Completion summary:
Before I start tearing into the nitty-gritties of every specific detail in here, I would like to state unequivocally that this is an incredible piece of work, clearly representing a LOT of effort and ingenuity, and you deserve a lot of praise for finishing an undertaking of this volume. I’m not going to spend too much time focusing on the positives, since you’re looking for critical feedback, so I wanted to state up-front how impressed I am. Round of applause for Green!
Every now and then I’ll watch a movie or a tv show and think “This would be a good first draft, but it needed several more rounds of editing before being filmed.” I’d say that’s the stage this book is at right now. Usually that reaction is a negative since I’m having it towards works that have already been published, but in this case, it’s a pure positive: This book is exactly where you want it to be. You’ve dumped a vast deposit of raw materials on the table, and now it’s time to vigorously cut and polish and edit until everything is smooth. Which is going to be tough and long, because there’s just so much written here, but at this stage, all you need to do is keep throwing time and energy at this until you’re satisfied.
Disclaimers:
1) I’ve done my best to separate my personal preferences from my analysis of your writing, but I’m just one person. If something I’m saying doesn’t match up with the feedback you’re getting from others, just ignore it.
2) You’re british, I’m american. Things that seem weird or wrong to me might just be cultural differences in phrasing.
First I’m going to give you some general feedback on your overall writing style and what I recommend doing about it. Then I’ll get into more work-specific details such as plot and characters.
1) Clarity of plot, world, and setting. There are many places in this book where I was confused or thrown off, but couldn’t tell if this was deliberate, if it was because I personally was unfamiliar with it, or because the writing was genuinely unclear. The last thing you want is readers to be confused, so you’ll want to ensure that readers always understand exactly what they need to at any given time.
I think this is especially true of explaining how magic works in your world. For example, heading into the final chapters, I still wasn’t really sure how soulwax worked.
How to fix it: The solution to this is the same as the solution to my next point, so I just put them both there. Another solution could be to include reference material in the back of your work.
2) Distracting choices of phrasing. There were also a number of places where I disliked the phrasing or dialogue you used, but couldn’t tell if this was a matter of personal preference or not. On my read through, I was trying only to make comments I thought would be true for all readers, not just me. If you want, I can do a more thorough sentence structure edit of this, but as I won’t be able to separate my personal preferences from objective value, you’ll have to get other people’s opinions too in order to parse out which edits are good and which ones aren’t.
How to fix it: Get 5+ brand new readers in your target audience to read as thoroughly as me, and ask them to do the following things:
A) Circle words they don’t know
B) Make a note when any alliterative or poetic phrasing becomes distracting
C) Make a note in the margin every time they feel confused or lost about the plot/details
If all your readers agree that a certain line is distracting, re-word it. If all your readers seem to be confused about the same plot point or magical element, work it in earlier.
3) Lack of reader tension. The single biggest problem with this book is that the writing isn’t “grippy”—while reading it I did not feel much anticipation and pressure to find out what was happening next. I think this is mainly due to two things: Sentence structure, and character depth, which I talk more about in a moment.
How to fix it: Primarily, get a professional editor as soon as you can. I can offer some general tips (or specific ones, if you ask me to do that thorough sentence structure read through) on improving this, but the most major aspect of “grippy” writing comes down to the nuance of sentence structure, and a professional will be able to speak to that on a much more complex level than me. This is just one of those things where lots of editing and lots of practice is the best way to fix it.
4) Depth of characters. I think this is more a matter of execution than any problem with your actual characters. The characters you have are complex and varied, there’s just so many of them. Readers can only care about so many people at once, and with such a wide array, you’re prevented from bringing the readers too deep into any one character. Readers caring about specific characters is the number one most important thing for keeping readers interested, and for keeping the book in their heads after they’ve put it down.
How to fix it: There’s a couple different approaches you can take here. These are the possibilities I can think of, you’ll have to decide what you think is best for your story.
A) Limit the number of viewpoint characters. This will reduce the scope of your story, but it will make the cast you have more manageable and complex. If you decide to do this; I recommend selecting the characters whose arcs you think will be the most emotionally impactful, and keeping them, then filling in with characters who physically need to be there to tell the story. I can also offer more specific suggestions if you choose to do this.
B) Longer chapters/viewpoint sections. This will let you go deeper into characters without sacrificing much in terms of scale.
C) Sticking closer to the perspective of the viewpoint character. You sacrifice some flexibility in your narration if you do this, but it could help the reader get inside the character’s heads more.
