You said to burn you with words so here goes.
i never thought i'd be using a dA comment on a brony comic as a reaction image but here we areeditorSatanInAZootSuit, April 18, 2016, 09:15:20 pm
To be blunt I hope you didn't pay her.
"It's... well, it's better than the fixer's apartment, I can give it that much"Quotation Marks
You need terminal punctuation inside of your quotation marks. If you're going on to add dialogue tags (like 'he said') afterwards then you chuck in a comma, but otherwise go with a full stop. Question marks are an exception. Use them whenever it's called for, regardless of dialogue tags that follow.
3 big knocks came from the door, suggesting my beater friend Marcus was here.
Numerals
Use 'three'. You should almost always use the word instead of the digit when mentioning numbers in fiction. It looks better and reads better. Listing the year in numerals in fine though. There are people who break this rule (42) but it's only worth doing for effect. If the number is unreasonably large and unwieldy to type out then use your better judgement. Along those lines, you list some kids ages later on and you should be using 'nineteen and seventeen' instead of '19 and 17'.
Ready to restyle the dudes face?
Apostrophes
What you've written here can roughly be translated as 'are you ready to restyle the one face of many dudes' whereas I'm pretty sure you mean 'are you ready to restyle the face belonging to The Dude'. Use apostrophes to indicate possession (ie
the dude's) and in contractions such as 'can't', 'it's', et cetera. This trips a lot of people up so don't feel too bad about it, but it's worth reading up and getting that shit set in stone in your brain.
I agree with everything punpun said. It's good to know that Deckard coming off like he's trying to
o hard is deliberate, but at the same time it comes off as the author trying too hard. Striking the balance between a character trying to show off how cool and edgy he is and not coming across as shoving slang and cool mannerisms in the reader's face can be difficult. Especially in first person.
It might help to make his narration less wordy. Anathema to the NaNoWriMo state of mind but fuck the NaNoWriMo state of mind anyway. Problem solved. It'll make your writing snappier. Here's an example of how you could do that with your opening lines.
Boston, 2021. A city too willing to let go of its past, filled to the brim with criminals. Most who can stay far away. Some of us never had the choice, trapped here in an aging city, scum taking over the roads and walls that hold in the worst of it. What a place to live.
What Would Courtesy Bee Do
It's far from perfect but I'm tired and have never been great at rewrites. If I were writing this I'd probably overhaul the whole thing but I don't want to bring personal taste and writing style into this more than I need to. Here's why I made the changes I did. 'Boston, 2021.' works better as its own standalone sentence
fragment but that's okay as it immediately tells the reader where and when they are and moves on. It's impactful. On their own, shorter sentences/carefully used sentence fragments help to sort of speed up the text and make it feel more exciting. You don't need a million of them, but it's worth mindfully sprinkling them through piles of longer sentences so the writing doesn't drag or grate on the reader.
Also, that comma is important. Deckard isn't from the two thousand and twenty first Boston. He's in Boston in the year 2021. Everyone knows what you mean, but getting it right is important. It also helps the flow. Yes, this is worth considering for two words.
I removed 'historic' because while descriptive, it's not helping you pack a punch in those first few lines. It doesn't tell the reader anything they need to know
right now, if they even need to know at all. If the historical significance of Boston is important to your story you can paint a picture with words later on and illustrate it with whatever details you like. That way you'll better convey to the reader exactly what you mean by 'historic' and why you want them to know that. Even if it's only for the purpose of setting the scene, you'll still be better served by dropping in details later than flat out stating 'historic' as your fourth word. If you're worried you won't get around to doing that, it's not important.
Now I'd like to be clear that I'm not against sprinkling adjectives in
at all. I like details! I like otherwise insignificant window-dressing filler words, as long as they're interesting and help to paint a clearer picture of the world the author imagined. 'Historic' ain't that. Sorry. Doesn't belong in the opening, either. You aren't starting with any exciting events. You haven't got a hook. This isn't
necessarily a bad thing but it does mean you have to keep your writing tight.
'Way' and 'of all types' had to go because they bogged down the flow without adding anything but the idea of 'this, but REALLY this'. A good rule of thumb is to avoid as much as possible qualifiers like 'very', 'really', 'totes mcgoats', 'extremely' and so on. When I first read that idea I scoffed because how else are you supposed to add impact? Conciseness is how. Believe me, I know how counterintuitive this feels, but puffing up your sentences with words supposed to make them more intense just makes them bloated. It also dulls down the effect of those qualifiers when you find an exception where you
really do need to use them. On top of all that, 'way' wasn't the correct word to use. Even if Deckard would've said it, it doesn't feel right to read. The correct word would've been 'far'. I would've kicked 'far's arse, too.
Speaking of 'far', I get why you repeated it in the next sentence. Honestly, you could get away with that if you're attached to how it flows. My biggest issue with the sentences starting with 'most people' is the repetition of 'choice/choose'. While 'far, far away' is deliberate, this clearly isn't. Repetition can be used to great effect but it has to be carefully considered to be done in a way that's clever and not flow-breaking. Be careful to avoid overusing words that aren't the super common ones you can't go two paragraphs without, because readers do notice. It'll knock them right out of the story. It's stilted.
I like 'trapped in an aging city'. You don't need the 'here' because that's implied. You've established that Deckard is in Boston and never had the choice to leave. Cut that shit like eyes from a potato. You could change 'an' to 'this' if you prefer.
To be honest I had trouble with the rest. The use of 'encrusting' is awkward. Don't get me wrong, it paints the picture you want. Knowing exactly what you're trying to stay doesn't make it feel right though. I'm not so hot on my replacement of 'taking over' either, but I heartily recommend you rethink your word selection.
Same kind of deal with 'worst bits of the city' in that while I'm not sold on my replacement I feel it shows how you could fix the issues. 'Bits' was removed to prevent bloat and 'city' for the same reasons as the 'choice/choose' stuff above.
I'm cool with the last part.
I'm not doing any more of this word by word correction because frankly I'm tired as hell but I hope what I've written helps. I want to be clear that this isn't me pulling some showoffy 'look at me i am so smart' kind of deal, it's just the best way I could think of to explain how to make the narration snappier. It's worth repeating that first person is hard. There's a reason so many people hate reading it. I think it's also worth repeating that Deckard's narration doesn't have to sound exactly the same as his dialogue.
Moving on to your second piece!
I like this a lot better. Even though Joseph has no idea where he's going, what little you have of this story already feels like it has direction. I'd still personally change it up and shorten a few sentences (for example, your second sentence could be 'the forest's trees offered little protection from the midnight rain') but I don't have as many issues as I did with your first story. You wrote One Darkness later, right?
I don't want to discourage you. The fact that you're even
asking for critique is good. There's a lot more I could say both good and bad but I have to
go the fuck to sleep so I'm closing out here lol. Keep at it.
i have not proofread this post for the last few paragraphs