In case there's any confusion over what
Seraphic is saying, he's talking about stuff like this:
Quote:
As the rebels were getting ready to fight back. Azazel stopped the Nephilim a little ways to watch as the military decended towards the outskirts of Los Angeles.
That first "sentence" would really only work as its own sentence if it were used as a generic response to a question about when something happened. Without that sort of context, what you currently have is a meaningless collection of words without any subject. Following Sera's advice (changes highlighted in
cyan), we can merge those two sentences together to make it significantly more coherent:
--As the rebels were getting ready to fight back
, Azazel stopped the Nephilim a little ways to watch as the military decended towards the outskirts of Los Angeles.--
But wait, we can do better than that. See how we're using the word "as" twice in the same sentence, both times to describe a correlation of events? Seems unnecessary to me, maybe even annoying. Let's fix some spelling and naming conventions while we're at it:
--
While the rebels were getting ready to fight back
, Azazel stopped
Nephilim a little ways to watch as the military de
scended towards the outskirts of Los Angeles.--
That resolves all the big issues with that particular paragraph, and you could rest after doing just that much. But if you want, you can also take it a step farther and (in my opinion) make it more engaging by making it more descriptive, which doesn't always entail making it longer. Let's give this a shot:
--While the rebels were
preparing their retaliation, Azazel
ordered Nephilim to decelerate so he could watch
his forces descend
upon the outskirts of Los Angeles.--
Now, I have to admit that I may have altered what's actually happening with that last set of changes. The problem is, I don't know if I did, and I don't know because I didn't read what came before it. I started to read from "Pre
sent Day..." but some of the errors that Sera mentioned were so prolific that I found my patience wasn't up to the task of deciphering what you had written (and it should be noted that I had the patience to type up this response). In fact, the paragraph that I chose to edit was the
very first thing my eye fell upon when I went to check the validity of Sera's complaint. Even though it may not have happened where you would expect it to, my first impression of this story's writing was that the author didn't know how to form sentences. That's a pretty damning first impression, so I would strongly recommend you follow Seraphic's advice.
After following Sera's advice, I would recommend focusing on perspective. In the paragraph immediately prior to the one I edited, there are at least two changes in narrative perspective, and that might be a generous estimation. As a general rule, you should try to keep your perspective constant throughout a certain portion of writing, in this case from "Present Day..." to the end of the chapter. There are some exceptions to this, but I can't think of it ever being in good taste to change perspective mid paragraph, which is just confusing and frustrating for the reader.
When I say perspective, I mean the point of view from which the story is being presented, or narrated, to the reader. You know, stuff like first person, third person, omniscient, those perspectives. But there's more to it than that. Have the events already occurred, or are they happening in the present? Is the reader "there," experiencing events as they unfold, or is the story reporting events to them. Just going from that paragraph I didn't edit, I have no idea what perspective you're using because you seem to switch between them mid-paragraph, sometimes even mid-sentence. As a reader looking for entertainment, that's not something I'd be willing to put up with unless I could tell it was supposed to be like that (and even then, not for more than a thousand words or so).
There's more that I'd like to recommend about how you write, but for now I think you should focus on those, as both poor sentence formation and inconsistent perspective can easily ruin even the best of stories.
