Spoiler

I didn't dislike this. I don't think he needed to be Harry, I think part of the fun would have been us recognizing him as Harry via existing character markers in our head - but I suppose writing "the boy" 80 times is fucking annoying.

There's a bit of stuff in here where I think you don't take it quite far enough. When you say "captured the thought", I want to see the boy reaching out and literally grabbing it. This is a fairy tale, after all.

On the topic of fairy tale vs. prose - there's a question of proximate locality that needs to be avoided, in my opinion, for it to have the mouthfeel of a fairy tale.

Do you see the problem with this? There must be only one river, one hill, one forest, and the only set of big rocks in all of creation. This creates a locality - and ends up being very wordy besides. By specifying, by describing, you've assassinated the fairy tale with a real story.

Or as I might say: full body cringe. Don't do this. I had to google these markers of British folklore, which I suppose is possibly my bad for being a dumb fucking American. But these things are never, ever mentioned, we don't know the significance in the story.

The power of the Deathly Hallows is that no one ever tells the story with "The Potter family Invisibility Cloak", "the Gaunt Family Ring", "the Wand Albus Dumbledore won from Gellert Grindelwald" - it's the inferences and bits of hidden knowledge that the characters pick up through the course of a story in order to come to these perfect, perfectly insane conclusions. Without a story to connect these big British folklore objects to, this lands about as well as a hunk of animal fat for desert.

 

Spoiler

This doesn't sound very Dursley-ish, to be given a shiny golden watch.

should be 'and wandered'. The first of many mistakes spotted, even when I was only half-looking. Look forward to Niez's review.

I notice by this point that the story is very telly. You need to have more personality in your writing. Your language isn't capturing the whimsical statements of a fairy tale for me, and at the same time it is not being written well in the modern style. Everything's 'he did this, he did that, he did this, he did that'. It's very plodding to read.

Missing comma after 'said'.

If you have the dialogue that you do above then you should just cut this 'telling' sentence. It'd be much stronger for Harry to shout out the discovery than for you to inform us and then have Harry notice it himself.

Ey? What? Who?

Ok, great. Try more on the body stuff. This is telling. Saying 'Harry glowered', even, would be an improvement.

Should be a capitalised H.

Should be a non-capitalised t of they.

Should end in a full stop not a comma.

You should just get rid of this 'thought about this for a minute' isn't good.

This is the second time we see three. You never really spell out why it's important but you use it all the time. It doesn't tap into anything in particular beyond the number of three and that's not enough of a fairy tale trope in my mind to justify it unless you point it out more. I wasn't entirely sure you were doing it on purpose until he leaves by running around the hill three times at the end, again.

What a peculiar thing. Black to silver to gold? Why do this? This is sudden magic by Harry and doesn't feel like what I was assuming was a long pre-Hogwarts Harry.

Shouldn't have this inside speech marks, or at all.

Shouldn't be a hyphen here.

Perspective has accidentally changed to the pixie's for some reason.

Capitalisation.

Crow

double silver

weird capitalisation

What? Is this meant to be meaningful to us?

You need to proofread your work. The language didn't feel right for a fairy tale, however, neither did it feel right for a modern story. I would advise trying to think, watch and read about how you might avoid 'telling'. I'm not even talking about at the level of adverbs or such, just straight-up telling us everything that happens.

 

Spoiler

This doesn't really work for me. Let's take a specific example to show what I mean. "Pixies hate running water" - with no further elaboration, but that's OK. This is introduced at the last moment, just when it's convenient for Harry that they do so. I think you'd have been better off introducing that earlier - a pixie steals Harry's watch and then Harry finds out that the pixie is avoiding the running water for some reason.

Another example: "All of a sudden who flew down but a big black crow." This is a typical sentence construction for fairy tales, right? Except that we're not really introduced to the crow beforehand, given no indication that it's there. It's convenient for Harry that it's there, so it abruptly enters the narrative and does what Harry needs, even talking to him. Why not use the snake you set up earlier? In that case, we could've thought "oh - it's Parseltongue. That makes sense."

And, in the end, what's the moral? Pixies are wankers? It's not very clear to me.

On a technical level, this isn't very good. "he saw lots of pretty blue flowers lots of big trees and he saw lots of big rocks too". You're missing punctuation - flowers, trees, and ... Your prose is choppy and basic, your sentence structure not particularly inspired.

