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Unread 07-29-2018   #11
Lycanthrokeith
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Join Date: Feb 2011
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Re: Style Mistakes that Weaken TF stories

Quote:
Originally Posted by TF-Viewer View Post
"Your hand stretches into a paw. Your bones shift into a new shape."

That's 2nd person TF, the narrator is telling the reader that they are transforming. I've never liked it, and when I see the story starting out like that I Just immediately close the page and find something else to read. Not everyone with a TF fetish wants to be the subject of the TF themselves.
In a TF text-based game, 2nd person is perfectly valid. In a story, it's much more difficult to pull off. Unless the story is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style of story, 2nd person doesn't really work.

Two mistakes that wreck a story for me:

1) Typos, grammatical mistakes, and the like. It doesn't matter how much I'm into a story, the instant I see a typo or a badly written sentence, all I can focus on is the mistake. If the author doesn't care enough to proofread, why should I care about reading it?

Exception: Dialogue. People don't always speak in complete sentences, so imperfect sentence structure is fine there. It actually helps to keep dialogue from sounding stilted.

2) A lack of synonyms for "transform": Shift, alter, change, mutate, become, and so forth. Not using the exact same one over and over goes a long way.
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