The Elf Princess

I really liked this story actually, although I had a few issues with the story line. Spoilers below so beware!

I'll start by saying it was well written, and I did like the twist about the leader of the dark order! It was a cute story and worth reading. I also liked the descriptions. I realize a lot of comments complain about "information dump" and such, but I thought the author painted a specific picture, and did it well. The red dress added to the princess's teenage rebellious feel (I thought anyway).

There were several paths in the beginning, but none affect the story. Furthermore, depending on the path you choose you can proceed in the story without all of the background information. This makes the middle of the story confusing.

For example, on my first play through I choose to dance, talk to William, and then to go with William. The next page started "You finish eating..." this was really jarring to me, because in my mental picture I was not eating. I went back several times to see if I missed something. Later, when Ash arrived, the story proceeded without explaining who he was. I had never met him, so  all the introduction I got was him showing up, and me yelling at him asking "where have you been?" All I could think was 'calm down crazy you have never met this person!' Likewise, when I met King Keenan I never saw the note from the dark order.

I had to stop and go read every path in the beginning, just to make sure I had all of the background information to continue. I think what happened was the author assumed we read every page, but left routes open where not every page was visited.

Likewise there was only one path and one suitor, that you never really talked to! Even in the options that you talked to Ash, you do not really find out a lot about him. I like him, I just wish the relationship was developed more.

Great plot and story idea, awesome descriptions and imagery, but lacking just slightly on the structure and execution in my opinion.

Whew, that is quite a start. The start of the story is what I would call an “information dump.” There is a huge amount of information there, and it is all thrown at the reader at one time. I realize this is done intentionally to setup the story, and it does a good job of that. However, making this more a part of the story instead of an information dump might make the story even more engaging. There are classic ways to present the appearance of the protagonist, such as showing them looking in a mirror and revealing what they see. This also gives you the power to show more about the character and what they think of themselves, which could be a key part of a story like this one. The same can be done with the environment, such as the room.

“Elvish people?” What’s going on there? Are there people there who are not elvish? If not, I’m not sure why this construct exists. It might be clearer just saying “Elves.”

I really did like the number and types of options in this story. My first time through I ended up with a sad ending rather quickly. I went back and explored and found that there were lots more options and different ways to go. There are some good characters in suitors and good quality conversations with them throughout the story. That was quite nice. A couple endings were rather sudden with betrayals, but that was kind of nice, too. This was a really nice story, thank you for sharing it with the site.

For a first story, this was good. Your work shows that you put time and thought into it. However, there a few areas you may want to focus on improving for your next story in order to take it to the next level.

1) Word Choice/Show, Don't Tell - Rely on strong nouns and verbs to convey your story and limit your adjectives and adverbs to when you truly need them. This goes hand-in-hand with #2. A concise but powerful description will typically trump a long list of adjectives and paint a clearer picture. Splitting sentences can help too.

Example: The big dog ran quickly across the green grass and knocked the old lady down, who was wearing a bright pink pearl necklace and white gown, into the dirty mud.

Example: Scooby Doo sprinted across the courtyard and barreled into Queen Elizabeth II. She plopped into the mud with a shriek, as pearls scattered from her broken necklace.

^ An exaggerated example, but you can see how the second one shows a scene vs. telling a description. Unless there is something special about the color of the pearls (are they significantly rare, even by pearl standards?) then their color is probably irrelevant. By context, we can probably get a good grip of what the queen would be wearing. Unless it has relevance to the story, what it specifically is or its color can be excluded.

2) Excessive Description - You spend a lot of time describing items and physical features in great detail that aren't really all that important to the story. No one is going to remember the laundry list of colors and other adjectives that describe your character and her dress. Pick the most important, prominent or defining traits and rely on strong nouns and verbs to illustrate them.

3) Dialogue - Good dialogue can take time to figure out. When I think of an elf princess like the one in your story, I think of elegance and refined speech. Your princess spoke very much like a teenager - granted she was one. But it is important to consider how a character would actually speak based on his/her background when choosing his/her dialogue. You may very well want an elf princess that speaks like a typical teenager, but you should have a reason for it if you do. Dialogue can be a very useful tool for helping to breathe life into your characters.

I hope this helps. With a little practice, I think you could take your writing to another level. Nice work and good luck.

it sad to read

At first I thought the 4/8 might have been a bit of a nice score but honestly, yeah I see it. This story has potential and effort clearly went in. Unfortunately it is just still short of being anything special. Potential only goes so far, but keep it up. This definitely could've been worse.

Pretty good for a first story, though I wouldn't say it's anything remarkable outright.

Also Aaron is a madlad.

I would recommend working on varying sentence structure to avoid "You are this, you are that" especially at the start of the game. It's good to make the reader care about the character, personality or situation wise. Eye color is much less important than interesting situations. I recommend working on basic punctuation/grammar (comma use, quotation marks) and spelling (like it's/its).

Pretty good...

A few grammatical errors, but overall a good story.

More character interaction early on would be good. A few hooks to engage the reader would be nice as well. Make the decisions more meaningful, with interesting possibilities pointing to each one.