 

Spoiler

The language felt a bit too childish for my liking. I know it's probably part of the appeal, but it just felt clunky more than anything.

It's too jolty, and the effect just comes off as a bit incoherent. It doesn't feel like it flows as a fairy tale or as a general narrative. There's a lot of telling happening and not a lot of showing.

 

Spoiler

so fairytales typically take place in a time and place that aren’t specific, so using Harry and the Dursleys as characters and Cornwall makes this location quite specific and historical (instead of ahistoric).

I also thought that Dursley loaning Harry his watch was out of character, but losing an object and trying to find it is a typical motif for a fairytale that works.

There are spelling/grammar issues that also detract from the reading experience.

 

Spoiler

I wanted to like this. The tale it tells is fine enough for what it is, Harry goes on a little adventure, and hits some thematic motifs, like recovering what was lost. But the entire time that I was reading this, I kept spotting little grammatical errors that broke the immersion.

The bit with changing the raven's coloring from black to shining stars to gold was probably the highlight of your writing. I thought he would have left it like that, but retaining at least one golden feather was good.

I don't quite buy that Vernon would ever lend a decent watch to Harry, even for keeping track of the time, but I can put that aside for the nature of the fairy tale, since without that Harry would need to find something else 'shiny' or else valuable to lose(from a personal stand-point, perhaps his glasses, hence his reliance on the raven more directly?). That aside, I'm going to agree that the objects Harry recovered at the end are kind of lost on me without historical references. Sure, it was a fun idea in the moment, but it lacks a punch IMO.

 

Spoiler

I enjoyed this. I felt like it struck the right tone for a fairy tale. It was sweet, and it was clever.

It bugged me (but only in a minor way) that you used canon characters but didn't keep them canonical. Why wasn't Uncle Vernon cruel? Why did Harry have such a good grasp of his magical powers? It seems like this story would've made more sense with a different character, who grew up knowing they were magical and who had caring parents.

Ched cleaned up the minor errors of your story in her rewrite that she's posted above. I endorse that version — it keeps your lovely story intact and just cleans it up. The only thing I'll add is that you need to format your dashes correctly.

That's not the correct formatting for a dash. Here's a blog post about how to properly format dashes: https://www.louiseharnbyproofreader.com/blog/how-to-use-dashes-in-fiction-dashes-uk-and-us-style

 

Spoiler

First of all I felt like this could have been told in a more fairy tale type of way, it doesn't have that nice flow fairy tales have. Besides that, though it hit everything a fairy tale should be in my opinion, the only thing I found egregious is that you should include a line like 'Harry always knew that if he wished for something, it'd come true' or whatever just give us some background on Harry being proficient with his accidental magic.

Still, this was one of my favourite entries and if you post it elsewhere I'd be interested in reading it again after your edits.

 

Spoiler: In the second entry of Q4 (Part II), Niez sent to me:

Where is my watch indeed! The hour grows near and I don't have time for much dilly-dallying, so excuse my haste. I feel that there was the potential here of telling a fairy tale about Harry's imagined childhood, where he rescues (appropriately aged) princesses or battles dragons, one which canonically, wizarding children would have been told about (as the evil Dumbledork collected copyright's payments or some such). Something that Molly Weasley would have read to little Ginny, in short. I would have definitely read one of those, and I am sad no one thought to wrote it (of the one's I've read at least).

The actual story you wrote, however, despite being enjoyable in some sense, fails in being a fairy tale imo. First of all, no Canon compliant story about Harry's childhood could become a proper fairy tale (fairy tales are universal and not-specific to any place/character/situation); second of all there are no dictatic moments, lessons, etc. I don't want to repeat myself too much about this point (I left a similar review for entry 1 if you are interested). Also, though you hit the whimsy tone and the talking animals and all the other tropes of a good old fashioned fairy tale, it is written perhaps a tad to childishly for my taste. Plotwise I also have a few qualms. Though it makes sense that Harry should be able to talk with the snake (something that was subversive and rather clever) the fact that he can talk with the crow too makes it rather less clever and instead merely fairy tale logic. The ending as well feels so weird to me. Are we supposed to care about the horn of whatever and the cookie dish?

My final thoughts are that though it is not terrible in any imaginable sense of the word (typos aside), I just didn't get anything out of it, nor do I think I was supposed to, so I don't feel this one was quite for me.

