Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24694643-20140624215144/@comment-24694643-20140627135236

Booboofinger wrote: Here are a few of the things I noticed:

There are  a lot of  awkward phrased sentences like :

"People, mainly adults with no children, were complaining to governments that they should globally enforce China's law of 1 child per family."

I would probably rephrase it to something like this:

"Most childless adults demanded that governments adopt China's One Child Per Family Law on a global scale."

"This was called "The Singular Youth Massacre". Almost every 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc child was killed legally, estimated putting down the population to around 11.2 billion."

I would probably change to:

"The "Singular Youth Massacre", as it later became known, was responsible for the legal extermination of every child past legal limit. This brought the population down to just over 11 billion."

World Wars, are represented by Roman Numeral, so instead of World War 3 it should be World War III.

"He/she looked the height of me, and I started to run away from it." VS. "The figure looked about my height, and a turned away and fled from it"

"Earth's stability, the government, clearly won." I couldn't really understand what this sentence was trying to say. Followed by "But many countries didn't." Didn't what? Where that sentence part of a paragraph, it would probably be obvious. But having the sentence floating there all by itself makes it unclear.

This brings me to my next point: you are breaking paragraphs a bit too often. This makes the story seem a lot longer than it is, and in some cases makes sentences not very understandable. You should keep sentences that deal with the same subject together in the same paragraph.

Also I would suggest you would change "The Solo Roamers" to maybe just "Roamers" as the former is just a bit too long and makes it sound like there is something to do with a musical performance. Think of it this way, if you saw one coming your way would you say "Run! It's a Solo Roamer!" or would you just say, "Run! It's a Roamer."?

Another suggestion is lose the Thesaurus. A lot of the dialog sounded a forced and unnatural, and some of the word choices did not fit properly. I'm not sure if you ever heard of this story called The Eye of Argon, but it clearly illustrates what can happen when you start using words whose meaning you don't clearly understand. Trust me, you do not want to be put in the same boat as that train wreck.

Instead,think of Ernest Hemingway who wrote at a level that even a 6th grader could read and is considered to this day as one of the greatest writer that even lived. There's beauty in simplicity. Keep that in mind.

As far as the story, the idea is somewhat cool, but it could use some work as well. The characters could have a bit more depth. I find that in a couple places they seem to go completely against character without much explanation or development. In a lot of ways it seems like a lot more thought was put into developing the world than the characters live in it.

As far as putting you work up on the main wiki, I would definitely revise the awkward phrasing and the paragraph issue first. Try reading your story out loud when you do that and a lot of the errors in phrasing will stand out. Yeah, when you put it that way it does seem a bit strange! It's just I'm more used to writing Trollpastas, so I'm new to this whole has-to-be-amazing business. But cheers for the advice!