Stories and Fantasies
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Hi
I see we both know that song 😀
“Enough! Be quiet! I can’t hear myself think! I can’t hear my teeth chatter!"
Yay, hello! We are reigniting this forum. 😛 I’ve found it very helpful when I started something similar on a different website, and I was thinking perhaps you might too (but I also read your thing about Character Castle, so don’t be obliged to). Basically we all post stories/parts of stories that we’re working on and get critique/encouragement on them. 🙂
Hrm. All of ’em look good, so it’s up to you! This is just a spot where we’ll share and get feedback if you want it, so if you want critiqued on a WIP, or on folk-lore (which I always find interesting), or on random ideas (this is a great place to put those), stick it in! I think I’m gonna go with part of/all of a novelette I wrote that was kind of a Middle-earth fanfic but kinda evolved into its own thing. *shrugs* What do you think?
Thanks, I wanna critique of my WIP but I think I’m gonna wait first and do lore or random ideas (whichever hits me first) for a bit then and maybe get to my WIP eventually.
Ooh, that sounds awesome! My sister loves everything Middle-earth Tolken wrote, I’d love reading what spun off from that! <3Welcome(ish?) @anne_the_noob14!
Welp…random thing that blew up out of the keyboard…XD
‘Wolf!’ She called ‘Wolf, why did you leave me?!’
Her eyes glimmer paleness under the lines of her red hood. ‘Wolf!’
The synthetic Forest half-glazed with shadow, the trees transparent black and the snow locking summer-flowers in ghostly depth. But there’s red in the Forest, ice-crusted roses in the corners, each flower looking more enchanted than the last. The Beast took the wrong one and look where he is now. But not her, she must pick the right one and pluck no other.
‘Because you’re a wolf doesn’t make you a monster.’ The red cloak hides her steel-encrusted body, almost wholly concealing her although the brilliant color bounces sharply off the snow-white. ‘I believed you were misjudged. Wolf!’
Her hand comes against stone in the snow until she brushes out the rest-in-peace of her grandmother’s grave. A low, vibrating snarl rumbles between the trees. She tenses, her hand drops under her cloak. He looked bigger than she’d every seen him before, drawing the shadow-trees around his fur. Staring up at him she backs a step, beside Grandmother’s grave.
‘What big eyes you have…’ Red as crimson. Another step back, frozen like the ground. ‘What big ears you have, what big hands you have!’ Rose petals red as blood whir in the shivering wind. Another step, her hand under her cloak.
‘What big claws you have! What big…’ Her breath hitches, hand locked on the weapon under her cloak. The blood-red eyes of Wolf reflect like terror, like living fear. Thought he was misjudged, not a monster, only someone broken like her. I believed in you. ‘What big lies you have!’
She twists back the string of the bow, the arrow red as roses as it fires. ‘And I’m not consumed by them anymore.’
The shadows of the Wolf shake and burst before red eyes are the last thing she sees of him.
‘I chose,’ She tugs the hood back releasing hair as black as the ebony pane tangled with rose-red locks. ‘I’m not the victim of the fairytale, I’m the Hunter now.’
The synthetic world faded around her into roses, turning to the next page of the maze. So she wakes up in front of the castle webbed in thorns, the rose still missing. ‘I’m waking up now.’To be a light to the world you must shine in the darkness.
Ooh, intriguing! Do you want critique or no? Great story (I had such a clear picture of what was going on, ha ha).
Here we go…
Introduction to The Half-ElfThis is not set in Middle-earth. I admire J.R.R. Tolkien’s works, so much so that I am creating a story not unlike his tales, but I do not wish to be such a copy-cat as to use his setting and his characters. I also do not feel able to recreate the people and places therein.
Therefore, although you may find that my world is similar to Middle-earth, and some characters may remind you of Thorin or any of the Dwarves in his company, or Legolas, Arwen, Gildor, or even Elrond, they are not the same. There are no Hobbits (sad as that may seem to many of you), no Wizards, and no Rings of Power. There are Elves, Dwarves, wonderful weapons, and other things Tolkien cannot take full credit for, but they may act and be described very similarly to his creatures. I also used some of his languages for authentic names and phrases.
Anyway, I sincerely hope that you enjoy this tale, whether or not you think me a copy-cat or uninventive.
Part I
“What was that?” cried a young woman, whirling to stare at the surrounding trees. “Nayandi, I’m sure I heard something.”
Her companion, another young lady of about nineteen, slowly notched an arrow to the string of her slender bow.
“It’s all right, Rhea,” she replied, after a tense second, letting the bowstring slacken and placing the arrow back in her quiver. “We’re alone out here.”
