Critique - (NSFW for violence) - Would like opinions and comments on improving the first draft of my first chapter.

I'd love to do a line edit of this, but given the format I'll settle for your first paragraph.

The door to the Lake Side Inn blew open with a force that only a man as large as the one beyond it could produce.

This is solid imagery. It gives me the location in an immediate way. Where it falters is the "with a force that only a man as large as the one beyond it could produce."

That bit doesn't work. It rambles far longer than it should, and the imagery is vague. You give me the idea that he's big, but don't show me in what way. "Blown open by a man with shoulders the width of a large bear." is more striking. Don't use that, it's shit, but you get the idea.

The shock of this abrupt entrance caused Torrin, owner and bartender, to drop the glass he had been polishing to the floor in a shattering explosion of tiny glass daggers.

This sentence is overly wordy, thrusts information at me, and then uses unnecessary imagery to draw my attention to a glass that, in the next sentence, you tell me isn't important.

"Torrin leapt at the sound, the glass he'd been polishing slipping from his hand to shatter against the floor."

Torrin never even looked down at the mess now covering his meticulously cleaned floor. Nor did he more than glance at the man taking up most of his doorway.

I'm tackling both these sentences at once, because, with the exception of the last half of the second sentence, they don't tell me things. They build suspense, which you don't need because you introduce his wife at the end of the paragraph, but you also don't need sentences 3 and 4 of your opening paragraph to be useless information.

"The man loomed in his doorway, his hand around the throat of Torrin's wife, Galla."

His wide eyes were glued to the face of the small woman being dragged up beside the imposing figure.

There's nothing glaringly wrong about this sentence other than that it lacks the polish of revisions, which is to be expected. 'Were' leads to passive voice, so stay away from that. If you want the reader to be in the scene, don't distance them from it. 'The imposing figure' is vague enough that it might as well not be there at all.

"He couldn't look away from her face. Her blue eyes pleaded with him, the skin around them mottled with split skin and bruises."

Swollen figures and bruised coloring mixed with blood decorated her face like an abstract painting.

Swollen features, you mean? Bruised coloring can't mix with blood because they aren't both liquids. Does the innkeeper have knowledge of painting? I understand the narrative voice, but if you're trying to engage us in the character and his plight, which I assume you are given that it's the first paragraph, keep us close to his thoughts and actions.

"In the spaces between the blood her skin was swollen and bruised."

But as her downturned eyes lifted to meet his there was no mistake. He was staring at the face of Galla, his wife

This falls back under the false suspense bit from a couple sentences ago. It's not the end of the chapter. We aren't about to switch perspectives and not come back to this for a hundred pages. If it's his wife and she's important to the scene, then tell me.

Stylistically, there are things you need to work on. Grammar is important. Possessive commas, dependent clauses, compound and complex sentences. Work on those. Vary the sentence types that you use. The flow of your writing will be much improved for it. Right now you use mostly dependent clauses to separate your adjoining actions, so things feel really broken apart. The sentences read in short bursts, usually only containing two or three actions.

In terms of narrative focus, I have no idea where this story is. We start off with Torrin, then slide to Jargeth, then to Jargeth's soldiers, then to Death. You would do well to pick a viewpoint and stay there.

Passive voice is your biggest issue for this piece. It feels distant, because of it. I don't know anything about how this characters feel, just what happens to them. Also there's this focus on...I'm not entirely certain how to pin it down. It's like you've got a solid idea of how you want the characters to come across and the way you want the action to flow, but it all seems a bit flat. Torrin is only the scared bartender afraid for his wife's safety. Jargeth is only the overly cocky douche lord who exists to show that Death is a badass. Death exists seemingly to show off.

Seeing as this piece stops with Death, I'm going to assume he's who we'll be following. If that's the case, don't use this chapter to show me that he can fucking kill shit. I'm fairly certain already that, being Death, he can kill shit. Show me who he is. Why he does deals. Did he really mean the come on at Galla? I couldn't tell. At the end of this piece I have no idea who anyone is because all the character interactions just felt like a backdrop so you could write about Death being a badass.

/r/fantasywriters Thread