Thread: Star Catching (Ready for grading)

"There it is, Buzz... a Starly..."

I sat crouched in a bush with my Elekid as we stalked a lone Starly poking around at the grass. It was a beautiful summer day. The sun was out high in the sky and the shrubbery of the quiet and isolated route was in full bloom.

"Get ready..." I whispered quietly to my partner.

"Ele..." I could hear the anticipation in his voice when he spoke.

"Now! Thundershock!"

"Ele...kiiddd!"

My little yellow buddy's body tensed up as he shot a weak jolt of electricity at the defenseless Pokemon. The Starly let out a cry as it was fried to a crisp by the super-effective attack.

"Sweet! Good job!" I yelled out as I high fived Buzz. "Now it's time to cature this little bugger. Go, Pokeball!" I cocked my arm back and threw my Pokeball like a baseball pitcher. I watched the Pokeball soar through the air, as if it was going in slow motion, rotating and spinning until... "WHAT THE!?" A full grown Staraptor swooped out of the sky and snatched the Pokeball at its apex in its giant tallons. "Give me back my Pokeball!" I shouted angrily at the Flying-type.

"Ele ele elekid!" Buzz also shouted to the thief, with his tiny fist clenched.

The Staraptor turned around swiftly and let out a ferocious cry as it tightened its grip on my Pokeball, completely crushing the capsule. It's mighty talons opened as the Pokeball fell from them in pieces.

Then, its body began to glow blue as it flapped its mighty wings a couple times before outstretching them and charging full speed directly at Buzz and I.

"Look out!" I screamed as my Pokemon and I jumped back into the bush we were hiding in.

The wild Pokemon came so close to us that the wind its wings knocked my hat off my head. Instead of hitting us, it kept going and slammed head first into a tree. It fell to the ground and shook its head, then turned around and let out another battle cry, even more vicious than before.

"Run Buzz, run!"

My Pokemon and I began running through the heavily wooded area with the wild Staraptor close behind, narrowly avoiding all the trees. We kept running until we finally saw a ledge, we jumped down the ledge and then stopped immediately, pressing our backs against the wall. The wild Pokemon flew right over our heads and almost immediately noticed where we were. It turned around and started coming at us with another Brave Bird attack.

"Buzz use Thunderbolt! Then run!"

Buzz launched another bolt electricity, however this one was much stronger than the one used on Starly. It struck Staraptor head on, but didn't seem to phase it.

"Look out!"

Buzz and I both dove out of the way of the Flying-type's Brave Bird attack, this time the Pokemon crashed into the wall of the ledge. Feeling heavy recoil damage, it shook it's head again, but it still had more fight in it. Its eyes glowed a malicious red color as it flew over to Buzz and attempted to attack it with its beak, talons, and wings.

"Buzz, dodge it!" I yelled out to my Elekid.

Buzz was able to deftly dodge, dip, and duck each and every strike attempted by the enraged wild Staraptor, until it finally became winded and let its guard down.

"Now Buzz, THUNDERPUNCH!" I yelled at the top of my lungs, with a smile on my face and my fist clenched. I saw the opening, and so did my partner.

Buzz smirked as he cocked his fist back, which was sparking with electrical power, and slammed it his opponent's face, instantly knocking out the fully evolved Flying-type.

"Haha! That's the way to do it, Buzz! Go, Pokeball!" I, once again, threw my Pokeball like I was a baseball pitcher at the fainted Pokemon, it hit the Pokemon, turned it into a ball of energy, and crammed it into the Pokeball.

Wobble wobble.

Wobble wobble.

POP! The Staraptor burst out of the Pokeball and flew away. I sighed and put my head down. I came so close... yet I couldn't capture it. Buzz patted me on my leg to comfort me.

"Good job Buzz, you did amazing battling that thing. I just couldn't pull it off." I said, defeated.

Then, at the same time, Buzz and I remembered something-- the Starly! We sprinted back to where we first met the wild Staraptor to see a pack of ravenous Bidoof surrounding the fainted Starly.

"Buzz, Thunderbolt on the Bidoof!"

Once again, Buzz's little yellow body tensed up as he shot a bolt of electricity from the prongs on his head at the wild Bidoof. His attack only struck one Bidoof, but it knocked it out. All the other Bidoof quickly ran away at the sight of Buzz's powerful Thunderbolt.

I ran up to the injured Starly.

"Are you ok little guy?"

"Star..." it said weakly.

"Buzz, I'm going to run this guy to the Pokemon Center, return!" I returned Buzz into it's Pokeball as I picked up Starly in my arms and ran it to the Pokemon Center.

