Critique of first three chapters of a novel

Thank you for sending me the first three chapters of your manuscript. I am somewhat handicapped in this critique by not having a synopsis of the rest, so I do not fully grasp where your story is going. Is this an apocalyptic tale, where everyone either dies or is condemned to an eternity of torment? Is it a story of redemption, where the Unhallowed One is saved by the faith and love of the Saint? Is it a romance story, where the two protagonists meet, fight, argue, bicker, reject each other, only to be pulled together at the end? Without knowing where you are going, I run the risk of trying to pigeonhole your story into the wrong genre.

Likewise, I'm unsure what your target audience is. Are you hoping to get published by one of the speculative fiction Big Three (Del Ray, Baen, or Tor)? Are you going for a smaller press, like Mikademia or WotC? Are you going to try and self publish via a books-on-demand publisher? Without knowing this, it is hard for me to say how ready your manuscript is for publication. For example, I'm pretty sure that it would be rejected by Del Ray and Baen, because they don't do this kind of dark, depressing fantasy. Tor would reject it for reasons I'll get into below. But if you are targeting a small press I don't know about that specializes in your type of work, I may be making critical comments about parts of your MS that would not be an issue. You might want to look over http://www.otherworlds.net/links.htm .

I'll start by saying that I enjoyed reading the chapters. You have done an impressive amount of worldbuilding. In the first three chapters, you inform the reader of a epoch-spanning historical struggle between the gods and men. While the conflict does suffer from a cliched "evil god vs all the rest", the reason it is a cliche is because people like reading of this sort of struggle. The twist you are adding to the stock situation is that your protagonist appears to be on the "dark side". Unfortunately, without the synopsis, I don't know whether he'll fall (like Anakin), or prevail (like Luke.)

The story themes appear to be a fairly traditional mix. We have the "coming-of-age" of Rage. We have the "collect the plot tokens" theme. The "gather companions on life's journey" theme. A romance genre relationship between two characters. What makes this stand out above these ho hum cliches is the leaning that in this story, Evil might actually prevail.

Reading your prose is not syntactically difficult. You know how to punctuate dialog correctly. You introduce your characters with enough description, spread over time, for the reader to begin the process of identification. Your sentences and paragraphs flow together. You are able to lay out events in chronological fashion. In other words, you know your craft as a writer. If you've read enough fanfiction or other works by beginners, you know that you avoid most of the pitfalls and pratfalls of novice writers.

Likewise, you are pretty successful maintaining your point of view and avoiding "pov faults." There are only a few places where you put into the story information that your protagonist, the pov character, would not know.

There are many other problems that unpublished authors fall prey to, and a whole jargon created to describe them. Tom Swifties, eyeball emoting, mirror descriptions, "too, many, commas", temporal cues, and so forth. For the most part, you avoid them or at least don't cram too many into an individual paragraph. See the Turkey Lexicon at http://www.otherworlds.net/turkey.htm for details.

Your greatest strength is a wonderful ability to describe a gritty city or dank forest in a way that allows a reader to easily place themselves in the scene. When I was reading about the pit bar in the first chapter, I jumped when someone came up behind me unexpectedly. I've gone camping, and your description of the rain and the mud and the gloom of the forest made me remember the appeal of a roof and bed.

I particularly liked the "tests" in the third chapter. I consider these scenes the strongest of all the MS. Wow, but you have a vivid and dark imagination. When your protagonist jumped into the test and experienced the struggles, I felt like I was right there. Many descriptions of fell demons and nether beasts leave me going, "yeah, right, ho hum another D&D Type 5 demon", but when you talk about a dramog, I'm glad I'm only reading someone else's story.

OK, enough building up your ego. My view of the purpose of a critique is to provide you my opinions of how you can improve this story specifically, and your writing in general, so that you can reach a wider audience. And get invited to all the cool parties at conventions. You've probably had the experience of giving your MS to friends or family members, and having them say "I liked it. It was good." But that sort of feedback doesn't help you get better.

