Would like feedback on this medieval otherworldly fantasy story of mine. (4,301 words) WIP

You ask for general impressions, so here goes. If you have been writing for a couple of years as an adult, you should know that there are trade-offs for starting early. An older adult has to get past the "everything I write sucks" stage, but once they figure that out, they're good to go. Writers that started young -- I was 11 when I started, so this is hard earned experience talking -- is that once you get to be an adult, the writing you did as a child had value in that it kept you writing through the "everything I write is terrible" stage that stops so many adult writers, but you can't count the years that you were writing from before the age of 18 (and to be perfectly fair, that number is probably closer to 25, but let's work with 18) don't really count the same way they do as they would if you'd started at 18 and wrote until you were 26.

You pick up terrible habits writing as a child that become cemented in with your style. You're not afraid to write, which is awesome, but once you get past that fear of sucking, you have to come to the realization that what the vast majority of teenagers/early 20s write isn't very good.

You may not be ready to hear this, but store it away in your long term memory so that when you're ready to hear it, it won't come as a crushing blow.

This reads like something a teenager would write. It's not just the misunderstanding of punctuation and formatting which is something that will click one day and be better, but what you write is how a teenager views the adult world. If you're as old as I think you are (maybe just old enough to drink in the states; here in Alberta it's 18, but I definitely think you're older than that) you first need to figure out how to be an adult, and from there, you can start to write about adult worries and problems.

The Dunning Kruger effect is something I think you're exhibiting. There's nothing biologically wrong with you thinking that your writing isn't as good as you think it is, it's a milestone of the early twenties. Your characters alternate between very high and very common language and I think you need work on your dialogue.

I usually crit with the "if you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all" attitude, but I see a lot of similarities between what I was doing at 21 and what is on the page, here. Most of the story is still in your head and as bare bones as the prose is, you see it as this lush and vibrant world. My mentor at 21 told me something that I still use to this day, but if you're not ready for it, I understand. Slow down the pace of your storytelling so you're showing us the scene, not just telling us what physically happens.

Also on the rewrite, look at your snark. Snark is one of those things that needs to be flawless or it doesn't work at all. If your joke lands in the 75% range, it counts as a hit but the only hits in snark are bullseyes. Don't lose your emphatic nature, but remember your characters operate on a dial that has ten notches. If you start them off on ten where everything is a declaration and characters don't just do anything, they overdo everything, you're not going to have any room for emphasis when you get to a bit that you want to be empathetic.

Until you're ready to hear criticism, there's nothing anyone can tell you that will convince you that your writing doesn't just have minor surface flaws. I don't know, you might be ready now. You're posting this up for critique. In school, the most important thing is that you wrote. Now the most important thing is what you write. I know how much you think because you've been writing for so long that it only makes sense that success is just going to be around the corner, but you really need to go back to the basics and patch up any of the holes in your knowledge.

The best thing that can help you right now is reading other people's work. Not just the published but the unpublished. If you aren't critiquing already, watch for common mistakes that everyone seems to be making. If a lot of people are making the same mistake, you might be too. If you are like me, I know it felt like everything I'd done I did for a specific reason to cause a certain effect.

I know you're going to keep doing what you want and I'm pretty sure you're going to think I just don't get it because when someone took the time to explain things I felt like they didn't get it. If you're more mature than I was at 21, kudos to you. I just want to set it in your mind to check in with yourself at the 2, 5 or 10 year mark. If what you're doing isn't working, you'd be doing yourself a huge favour to go back rather than doubling down and convince yourself that success is just around the corner. Regardless of what you choose to do, if any, eventually you will be able to look back at this and marvel at how far you've come as long as you keep moving forward.

/r/fantasywriters Thread