It was a long run; about a mile and half, but I felt responsible for this Starly's life. I had knocked it out and left it out in the wild at the mercy of any other wild Pokemon, I had to make sure it was ok. After about 10 minutes of running, my legs were incredibly sore and my entire body was cramping up, but we had made it to the city. I rushed across town to the Pokemon Center and gave the injured Starly to the nurse.

"What happened to it?" she asked me.

"I..." I started to tell the story, but then changed my mind and decided to lie. I couldn't tell this woman that I practically left a Pokemon out to die. "We were attacked by a wild Staraptor and Starly tried to defend me but he..."

"We'll have him healed up in a jiffy! Just wait in the waiting room." The nurse said as she cut off my story.

I let Buzz out of his Pokeball while I waited in the waiting room with a elbows on my knees and head down. What if Starly wasn't okay? I would feel horrible about myself.

But thankfully, after about an hour, Nurse Joy brought out the Starly and handed it to me.

She smiled politely. "Your Starly is fine, just a few cuts and bruises. Be more careful next time!"

"Thank you, Nurse. Will do. Have a good one." I said as I walked out the doors of the Pokemon Center.

"You too!" Nurse Joy called out.

When we got outside, I sat Starly on the sidewalk and got on my knees to talk to him.

"Look buddy, I'm really sorry. I was just trying to capture you... I didn't mean to hurt you like that."

The wild Starly just cocked its head and looked at me.

"So uh, you wanna join my team and travel with me?"

Starly straightened its head and let out a happy cry.

"Star! Star!"

I laughed at the Flying-types enthusiasm. "Awesome, then just get into this Pokeball, bud."

I opened up a Pokeball and sat it on the ground next to Starly. He walked over to the Pokeball and pecked it, causing the Pokemon to be absorbed into the Pokeball.

Wobble wobble.

Wobble wobble.

Wobble wobble...

_________________________________

Target Pokemon: Starly (simple)
Word count: unknown (I had to type this on WordPad)

Claiming this because you seem cool and it's a small story, just the way I like em.

You're a grader, too!? lol Thanks man.

Lololol, I'm a lot of things. Not a problem, bro - here's your grade.

Introduction

You have a nice simple introduction to the story, which is fine at your current level, but you’ll need to elaborate at harder difficulty levels. At their most base levels, stories usually consist of a beginning, a middle, and an ending, and there’s always a problem to solve or a conflict to overcome. In your introduction we see the protagonist and his Elekid hunting a Starly to capture, but after weakening it a Staraptor intercepts the PokeBall and starts attacking them.

There’s a bit of imagery in the introduction, which is good to see, but probably not enough. A rule of thumb when writing stories is to imagine that the people who are reading then have never seen a Pokemon before. You mentioned Buzz was yellow, and later on there’s an allusion to some “prongs” on his head, but aside from that an unknowledgeable person would have no idea what an Elekid or a Starly or even a Staraptor is. You could have mentioned the black bands around Buzz’s arms, the Staraptor’s pointy red crest, etc etc etc. This can be forgiven for a Simple level mon, especially considering this is your first story, but keep this in mind for future attempts.

Another thing that’s usually covered in your introduction (unless you’re trying to do something impressive in a harder-level story) is the characters’ backstory – that is, a little bit of insight into their history and why they do the things they do. It’s not always needed, and it isn’t here (for reasons I’ll get into a little later) but in general, you should try to give a bit of backstory. Age, hair colour, home town, why exactly your character is trying to catch a Starly, things like that.

All in all, your introduction is acceptable for a Simple level Pokemon, but only just. Remember to describe things a lot more – you didn’t do much of this. Aside from that though, everything looks fine here.

Plot

Most of the stories around this level are something simple, like a Trainer goes out to catch a Pokemon, finds it, battles it, and then captures it. This is usually enough, as long as the grammar and descriptions are suitably impressive. This story deviates from the usual crowd just enough to make it enjoyable – a Staraptor interferes with a capture attempt and attacks the protagonist and his Pokemon. They run away and then fight it off before returning to the Starly from the beginning. The main character brings it to a Pokemon Center, where it is healed, and then it chooses to join his team.

It’s not violently original, but that’s no huge crime. There were a couple of things that didn’t make sense to me, though. First of all, why did the Staraptor just fly away? If it was the Starly’s parent, it would stick around and chase the Trainer until he was far away from the Starly. You could argue that it was just bored or mean or something, but in either case I would still think that it would stick around to finish the job. Secondly, your Trainer lies to the nurse, making it sound like the Starly is already yours. While this is interesting and gives us a good look at the inner workings of your character, it doesn’t really do anything for the story. One of the more famous writing techniques is Chekhov’s Gun, and one of the principles is:

One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.