So, while the paragraphs above focused on what I think you're doing well, the next section will describe what I think are the shortcomings of the manuscript, and the areas where I think you should focus on to try and improve as a writer. Remember, since I'm not sure of your genre or target audience, some of the things I critique may not apply for this story. I'm also not saying, "Don't quit your day job" or that your story is unsalvageable or that you're a rotten person with a twisted psyche that needs serious psychiatric intervention. :-)

I'm saying that there is room for improvidence in this story and in your overall writing style. Likewise, this should not be viewed as the end of the process. I would encourage you to read the rest of the critique, and then do something else for a day or two. You will probably feel the impulse to sit down and write a response to some of the points I make or answer some of the questions I'm asking. But most authors who engage in this sort of online critting method find that letting the criticism sit in their minds for a day or two allows them to get beyond the initial shock of someone pointing out flaws.

With that said, on with the "critical" part of the critique.

I'll start by saying that your MS has a variety of structural problems with it. If you are going for a mainstream publisher, I'm pretty confident that it needs more than a final edit and polish before it would be accepted. I've gone to workshops and dinners with professional editors and authors of Speculative Fiction, and they would have problems with many if the issues I'm about to raise.

Here's a summary of potential issues.
* First person present narrative style
* Unsympathetic protagonist
* Non-believable tension between the two main characters
* Plot holes
* Worldbuilding issues
* Too many prepositional phrases
* Confusing flashbacks and chronology

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You're narrative is "first person present". This is unusual. Most fiction is third person limited, with only a few being written as first person omniscient or straight first person. This is both a strength and a weakness. The strength is that it contributes to the sense of immediacy and vividness of your descriptions. It also immerses the reader into the mindset of your protagonist.

Now, your unsolicited manuscript is going to go into the "slush pile" at a publishing house. And someone underpaid staffer will read through it, same as I am doing now. Your choice of unusual narrative is going to be a strike against you. Now, you do pull it off, but it will make it that much easier for the slush reader to toss your MS into the reject pile.

A structural weakness of first person narrative is that you are constrained to only giving information that the protagonist would see, hear, taste, or hear about. Now, you pull this off for the most part. The infodumps where secondary characters inform the protagonist (and thus the reader) about the background and setting are mostly painless. Your use of flashbacks to describe incidents in the protagonist's past, while confusing, do help to round out his character.

The other major problem with a first person narrative that you have, is that the author is constrained to stick within the confines of the protagonist's prejudices and abilities. I most noticed this in one of the "tests", where you used the word "clone." While this might not be anachronistic (after all, D&D has a clone spell), I have no expectation that the protagonist would know about it. After all, he's openly dismissive of wizards and books! Similarly, the protagonist seems quite knowledgeable about the demonology of Ahem. How would a pit fighter, only interested in killing, know such things?

Now, this could easily be fixed in your text. All you would need to do is add a line or two, about how Moor bored him with such information, or how he heard night-time stories when he was a kid, or how the sailors whispered tales on shipboard. But if you look, you'll probably find other places in the text where your protagonist is more knowledgeable than he would.

One suggestion I will make for you is to alternate between different styles. I certainly feel the "test" sequence should stay in first person present. That's the best writing, and is certainly worth being read by a larger audience. You can also write the flashbacks in first person past, to signal the time shift. But I think the bulk of the story would benefit from third person limited. (Let me know if you don't understand these terms, and I'll send you a URL.)

In fact, writing some of the chapters from the Moor or Psyfa's point of view, letting us know their internal motivations, would go a long way towards resolving my second issue.

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Which is, that you have a an unsympathetic character. I feel this problem alone would get you a rejection letter from the major publishing houses.

Again, I don't know your target audience, but if you're going for a mainstream audience, the reader is going to say, "Why do I want to keep reading about this guy?" You do such a good job of portraying the protagonist as a bigoted sociopath killer with no hobbies, interests, or redeeming characteristics that I want to put the book down and go read something else.

While reading your story, I was comparing him to other characters. At first, I thought of Conan. Not the one from the movies or the comics or the versions of him that were written by de Camp or others, but the original Conan as set down by Robert Howard. Or Bran Mac Cormac, or King Kull, by the same author. Or some of the characters from the Dread Empire or Black Company series by Glen Cook. Or even the first few Gor books by John Norman, when he was still writing fantasy and not S&M.

