Title: Inheritance
Author: puiwaihin
Rating: T+
Category: Horror/Fantasy
Chapters: 1 [Oneshot]
Words: 3,674
Summary: Harry Potter wants out from the Dursleys and needs money to achieve his independence. Does Gringotts have the answers he is looking for, or just more mystery? Warning: A bit dark. One-shot.
Link: Fanfiction.net

Got a generally good reaction from the WBA section, so submitting it here for approval. It's a play on the Harry goes to Gringotts to get an inheritance cliche, so expect to see it play to the cliche at the start.

 

Just so you know, it's considered somewhat bad taste to submit your own stories.

 

You are supposed to tell us more about the story than just the summary. What makes this story fun, unique, interesting, good enough to make it into Library?

I read it, and it's fairly average, to be honest. Nothing eye-catching, no gripping, nothing exciting, though the twist in the end is kinda neat but that's about it. CheddarTrek and Chime raised most of the pertinent issues going against the story.

2.5/5 from me, rounded down.

 

No it isn't, lol. It's not usually done, but nobody gives a fuck.

 

There's nothing wrong with submitting your own work if you're proud of it, I think. That said, it probably is a small faux pas.

The story is "okay" in that it pokes at things that we tend (or tended to) to deride around here; though it's not archive worthy. It's pretty ordinary.

2/5 from me, I got a little chuckle at the end, but that was it

 

On the submitting your own story issue, I was originally not going to do so until I saw a couple other stories submitted by the author without any negative comments on the matter. This being a One-shot that's not likely to attract a lot of attention, I figure the only way I would know what the community thought would be to submit it for review.

On the other hand, if I praised my own story or tried to hype certain parts of it, I would feel I was being boastful. Which is why I left the explanation so short.

Generally I'd agree with you, but in a story as short as this I need to keep the exposition and background brief. Adding another 500 words or so to demonstrate this feeling just isn't economical. And it is, as you pointed out, exaggerating the thoughts. Not to the point of being crack, but to point out a little of the absurdity.

Thanks for the responses so far, even if they are not quite what I had hoped to see.

 

Hm, were you looking for more a thorough criticism? Your writing isn't bad, but for 3.5k words, I mean, I wasn't falling out of my chair laughing at the "horror" of it all. My personal standards say it doesn't belong in the library, but maybe others disagree. I could be judging it way too harshly.

It could be library worthy in my eyes, if you didn't end it where you did. It would be an interesting short story, recovering from such a blunder.

Not to suggest that something short can't be in the library, but the shorter a story is, the more weight each word needs to have.

 

I didn't recognize the title and almost clicked away when I saw a self-posted story with less than 4k words and not clearly marked as complete or a one-shot. And apparently the raters in WbA are kinder than the ones here, which is odd since at least some of the ones there must have seen your earlier version which wasn't as good plot-wise.

The niggling writing issues remain, however. Right off the bat you have:

Both of those need commas in the middle, so it kind of sets a low expectations on the writing for the story. That's a shame, because these two sentences are not representative of your writing ability.

In fact, without that I might not have looked for problems so closely. You type "Harry" an awful lot when "he" would work perfectly fine, since the previous usage is often not far behind, with no other possible character mentioned in between. The story is littered with examples, but here are some shorter ones:

My last general note is that it would be nice to vary up the paragraph structure a bit; most paragraphs begin with either Harry or Muknail. Maybe using "he" would have made that less noticeable, though.

Getting down into the weeds: while short, choppy sentences occasionally work for some things, they tripped me up here:

I like semicolons just as much, if not more, as the next guy, but the only one in your story is misused (it should be a comma):

And lastly a homonym mix up (should be waive):

Annnnd now I realize I should have posted most of this stuff in your WbA thread. Sorry about that. Despite those issues, I like the subversion of the inheritance cliche, and I like the length and pacing. So to me, it's definitely a one-shot worth reading. 3/5.

 

I do appreciate criticism, constructively given. That's why I posted this in the WBA section to start with. I got some comments there and made a few changes based on that. As nobody had anything negative to say, I wanted to see what the oveall consensus was.

I completely agree about what you said on the issue of length. The shorter it is, the stronger it must be in order to be memorable. Aside from technical merit, whether you feel a particular story is strong or not is subjective.

Thanks for elaborating on your opinion. Gives me a clearer picture of where I stand.

---------- Post automerged at 10:46 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:24 AM ----------

First off, thanks for pointing these issues out, I definitely would have appreciated them in the WBA section, but I'm happy to take them now.

On the comma issue, you're right on the first sentence, but in the second it is optional. It's certainly not wrong to put the comma there as well, but I don't see an issue readers would have without it.

Unfortunately with both of my main characters being male, I had to deal with the issue of avoiding ambiguity. I can only say "the goblin" or "the young wizard" but so many times. Still, that's a good point, there are some places I could have used 'he' without an issue and I could have started a few more paragraphs with descriptive phrases leading in.

Even after at least 10 read throughs I still hadn't caught that. Thanks.

Again, thanks for taking the time.

 

I don't see anything wrong with submitting your own work if you have a reason to believe that it's library-worthy. That said, I didn't like this one. 2/5

 

Honestly, I rather enjoyed the ending. Still, although the whole inheritance in the beginning is made to be satirical, it didn't make those 2000 words any less boring to read. The impact is all at the ending, and I believe this is what separates this from being good to great. That said, I'd give it a 3.5/5, rounded down.

 

Totally right, it was all about the ending. Everything else was just trying to get there without giving away the game.

I guess it would have been better to have gone more crack, playing up the cliche so that it was noticeably parody rather than trying to play it straight and relying on the ending to carry the story. A bit more fun on the way to the ending.

Or perhaps just cut out the whole walking up to the counter part of the story.

 

It was alright I suppose.
The thing about one-shots (or so I feel anyway) is that they're better off above 5k words, otherwise there is a tendency to make them seem abrupt and brief.
The story itself was alright (again). The twist at the end, although was not bad in its execution, was sort of predictable. Everything going really smoothly with a horror tag up in the description? Uh oh; you know what's coming next...
It wasn't hepled by the fact that the foreshadowing was a bit too thick, increasingly so when you recount that it's a oneshot and as so does not require too much foreshadowing.

3/5

 

You're intention may have been to "satirize that very cliché", but it seemed like you did the cliché and nothing else came of it, except the final conclusion. At the end, I felt like he got what he deserved.

 

Yes, that seems to be the consensus here. For the DLP crowd there just was too much of a rehash of the old stuff to make the payoff worth it for them.

I'm still happy with this story as many of the non-DLP'ers who reviewed or PM'd me were completely shocked by the ending, the earlier writing lulling them into a sense of familiarity and setting them up for the conclusion. I think it actually does what I planned for it to do.

I understand this doesn't have nearly the same impact with the DLP crowd, so I get the lower rating.