Into the Twilit Gloom

By amaryll28

Into the Twilit Gloom is about two young demon hunters in search of treasure after a mission takes them to an unexpected realm. Your blurb is really good. I didn't read it until after I read the chapters you had posted because I wanted to see if I could figure out the premise without reading any summaries. I was pleasantly surprised to find a hooking, well-written blurb after I finished reading. I especially liked the line "a secret school that trains young paranormals for the eternal battle between good and evil." This is a good teaser for the fantastical world you have created.

I was also impressed with how well and how creatively you incorporated the prompt into your storytelling. Prompt-based fiction writing can be so challenging. You used your prompt in a way I wouldn't have expected. The prompt goes as follows: "Write a story incorporating the following elements: cherry blossoms by the lake, two friends, an antique map, a ring. The story should contain one prominent magical element." I thought you wove these elements into your story in delightful ways. I like that you made the ring so important to Frankie from an emotional and personal point of view. I was sad when she lost it. So I definitely think you accomplished something great there: you successfully used the prompt to incite an emotional response from your audience.

One issue with prompt-based fiction is that it can hinder a story rather than help it. Sometimes a prompt forces a writer to bend or sacrifice essential parts of the story so that it fits with the prompt. I think that's what is happening here. This story was really episodic which I quite liked, but I felt as if it were episodic so that it would satisfy the prompt. You have the portal that takes the characters to faerieland, then the cherry blossom, the ring, then the map, the river, etc. You allowed the prompt to write your story for you while adding in some very creative world-building and magic systems of your own along the way–and I commend you for all of that. Unfortunately, I think you sacrificed some important elements of storytelling to do so. The story doesn't seem to have an overarching goal. Yes, the characters have a goal of finding out what treasures the antique map leads to, but I don't know why they care so much. Why do Frankie and Meg want to find the treasure so badly? Are they just greedy, or are they desperate for money? If it were me, I would have left the map and gone on with my demon hunting, unless the map lead to a magical treasure chest valuable enough to pay off my student loans.

What I'm getting at here is that I think you sacrificed compelling character arcs in order to make sure all of the prompt elements were in your story. This is why I don't like prompt writing very much. From what I understood from the text, Frankie and Meg started this quest for treasure because...? They wanted to? They thought the map was really cool? I just think that giving them stronger motivations to find the treasure would add more meaning to the story. It would make the story seem less like "I'm writing this part because the prompt says I have to." And if Frankie and Meg have personal reasons for wanting the treasure so much, these motivations need to be more clear. I couldn't deduce their motivations from the story whatsoever, nor could I figure out their character arcs. They were kind of the same at the end of the story as they were at the beginning, just slightly more stressed out.

I want to use Puss in Boots: The Last Wish as a case study. The plot beats are similar: Puss, Kittysoftpaws, Jack Horner, and Goldilocks are seeking a treasure map that will lead them to a magical star with the ability to grant them any wish. They all have different reasons for wanting the treasure. The only character who doesn't have a reason for wanting the treasure is Perrito, but Perrito still has an emotional motivation that drives his character. He just wants companionship and to feel like he's accepted among friends. Puss wants to use the wish to escape death which is extremely compelling since he is on his last life and the physical manifestation of death is after him. Goldilocks wants to use the wish to find her real, human family, neglecting her bear family in the process and forgetting that she already has a family who cares for her. And Jack Horner, hilariously, just wants the wish because he's evil and selfish. And I love that. He's one of my all-time favorite villains because he is evil just for fun.

All of these characters have flaws that drive their motivations. These flaws motivate them to change throughout their individual journeys in search of the "treasure." They believe in "lies" that keep them from finding their "truths." Puss' "lie" is that he believes he can keep throwing away his lives and continue living this dangerous, adventurous life of his, mostly for the sake of maintaining his reputation. Throughout his journey in search of the wishing star, he learns to slow down, value his life more, and to value the people in his life more. Perrito doesn't change much because he doesn't have to. He's a flat character, he has the ability to change the people around him because he believes in the truth: that companionship is more important they any treasure. Goldilocks believes in the lie that she has to be with her human family to truly find love and belonging. Her journey in search of the wishing star teaches her that her loving family is already there, and that her bear family is her true family. And Jack Horner is just chaos he's completely irredeemable and it's great. He never changes throughout the story. He's selfish from the beginning to the end.

I think that doing this kind of character work would really take your story to the next level. Sit down with Meg and Frankie. See if you can identify their flaws, the "lies" they believe in, and the "truth" that your story can teach them about. What is your story about at its core? Is it teaching your characters to value things other than treasure, like friendship or simply the places they get to explore? Does it teach them that the journey is more important than what is on the other end of the treasure map? And then you should figure out what their flaws are to determine their motivations. Why does Frankie want to find the treasure so badly? Is her family facing financial difficulty? Is there something she wants to buy for herself with the treasure? Is she like me, crumbling under student debt and searching for anything that might give her a shot at a financially sound future? Maybe finding the treasure will help her rank up at demon hunting school? Then answer the same questions for Meg. Why does Meg want to go on this journey? Is it just because she wants to spend time with Frankie, or does she also want the treasure for a personal reason and why?

I personally do not use K.M. Weiland's method for creating character arcs. I have no issues with the method but it just does not work for me and my process. However, I do think that her method would really help elevate your work here. I would recommend determining the Lie Your Characters Believe, the Thing He Wants, the Thing He Needs, and the Ghost...for both Frankie and Meg just as Weiland suggests. Oftentimes a story will teach a character what they need instead of what they want and that lesson is what causes that character to change. The Ghost, by the way, is something in the character's past that haunts them and influences their decisions. Figuring out the answers to these questions will add a lot of meaning to this story that you've crafted.

