I'm not very good but I really need feedback, thanks :)
I have been conditioned to believe that young hearts are not able to feel real love for a person. Especially for a person of the same gender or sex. They told me to focus on school and jobs. That love is for the future when you had money and everything you needed. But for me, the only thing I needed was someone to love and for them to love me back.
My mother was the person who showed me what love really was. She showed it with everything she did. Her and my father never cared if they showed their love in public or showed it off to past exes. They would dance around the kitchen and kiss whenever they felt like it. They were - in my eyes - the definition of love.
The only problem was that she taught me her beliefs in love. She taught me if I loved someone who is the same gender or sex as me, I was a sin to myself and the family. I was 8 at the time, so I believed her. She was my mother and she always told me she would tell the truth. But she also said she would love me no matter what I did. So I was also as confused as a chameleon in a bag of Skittles.
My father was the same way, only he didn’t care as much as my mom. He agreed with her and went back to his work.
That’s how my life was. Until I was 14. Me, my brother Kyle, my sister Hazel and my dad Jackson went to the beach for an evening picnic. My siblings and I started a game of tag and soon our parents joined in. We were laughing and having fun. We were a family. Until my younger sister heard “fireworks”. She ran up the rocks to the roadside. My mother ran after her knowing that the sound was not fireworks. My father ordered me and my brother to stay back with him even though he was the one we should have been ordering to stay back. He was shaky and jittery and wanting to run to his wife and help her, but he needed to help us more. Because he knew what was going on before we did.
We stood there for what seemed like hours but was just seconds. Sweat starting to form on my hands and forehead as I wait impatiently for my mother and sister to come back and tell us everything was fine.
Then we heard another “firework” go off. Everything after that was a blur. The sound of the sea washing away the footprints of the people walking along the beach moments before was all I could hear. All I could see was the flock of people running towards my mother and sister, whom I could no longer see.
Hi Mack! I've gone through for grammar + spelling things on a Google doc here if that interests you, and I've got some more general comments below.
- Tone - This excerpt comes across with a consistently detached, unemotional tone which doesn't seem to fit the subject matter: the main character's mum and sister getting hurt in some kind of explosion (or dying). This might be what you're going for, but if it's not and you're aiming for the narrator to sound upset or shellshocked, there are a couple of things you can change to help with that.
- Sentence length - Shorter sentences (and by extension, paragraphs) tend to create a sense of action, immediacy and tension. Think of sentence length as a bit like the length of a cut (I think that's what they're called) in a film. A typical action sequence is usually made up of a lot of very short cuts: the hero punches the villain, cut to the villain falling over, cut to the sidekick leaping over a car to join the fray, cut to the hero noticing the sidekick, cut to the villain throwing a dagger at the hero while the hero is distracted, cut to the dagger slamming into the hero's shoulder, etc. Sentence length can work a bit like that. Using longer sentences when writing about playing on the beach and much shorter ones when writing about the sudden explosion and the narrator's world turning upside down can help create that shift in tone from 'family fun' to 'sudden danger'.
- Expensive words - In the 'running to the fireworks' sequence, you use the word 'run' at least three times. Nothing's wrong with the word 'run', but it won't conjure up a strong image in your readers' minds. Try to choose words that will have an impact, especially a visual or emotional one. How did the mother run? Did she sprint, dash, bolt, etc.?
- The beginning - the narrator starts with a sequence of thoughts that, purposefully or not, put the narrator's parents in a bad light. This, again, is not a bad thing, but it doesn't seem to flow well with the 'my mother showed me what love really was' and then the subsequent trauma of the narrator losing part of their family. I think if you want to start with being conditioned to believe that young folks can't feel love especially for the same sex, the next part of the narrative should build on that rather than skipping to a different topic. Likewise, if you want the story of what happened to the narrator's mum and sister at the beginning, then you should introduce the 'love' part of the theme later.
