Feeling like a bitch, but.... this girl Alex, just had me read another one of her stories, and.... reading her works, makes me feel a little better about my writing abilities. *shrugs*
She's a sweet girl. Terribly annoying, and she can't write, but a sweet girl. I don't have the heart to critique her, aside from spelling and grammar.
Edit - Anyone notice the name change? Yeah, I was talking to Jessica, and... *got confused*
It's.... Well.... atrocious, to be blunt. Even by the standards of the genre (she's going for the mainstream-YA-high-school-social-scene thing) it's horrendous, and that genre typically doesn't hold the best writings.
It's... yeah, it's really bad. I told her to have Jessica (why I got confused) read it....because, well, they're best friends and Jessica says /everything/ is amazing.
Uh... Just.... Short excerpt: (the thing is like, freakin' 8k, and I just read all of it.... formatting/grammar/spelling is intact, how she put it, by the way.
I picked out the best part of it, or what I considered to be the best part anyway.)
People aren't always who they appear to be. They may look like they are nice, and a good person. But then they let their true selfs come out and they turn out to be a person you don't want to know. They
knock you down, and step on you. The only good thing is, you know who is really there for you and who isn't. That's how Lucy found out who is really there for her and who cares about her. Lucy lives with her older
brother Jesse. Their parents left her when she was 13 and has lived with him since. Now she's 15 and is just starting high school. She hasn't talked much since her parents left. "Lucy it's time to get up." yelled Jesse
from outside her door. She walked out of her room and headed toward the door. "Have a good day!" said Jesse after her. But she just kept walking and didn't look back. Lucy missed her parents a lot. Sure she loves
Jesse but the seond he turned 18 he left the house and completly forgot about her.
So, one of my friends has a friend. She heard I was very much into editing and liked to write, so I got her story as she wrote it. Her characters? A girl named Nessie, a boy (werewolf) named Jacob, and some other bloke who was a vampire. It was a backwards Twilight almost. But she claimed not to have taken the characters, (Nessie was supposedly a reference to her name, being Ness), etc, etc, etc, and it was. . . .ghastly at best.
*didn't* But then, the edit was already up by the time I read it.
If you're just reading it as a friend, then you mention the plot/ idea/ something seems like a good start, but you think improving something else might help the story come across better... Or something to that extent.
If she's asked for your opinion and wants to honestly know what you think, well then there's no point sugar coating it. And if it's really that bad, there's probably no point sugar coating it anyway, someone will eventually tell her what they really think, and she'll be left wondering why everyone else thought it was good and this person thinks it's so bad.
That's the thing, she's got other friends who commented on the FB note saying how much they loved it.... but it's bad. I mean, I know I can be a critic, but.... it's just horrid.
And she PM'd me, later, saying that a mutual friend told her that I write, and she wanted my opinion, so I went to read it.
Maybe start by telling her you're taking a critical view, and that just because its not good writing doesn't necessarily mean people won't like it, just there are large areas where it could be improved. And then hack it to pieces, gently of course.