D) Add/highlight more non-essential recurring character-building details. This risks lengthening your story, but could be worth it. Come up with a couple random details about each character (Gawn’s favorite color is orange, Qa always gets stuck with unbalanced weapons, Darnun snores, etc.) and see if you can work them as a through-line for that character’s scenes and relationships. It’s a bit of a shortcut for when you don’t have the space to toss in more beefy character-building scenes, which I recommend against, since this is already a very long book.
E) Add more humor. Humor has a high returns-rate for reader engagement, if you can work it out in a way that fits the tone of your work.
F) I’ll be offering more scene-specific and character-specific recommendations on the re-read.
5) Out-of-place dialogue. One thing that seemed pretty consistent to me as a low-level negative was that characters seem to over speak, as in, they say more in dialogue than I would reasonably expect them to say at the time, both in terms of volume and how explicit they were in their views. This isn’t a major problem, and it might just be something that only bothers me personally. It falls under the general umbrella of show-don’t-tell. If you want, when I do a second read I can go through and look for places to cut down on over speaking, and make the dialogue seem more natural and fluid, but I won’t do this unless you want me to since it may well just be a stylistic choice that other people like. I’d ask other people if the dialogue also sometimes seemed out of place to them.
How to fix it: No trick here, just editing. Read through your dialogue and make sure it seems realistic given the context. Ask your beta readers to point out any time the dialogue seems weird to them. Again, I can pay more attention to specifically this on a re-read if you want.
6) Difficulties with marketing. This is less of a problem, and more of a “heads-up”. Since you’re an unknown author working on a series and not a stand-alone, you’re going to have a very tough time selling this to a publisher (assuming that’s what your end goal is). If you haven’t already, I recommend you start looking into the details of the book market.
Next, I’ve got a few questions for you that will tailor how I offer more specific feedback on the details of your plot and character arcs:
1) Who is your target audience?
2) Since this is obviously a series, to what extent do you have future works planned out in detail, and how many will there be?
3) Do you have the complex mechanics of the magic for this world worked out, and if so, do you plan to reveal this in later works? If the answer is yes, I strongly recommend explaining the magic in this work, so that the readers can understand what’s going on. For example, I never really fully understood how the amalgamates' power worked with two people, and what its secondary power was.
4) How do you want readers to feel while they’re reading this? How do you want them to feel after finishing it?
5) If you could give me a two-sentence summary of what emotional impact you were going for with each character arc, that would be helpful, and I can give more specific advice on how to achieve what you’re going for. Here’s what my impression of each of them was:
Aithne- We’ve got a somewhat naive and idealistic young princess in a brutal world instigating a brutal war, becoming gradually more confident, and more destructive. Great. I think here you just need to work on the pacing of her arc, establish her original personality more firmly earlier on, and show the change as being more gradual, through her words and actions rather than description. You’ve got a strong first-draft arc here, it just needs editing and polish.
Darnun- Obvious themes of motherhood here, which I think you handled well. Her end goal, when revealed, is in character. Her arc obviously isn’t over, so I don't have a firm analysis on this one yet.
Gawn- Gawn’s loss of faith is important, and overall well-handled. I think if you link her loss of faith with her reluctance to use her Lialite powers/later acceptance of those powers, you can get a more cohesive arc. Oskar’s faith and Oskar’s growing unease with Gawn can be used as a contrast here.
Icarus- I’m not completely sure what you were trying to do here, what was the drive behind Icarus’s arc?
Oskar- Gotta say, I wasn’t expecting him to survive, but I’m glad he did, there are a lot of interesting directions he could go in. You’ve already got a nice arc for him with his love for and growing unease with Gawn (which I expect to see continued in future installments), all you really need to do is polish the pacing a little.
Charnn- I think you’ve got the materials for something quite interesting here, but didn’t quite pull it off. Charnn seems incredibly lost. He’s latched on to the forces of flame, and seems to want to help people, but also has a streak of cruelty. I recommend that in this arc you focus on Charnn’s inability to determine what the best course of action is, between following Aithne, having fun as a titan, and helping kids. If you have his death end with him still not sure what he’s doing, and still trying to work out the best course of action, it may be more impactful.
The captain- Doesn’t get enough chapters for me to really get a sense of him, though I do think his presence here is important and works well. Anything you were specifically trying to do with him?
Monika- Monika was interesting, the sharp contrast between her compassion towards some, such as Julien, and her utter derision for Darnun works well. You could get a decent arc out of her this way, but as things stand, she doesn’t have enough chapters to support it, and you may want to focus on more plot-important characters. She serves her narrative role well.
