to. In reply to "I wasn't too sure if you really need the last section in part four though - I found it a bit of an anticlimax after the scene with the last friend in the pact...." I did have another ending, but I changed it for this one. In the other ending it told of Jack's mum cleaning out all of his old belongings from his room. She pulls the sheets from his bed and finds a note which he wrote to her. I had to edit out the part where he writes it to her when I changed the ending. Thanks again for all your help. I'll have a better read tomorrow when it's not so late. Rachiesmif x

When I said this: "The dialogue is a bit Hollyoaks-esque." I wasn't disputing this: "The characters in this story are based on my friends who are real life people. Most of the dialogue is actual quotes of what my friends say. That is how we are." The question isn't whether the dialogue sounds like the way real people talk. To give an extreme example, if you made a transcript of the unedited bits of Big Brother, it would be an exact reflection of how some real people talk but 98% of it would be completely tedious and tell the reader nothing of interest. Although it needs to seem as realistic as possible, dialogue in stories - particularly stories which rely heavily on dialogue - needs to tell the reader more than what they'd get from over=hearing some people having a chat on a bus.

You're not doing badly and I'm not necessarily right about the dialogue - it's worth getting a few different opinions on these things - I'm just not wrong for that reason.