STORY STARTER
“Your crown is made of the people’s bones and hunger.”
Use this dialogue to set the scene for a short story.
Shellbound: The Last Oracle
“Your crown is made of the people’s bones and hunger. Your cloak dyed red with their blood. Your robe is nourished by their tears. Your scepter bears the names of the people you serve.”
Ameru, Priestess of the Jagged Cliff, pressed the tip of her dagger into my throat. “If there is any fear or doubt in you, if your heart does not wear this mantle in openness and love, it would be better for all that you leave this place and your name never to return.”
I no longer felt the tiny bite of the metal, the trickle of blood slide down the hollow of my neck. I heard the voices of my mother, Lai blend into her mother, Ina of the Free Swallows, and her mother and her mother’s mother, an unbroken magic manifest in my every cell.
My voice filled the round space. “One is for my flesh and its despair shaped to shelter our people. Two is for the eyes I blight to sharpen our prophecy. And six is for the memories I surrender until we reclaim what we have lost.”
Ameru’s slate eyes found mine. “How do you enter this spiral?” I had heard some hesitated here to take in every initiate that stood in their fixed nodes along the Nautilus, but I had seen its curved and coiled sigil all of my life, its pattern fixed even with my eyes closed. “I enter the Nautilus with perfect love and perfect trust.” Ameru’s hand was steady on the dagger. “Then, step forward and join us beyond the veil.”
This was good! The main thing that I found sort of weaker was the first paragraph. I say this because I have a belief that the best way to catch someone’s attention is to have a starter that really grabs that attention, and the first paragraph of this didn’t have a whole lot of flare or variation in sentence structure. The rest of story had amazing variation and attention-grabbing moments, but if someone were to just read the beginning paragraph they may think the whole story would be similar. This can also affect pace too! If you make some sentences smaller and some larger in the first paragraph, it will feel less stagnant as a start.
As far as voice goes, I thought it was pretty good. I felt as though an actual person was telling me the story as it was happening.
As for general feedback, I would say just be sure to proofread before finalizing your stuff, I did notice a few like small spelling/grammar mistakes while reading that sort of made it hard to follow along. Of course, that’s me getting real nit-picky because if you’re like me, you just write on this app to have fun and improve your craft and less so trying to make perfect, masterpiece-level stories 😭 I feel like proofreading on this app could help for the real important stories too though. If I remember correctly, you said you wanted to try and publish your first novel soon (I think I read that in the discord), so proofreading now can help with that project too!
Overall I loved this story, it was very tense and intriguing to read. I hope my feedback helps! 😊
*stories.
I love this. It is great. I can’t wait to read another one of ur stores!!!!
