Postby Davidizer13 » Tue Sep 04, 2012 6:41 pm
Hooooo boy.
Let's start with the verdict: Your story is unreadable, in its present state.
First off, use some line breaks. Stick 'em between when the speaker in a conversation changes (speaking of which, don't use that RPG character-colon-words stuff, stick with the quotation marks and "he said/spit/screamed" construction; anything else is really annoying), or when the subject or action changes significantly. Punctuation - learn it, if you haven't already, and use it properly. If you don't care enough to format or copy-edit your story, I probably won't care enough to take the extra time and effort I'd need to read it. You aren't e.e. cummings or James Joyce. Don't write like them and claim it's your "style" - you need more practice with the basics before you can mess with the formatting or narrative like that. Write more like you'd see in a real book, but even so, let your own idiosyncrasies and turns of phrase shine through. Let that be your "style."
And speaking of which, read some of them real books, the classics and stuff. The best way to learn how to write is to see how people did it well (or not so well) in the past and what's stood the test of time. It'll help you write better, trust me.
So much for formatting. Now, onto the story itself. It's incoherent and jumps around too much, but hey, at least it doesn't waste time doing silly things like explaining what's going on are and why I should care about any of it! (No, wait, that's a bad thing...) Why is the Cave of Zero Tolerance or whatever so important? Why would there be traitors in the midst of the school? What's the school meant to teach? Why is our hero there? Who are these people even fighting against, and what do they want? What does the character's Christianity or 2nd Timothy 2:16 have to do with anything? The less you explain the important points of your story, let alone why they're important, the less I'm likely to keep reading to figure them out. What's more, you essentially throw up your hands and answer some of those questions about the main character with "lol i dunno" at the beginning of your story makes it that much worse, because that means we'll never get an answer.
But let's go back to the school thing. Why a high school, and not some other type of school? (I suspect I know the answer to that, but I'll just keep that to myself for now.) Why not a school for Cubone or whatever? Sure, the magical academy concept has been done to death, but it keeps this air of "this is different" that you want in your story, clearly (or maybe not).
Or even wilder, why have a school at all? One of the first things that comes to mind when you're describing the tribes and the graduation and being out in the wild all that, is some of the descriptions in Roots by Alex Haley (one of those great books you should probably read). In the beginning of the story, the main character, living in a village in western Africa, goes out with the rest of the local boys his age to their coming-of-age ceremony. The village elders take them out into the wild and teach them all the essential skills they need to survive as men and perform the rituals that will mark them as fully grown and capable. In one scene, one of his friends points out a bird in a tree (because they're in the jungle), and the elders say "That's great, kid. Go bring it here," because he's acting like a kid still. It takes him a long while to do it, but eventually, the friend does bring it back, and he's celebrated for it. Stuff like that.
Now, this might not be what you want for your story in particular, but something like that will stretch your world out - something like that would mark your story as not just existing in a copy of suburban Western life only with bone magic, but as part of its own, fully-fledged world, distinct from anything we're used to. You're limited only by your imagination, so...yeah, get to it. You've got a lot of work to do, trust me.
We are loved even though we suck.
Psalms 37:37 (NHEB)
Mark the perfect man, and see the upright, for there is a future for the man of peace.