I leave a line by line read-through below and a present at the end .

Spoiler: Bit heavy on the mistakes, for such a short piece. Don't let me catch you at it again.

And.

The second 'he saw' seems unnecessary, even if you are going for a childish tone.

Too much use wandering in too short a time. Besides, its an odd verb to use in this situation. 'Went around', 'circled' or the evergreen 'walked around' are all alternatives.

No. Clear foul. A comma after 'said' and 'And' should not be capitalised, I'm pretty sure. Also, there is like three 'all of a sudden' very close to each other. Is that by choice? Because remember that our choices make us who we are.

First of all I think it should be 'he raced up the hill', since it is the start of a paragraph. Also there is a 'but' missing between 'looked around' and 'the only thing'.

It. No matter how much a snake talks, it is still an inanimate object according to the rules of English grammar. Also, shouldn't it be 'dissapointed [... ] by how rude the snake was'?

Stop with the random caps. 'T' in 'they 'should be in lowercase.

All the pixies wanted to chase the crow, everyone wanted a feather, so everyone chased the crow. Something, somewhere, is quite redundant.

Wasn't it a dish and a cup? You, sir, confuse me.

His uncle is quite possessive of his things, thus, uncle's.

Had eaten on.

I'm starting to think this is a stylistic choice. A wrong one, because you should not capitalise words after commas, but still.

This typo is, admittedly, quite funny. Crow, my dude, not crowd.

A comma is missing, 'gold to silver, silver to stars'. Also stop capitalising words out of nowhere for the love of God also 'crowd' should be crow (again).

Wut. He showed his uncle his watch.

Spoiler: A formerly cute, now quite terrifying kitteeeeh

/\_/\
/\ / o o \
//\\ \~(*)~/
` \/ ^ /
| \|| ||
\ '|| ||
\)()-())

Some day I will learn how to paste into the DLP format correctly, but today is not that day,

 

This one is mine. Kinda blown away by the comments- I'll answer things as best I can from memory and then go back to see if there is anything to add.

First, this is a story I tell my three-year-old. It's one of several in a similar vein, stories of a Harry that has adventures before he goes to school, and how he grows to use his magic. It's heavy on the telling for more than one reason. I'm literally telling the story to someone, and haven't written it down to really process through which parts should remain "tell," and which should move to "show." Another problem I have here is that I've repeated the story verbally so many times, that some things have gotten lost. It sounds overly simple because it's intended for a child. Vernon is not cruel because I don't want to go over that with him at this time, and for overarching story reasons below.

Errors that I did due to posting on DLP that are actually not in the main story I tell him:
1. Calling out the name of the cup and the dish instead of just having them be something that magically refills with whatever he wants to eat or drink. Should have left it alone, thought the Brits here may have liked it.

2. Added Cornwall- I don't tell him where it is because he doesn't care. I did here because it's to set up an issue with the Cornish Pixies getting out of control, and he handles it before someone official has to step in. (The park is actually a real place in Cornwall. I'd have to see my notes to remember the name.)

3. I never reiterated the Main Point of the story, figuring a softer touch would work better here. It's "Do what you have agreed to do." Harry agrees to be back by 2, he agrees to give the crow the apple.

My grammar and word choices were not what they should have been. That's what I get for waiting till the last minute and then dictating the whole thing and editing it on my phone. The Word count was my fried brain thinking it was 1300 even though I had just read 1200. I actually took out a third animal encounter to reduce it.

The story and the six to eight other short stories I have in this AU are a cross between showing how Hary gains experience with magic before Hogwarts (while acquiring a taste for adventure) and would end up being something that Harry publishes to counter the children's stories that were published without his permission.

Vernon's character (all the Dursley's) is much reduced due to wanting Harry to have different mindset towards adults and with a desire to write a slightly more dimensional character.

@Ched thanks so much not just for the kind words, but also showing how something can be changed and polished like this. You really retained the feel and improved the flow. Your questions on the running water: The crow tells him, but that got cut earlier. In hindsight, it's more important and should not have been cut. The feather change is transfiguring the colors, and Harry it taking the thought of the night sky and using association to bring along the silver, then to make it more pronounced, and then the association of silver and gold to make the final change.

Will likely post an updated version in the WBA and move to the rest of the short stories after.