What that means is that if you include something in a story, be it a character, object, or occurrence, it should somehow have a relevance to the story itself. As it stands, your character lies for no reason other than he’s a bit uncomfortable. This would have been enough if you had your character imagine what would happen if he told the truth, for example he imagined being denied service because the Pokemon technically isn’t his or something, but as it is this little event just digs at me as something that could have been more.

The last thing I want to bring to your attention is that your character is never described or named. This isn’t a huge deal – sometimes people do this on purpose, to allow the readers to better enter the character’s shoes and identify with them. I’m pretty sure you weren’t doing this on purpose, though, so just like with describing Pokemon, if you introduce a character you should talk about how they look so that readers can properly imagine them.

Dialogue

Your dialogue was very well done. You conveyed through your characters’ speech and thoughts just what kind of people they are, and it’s doubly impressive because this is one of the hardest things for new writers to do correctly. It was also good to see that you didn’t completely spam exclamation marks – that’s another common pitfall, and while you did use them an awful lot you didn’t completely ignore periods.

Pokemon in your story communicated anime-style, that is they only speak parts of their name. This is a fine choice, and you did it well without going overboard. Usually whenever a writer uses this convention there’s always one point at which a Pokemon calls out their name while performing an attack and there’s like twenty letters in a row. Your exclamations were short and sweet, however, and I could clearly imagine what the Pokemon sounded like.

On the whole, very well done, although there were a couple issues you should look at. In both of the following quotes, there’s a tiny mistake. When a character is speaking and the speech tag is immediately after the slice of dialogue, you should never use a period. If you feel like using a period, use a comma instead. This doesn’t matter for exclamation or question marks, which is probably why you didn’t make this mistake often. I’ve put in the correct versions below the quotes so you can see what I mean.

"Good job Buzz, you did amazing battling that thing. I just couldn't pull it off." I said, defeated.

“Good job Buzz, you did amazing battling that thing. I just couldn’t pull it off,” I said, defeated.

"We'll have him healed up in a jiffy! Just wait in the waiting room." The nurse said as she cut off my story.

“We’ll have him healed up in a jiffy! Just wait in the waiting room,” the nurse said as she cut off my story.

The other problem was in your introduction. When a character speaks, you should always start a new paragraphs. There are virtually no exceptions (well, there are a few, but I won’t go into them now). Below is the paragraph, and below that is the way it should have been. Note, however, that you can put voice tags in-between snatches of speech, which is why there’s no new paragraph for the second bit of speech.

"Sweet! Good job!" I yelled out as I high fived Buzz. "Now it's time to cature this little bugger. Go, Pokeball!" I cocked my arm back and threw my Pokeball like a baseball pitcher. I watched the Pokeball soar through the air, as if it was going in slow motion, rotating and spinning until... "WHAT THE!?" A full grown Staraptor swooped out of the sky and snatched the Pokeball at its apex in its giant tallons. "Give me back my Pokeball!" I shouted angrily at the Flying-type.

"Sweet! Good job!" I yelled out as I high fived Buzz. "Now it's time to cature this little bugger. Go, Pokeball!"

I cocked my arm back and threw my Pokeball like a baseball pitcher. I watched the Pokeball soar through the air, as if it was going in slow motion, rotating and spinning until...

"WHAT THE!?" (I exclaimed.)

A full grown Staraptor swooped out of the sky and snatched the Pokeball at its apex in its giant tallons.

"Give me back my Pokeball!" I shouted angrily at the Flying-type.

Grammar

Just like with your dialogue, your grammar was surprisingly good. You showed a good grasp of paragraphing and correct spelling, and your punctuation was pretty much exactly where it needed to be. You did make a few mistakes, but they weren’t recurring, and that’s the important part. I won’t go through and point out ever mistake, considering this grade is already longer than your story (>_>) but here are three of the worst offenders.

A full grown Staraptor swooped out of the sky and snatched the Pokeball at its apex in its giant tallons.

It’s spelt “talons”. Only one “l”.

I laughed at the Flying-types enthusiasm.

That should be “Flying-type’s”. Without that apostrophe, it sounds like whatever you’re laughing at has multiple types, all of which are Flying.

Then, at the same time, Buzz and I remembered something-- the Starly!

Only one dash is needed, not two.

