This was lovely. You have a unique voice, and it was a very well executed piece. The repetition of the phrase "crept into the middle" was a bit jarring though, but not much of a bother. I liked how you waxed eloquent about "Forever", though - great job!
Thank you! I really should have found better ways to express "crept into the middle," so I'll keep that in mind for future pieces. I'm glad you liked it! Thanks again.
You have a REALLY AWESOME concept. I love the idea of a love story constructed with writing and literature concepts, zooming in on love story archetypes and realities. There were some really nice parts to this story. However, I have several constructive suggestions that I hope you will find useful for your future writing:)
Formatting--
So I'm not sure whether this is a completed story or the first chapter/intro to a whole book. It appears fairly clearly to me as the former, but I could be wrong; if I am, I would be very interested to see how you would be continuing the story from here. Either way, the title of this section "The Semicolon," seems rather ill-fitting, as you never mention semicolons even once in the story, and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the story. However, the overall title "Our Grammatical Error," fits extremely nicely.
Style--
While I really like the specific style idea of this story, it gets a bit repetitive, specifically with the phrase and related phrases "you crept into the middle of my story" "the middle of my page" "you crept" "you creep" etc. It's a really nice phrase, but using it over and over in so very many variations begins to feel extremely overdone to the reader. I would suggest thinking of some new word-pictures to use throughout the story; they can be related without being verbatim. As well, I would like to address the overall abstractness of this story; at times it wasso abstractthat your analogies were completely lost on me. When I write abstract stories, or even poetry with symbolism, I try to have a very specific concept in my with very specific, if obscure, metaphors, so that, technically, if the reader is careful enough, it should be theoretically possible for him or her to piece together an entire, cohesive story, rather than something ultimately abstract.
Grammar--
So while I understand that the story is called "Our Grammatical Error," I presume you don't want to actually have any of those in your story, right? (you definitely don't :P ) Your biggest problem in this department is definitelysentence structure;a surprisingly large portion of all your sentences arerun-on sentences,which means that you are joining too may independent clauses (complete sentences) together with punctuation other than a period. In many cases, you are also using incorrect punctuation to join complete sentences. A good way that I identify independent clauses as such is to imagine them in their simplest form, as subject + a verb; all the other words are just decoration and don't matter. Independent clauses may be joined ONLY by a semicolon OR a comma+conjunction. Examples of conjunctions are and, but or if. Dependent clauses are correctly joined by ONLY a comma OR a conjunction, as well as other punctuation such as a colon or a long dash. With the correct punctuation, any amount of dependent clauses may technically be inserted into any part of a sentence, though in inordinate amount may prove burdensome to readers. An important rule about sentences that might help you is thatcannotandshould notjoin more thantwoindependent clauses together into one complete sentence, even if the punctuation is correct. It is not only technically incorrect, but it tends to exhaust the reader.
Specific Errors--
Most of your errors with run-on sentences; I will explain a few examples in detail so that you know will understand the gist of what I am saying.
"...I just assumed you were a character in my story ... who had creptyourway into the middle of a page in my book." Here you need to change "your" to "his" her" or "its," because the pronoun is referring to the subject of the sentence which is the word "character," since it is the most recently mentioned noun. As a third-person noun, the pronoun "your" is not appropriate, though it would be if you removed the word "character."
"I think we also started in the middle of a sentence, what with your creeping into the middle of my page and into my story, though I have no way of knowing if you crept into the middle of my story because I don’t know how it ends, no matter how much I wish I did or how much I thought I did."Here your problem is that you have joined 3 complete sentences into one and the last sentence with incorrect punctuation, since you only used the conjunction "because" with no comma. You can know there are 3 complete sentences here by looking at the 3 subject+verb clauses I have underlined. On a side note, I don't know if the use of "though" is appropriate in the sentence at all, since I don't see any comparisons before or after it. To fix this sentence, you can add a period after "...into my story" and add a comma after "because."
"We just can't and I should know because I am the master of just being unable to." Firstly, here you need a comma after "can't" to complete the comma+conjunction, but the main problem with this sentence is your incomplete infinitive. An infinitive is the word "to" combined with a verb. Except as a preposition, the word "to" can never exist without a verb directly after it, even if you think it's implied. In this case, I'm not even sure what you're referring to. You're unable to... what?
