You're not supposed to know right away what it's about. For me, if I read a book and know what it's about right away before the first chapter is even finished, then the book is too predictable and therefore, in its own sense, boring.
But anyway, I'll work on what you suggested.
Do you think that I don't have enough voice?
I mean, you can be honest. I won't be offended or anything.
You have two strikes against you for me - but perhaps not for the market for this kind of fiction.
For me,
I don't read anything that doesn't have paragraphing spaces. Once in a while I lose out by that, but not often.
And, I'm not interested at all in fantasy. But many other people are..
So, I'm at a loss re your writing.
While that sounds mean of me, I can't begin to tell of your writing ability - and wish you well.
It's not a case of enough voice, it's the type of voice.
Try a rewrite of the first part you posted and let us see that. You have a good grasp of language. You just need to simplify the sentence structure while keeping the descriptive qualities.
For an exercise you might want to go to your local book store and just read the first paragraph of several fantasy books looking only at the technical aspects of the writing. How long are the sentences, sentence structutre, etc? Don't look at the story line, just the writing style. Which technical aspects help to draw the interest of the reader when reading that first paragraph?
Asking for and accepting criticism of your writing is a big step for any writer. One thing I have heard is you need to keep your audience in mind when writing. Who are you telling the story to?
Ok...well, this revision you speak of probably won't come 4 awhile, because I am veeeeerrrrrryyyy busy and don't have a whole lot of time to devote 2 my writing right now. But I'll try 2 work on it as soon as I can.
My audience, I'm thinking, would be pretty much everyone, but primarily teenagers. Sort of like the audience that J.K. Rowling generated for her novel, Harry Potter. Just a wide variety of people, in general.
In Richard Ellmann's biography of James Joyce, which Anthony Burgess called 'The greatest literary biography of the century', a verdict few would argue with, he quotes Joyce explaining his writing of Finnegans Wake to a friend in this way-
"I might easily have written this story in the traditional manner. Every novelist knows the recipe. It is not very difficult to follow a simple, chronological scheme which the critics will understand. But I, after all, am trying to tell the story of this Chapelizod family in a new way. Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book. Yet the elements are exactly what every novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death. There is nothing paradoxical about all this. Only I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose. Did you ever read Laurence Sterne? "
Maybe Dylan had read that when he wrote-
"How many years can a mountain exist
Before it is washed to the sea?"
and
Open The Door Homer. Homer is mandatory.
You need to read a very great deal before you can even begin to think about the art of writing and you need to read only the best and the commentaries the critics have addressed to their works.
Mr Ellmann's book is an excellent starting point. He opens doors which you have never heard of and you must enter as many of them as you possibly can.
If you find the book boring don't give up your day job.