Out here referred to the unexplored forest the two were traveling through. Slender aspen trees crowded close together, their silver bark mingling nicely with the rustling green of the leaves in the canopy. Dead trees were here and there, either lying on the ground or stuck straight up in the air, leaves gone, branches brittle. Ferns and other undergrowth crammed together on the forest floor. If the maidens hadn’t had their trail to follow, they would have had a tough time chopping their way through. But despite the beauty of the wood, it housed an ominous feeling, one that shivered its way up the girls’ spines. Danger threatened every step they took.
“Alone, except for a wild animal or two.” Rhea replied, tossing her shoulder-length nutmeg hair out of her hazel eyes. She smiled apologetically at her half-sister. “Sorry. I just don’t like these woods.”
“Not many do,” came the quiet reply. Nayandi glanced around her as she turned back to the trail the maidens were on and leapt lightly over a log. Rhea followed.
The two walked in silence, with Rhea occasionally glancing anxiously around the dense undergrowth. The quiet was unbearable, for not even the song of a bird, the chirp of a cricket, the gurgle of a creek, or the rustle of leaves when a breeze softly pushes past them could be heard. She glanced again at the tall figure before her and broke the silence.
“Nayandi, tell me your Elvish name again.”
Nayandi smiled slightly, her serious dark eyes sparkling for a mere second. “Lárawen.”
“You know,” Rhea replied after a moment. “I wish I could have been a half-Elf.” Her eyes danced as her usual smile lit up her face. “To be able to make that choice.”
Immediately Nayandi’s face snapped back into its solemn countenance as she remembered her quest. “No, you don’t. You have no idea how hard it is for me to make this choice.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Rhea answered, stealing a glance at her companion. “This whole journey is to help you make that decision.”
“Yes…” Nayandi mused, her mind wandering to the oh-so-distant past, imagining what it must have been like for her father, Charles, and his first wife, the Elvish maid Naldiel.
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So the next part is part of Nayandi’s memory, that’s why there’s an abrupt ending. All critique welcome!
Ooh, intriguing! Do you want critique or no? Great story (I had such a clear picture of what was going on, ha ha).
Yes please critique me and be brutally critical! (Thanks, I had such a clear picture in my head)
Alright non-Middle-earth Part 1 critique! First of all, it’s really good and I can’t wait to see how you develop it!
I’m gonna just start with some staple questions I use with my writing to critique; 1. Who’s the main POV in this clip? 2. What’s the main problem in the scene? 3. What does the POV want/need? 4. What’s the main feel you want to convey? And 5. What changes to push the next scene?
So, for 1 you seem to start with Rhea but shift to Nayandi, maybe you should start with Nayandi instead or have a transitional element or give her a more distinctive voice? Describing things through a POV or an emotional tone can describe both the setting and the character’s personality by how she views the setting.
Number 2 the main problem/goal, seems on an emotional level Nayandi’s decision as a half-Elf, maybe you should set that on the forefront within the first couple paragraphs? Another problem they seem to be wrestling with is the forest, but why are they in the forest? You might not want to answer that immediately, if so, maybe you should give a sorta writer’s promise that there’s something definite and purposeful about path; focus on hinting at goals and reasons so the reader knows this is building to something. So 3 is pretty much answered in this too unless there’s another, more steady internal want/need to be addressed in the story as a whole so 4;
The main feeling seems to be how chilling the forest is the key words coming to mind are; isolation, impending doom, and memory, memory being the transition from this scene to the next scene? And 5 the change idk but it’s probably not necessary for every scene. So…I lost my train of thought XD. I like it and I can’t wait to see what happens next. Maybe focusing on one POV for each scene would make the narrative smoother? But that’s just me <3(welp, that was a horrible critiquing of mine XD )
To be a light to the world you must shine in the darkness.
No, that was EXCELLENT critiquing!! I wrote this story… yeesh, like two years ago or something, and I thought it was so good until I went back and reread it for this. Then I was like, “Oh dear. This is not what I thought it was.” XD So we’re fixing it up!
Yurp, Nayandi’s the POV for the entire story if I remember right. And thx for the tips! I shall apply them. 🙂
I don’t have time to type out a “brutally critical” critique right now, but I shall later! 😀
Doing this literally right before work but since when has time management been a skill of mine…
Also hi
Beginning of my main Haven world story
@joelle-stone @this-is-not-an-alien (the one Brendin’s in)Ada Warin was beautiful in a wild, hunted way. Her narrow face, framed with the waist-length knotted brown curls that adorned her head, had an air of fear and trepidation about it. The sharp, high cheekbones and delicately tapered chin only added to the effect. Her small, mute mouth was often pressed into an apprehensive line below wide, deerlike eyes that had a look of wariness and suspicion about them, at times even terror. They were wild eyes, hunted eyes.
