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I hope you enjoy this story with the weird universe I have created, possibly more to come from it since I enjoyed writing it a lot. Please give your thoughts on this short little excerpt :)
I think the story could benefit from less colour highlights, as they're a little distracting on the eye and may come off as unneeded. But the dialogue is good and sound, as well as the setting leaves the reader wanting more. +1, has a good hook.
Yours, Sevalif
Thank you for the upvote and feedback! for clarification, the green words are used to describe the class president in one way or another, I did this to add another layer and make it a small bit better to look at.
to me this feels a bit messy, a bit disjointed. it doesn't really gel - the scraps of understanding are too few and far between. i didn't find the dialogue compelling or particularly natural-feeling, and im struggling to invest in the characters. it doesn't feel especially complete. i also found the different colors distracting, unfortunately. -1, but i think the fun you had writing it is evident, so i wouldnt give up on it!
Thank you for the feedback, sorry to hear about the downvote. Do you have any suggestions on what I could do for the dialogue in the future? The reason it doesn't feel complete is because it's just a glimpse into someones life, It's not meant to be a whole long winded story, so I wanted to keep it brief because of that. I'm sorry to hear it didn't convey well enough.
the problem for me is that because it's so short and there isn't enough development it ends up feeling random and arbitrary and i don't form much of an opinion about the characters at all. short form stuff can work really well (including little slices of life) but i just dont think there's enough to tie this together — there's a balance to be had.
part of the dialogue issue is the formatting here. i would go back through with a fine-toothed comb and make sure you're following dialogue conventions. it's not always clear who is saying what and when. there are a lot of spag issues around your dialogue and that really obfuscates things, including with verb tense. "what's up, virgin?" is also like. extremely weird and awkward, even by the standards of the characters in question? to me, anyway. beyond that, there's a lot of boilerplate advice i could give on dialogue, like reading it aloud without the non-dialogue narrative in between and to listen to how people talk to each other and then smooth that out, because actual natural dialogue sometimes reads in a stilted and awkward fashion, but for me i think just some editing passes could do a world of good. i certainly won't claim i have all the magic of dialogue completely figured out or anything.
thanks for being open to feedback! not everyone has that mindset. all of this should be taken with a grain of salt. im not a master author or anything. if i had more time i would go through and do spag cleanup myself, but right now i can't manage that, so my apologies.
Thanks a lot of this, actually. I didn't really think about reading the dialogue without all the fluff in between it, so I will start to do that from here on because it's pretty good advice that I haven't heard before. Apologies for the spag as well, I thought I found it all but a lot of them slip past me annoyingly enough.
I don't have much to say on the format other than trying to reduce the amount of "text wall" here and possibly breaking up some lines which I could do, so thank you for bringing that to me attention. Looking forward to hearing from you on future works!
Giving this a hesitant plus one.
Agreeing with earlier comment that it feels a bit disjointed, like the prelude to a larger story rather than a complete piece. The dialog can be a bit jarring as well. With that said i think there's potential here and i think this piece could shine, so keep going!
unfortunately, i have to second most of zip's criticisms. the prose clunks pretty badly on the whole, and even when it doesn't hurt my ability to parse what's going on, it still takes me out of the story. i'm also having a hard time getting invested in these characters, though i think it has less to do with the dialogue and more to do with a lot of potentially interesting crumbs going unexplored — the story tells me that the narrator is behind at school because of problems at home/work, but these difficulties don't really come up again in any significant capacity, so her only distinguishing trait for much of the story is that she doesn't want to be in the situation she's in, which goes without saying. similarly, it's implied that the crocodile lady feels empowered to belittle the narrator because she's in a position of societal privilege, but this is never delved into meaningfully, so she ends up feeling flat.
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