Detail

Your detail and descriptions were easily the most lacking part of your story, and something you need to work on. Like I said before, you should always assume that the person doesn’t know anything about Pokemon so that you do a good job of describing their attacks and their appearance and so on. I already talked about how you didn’t describe your character, but you also didn’t really describe the city or even the nurse. We can’t assume it’s one of the Nurse Joys, and even if we could, we don’t know anything about Pokemon, so we still don’t know what she looks like. Furthermore, just quickly – if something is “fried to a crisp” it’s probably dead, unless you’re invoking the Rule of Funny cartoon-style. Which your story didn’t.

It’s not all bad news regarding descriptions, though. The quote below was quite beautiful. You have the skills to write well, you just need to bring them out.

It was a beautiful summer day. The sun was out high in the sky and the shrubbery of the quiet and isolated route was in full bloom.

Your details and explanations of the Pokemon and their abilities were mostly alright too – if a bit rare – and there was only one glaring problem I found:

We sprinted back to where we first met the wild Staraptor to see a pack of ravenous Bidoof surrounding the fainted Starly.

Bidoof are herbivores, meaning they don’t eat meat, which means that ravenous Bidoof wouldn’t pose any more of a threat than satiated Bidoof. If you really wanted to give them a reason to be dangerous, say the Starly was intruding in their territory, or even better, change the Pokemon to like a Poochyena or something.

Length

Quick note: there are plenty of online tools that can help you with writing, and pretty much all of them include a character counting function. This is what I use to check character counts – it’s simple and easy. Just bookmark it in your web browser or something.

Anyway, your story itself has 6,739 characters, and the amount required for a Starly (being a Simple rank Pokemon) is between 5,000 and 10,000, so you’re good here. You could have included a little bit more though – the extra descriptions and the hole I mentioned about your characters lying would have filled this up nicely. However, you’ve done the minimum required, and that’s pretty much all I ask for this section.

Climax

This is the hardest part of a story to get right, even harder than dialogue. It’s all about the flow of the story, and making sure that the climax – the tensest, most exciting point – is right where it should be, at (or damn close to) the end. You did pretty well here. The battle with the Staraptor was quite tense and enjoyable, but for a bit after that I was worried. Worried that you’d just jammed some rubbish onto the end to reach the length requirement. However, the final ending, the part where Starly goes into the PokeBall? That’s suitably climactic. I especially liked the simplicity with which you ended your story.

However, my issue is that it’s not nearly as thrilling and tense as the Staraptor battle. Like I said, a story should have good flow – in my opinion, that’s the most important part. Your story starts, and flow quickens as he weakens the Starly. It builds up to its highest point during the Staraptor battle, and then ebbs back down as he recovers the Starly. You’re still fine up to here – stories should have both ebb and flow. A story that’s all up is usually very straining and hard to read. The problem is that the excitement drops for too long, and the momentary increase in tension given by the ending isn’t really enough to make up for it.

I guess what I’m trying to say is you did okay, but the most exciting part of the story should always be at or near the end, and while the ending is pretty exciting, it’s nowhere near as exciting as the earlier climax.

Overall

Overall, this story was fair. It wasn’t great, but it certainly wasn’t rubbish. I enjoyed it, and everything required for a Simple Pokemon is here – plot, characterisation, good grammar, a reasonable flow. Next time you need to remember to describe your characters and surroundings a bit more, and your plot will need to be more interesting and complex, but for now:

Starly Captured!

You can now add this Pokemon to your stats and battle with it. Don’t forget to note down that you obtained it by writing this story – you have to note exactly where you got each of your Pokemon. Oh, and you should evolve it by battling my Burmy ;)

Originally Posted by ChainReaction01

Lololol, I'm a lot of things. Not a problem, bro - here's your grade.

Introduction

You have a nice simple introduction to the story, which is fine at your current level, but you’ll need to elaborate at harder difficulty levels. At their most base levels, stories usually consist of a beginning, a middle, and an ending, and there’s always a problem to solve or a conflict to overcome. In your introduction we see the protagonist and his Elekid hunting a Starly to capture, but after weakening it a Staraptor intercepts the PokeBall and starts attacking them.

There’s a bit of imagery in the introduction, which is good to see, but probably not enough. A rule of thumb when writing stories is to imagine that the people who are reading then have never seen a Pokemon before. You mentioned Buzz was yellow, and later on there’s an allusion to some “prongs” on his head, but aside from that an unknowledgeable person would have no idea what an Elekid or a Starly or even a Staraptor is. You could have mentioned the black bands around Buzz’s arms, the Staraptor’s pointy red crest, etc etc etc. This can be forgiven for a Simple level mon, especially considering this is your first story, but keep this in mind for future attempts.

