Friday, June 8, 2012

jessicaliana's My Caring Guardians

Author: jessicaliana
Link: http://www.asianfanfics.com/story/view/209290/my-caring-guardians-comedy-friendship-korean-romance-you-exom


Well, looking at the foreword, you are doing a few really silly things. First of all, you don’t need disclaimers saying “I do not own any characters and similar plots are a coincidence. This story is from my imagination, I did not copy from anyone else.It’s silly and a waste of space. Same for the plagiarizing and copyright part. Your fic is not copyrighted and you don’t own the idea. You especially can’t claim copyright when you don’t own the pictures used.

Also, you are using character profiles. I always say that people shouldn’t use them because the pictures take up a lot of unnecessary space and they reveal too much about the characters, which yours does. You want readers to think you write well, and you can prove that my developing the characters throughout the fic. If you do really want to use the profiles, keep the descriptions to a minimum and resize the photos to be smaller, way smaller.

Try to think less about what makes a good person and go for what makes an interesting and realistic character. Young Mi’s personality seems surface level, really try to dive into those emotions and thoughts properly. The description for the boys, well, it seems just like Exo instead of actually made up people. That’s fine in a band fic, but you’ve taken Exo out of their idol life, throw in your own creative twists.

You should include more about what the story is going to be about or about the process of writing. From the foreword, I’m not really interested in reading the fic. I see you are now entering your second year on AFF, so compare how writing a year ago is to writing now. Or you can write about how you came up with the characters and plot (without revealing too much). If that doesn’t fit your style, then just copy a part from one of the chapters and give the readers a taste of what is too come.


Now onto Chapter 1. In the beginning several of the sentences started with ‘You,’ so work on varying up the word choice. It is a little difficult in ‘you’ fics, but keep at it.

When Young Mi was being bullied you could have done more to make it a point that she has no one there to help her and she faces this regularly alone. When Suho was saying it, his words came out as repetitive. The saying is that Actions speaks more than Words. The whole process of walking into the bookstore again and reading whichever books she wanted could really be embellished. You started to, but you didn’t go all the way through. Their time spent book mending could have also shown the routine they follow and their closeness if you had gone into that more. That being said, do actually describe the actions in detail: full body movements, body directions, habitual movements. Write in the moment.

While you want to add more to those parts, stop having the characters disclose so much when they are speaking. If you had developed the bullying part more Suho wouldn’t have had to ask if she was bullied again, instead he would have just known because he knows her so well. Same with how he calls out her anti-social behavior.

Little side note, when characters are thinking, try using italics instead of asterisk, those little star things (*).


You are doing a good job with keeping track of the character relationships, the social standings, the feelings, and the family history. It’s wonderful that you have all of that planned out and ready for the story, just work on incorporating this information into the story cohesively instead of just telling the readers things. 

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