Already, they were further from home than they had ever been. First, they had crossed pastureland, spotted with fattening cattle and charmless hamlets, and then their train had climbed through a range of snow-veined mountains where condors roosted in nests large as haystacks.

It was a four-day journey by train from the coast to the desert where the Tower of Babel rose like a tusk from the jaw of the Earth. I've posted the unadulterated page first then again with comments inset and at the end. I've flicked through some of the pages looking for one where I have something to say - something that hopefully is useful to the author and to anyone else reading the post. If they don't like your prose it's not personal - they didn't just slap your baby. That person has put in effort on your behalf. The person critiquing you is almost always trying to help you (it's true in some groups there will be the occasional person who is jealous/mean/misguided but that's the exception, not the rule). It will stop being yours and turn into some Frankenstein's monster that nobody will ever want to read.Īdditionally - don't get hurt or look for revenge. If you act on every bit of advice you'll get crit-burn, your story will be pulled in different directions by different people. You need sufficient confidence in your own vision/voice such that whilst criticism may cause you to adjust course you're not about to do a U-turn for anyone. The art of receiving criticism is to take what's useful to you and discard the rest. Possibly not the same author in each case though. You will likely be able to find a successful and highly respected author who will tell you the opposite to practically every bit of advice I give. His first page clearly did a great job for many people. But that book has 150,000+ ratings on Goodreads, a great average score of 4.12 and Goodkind is a #1 NYT bestseller. I didn't, for example, like page 1 of Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule (I didn't pursue the rest of the book). There are page 1s from popular books with which I would find multiple faults. It's very hard to separate one's tastes from a technical critique. I turn this time to one of my favorite books: Senlin Ascends, by Josiah Bancroft.įirst of all I'm going to cut and paste the disclaimers, and anyone prone to outrage really should read them:

I'm also posting some of these on my Youtube channel (like, subscribe yadda yadda). This continues the reprisal my series of page 1 critiques - you can read about the project HERE, and there's a list of all the critiques so far too.

Senlin ascends series