In Pursuit of Feedback!

KAbhinavV

New member
Joined
Jan 21, 2025
Messages
5
Points
3
Hey there, I am Abhinav, a young aspiring author. I'm still an amateur and am just looking for experience, and hopefully my two minutes of fame on the internet.
I am looking for readers who are willing to give my work some of their precious time and come back here to tell me all about it.
Please help this junior of yours.

 

Tempokai

The Overworked One
Joined
Nov 16, 2021
Messages
1,396
Points
153
Your story simply fails at every proper storytelling angle. Synopsis is barebones that I can hear bones rattling out of sheer desperation. Tags are nonexistent, as if you don't care about the reach the story can have. Ethos, your credibility, is dead at this moment.

Oh, the content of the chapters is even worse. Prologue functional, sure, but it doesn't tell anything about the MC or the circumstances besides MC being "quinessential everyman." Chapter 1 is disaster in tone, completely separated from the context of prologue, as if written separately and jointed together with prologue to create a chimera of sheer nonsense that technically readable, sure, but what for?

It lacks proper storytelling, instead trying to dazzle with mediocre (not amateur) prose, technically doing the job, but with voice so mechanical, it reads like it was written by LLM.

Oh wait, it is.

Nevermind then. Carry on, O Great GPT wielder, master of the prompt, and producer of mediocrity. If you're going that path, I can't stop you. You have failed as a proper storyteller, and there's nothing I can do.
 

Seaspecter

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 29, 2022
Messages
700
Points
133
Your story simply fails at every proper storytelling angle. Synopsis is barebones that I can hear bones rattling out of sheer desperation. Tags are nonexistent, as if you don't care about the reach the story can have. Ethos, your credibility, is dead at this moment.

Oh, the content of the chapters is even worse. Prologue functional, sure, but it doesn't tell anything about the MC or the circumstances besides MC being "quinessential everyman." Chapter 1 is disaster in tone, completely separated from the context of prologue, as if written separately and jointed together with prologue to create a chimera of sheer nonsense that technically readable, sure, but what for?

It lacks proper storytelling, instead trying to dazzle with mediocre (not amateur) prose, technically doing the job, but with voice so mechanical, it reads like it was written by LLM.

Oh wait, it is.

Nevermind then. Carry on, O Great GPT wielder, master of the prompt, and producer of mediocrity. If you're going that path, I can't stop you. You have failed as a proper storyteller, and there's nothing I can do.


 

ShrimpShady

The One With the Wurlitzer
Joined
Jan 2, 2019
Messages
543
Points
133
I read your story up until episode 4, and I'm sorry to say that I zoned out by the end of it.

My main issue is that I just can't find a reason to care for what's going on. I understand that the story is still in its early stages, but none of the characters feel like actual people. They have names, but barely anything else. The protagonist is the most egregious case because even though we're following his perspective, he doesn't really have anything interesting to say. It's hard to gauge his personality and I didn't get a feel for why he's so obsessed with learning magic in the first place, other than you as a writer just really wanting to talk about the magic system you came up with.

I'll admit I'm not a magic system nerd. I don't give a shit most of the time. Considering that I've decided not to continue reading your story, I won't be able to tell you whether or not your magic system actually amounts to anything compelling. What I can tell you is that you've fallen into a trap that I see surprisingly often with speculative fiction: You've gone and dumped a bunch of exposition about the magic of your world without really showcasing said magic or world. So far we've really only seen the MC's mom float him up in the air as a toddler and then have him crashing down (that sounds painful and weirdly callous for a mother to do tbh). You'd do a much better job hooking readers by creatively showing them what your magic can do before going into the explanations. Imagine watching Attack on Titan, but the first 10 minutes of the show were dedicated to an exposition dump detailing how the 3D maneuver gear works without showing any titan fights. That's not what the audience needs in the early parts of your story.

Other than that, I have some gripes about how empty the setting feels. Almost all of the dialogue is centered around explaining your magic system instead of anything that would flesh out the characters and the world even more. I honestly can't tell what the setting's supposed to be. My head just imagines a generic medieval European fantasy town because there isn't much to go on. The only actual piece of worldbuilding you seemed to have incorporated was the little offhand detail that cakes don't exist, which in my opinion, doesn't add to the authenticity and uniqueness of your setting, but rather detracts from them. Why wouldn't cakes exist? I can't think of a single reason. Bread has to exist, right? I assume the golden fields mentioned in episode 1 were wheat fields. It just feels like a weirdly incongruous detail, which I assume was just added without much thought. But sadly, that's the only real worldbuilding detail I could latch onto.

Lastly, parts of the story just reek of AI generation. That's its gravest sin. I understand that new and inexperienced authors might find it hard to convert the ideas in their heads into writing, but using AI to write your story for you is the worst way you could go about dealing with that. To put it bluntly, AI writing is shit. Being shit isn't the worst thing in the world though. Shit writing by an inexperienced human writer is forgivable, even respectable if they decide to put themselves out there despite their inexperience. However, AI writing is also soulless. Its prose evokes nothing. It flops around with insipid adjectives trying to tell a story that will never go in a way that surprises you.

Luckily for you, you can still improve as a writer while ChatGPT is still a long way from gaining a soul. I think there is a future where your story is great, where your characters are great, your setting's vivid, and the magic system gets all the magic system nerds pitching a tent, but that future won't come by typing up prompts and pasting the slop that's generated.

Best of luck :blobthumbsup:
 
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