But Ada’s inborn wildness did not stop at her eyes; it spread from them.
Her fawn-like face was balanced on a long, thin neck perched between narrow shoulders on an equally narrow frame. Her limbs were long and willowy, as were her hands and fingers. The nails at their tips were naturally pointed and clawlike and added yet more to the air of ferality about her. Her feet were narrow with high arches and she tread lightly, with a nimble step and easy, skittish grace.
Lord Northiron called her the ‘little wildling’; to the staff she was simply ‘Fawn’.
Ada was, by all accounts, a nervous creature, and her friends were few. They consisted almost solely of the Eya gypsy Nadia Fabian, a minstrel maidservant in the employ of her foster mother. Ordinarily the Lady Warin did not hire minstrels, but Nadia was an orphan being raised by a traveling troupe, and Ada latched on to her so quickly as a friend that the Lady hired her in the official capacity of a minstrel but in reality as Ada’s constant companion.
Their friendship was a strange one for certainty. Where Ada was skittish and high-strung, Nadia was outgoing and confident. While Ada sat tense and silent in the corner Nadia would stand in the center of the room and fill it with stories and songs of the Eya, her people. In appearance too they were less alike than not.
Nadia’s skin was unblemished and nut brown in color in comparison to Ada’s pallid and befreckled complexion. Her hair was thick and black and fell in waves about her shoulders, silky to touch and easily tamed, and while not exactly plump Nadia had more curves to her figure. She, like Ada, was long-limbed, but there was a considerable amount of sinew between the skin and bone and years’ worth of hard callus on her hands and feet. Her face was much like others of her race, with a square jaw and broad forehead still free of worry lines. Her nose was straight where Ada’s was slightly crooked over a pair of full lips often upturned at the corners. Finally her brows were arched loftily with a wry irony above narrow, half-lidded eyes at a catlike slant so onyx in color to be blacker than her hair.
The eyes were the greatest contrast between the pair of them. Ada’s wide and fearful, Nadia’s lazily half-open and contented, almost sly. The residents of Castle Ironstorm could not see how such a friendship formed between their skittish fawn and the gypsy cat. Nadia, it seemed, was the only person Ada trusted. She relaxed around no one else and always seemed prepared to flee at the slightest provocation if she was in the company of others without Nadia present. The gypsy was her constant companion, telling her stories and singing old folk melodies in the foreign-but-familiar language of the Eya. Often they would sit on the wall of the ravine through which the Ironflow River coursed and Nadia would fill the air with words of old heroes and older magic as Ada simply sat and listened. So they sat two days before Yuletide when Alexander Northiron fell into the river.
"Remember, you go nowhere by accident. Wherever you go, God is sending you." - Rev. Peter R. Hale
@joelle-stone @this-is-not-an-alien
Please critique if you could. Also you may notice something if you reread the character castle before reading this…
"Remember, you go nowhere by accident. Wherever you go, God is sending you." - Rev. Peter R. Hale
Okay, critiquing here we come!
So, what I got from this is it’s kind of a bit of a fairy tale (Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf, something about a Beast, which I’m not quite sure if that’s the Wolf or Beauty & the Beast beast), but taken to a more… mature level. Red Riding Hood is kneeling by her grandmother’s grave (’cause the wolf ate her grandma in the story). She’s luring/calling to the wolf to get revenge on him, I think.
The climax where she is stepping backward with the “what big ___ you have” is really really good. I have this picture-perfect image of a teenage girl with a red cloak lifting a bow with a red-fletched arrow, aiming at the heart of a gigantic black shadowy wolf as it snows and rose petals blow around. A grave is between them. Very very cool.
Anyway, I think it’ll be easiest for me to critique if I just put your story in here and add my notes in. I went ahead and edited grammatically (although I’m not a grammar queen, so feel free to chuck those) without making notes about it. 🙂
“Wolf!” she called. “Wolf, why did you leave me?!” Her eyes glimmer paleness (is paleness a noun? Maybe palely?) under the lines of her red hood. “Wolf!”
The synthetic Forest is half-glazed with shadow, the trees transparent black and the snow locking summer-flowers in ghostly depth. But there’s red in the Forest, ice-crusted roses in the corners, each flower looking more enchanted than the last. The Beast took the wrong one and look where he is now. (<–What Beast? Is this your protagonist’s thought or an author’s thing? If it’s a thought, you might italicize it and reword it so that’s clear, but if it’s an author’s thought you’ll probably want a bit more detail about who the Beast is and what happened when he picked the wrong flower.) But not her, she must pick the right one and pluck no other.