Conclusion--
Overall, again, a VERY nice story! Love the idea! I apologize for the novel of a review, but I know that I always REALLY appreciate it when people write long reviews for me. So few people actually do nowadays, and I always just think it's a nice thing to do. Hope this is at least a little helpful:)
Okay, first of all, I completely appreciate this "novel of a review." It's quite refreshing, actually. I want to improve, and you've definitely helped me out. I will definitely keep your advice in mind for future works, but I don't really want to go back and make huge edits to this one. Some of it was left intentionally ambiguous, but you pointed out some mistakes that I definitely would never have caught. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this for me. :)
Ok, here's the deal:
You have a REALLY AWESOME concept. I love the idea of a love story constructed with writing and literature concepts, zooming in on love story archetypes and realities. There were some really nice parts to this story. However, I have several constructive suggestions that I hope you will find useful for your future writing:)
Formatting--
So I'm not sure whether this is a completed story or the first chapter/intro to a whole book. It appears fairly clearly to me as the former, but I could be wrong; if I am, I would be very interested to see how you would be continuing the story from here. Either way, the title of this section "The Semicolon," seems rather ill-fitting, as you never mention semicolons even once in the story, and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the story. However, the overall title "Our Grammatical Error," fits extremely nicely.
Style--
While I really like the specific style idea of this story, it gets a bit repetitive, specifically with the phrase and related phrases "you crept into the middle of my story" "the middle of my page" "you crept" "you creep" etc. It's a really nice phrase, but using it over and over in so very many variations begins to feel extremely overdone to the reader. I would suggest thinking of some new word-pictures to use throughout the story; they can be related without being verbatim. As well, I would like to address the overall abstractness of this story; at times it wasso abstractthat your analogies were completely lost on me. When I write abstract stories, or even poetry with symbolism, I try to have a very specific concept in my with very specific, if obscure, metaphors, so that, technically, if the reader is careful enough, it should be theoretically possible for him or her to piece together an entire, cohesive story, rather than something ultimately abstract.
Grammar--
So while I understand that the story is called "Our Grammatical Error," I presume you don't want to actually have any of those in your story, right? (you definitely don't :P ) Your biggest problem in this department is definitelysentence structure;a surprisingly large portion of all your sentences arerun-on sentences,which means that you are joining too may independent clauses (complete sentences) together with punctuation other than a period. In many cases, you are also using incorrect punctuation to join complete sentences. A good way that I identify independent clauses as such is to imagine them in their simplest form, as subject + a verb; all the other words are just decoration and don't matter. Independent clauses may be joined ONLY by a semicolon OR a comma+conjunction. Examples of conjunctions are and, but or if. Dependent clauses are correctly joined by ONLY a comma OR a conjunction, as well as other punctuation such as a colon or a long dash. With the correct punctuation, any amount of dependent clauses may technically be inserted into any part of a sentence, though in inordinate amount may prove burdensome to readers. An important rule about sentences that might help you is thatcannotandshould notjoin more thantwoindependent clauses together into one complete sentence, even if the punctuation is correct. It is not only technically incorrect, but it tends to exhaust the reader.
Specific Errors--
Most of your errors with run-on sentences; I will explain a few examples in detail so that you know will understand the gist of what I am saying.
"...I just assumed you were a character in my story ... who had creptyourway into the middle of a page in my book." Here you need to change "your" to "his" her" or "its," because the pronoun is referring to the subject of the sentence which is the word "character," since it is the most recently mentioned noun. As a third-person noun, the pronoun "your" is not appropriate, though it would be if you removed the word "character."
"I think we also started in the middle of a sentence, what with your creeping into the middle of my page and into my story, though I have no way of knowing if you crept into the middle of my story because I don’t know how it ends, no matter how much I wish I did or how much I thought I did."Here your problem is that you have joined 3 complete sentences into one and the last sentence with incorrect punctuation, since you only used the conjunction "because" with no comma. You can know there are 3 complete sentences here by looking at the 3 subject+verb clauses I have underlined. On a side note, I don't know if the use of "though" is appropriate in the sentence at all, since I don't see any comparisons before or after it. To fix this sentence, you can add a period after "...into my story" and add a comma after "because."
"We just can't and I should know because I am the master of just being unable to." Firstly, here you need a comma after "can't" to complete the comma+conjunction, but the main problem with this sentence is your incomplete infinitive. An infinitive is the word "to" combined with a verb. Except as a preposition, the word "to" can never exist without a verb directly after it, even if you think it's implied. In this case, I'm not even sure what you're referring to. You're unable to... what?
Conclusion--
Overall, again, a VERY nice story! Love the idea! I apologize for the novel of a review, but I know that I always REALLY appreciate it when people write long reviews for me. So few people actually do nowadays, and I always just think it's a nice thing to do. Hope this is at least a little helpful:)
-Wicked