I agree, to a certain extent. Please do the same with your posts, Anarual... The last one was actually painful to read.

Night, I think everything that needed to be said about the current version of your prologue has been said already. Therefore I won't talk much about the flaws, but I'll try to give you ideas, just as Necrule Paen did.

As Yarrgh said, I doubt a Beta would be willing to edit a story with so many mistakes. Maybe you should take a break in your writing, write down your ideas somewhere so you don't forget them, and read a little around to acquire some experience. I recommend DLP's library. You can also immerse yourself again in the HP books, it's always useful (especially for getting the basic canon facts right ).

As Necrule Paen said, your paragraph sounds a little like a lifeless 'laundry list'.

Take the time to settle your prologue in space and time, by using descriptions and possibly flashbacks; be careful with those though, they are difficult to handle for an inexperienced writer. Perhaps you should put yourself in Harry's position and describe everything from his PoV; imagine his thoughts, feelings etc.

For example, instead of giving a list of his injuries, such a process would enable you to describe them more vividly (Harry tries to stand up, but he feels an intense pain in his leg and realises it's broken). Or, if he's looking for his friends, he finds some of them alive and others dead (insert his thoughts and feelings). He can recall his last fight against Voldemort that way, and it'll sound far less dry than it does in the current version.

Once you've re-written it, I'll be happy to review again.

Good luck with it!

 

When I read a story I wrote two years ago, I can't believe I was writing that bad. It's mainly grammatical mistakes, though my writing style was really bad.

Reading a lot of fanfiction helps a lot to improve how we write. Writing helps even more.

So, if you see you can't write perfectly, don't try it. Just write the only way you can. Then a few month later, write another story. And compare what you wrote earlier. You'll see the difference.

In fact, if you pay attention to some fanfictions you can see how the writer improve his style gradually. For example, the last fanfiction I was reading wasn't that good at the beginning, the dialogs between characters were a little bizarre. Ten chapters later it's way better. And the last few chapters are really well written.

Here's the link to the mentioned fanfiction:
http://jbern.fanficauthors.net/To_Fight_the_Coming_Darkness/Three_Stand_Alone.php

 

Heh, lnky, no need to go that far . JBern is an author here, and a very popular one. His story's thread is here, for further notice.