Yet, all of those characters have something that the reader can relate to. Conan retains a sense of "barbarian" honor. Kull has a noble regalness. The members of the Black Company have an "us against the world" mentality. Tarl Cabot was an ordinary guy from our world when he was immersed in Gor. Unfortunately, from my perspective, there is no reason for me to keep reading about your character. I found myself wishing that you'd kill him off, so I could find out more about your world from another character's perspective.

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I kept getting jarred out of my sense of immersion by how your characters related to each other. People I know don't behave like that. I think I can put it best by asking bluntly, "Is your protagonist gay?"

I mean, he must be either gay or asexual. He certainly wasn't interested in a naked elf when he first saw her, ore even when she washed the mud off. There is a certain amount of "subtext" between him and Moor. There are hints later on that he is attracted not only by the spiritual purity of Psyfa, but her physical body as well.

Now, this may be because you're going for a market that caters to young boys (probably about 9-13) who find girls icky, and are more interested in reading about decapitation than fornication.

Likewise, you do not give any reason for her to follow him around. When he asks, "Why didn't you stay in the elf village? Why are you following me?" he was only asking a question that I had been wondering about for many, many pages.

Again, this could be relatively easy or very hard to solve. You could have her answer. You can rewrite the novel so that the interpersonal byplay makes more sense.

Likewise, while you provide convincing detail about why Moor hangs out with Rage (Rage rescued him from bullies, Rage isn't impressed by his wealth or intelligence, Rage is good to have around when you're going over on the wrong side of the tracks), I have not read any reasons for why Rage hangs out with Moor.

In many different internal thought dialog, Rage expresses his disdain for wealth, intelligence, and anyone not as interested in general mayhem as he is. A common theme between the two is their overweaning ambition, but you don't give any evidence in the text of this.

Another plot artifact which undercuts any attempt at making the interpersonal relationships make sense is the revelation that the main characters are being manipulated by outside forces. First, that Larin, lurking in the background, has been channeling Rage (and Moor) for their entire lives. This discovery means that the reader cannot tell whether the characters are growing and changing throughout the story, or if they are just fulfilling someone's desire to be a controlling psychopath.

Another problem with this discovery (at least as far as I am concerned) is that Rage does draw the logical conclusion. While Larin declares that he, and he alone, is responsible for all the good things in Rage's life, Rage does not realize that Larin was also responsible for the bad things, as well. Now, the impression I've gotten of Rage through the story is that he's a big strong psychopath with poor impulse control and a decent amount of smarts. If he figures out that Larin is responsible for putting the crystal blade in Sevrin's chest, my expectation is that he would turn around and kill Larin. His failure to realize this, and take this action which would be so in character for him, feels like an authorial intrusion into the story.

Second we find out that the Gods (two competing Gods, in fact) have plans for the two romantic leads. While this explains why the two stay in close physical proximity, it totally destroys any reader identification. If Rage kills Psyfa, it won't be a demonstration of his loathing of any emotional attachments, it will be because Ahm gains the upper hand. If Psyfa soothes the savage beast and they fall in love, it won't be as a result of character growth, but because Nia gains the upper hand. At which point, most readers will feel cheated.

There are other minor plot contrivances that may not necessarily be fatal, as long as you don't overdo them. Rage just "happens" to see a scroll in the waistband of the pit fighter he kills.

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There are some worldbuilding problems with the text. Again, some of these can be solved via throwaway lines. Others might get you thinking, and deciding to rewrite great swathes of text.

The most glaring to me was your monetary system. You state that 50 sigots is more than a year's income for one of the most highly skilled pit fighters. But in the same scene, we find out that he has 2g.15s. Um... This is easily fixable by saying he only has 15s.

Continuing the economic analysis, he buys a weeks worth of travel rations for 7s. That seems normal. But after the fire, we learn that a helmet and gauntlets will cost 20 gold. (And you do use the term gold, and not sigots.) How much was the horse worth? He doesn't see concerned about that, yet in most low-tech societies, a good horse would be worth more than armor or even a good weapon.

