 Warmest greetings!
I stumbled upon your work through community feeds! Honestly, I'm still a new writer - not very adept at handing out feedback, but I wanted to start building my presence, so here goes~
I've checked through your portfolio and since you mentioned appreciating people who could give an honest feedback, I won't hold back. But please bear in mind the following: the truth is subjective to our individual thinking, what may be true for me cannot be said the same as you - so take it with a grain of salt. With that out of the way, here's what I think about your prologue!
Overall impression
The prologue does everything it needs to - an inciting incident (the death of the son), a clear sense of worldbuilding (the two clans) and the epics of an ancient battle. I had a solid grasp of the entire scene throughout! But I think there's one key element missing here: Internal thoughts. The entire prologue didn't stop to dive into any individual thoughts, it moves quickly from dialogue and scenes and dialogue, too fast-paced. Even if this is intentional, I definitely think that there are still ways to incorporate this element for us, the readers, to get a clearer understanding of the character. A writer's strength lies in the very fact that we could move into and explore a character's internal world - movies don't show that!
Let's have a look at this paragraph of yours:
Both clans crashed together, and the war began as giants slashed at one another, bringing blood and gore. Aelvok smashed his axe into the head of a bear, and it fell to the ground, as he pulled his axe out of the beast’s skull. The giant sitting atop it screamed incoherently, and tried to attack Aelvok, but his wolf cut the giant down and began to tear at him as he screamed. The joy of battle overwhelmed Aelvok, and he laughed, removing the head of a giantess, and he watched it roll onto the ground in a spray of blood, before turning to another giant. He swung his axe around in a deadly arc, and the giant blinked, before his head went flying. The bear he had been on roared in anger and tried to attack, but Aelvok brought his axe down onto its head, silencing it. The bear fell to the ground with a thump.
Nothing too out of sorts - a clash, a detailed fight between Aelvok and a nameless giant. But what if I were to highlight it using the spotlight system? Basically, in the spotlight system, green means dialogue, yellow means sensory details and descriptions, and red means internal thought.
Both clans crashed together, and the war began as giants slashed at one another, bringing blood and gore. Aelvok smashed his axe into the head of a bear, and it fell to the ground, as he pulled his axe out of the beast’s skull. The giant sitting atop it screamed incoherently, and tried to attack Aelvok, but his wolf cut the giant down and began to tear at him as he screamed. The joy of battle overwhelmed Aelvok, and he laughed, removing the head of a giantess, and he watched it roll onto the ground in a spray of blood, before turning to another giant. He swung his axe around in a deadly arc, and the giant blinked, before his head went flying. The bear he had been on roared in anger and tried to attack, but Aelvok brought his axe down onto its head, silencing it. The bear fell to the ground with a thump.
Wew, that's an entire paragraph of just explaining and explaining and explaining. If I would add three of your paragraph below too, that'd be an entire wall of yellow texts - and a yellow wall usually signifies overexplaining. For me, personally, I immediately skimmed through the entire long paragraph the first time I read it, there wasn't any groundbreaking information to be known. Sure, the fight is heroic and triumphant, but.. why exactly should I care about this fight right here? I'm not interested in whatever nameless giant to be slayed, I wanted to witness where this war would go, or whatever revelation to be had. It's harsh feedback, I really do apologize, but I really wanted to be honest.
If it were me, I'd probably rewrite it something like this (You do not need to use this as a reference or as a feedback, as well as direct changes to your manuscript, I just want to show what it could possibly look like by breaking the wall into multiple colours)
Both clans crashed. The shrieking sound of a warhorn - the Umbral's battlecry. Axes began swinging - splattered blood and bone painted the battlefield crimson. Oh, those days.. How Aelvok had relished this moment. With a screech of his lifelong trusted Windlok (I made up an entirely nonsense name for Aelvok's axe here), Aelvok subjected himself into the burning heat of a fiery clash.
A bear immediately lunged at him. His axe hammered down on the beast's skull. Pitiful creature.
"You'll die for that, Aelvok!" The barbarian on top of the bear rolled down. He charged towards Aelvok with all his might, axe raised upwards.
Squish. Splatter. The clean fleshy sound of death. The giant thumped to the ground, neck torn apart as the wolf bit it to shred. Aelvok didn't even need to raise a hand - how disappointing. The beast continued devouring the remaining muffled scream of the nameless warrior as Aelvok stood, watching as life faded in the giant's eyes.
As you can see, I only peppered the scene with a small amount of internal thoughts and dialogue, since the main purpose of it is describing the war, but it just makes it less like a task of reading through! We're given a dialogue to break up the descriptions, and some internal thoughts to build some of Aelvok's character. I hope it was somewhat useful for you! You could also enhance the scene more by describing the scene through Aelvok's POV - like what languages would he use, how would he speak, all of those contribute to the internal character worldbuilding!
Moving on, I really like the settings that's been established, and I think it could be stronger. I'm hooked on the premise, but well, I'm not too particularly hooked on the characters. I have no idea who Aelvok is, no impression with the queen other than the fact that they are both very strong people. Likeee, big, buffed baddies. Yeah, that's all I remember about those. I could literally describe two characters using that same sentence.
Well, that's just not a good first impression now, is it? I will definitely explore more about these characters later on, but right now, I'm feeling a huge sense of detachment from the characters. While you don't need to describe both, I feel like Aelvok should at least leave an impression on the first page since I assume that he's our protagonist!
Your external worldbuilding is extremely strong - I have to admit the fantasy you've built, bear, wolf, a clash, obvious long history between the two clans, they all left immediate impression, but I couldn't pinpoint any of the memorable characters. As I'm writing this feedback, I've barely been able to memorize the name Aelvok after scrolling up a decent amount of times. Since it shows that you put so much thought into the story, let us have some glimpse of the inside world too! A place where you can definitely and should add more internal processing is when the son Ishkul died. How would Aelvok react to that? I think it could be a very strong and decisive moment to ground Aelvok's character!
Conclusion
Those are the first and overall impression I had on your work. Thank you for reading to the end and letting me review your work! If you want further feedback on word choices (showing - not telling, grammar), sentence varying and structural suggestions, hit me up with a note, and I'll gladly offer further insights.
For now, I think I'll stop here! It took me a quite a while to write this. I hope you could learn a thing or two and I'll await more of your work!
Peace out~ |
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