Dave wrote:Well hopefuly the first chapter will make you change your mind.
Sorry, but it didn't.
First of all, "it's late and I'm tired" isn't an excuse for low quality work. If you're too tired to work on your story, then go to sleep and work on it tomorrow. There's no rush and no deadline, and it's better that you take your time to create a good product than to rush it and create a not-so-good one. Effort is the key, and "going to sleep so that you can work on the story when you're more awake" counts in the "effort" column. Nobody is expecting you to get this written in a certain timeframe.
(For those wonderring Olives are essentially Ball's with Legs they are on of the oldest mech still in existence)
You should not need to rely on parenthetical statements to convey information to your reader. Weave that into the text so that it is part of your narration and description. A parenthetical addition implies that you're saying "Oh yeah, I forgot to add that..." It breaks the flow of the narrative, and "flow" isn't exactly going strong here anyway.
Finally, in what seemed like an eternity, air support came and bombed the Olives to high heaven (even though it was only 5 seconds).
Style is not a strong point here. Again, your narrative can't have breaks like these, because it's very distracting. Also, it might just be personal preference, but I've found that using colloquialisms in writing, like "bombed the Olives to high heaven," only works if you know what you're doing and the image and tone of said colloquialisms fits in with the image and tone you're trying to convey. That's not the case here. There's issues with details and description, which I'll get to later, and it's also difficult to read when the story consists of large blocks of text. Breaking things into more than one paragraph is often a useful stylistic tool to change points and move the narrative along, if you do it in the right places.
As mentioned, there's also issues with your descriptions. Your narrative style has almost none of it. Without any details to go off of, all the reader is left with is some guy in a Gundam fighting a bunch of mecha in a field or something somewhere and all of the sudden he's screaming "noooo!" Description and detail is how you make this story, this world, and these characters come alive--it's where you can make the reader start to care about any of this.
he suddenly twisted his craft around and in a what looked like a scene out of "Resivior Dogs" Darnell,now on his back shot point blank at the enemy's mobile suit.
If "it looked like a scene from
Reservoir Dogs" is the best you can do when describing something, then I mourn for the death of the poetic mind. Description is essential to making us care, and as the writer, it's your job to paint those pictures for us in your prose. Read some novels by professionally written and edited authors, and you will be hard-pressed to find people describing things as "like a scene from
Reservoir Dogs." It especially breaks down when the reader doesn't know what you're talking about. For example, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about because I haven't seen
Reservoir Dogs. That's why you should only use images and metaphors that everyone will be familiar with. Comparing Darnell's machine's movements in midair to a gymnast or a trapeze artist is a lot more familiar to people than comparing his movements to that one backflip that Neo did in the lobby shootout in
The Matrix.
Too numerous to quote are the various punctuation and grammatical errors. I'm not going to ignore them because a) there's so many and b) I think you're greatly underestimating the importance of both in making your story readable, let alone good. If English is not your first language, then I understand the difficulty, but if you're taking the time to write a story in English, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that you try to follow proper punctuation and grammar. If I tried to write a story in French or Spanish or Japanese or anything else, and I ignored the language's grammar and conventions, I'd get raked over the coals, because the French/Spanish/Japanese/whatever speakers I was writing that story for would not be able to understand it. Hence, getting the mechanics of the English language down is crucial to making your story understood. The same goes if English is your first language--proper grammar and punctuation go a long, long way in making your story understandable and enjoyable.
This was not a good way to start a story that takes place in a new universe. You need to establish the setting, and you need to do it artfully and vividly--so that we aren't reading a textbook on Dave's
Gundam Story, and so that we know what the hell is going on. As the writer, it's your job to paint for us the world that this is taking place in. There was no painting going on here--in fact, echoing my previous point about how you seem to have thought about the mecha before anything else, the only thing going on in your first chapter is a bunch of anonymous mecha and a guy called Darnell fighting. This is what I was talking about when I said that the mecha should not be the focus--otherwise you end up with what you got here. Granted, that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't begin your story in the middle of a fight, but doing so means you need to make it tense and interesting enough to grab the reader's attention. That's what's called the hook, and it's your one big chance to make your reader want to keep reading past the first few lines.
And either way, I can't ignore that this chapter is so short. You're trying to build a new world with a new cast and lay the groundwork for a new story, and this chapter leaves that all as blank and ambiguous from the reader's point of view as it was when you first started this thread.
Also, I think the word you're looking for here is "prologue." "Prequel" implies that this is an entirely different story that takes place before another, original story--for example, the
Star Wars prequels taking place before the original trilogy.
Is.................Is.........M....M....NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! "
It may well be just a pet peeve of mine, but why is this so drawn out? You don't need a bunch of Os or a bunch of periods to make your point--it's just filling up space unnecessarily.
Also, it just occurred to me to ask, but is the title a Bruce Springsteen reference?
It's not impossible to become a good writer if you aren't one already. It just takes work, and I think you could stand to do some before you have the skills and knowledge to write a solid story. It helps to read a lot already, both fiction and nonfiction, to get an idea of how writers have to paint the pictures for their readers, how they use the language they're writing in, how they manipulate punctuation and grammar and paragraphs and so on, how they evoke images and use metaphors, etc. Reading this abortive first chapter, I get the feeling that you know in your mind what it is you're trying to put on the screen, and you're assuming that I know what you've got in mind too, and that when I read this, I'll see the same vivid image of what's going on that you see. But I don't. As the writer, you have to take everything you have in mind for what you're trying to put on the screen, and put it on the screen. It's not always easy, but nobody said writing would be. If you can do that, then you're on the right track.
)Chapter 1 should be up after two or three comments or tomarrow which ever comes first.
)That was just a back story. It's way to late for me to be typing on the computer and still make sense. But don't worry it's coming
. 
