late for uni so a proper critique to follow. but i do feel from the first paragraph that you could tighten the writing. e.g
'The young woman ran across the field towards the haystacks, the workers’ lunches left unguarded on the ground nearby. Her dress, that of a thresher in the fields, flapped behind her as she went.'
What I'm struggling with is that I'm very at home with cold characters, talking in detached, short lines. But as soon as the writing gets warmer and my sentences get looser, things do fall apart a bit. I think the rule is that long sentences are ultimately more powerful, but harder to master. I've been reading Eliot, who writes in REALLY long sentences but has the command of language to make them seem normal. My knowledge of punctuation is slightly hazy, and I think I have a long way to go before I can write in a more classic style, which is what the above was an attempt at.
fair enough ! you don't have to clip your sentences but there are a lot of superfluous words that drag them down, which is what i was trying to get at with my above comment. if you're going to make the sentences long they need to read like they should be long, not that they're long because of bad editing. when you can replace 'for the reason' with 'because', like the lurker below suggested, it looks like bad editing
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This comm popped up on my friends page today and I plan to lurk for a while because I currently don't write any original fiction, I write the dreaded fanfiction instead. I find myself agreeing with firstredmoon. I couldn't pin it down at first but I was just feeling a lack as I read this the first time; something didn't feel right. Perhaps it began with the use of "it" to refer to the child in the second paragraph. Though understandable, if Hannah could not discern the child's gender, it just stands out as wrong.
As for the opening of the third paragraph, perhaps: "Hannah was approaching twenty, was blonde (Is this an British spelling, the American would be blond?) and strong-armed with a finely shaped mouth and shining eyes. She was a phenomenon around these parts because she did not belong to them: she had come out of London seeking better things, and had quickly established a reputation for working with a relentlessness that only one who had lived in city slums could sustain."
I dunno about the gender comment - all novelists will describe an approaching figure as "it", and for me there is no issue here.
Blonde is a British spelling, yes. I do agree that this needed tightening up, and thank you for taking the time for providing me with a guideline for this (changing "for the reason" to "because", etc.), although perhaps the marks were deeper than you had time for: even reading your lines back to me, there still seems something strange in the authorial voice.
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late for uni so a proper critique to follow. but i do feel from the first paragraph that you could tighten the writing. e.g
'The young woman ran across the field towards the haystacks, the workers’ lunches left unguarded on the ground nearby. Her dress, that of a thresher in the fields, flapped behind her as she went.'
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I find myself agreeing with firstredmoon. I couldn't pin it down at first but I was just feeling a lack as I read this the first time; something didn't feel right. Perhaps it began with the use of "it" to refer to the child in the second paragraph. Though understandable, if Hannah could not discern the child's gender, it just stands out as wrong.
As for the opening of the third paragraph, perhaps:
"Hannah was approaching twenty, was blonde (Is this an British spelling, the American would be blond?) and strong-armed with a finely shaped mouth and shining eyes. She was a phenomenon around these parts because she did not belong to them: she had come out of London seeking better things, and had quickly established a reputation for working with a relentlessness that only one who had lived in city slums could sustain."
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Blonde is a British spelling, yes. I do agree that this needed tightening up, and thank you for taking the time for providing me with a guideline for this (changing "for the reason" to "because", etc.), although perhaps the marks were deeper than you had time for: even reading your lines back to me, there still seems something strange in the authorial voice.
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