I jotted down notes during each chapter while I was reading. I like sharing the notes I took with my critique partners. That way you can see how I was reacting to and processing your story while I was reading it.

Chapter one

Your main character has a great voice and she made me laugh several times. She's plucky and can make a joke out of any bad situation. That's something I'm trying to learn how to do with my own characters. Humans have the ability to make any stressful situation funny and more enjoyable. Frankie does this very well, both through her snark and her intelligence. Any story that has a terribly sad and stressful plotline with no happy parts tends to be unrealistic. This is the issue I had with Netflix' Dark and McCarthy's The Road. Both are well-written, but both avoid humor at all costs and I think that's a huge flaw. A completely humorless story disrupts the fictional dream because that's not how humans act in real life. The reality is, most people will try and make light of any situation, whether they are in prison or trying to get through boot camp or dealing with loss, or, in this case, hunting demons. It's how we survive, really. I liked that Frankie had the ability to crack jokes and make Meg laugh even while they are avoiding near-death situations.

Chapter two

Sometimes your subject-verb agreement is odd. Take this for example: "The church itself smelt musty, a mixture of ancient brick and layers of dust." This sentence says the church smelled of musty ancient brick and layers of dust. But I think it's trying to say: "the church smelled musty" and "the church was a mixture of ancient brick and layers of dust." So I would recommend this arrangement: "The church was a mixture of ancient brick and layers of dust that smelled musty." There were a lot of compound sentences like this one that didn't quite make sense. It seemed like you were trying to combine two different sentences into one, but ended up combining two incomplete phrases or combining a complete phrase with an incomplete phrase about a different subject, so you end up with just a string of non-sequiturs.

I love "hundred of years of fingerprints had smoothed the bowl"

Your environmental storytelling is amazing. I love the details you've written about the world you built here.

I love that we dived into the adventure right from the start. It really kept my attention and made me want to keep reading.

It isn't clear what exactly they are after and why

Specifically, what Frankie is after and why

I think there needs to be more character work

Chapter three

I love the personification in descriptive paragraphs but sometimes you separate characters from their body parts. This is something you should be careful to avoid. Sometimes it sounds like characters' body parts are acting on their own. Like "his hand touched." Or "her eyes looked..." just watch out for instances of personification that separate body parts from a character and give those body parts minds of their own. "She touched." "He looked..." that's always fine. You don't need to indicate what body part is "touching" or "looking" because the audience knows your characters are looking with their eyes and touching something with their hands.

You begin a lot of sentences with prepositions: "beyond the trail the woods were dark." Avoiding prepositional phrases would improve a lot of your prose. For example: "the woods were dark beyond the trail."

I love this beat: "Standing here in the dark felt like standing on a knife's edge..." Fantastic!!

They're looking for treasure now. There doesn't seem to be one singular goal for the book. It's episodal. That's fine but I just think it should be more intentional about it.

Chapter four:

Avoid cliches like: "the gaping silence"

More disconnected personification that could be avoided: "focusing her feet on the trail" vs. "she focused on the trail."

I love that Frankie is a botanist but I feel as if she could show that more...show it so much that it's unnecessary for the narrator to say "Frankie was a botanist..." Maybe she knows facts about the plants they are seeing. Maybe she's good at describing and understanding the plants. That would be enough for the reader to infer her love of botany instead of the narrator having to tell us that she does. Details that show instead of tell us aspects of a character help immerse the reader in the story and they support the fictional dream. You don't always have to show instead of tell though...but that's a topic for a different essay.

I absolutely love the tech, the "dark sight glasses..." cool stuff!!

Great sensory details "Frankie's nostrils twitched..."

Chapter Five

I really love the atmosphere of Faerieland and it comes to a crescendo here in chapter five. You have amazing environmental details. I loved the paragraph that described the lake and stars.

At this point in the story, I'm still unsure why they are in Faerieland, why they want the treasure, what treasure they're looking for, and what demon hunting has to do with all of this. Whether or not you have answered these questions by now, the answers are not clear. I am also unsure of Frankie's motivations, her "need," her thematic principle. It seems that the author is struggling to communicate these elements to the reader while simultaneously doing an excellent job of communicating the world-building and what the environment looks like. I think the author knows the thematic principle, what the story is about, etc., but is struggling to write those elements clearly into the story...maybe the prompt is messing with her ability to do that well.

Chapter Six

I'm absolutely in love with the opening line. "A riot of colors was spreading across the sky." I wonder if changing "spreading" to an active verb would improve the sentence: "A riot of colors spread across the sky..."

The line "I definitely count this as some sort of treasure" from Meg was important to me. It suggested that the story could end up being less about the treasure they find and more about how Faerieland and their adventures together through these wilds are more valuable than the actual gold. If you haven't developed a thematic principle yet (what the story is about at its core) this would be a good one

I loved the banter between Meg and Frankie in this chapter, especially about the faerie dust

There are some repetitive verbs like in the sentence "she kicked at it...kicking up splashes..." I would suggest using a thesaurus to add variety and avoid redundancy.

I really liked this story. I liked the demon-hunting stuff, the tech, and the worldbuilding the most. And wow, your descriptions really truly beautiful and they made me want to get back to my own writing. I hope you get more reads!

I hope you found my musings helpful and if you didn't, please let me know why in the comments so I can improve as a beta reader and a reviewer.

See you, space cowboy

References

Crawford, J. (Director). (2022). Puss in Boots: The Last Wish [Film]. Universal Studios.

Weiland, K.M. (2016) Creating Character Arcs. Pen for a Sword.