Albert Liu wrote:
This is my first chapter of my new fic, it does get better ( in my opinion anyway )
c&c welcome, flames not!
PLEASE e-mail me I need your comments!
Okay. To start with, FORMAT properly please! Lots of people (including
me) generally won't even look at a fic if the lines wander off the edge
of the screen.
Chapter 1
Here�s Ranma and ?????
We see a man in his late thirties, with a moustache and shoulder length black hair sitting in a traditional
"We" is a poor way to put that. We who? It's generally bad practice to
refer to the reader at all. A better choice would be to write, "A man
in his late thirties...sat in a traditional Japanese dining room reading
a letter." Oh, and capitalize Japanese whenever it comes up.
Soun Tendo overjoyed with the news shouted out to his three daughters, to inform them of
news.
Uh, what? Insert commas after 'Tendo' and 'news', and I think you left
out a word there... try 'them of the news'. And you used 'news' twice
in the same sentence, which looks bad.
"Kasumi, Nabiki, Akane come on down I have something to announce"
Punctuation, punctuation, punctuation. Plus, he's calling out to them,
so...
"Kasumi! Nabiki! Akane! Come on down - I have something to announce!"
Kasumi and Nabiki arrived in the dining room,
Period here, not comma.
"what is it dad?" questioned Nabiki.
Capitalize.
"where is that girl Akane?"
Capitalize.
At that moment we see a 16 year old girl with shoulder length hazel hair returning from a jog,
Is this the same Akane? I've always thought of hazel as being brownish,
while Akane's hair is jet black. And there's that 'we' again.
At that moment a another girl walks in, she is around Akane�s age with short cut black hair,
and cool calculating eyes.
...Whereas Nabiki's hair is a bit more brown than black, IMO. Don't
change tenses between sentences, either, and... well, here's a better
version:
At that moment, another girl walked in; she was around Akane's age, with
short cut brown hair and cool, calculating eyes.
"No wonder all the boys are scared of you, you�ll never get a boyfriend at this rate!"
"Why do I care Nabiki, I hate boys" answered Akane.
Punctuation.
"well then I guess you won�t be interested in what father has to say then" replied Nabiki.
Capitalize.
The three girls all gathered in the dining room to listen to their father�s announcement,
Punctuation - this should be a full sentence, and should end with a
period.
"FIANCEE!!!!" all three Tendo daughters screamed
Since the scream is at least half disbelief, swap one or two of those
exclamation points for question marks. And put a period after
'screamed'.
Soun continued unaffected by their reactions "Yes an old friend of mine and his son will be coming to visiting me in a few days,
if one of you were to marry him then the legacy of the Tendo dojo would
be secure "
Punctuation. Punctuation. PUNCTUATION!
"They have just finished crossing into China six months ago and should be arriving in the next
few days"
And again.
"Wow China" Nabiki murmured
And again. Three times.
Akane was the first to react, shouting out "Huh big deal anyway don�t we get any say in who we marry",
You generally don't shout 'Huh'.
Nabiki was the only silent one, but in her mind she was already calculating all the ways in which
ahe could make money out of this.
She's actually pretty excited at this point...
I'm going to stop here - there's just too many errors, and too many
cliches to go on. To summarize:
1. Format your message properly.
2. Learn how to use punctuation and capitalization.
3. Don't narrate the character's feelings so much - have them express
it every so often.
4. You've gone waaaaaaaaaaay overboard on Nabiki. Almost every single
time you mentioned her, she was thinking about getting money. She's not
obsessed with the subject, IMO.
5. As 'new universe' beginnings go, that was utterly, utterly
predictable. Try writing it from a different starting point, or from a
different point of view.
My advice would be to read more fics and study the basics a little while
longer.