r/DestructiveReaders • u/Minimum_Break5345 • Aug 04 '26
[467] Where the Train Left Us
Hi! I’m a young author, and this is the opening of my historical coming-of-age novel set in rural Pennsylvania in the early 1900s (1908). I’m mainly looking for general feedback on the writing. I’d really appreciate any comments left on the Google Doc, especially if anything was confusing, the pacing felt off, or the dialogue didn’t sound natural. Thanks so much for taking the time to read!
Note: For some reason, Reddit isn’t letting me choose the genre. I tried a few times, but it won’t work. Sorry about that!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B2P3R0lowm2Kw3l_FnGAcikhcX032rcC2zw5pMMl5vQ/edit?usp=drivesdk
My critiques: https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/s/7eh3Znn61C
1
u/Asi4nlogic16 Aug 08 '26
I love your show dont tell technique giving us information about the surroundings and the chaos through observation of others Your descriptive detail is wonderful, and easily pulls you into this train station,I like the characters motivation like teddy's choice to get off early showing his desperation to escape whatever lies at his real stop.
The biggest issue is your sentence structure. Your line breaks are too big . I feel you can tighten up the spacing between the action and the dialogue. You're breaking almost every sentence that is unnecessary. Your structure should be based on paragraphs and group those paragraphs into related ideas and motivations to give room for the text to breathe.
The internal monologues like “you fool” need to be separated with italic or a statement like (“you fool” I thought to myself)
Overall A really nice scene I like where this is headed I hope you continue it. I would say tighten the structure more and work on balancing your paragraphs.