Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate you taking the time to let me know what you thought, although there's some things I'd like to clarify.
lacheyenne
i read chapter 1- have to say that i enjoyed it.
Hrm, by this do you mean that you've only read Part I? If so, forgive me if I take some things you say with a grain of salt, as I would have to anyways-- there's some things that become clarified over the course of the story, some of which happen in parts that aren't even written. And there's a good chance that you should take everything I say with the whole damn salt shaker.
lacheyenne
my mind snagged on a few items, but they were nothing so overarchingly horrendous that an editor couldn't take an afternoon and offer you solid fixes. the idea of it all seems strong to me.
Yeah, this isn't exactly highly polished. I might go back, clean it up, and post it to ff.net later on, but as it is, I'm aware that it's riddled with typos and bits of dodgy writing. It's been an education for me on the importance of
not allowing that sort of thing, as there are some very deliberate things that I've done that could easily be read as mistakes.
lacheyenne
mmm... there were grammatically
correct tense shifts toward the beginning that, in the interests of content flow, i would rearrange.
Overall, there's a lot of tense changes, they're not even really shifts. The story is told from the perspective of a very particular point in time, and the awkwardness of that is... well, it fits. But what, in particular, would you change, how, and why? Because personally, I like the unpolished feel that this arrangement has, and some minor temporal switch-ups do delineate one episode from the next, which I kind of wish carried through past Part I, but that's what editing is for.
lacheyenne
also the transition into "" (i reference that first scene, as it were, with flitwick) as formal dialogue relates to the format of this "letter to harry" (did i get that right?): there are letters, and then, apparently, there are
letters.
Um, what?
I really have no idea what you mean here.
Does this relate in any way to the sort of back-and-forth section that is Nathaniel's retelling of what he imagines the debate about whether he should go to Hogwarts or not to be? 'Cause no one's actually speaking there, it can't even be taken as an accurate representation of what Flitwick means to say, though it is something you should keep in mind in terms of the evolving criticism of Rowling's world and work that Nathaniel's story presents.
lacheyenne
i also wish that you didn't need an introduction (by you, the author) to get us started- something like "hey harry- writing you from _____, thought i should tell you a bit about _____" as a reference point, i think, would be nice. ...i hope that i'm not so tired that i completely missed something like that.
emotion_eyebrow
Hmm, I've considered having Nathaniel giving some sort of introduction, but given what this "letter" really
is, I'm not sure it would be following form. I think any really direct address to Harry himself belongs at the end, for Reasons. If you're wondering what those Reasons are, I would encourage you to consider why--and especially
when--said letter would be written, and what its tone and structure might resemble.
On its own, I don't think the story necessarily
needs some indication of the premise at the outset, but as a blurb, it does. As far as chapter introductions go, I do think that being able to engage in a dialog with the reader directly is one of the benefits of fanfiction, and I don't want to surrender that, but as it stands, I might be doing this story a disservice by introducing each chapter.
Maybe I should put author's notes in the comments? Take out the intro from the LJ post, because every no one reads my LJ posts who doesn't already know what's going on, and everything that links to that post already
has the blurb? This has been, and will continue to be, a learning process.
lacheyenne
mmm... i don't... remember... well. anyway. a general thought: this kid/adult writes pretty well.
This is because I find narrators without any sense of poetry a pain in the a** to write, and they're a major obstacle if I ever want to get any writing done. However, I really don't think Nathaniel is a particularly polished writer: the manner in which he constructs his arguments is rather elementary, (restating the theses explicitly instead of weaving them into the telling of the story) his grammar is pretty danged bad, (and not just in a rhetorical "one-word sentence" kind of way, you should
see how many errors MS Word picks up, though it does turn up false positives with regular frequency as well) and the vast majority of his vocabulary is cobbled inelegantly together from outside influences. I have taken some liberty in making the whole thing more coherent than might be completely in-character, because screw it, I do actually want this to sound kinda decent.
As to Nathaniel's age at the time of writing, if you look closely, there are some major clues. Unfortunately, they might be easily be taken for typos, and I can't guarantee that all typos couldn't be taken for something else. See above re: typos suck.
lacheyenne
have you thought about mentioning why he is (unusually, by my standards) eloquent - perhaps in his short "before hogwarts" autobiography? e.g.: he's naturally smart- like dad? his guardians made sure he was literate? or maybe before hogwarts, he was terrible at language but improved over time? due to exigencies?
Oh man, you have no idea how hilarious most of these suggestions/guesses are.
- Nathaniel isn't going to talk about how he learned to write, because he has much more pressing issues to discuss.
- *snrk*
- Given the level of disregard that Griffith and Melissa show Nathaniel, do you really think they care what he learns or doesn't? If anyone wants Nathaniel to write well, it's Augustus Rookwood, and he has a pack of wizard cigarettes that says this copy of
The Elements of Style gets sent properly and anonymously. Or something. If you really want an explanation other than "the author didn't want to put everyone through the pain of non-eloquence-boosted!Nathaniel's prose," that's it.
-
rofl
- Possibly?
Please note that Hogwarts does not teach either literature or composition, and thus, most of the students are turning in "essays" written at about a fifth grade level
at best. Think of all the terrible spelling, incoherent grammar, and ill-concieved attempts to form paragraphs that would result in. Pull out your old homework assignments and revel in their terrible prose, and then see that that's about as well as anyone in the Wizarding world knows how to write. THIS IS CANNON.