Julien- Assuming Julien is the snail, I’m intrigued to see where this goes. I think you did a good job setting up his personality in the early chapters.
Briar- Briar is a tragedy about someone torn between wanting to protect and defend a friend who is changing, and missing a simple life that was stolen from her. I thought you did a good job with her, working her more directly into Aithne’s early chapters might help with Aithne’s arc.
Qa- There are plenty of parallels with Qa and Briar, which overall worked well. Qa’s personal desire to see Icarus again works well as a motivator, but I think the groundwork needs to be laid more firmly in the chapters when they’re onscreen together in the beginning for the payoff to work. I didn’t realize Qa and Icarus were especially close until they directly told me.
Bantor- Bantor is fun. He was fun in his early scenes, and got more fun as the work went on. I think you did an excellent job with him. His death obviously serves to further Darnun’s arc (and does so effectively), but it’s too bad, since he was a very flexible character who could have gone in a number of different directions. Overall, I think you utilized his character very well. The one thing I would ask here is why he’s so loyal to Darnun specifically, I never quite figured that out.
Karkannaz- She sneaks up on you, she doesn’t have a detailed arc like some other charaters, but her presence became more important later in the work. I’m curious to see where her character is going.
Arvin- Arvin is also fun, and his friendship with Grimbsy is fun. Arvin’s perspective on the snail sail frames the development in a much more intriguing way than focusing on Karlos or the snail’s perspective would have. I’m curious to see where this storyline goes in the future.
6) Could you update me on how many other editors you have working on this and at what point they’re at in the review/what they’re focusing on? This would help me figure out what to focus on. It would also be helpful to have a general update of where you are in the process.
7) When you have a current/updated version of GSR you’re ready to share again for editing, send me another suggest-able link and I’ll do another round.
8) Finally, it would be extremely helpful if you could ask me specific questions on what to give feedback on, like if you had specific questions about a certain character or plot point. It’s tough to give helpful and specific feedback on such a big project without some guided questions.
And finally, some more specific details:
1) I recommend adding some kind of informational glossary in the back, explaining things like the races, the basic factions, and some details about how magic works. Something like the “Ars Arcanum” if you’ve ever read a Sanderson book.
2) I recommend putting dates on some if not all the chapters so the reader can keep better track of the timeline.
3) I recommend keeping each chapter to a single point of view only.
4) You may want to cut down on the prophetic dreams, for two reasons. First, unless there’s an in-universe reason for it (of which I am not yet aware), it just seems like a shortcut. Second, even if there is an in-universe reason, it’s best in moderation as it can serve to spoil future events. Prophetic dreams are best when they’re misleading rather than accurate.
5) Aithne’s refusal to read the letter until the end is a major plot point, so I’m not sure how you can change it, but it feels really forced. Perhaps if you build up Aithne’s anger at her mother, and have her on-screen make a deliberate choice to ignore communications from her, (such as casting the letter aside), that could help. Maybe she’s received letters from her in the past that just made her angry.
6) I like what you’ve done with the League, particularly the contrast between their prior morals and current ones.
7) The conflict between Oksar and Gawn in the second part of the book needs to start being foreshadowed earlier on.
8) The relationship between Darnun and Bantor was one of the more intriguing ones, and I would have liked to see it explored in more detail while they were actually on-screen together, not just in Bantor’s reminiscences. I think with some changes to their interactions in earlier chapters, you can make this more impactful.
9) This was just the stuff I could think of off the top of my head. I'll certianly think of more later.
And finally, I’d like to end with what impressed me most about this. I’m absolutely blown away by the world building that’s gone into this. This world you’ve built feels real and fleshed out in ways that few published works can compare to. Everything is rich with history and significance, but never in a way that hampers the natural development of the current plot and characters. You provide plenty of setting-building details without distracting from the narrative. You also keep enough information hidden to retain a sense of mystery without it seeing like a cheap suspense tactic. And from what I can tell, what’s revealed in this work is only the tip of the world building iceberg. It’s very impressive.
This is a long post (sorry), so here are the general and most-important points summarized for you:
1) Congrats!
2) Once you have current version up to your satisfaction, could you send me the link to another suggest-able google doc?
3) Do you want me to do a more thorough and personal sentence-to-sentence edit as described above?
4) What are some specific questions you have about this work that I can provide more detailed feedback on?
5) Where are you and your other editors right now in the editing process?
