Sharassein
The Lady of Darken Woods
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Now, I am a huge fan of gore so you did strike my interest, but there were an incredible amount of errors in this piece.
First, I don’t think you should capitalize ‘lady’. My partner is sitting here arguing with me that perhaps you have done so because it is a title, but in any case, it just doesn’t look right if you are saying “the Lady” rather than “Lady Luck” for example. I know that isn’t her name, but when it is a combination of title and name, then I will accept capitalization of ‘lady’.
Following on this line of thought, it is a pretty big risk to take to not name your protagonist if you want the audience to care for the character. I am not saying that you shouldn’t do it, but if you have an anonymous protagonist, the characterization needs to be so powerful that a name means nothing. You just didn’t nail the characterization well enough to hit this home, so I don’t really care for the lady, the knight, or the socceress.
Another thing that struck me was this horrible sentence:
“So... many... Knights have died in these woods.”<- That is two fragments strung together by two poorly used ellipses. Rotsab tells me that certain guides of style accept ellipses as a pause, but traditionally they are used to indicate where the writer has left out something and plans to go back to it later to finish it. Let’s humour ourselves for a moment and say that I will ignore the mis-use of the ellipses technique: Why would you use two there? Have you tried to read that out loud? It sounds like an old man dying from thirst in a desert. Okay, I exaggerate, but two pauses in one really short sentence seems a bit ridiculous
and in doing so, you have created two fragments. ‘So’ is not a sentence; ‘many’ is not a sentence. The worst thing was that you repeated this same sentence twice and paraphrased it a third time. I hate repetition unless it is executed in a very dramatic way. This sentence really wasn’t.
Back to fragments, your piece is littered with them. I’ve been discussing with a few people about what kind of fragments are acceptable. If the subject matter is made clear in the sentence immediately before, I might let it slide, but sentences such as “Knights and swords” don’t really make a whole lot of sense on their own. I know what message you are trying to say, but it isn’t too hard to add three or four words to construct a full sentence.
Oh my god, your dialogue makes me cringe. I don’t know if you were quoting a three year old, if you were really high, or you just didn’t proof read (maybe all of the above) but either way, have a look at some of these examples and I bet I wont even need to tell you where you went wrong:
“"Do you be a demon, little Sorceress? Do I be cursed with ill luck? Such things do I hear of magic."
“"Why do you be so wicked, little Sorceress?"
"Kessardi? Demon? I do no like these names,"
"Devilish beings do be in these woods!"
That there was quite a ********, wasn’t it? Oh and do you really think that when the lady is dying, screaming in agony, with blood spurting out of her like a gutted pig, and her flesh molding into some freakish volcanic rock, that she is really going to say “"Silly sorceress," the Lady moaned, and held up her arm. "Look what you did to me." That’s like being tortured and just going “Oh you clumsy ducks; you just took my toe off.”
I already mentioned needing to work on your characterization, but I also think you need to work on your imagery. I found it really hard to grasp what was happening in the action scenes and when I did grasp it, it wasn’t a very believable picture.
Finally, that ending was a classic example of telling rather than showing. You don’t allow the audience to connect the dots and understand the implications of the Lady’s death, but rather you step in with a narrator that alienates the audience by pausing the movie so to speak, to explain this incredibly significant aspect of the plot that is never adequately covered, just to hit play again just in time for that one anticlimactic line that was a paraphrased repetition of the opening sentence. That really is a deal breaker.
I hope this helps.
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