/lit/ - Literature

Pic related is page one of something I'm working on, any feedback welcome

>>18900949
As other anon said I'm having trouble parsing most of the first paragraph just because it's so long and convoluted. That's part of the style of course and you shouldn't completely chop it up but there are several places where I lose track of what the independent clause is and whether or not I'm in a dependent section. I think reading it out loud or having a text-to-speech program read it to you will probably help. Some of your adjectives are very nice (scant and stinking grange) but others have a somewhat mysterious relationship to their noun (garroted enviousness). Finally I think it risks getting into overly purple territory when you describe what sounds like a pretty typical childbirth in such dramatic terms, "I was introduced a gasping parasite, tied by an umbilical cord," etc, this is more or less how everyone comes into the world so making too much of it can be a bit of a groaner. The detail about the delivery farmhand relating the birth to field animals and using a pocketknife is nice, and more unique, but it threw me off at first because you had called him noble, which I thought may have signified his actual station. I think it would be less confusing to let us infer his noble character from the sentence that follows.

>>18900973
There's a lot of rough grammar which comes off less as a stylistic choice and more as unrefined. Definitely recommend reading it out loud quite a bit and making sure the punctuation in the sentence matches how you want it to flow. Cut down at least 25% of the word count, get rid of constructions like "which I would imagine" and "of course" that don't get a point across. Also try to stick to direct experience rather than abstract. It's good to see the teacher playing with his ring, but then you take a few sentences after that talking about how he always plays with his ring, he does it all the time, why do I care that he does it, and so on, which is all TELLING instead of SHOWING. Get that information across more quickly if you must, and better yet, convey it in a way that we can see its effects instead of being told about it in the abstract.

>>18900720
Impressive effort over time anon.