“Because you’re a wolf doesn’t make you a monster.” (Love that!) The red cloak hides her steel-encrusted body, almost wholly concealing her although the brilliant color (of what?) bounces sharply off the snow-white (snow-white what?). “I believed you were misjudged. Wolf!”
Her hand comes against stone in the snow until she brushes out the rest-in-peace of her grandmother’s grave. A low, vibrating snarl rumbles between the trees. She tenses; her hand drops under her cloak. He looked bigger than she’d every seen him before, drawing the shadow-trees around his fur. Staring up at him she backs a step, beside Grandmother’s grave.
“What big eyes you have…” Red as crimson. Another step back, frozen like the ground. “What big ears you have, what big hands (hands or paws?) you have!” Rose petals red as blood whir in the shivering wind. Another step, her hand under her cloak.
“What big claws you have! What big…” Her breath hitches, her hand locked on the weapon under her cloak. The blood-red eyes of Wolf reflect like terror, like living fear. Thought (who thought?) he was misjudged, not a monster, only someone broken like her. I believed in you. “What big lies you have!”
She twists back the string of the bow, the arrow red as roses as it fires. “And I’m not consumed by them anymore.”
The shadows of the Wolf shake and burst before her. Red eyes are the last thing she sees of him.
“I chose” -she tugs the hood back releasing hair as black as the ebony pane tangled with rose-red locks- “I’m not the victim of the fairytale, I’m the Hunter now.”
The synthetic world faded around her into roses, turning to the next page of the maze. So she wakes up in front of the castle webbed in thorns, the rose still missing (what rose? The one the Beast plucked?). “I’m waking up now.”
Anyway, feel free to ignore those comments and stuff. Excellent story!!
Will do! 😀
Thank you for critiquing me!
I was pretty vague in showing a lot of what was going on, I tend to get so involved in what it feels like I forget to explain what it actually is lol. I feel like this is a prologue to something but I want it to be able to stand on its own. I think about a girl stuck in a fairy tale book trying to break out of her role in the story by killing the wolf who symbolizes fear but also the internal lies she’s believed about herself. But I definitely didn’t establish that well in the narrative. Alright, so pounding that out in the story.
The Beast is the next fairytale in the book so somehow related but if I want this to stand alone I might need to cut that out or at least clarify better like you pointed out. And the rose…mhmm, I only have a vague idea what it’s supposed to be, I think it’s desire and picking the right rose is finding realistic dreams or making those over-idealized desires concrete and brought back to what can be done; taking a fairytale ending and making it practical. I better find a way to better integrate that in the story. And you’re right a lot of my sentences are cluttered and confusing, that’s another thing I need to pound out.
Alright! I’m gonna redraft that with your advice and see how that improves…
Thanks again, that really helped me!Doing this literally right before work but since when has time management been a skill of mine…
Lol, I’ve literally started jotting story notes in the middle of a test before.
Alright what I see is first of all; it’s got excellent descriptions I can really get a feel for these characters and they’re interesting and exciting! Buut, there isn’t much plot information and maybe packing all the descriptions into one scene might strain the read. Maybe go right to Alexander Northiron falling into the river, or have the two characters doing something like talking or setting up for the action while you describe them. The way you describe them is scrumptious and provokes a very clear image both of them and their personalit–IRONSTONE like the Ironflow River! Brendin mentioned being involved in…wait is Ada Warin his sister?! *haha, it’s a good thing I don’t like reread all these posts while studying for my science tests*
Anyway, critiquing; the descriptions are luxurious but impractical all at once especially in an action/adventure novel (I’m assuming it’s action/adventure?). Try incorporating dialogue or interaction with the scenery that builds up to Alex (assumably) drowning. <3To be a light to the world you must shine in the darkness.
I probably should’ve mentioned but the story is written with a deliberately slow beginning because the style I’m writing in is akin to Tolkien’s and the story isn’t completely packed with action and adventure. But I probably should work some setting in there yeah…
(Also it’s IronSTORM, not IronSTONE. Slight difference. And yes, the Lady Warin mentioned is indeed Brendin’s mother)
"Remember, you go nowhere by accident. Wherever you go, God is sending you." - Rev. Peter R. Hale
First of all, I love the comparisons going on during your description (skittish fawn and gypsy cat are excellent metaphors). Your writing style is friendly and almost Lewis-like in the way that Lewis talked to his readers as he told the story.
I would suggest perhaps varying your sentence structure a bit, though. You have a lot of sentences that are eloquent and flowing, which is great for description, but sometimes the readers want just a short one here and there. You do great with having different… erm… styles I guess is the word in the beginning (not just starting with “the”), but most of your sentences follow a pattern. *shrugs* That could just be me, though.
Your cliffhanger ending is really great!
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