So, I get the sense that you haven't quite worked out what the economy is. The tables in the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide are not terribly reliable, but there are probably web references that will help you out here.

Digressing a bit, the monetary problem was compounded for me by the sentence, "After a day of walking I notice that my bag of gold has a hole burnt in it and has lost some gold." I don't see how he would have only lost "some". Saying he lost all the gold, or all except one lonely sigil stuck in a seam, would make more sense.

Another worldbuilding problem leaps out in your opening sentence: "It is only a few days before the dawning of the harvest moon late in the solstice." Unless you have some strange astronomical thing going on, the "solstice" is not a month, it is a single day. And if the astronomical and agricultural calendar is based on ours, the solstice happens in summer and winter, while harvest happens closer to the equinox, in fall.

This is not a minor point. Why? Because your first sentence, first paragraph, and first page are crucial to your ability to get someone to buy your book. You will have no control over the cover illustration or back cover text or inside front cover text or the blurbs -- the publisher's marketing department owns those. So your first chance to convince someone to spend their money on your book, instead of on a movie, video game, computer game, netflix rental, etc etc etc is here. And if you make this apparent mistake here, a very large part of your potential readership (pagans, people who care about accuracy) is going to groan, close the book, put it back on the shelf at the bookstore or library, and go onto the next book. If you don't believe me, go sit in a bookstore or library for a few hours, and watch how people browse.

Having said that, I will applaud the rest of your first page. It introduces the protagonist, demonstrates that he is not a nice guy, and clearly puts your tale in the "grim 'n gritty" genre.

Another worldbuilding issue is the Game of War. It appears that the current King won it to gain the crown. Yet Rage does not wish to repeat that task, he just wants to be noticed in order to become a general. Yet he should realize that glory in the pit does not translate into strategic ability.

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My opinion is that while you do a great job of creating images, the exposition that creates those images is often clunky, wordy, or otherwise distracts from the process of getting something from inside your head to inside your reader's head. A good way to guard against this sort of thing is to read your text aloud to friends who are not interested in this genre of writing. If they start giggling or giving blank looks at certain passages, then it's overly purple and needs a rewrite. Here are some examples:

"I often sit in the One Eyed Dog, staring into the crowd, and wonder if I am overlooking my purpose."

"overlooking my purpose" is clunky and not in character for the way the narrator has been talking up until now.

"I am one of many elite fighters demonstrating an aggressive supremacy."

Ditto for "demonstrating an aggressive supremacy".

"His face reflects great pain as I strangle him; "

Well, of course it would. This is funny in a way you probably do not intend.

"His perfectly dressed, dark gray hair lies on the shoulders of his immaculately sharp looking black robe."

You're alluding to the phrase "sharp dressed", but "sharp" and "robe" do not go together.

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A problem with your text that you share in common with many writers is chronology. Since you're trying to cram so much backstory into the beginning chapters, you go back in time. Repeatedly. And sometimes your transitions are not obvious. Maybe if you tried to cut back and only have one flashback or infodump...

There is a reason why I asked for three chapters. Another problem I don't think your manuscript has, is that many writers start there story in the wrong place. Advice often given in critting workshops is "drop the first two chapters, and start... here." Without a synopsis I can't be sure, but I think starting with a fight is a good idea. Starting with a fight that foreshadows his final battle is a good idea. But if your narrative requires so many flashbacks, you may need to go more episodically, where the first chapter is a scene from his childhood on shipboard, the next his first meeting with Moor, etc. I'm not sure.

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I want to send this off this morning, so I'll sum up. Speculative Fiction is often broken down into character, exposition, backstory, description, and plot. You are very strong on description, and have a good backstory. But your plot seems rather generic, and you are definitely weak on character. Depending on your target audience, these shortcomings may not be an issue.

You would probably benefit from an online critting workshop. Face to face groups that meet once a month have the problem that people's egos get very involved, and that most people don't understand SF. Reading other people's "slush", and then describing to them what is wrong, is an excellent way to improve your own writing.

Good luck, and keep writing.