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@devastate-lasting

I managed to find some time for critiquing today. Yay!

Okay, let’s get started.  🙂 *puts on a pair of nerdy-looking glasses*

– Plot: For the most part, it made sense.  There were a couple things I think you could have touched on a little bit more, like why they were even in a war, or who they were even at war against.  Also, I didn’t quite understand why they were specifically killing children?

– Flow: It seemed to flow fine.  I like your style.  It’s very simplistic and easy to read.

– Theme: I thought for the most part it wasn’t too preachy, and you definitely got your message across well. 🙂

– Characters: I liked your characters! They were interesting and I found myself wanting to hear more of their backstories.

– I think it perhaps was a little confusing at parts… I felt that some of the time you were maybe too vague on who you were referring to.  Like when you described the characters as “the young man”, or the “the late soldier”, or “deep-voiced”, I sometimes got a little confused.  Maybe it would have helped if you introduced the character names earlier on.

– Descriptions: I think this is an area you could work on.  A lot of the time I wasn’t really able to “see” what was going on.  Like with your characters- as much as I liked them- I felt like I would have liked them more if I could get an actual mental image of them.   To be honest, this is something I tend to really struggle with in my writing.  It can be so hard to really capture what’s happening!

– Inner Conflict: I felt like you presented this well.  And I think you did good having Rillian’s inner conflict play into the exterior conflict.

Besides that, I think there are just a couple more things I’d mention:

First, dialogue tags.  Dialogue tags are what you use to distinguish who’s talking.  There were a few times where I couldn’t figure out who was talking because you’d left out a character tag.  And then other times, you used a lot of tags like, “the girl demanded” or “he snorted” or “he muttered.”  Tags like these tend to take away from the dialogue, because they can be distracting.  (And I loved your dialogue, btw!) I would strongly suggest cutting down on them and just using simpler tags, like “said”, which can be easily ignored.  And then, show the emotion instead.  Here is a link to an article that explains this better. 🙂

And besides that, the only thing I would suggest is to make some of your paragraphs shorter.  A lot of the time you’d switch the subject, but still keep it in the same paragraph.

Guess that’s about it.

Overall, fantastic job!

Thanks for sharing! 😊