Yeah you're right, my description of the characters was really weak. But in all honesty, I didn't put all my effort into this story at all. I'm not saying I'm a great writer, but this isn't my best work. haha

Another thing that’s usually covered in your introduction (unless you’re trying to do something impressive in a harder-level story) is the characters’ backstory – that is, a little bit of insight into their history and why they do the things they do. It’s not always needed, and it isn’t here (for reasons I’ll get into a little later) but in general, you should try to give a bit of backstory. Age, hair colour, home town, why exactly your character is trying to catch a Starly, things like that.

All in all, your introduction is acceptable for a Simple level Pokemon, but only just. Remember to describe things a lot more – you didn’t do much of this. Aside from that though, everything looks fine here.

The reason I didn't go into much detail about my character was because I didn't really think it was necessary for a short story like this, and plus I wanted to kind of make this story about me catching my first Pokemon, I was going for the vibe that I was an old man telling my grandson how I caught my first Pokemon, haha. But now that I know this I'll make sure I include it in my next story.

Plot

Most of the stories around this level are something simple, like a Trainer goes out to catch a Pokemon, finds it, battles it, and then captures it. This is usually enough, as long as the grammar and descriptions are suitably impressive. This story deviates from the usual crowd just enough to make it enjoyable – a Staraptor interferes with a capture attempt and attacks the protagonist and his Pokemon. They run away and then fight it off before returning to the Starly from the beginning. The main character brings it to a Pokemon Center, where it is healed, and then it chooses to join his team.

It’s not violently original, but that’s no huge crime. There were a couple of things that didn’t make sense to me, though. First of all, why did the Staraptor just fly away? If it was the Starly’s parent, it would stick around and chase the Trainer until he was far away from the Starly. You could argue that it was just bored or mean or something, but in either case I would still think that it would stick around to finish the job. Secondly, your Trainer lies to the nurse, making it sound like the Starly is already yours. While this is interesting and gives us a good look at the inner workings of your character, it doesn’t really do anything for the story. One of the more famous writing techniques is Chekhov’s Gun, and one of the principles is:



What that means is that if you include something in a story, be it a character, object, or occurrence, it should somehow have a relevance to the story itself. As it stands, your character lies for no reason other than he’s a bit uncomfortable. This would have been enough if you had your character imagine what would happen if he told the truth, for example he imagined being denied service because the Pokemon technically isn’t his or something, but as it is this little event just digs at me as something that could have been more.

Yeah you're completely right, the story was a bit rushed after the Staraptor battle. Again, the effort just wasn't there. :/

The last thing I want to bring to your attention is that your character is never described or named. This isn’t a huge deal – sometimes people do this on purpose, to allow the readers to better enter the character’s shoes and identify with them. I’m pretty sure you weren’t doing this on purpose, though, so just like with describing Pokemon, if you introduce a character you should talk about how they look so that readers can properly imagine them.

Like I said above, I was trying to pretend I was an old man telling a story to his grandson, but I'll sure I fix this stuff next time around.

[/QUOTE]Dialogue

Your dialogue was very well done. You conveyed through your characters’ speech and thoughts just what kind of people they are, and it’s doubly impressive because this is one of the hardest things for new writers to do correctly. It was also good to see that you didn’t completely spam exclamation marks – that’s another common pitfall, and while you did use them an awful lot you didn’t completely ignore periods.

Pokemon in your story communicated anime-style, that is they only speak parts of their name. This is a fine choice, and you did it well without going overboard. Usually whenever a writer uses this convention there’s always one point at which a Pokemon calls out their name while performing an attack and there’s like twenty letters in a row. Your exclamations were short and sweet, however, and I could clearly imagine what the Pokemon sounded like.

On the whole, very well done, although there were a couple issues you should look at. In both of the following quotes, there’s a tiny mistake. When a character is speaking and the speech tag is immediately after the slice of dialogue, you should never use a period. If you feel like using a period, use a comma instead. This doesn’t matter for exclamation or question marks, which is probably why you didn’t make this mistake often. I’ve put in the correct versions below the quotes so you can see what I mean.



“Good job Buzz, you did amazing battling that thing. I just couldn’t pull it off,” I said, defeated.



“We’ll have him healed up in a jiffy! Just wait in the waiting room,” the nurse said as she cut off my story.

The other problem was in your introduction. When a character speaks, you should always start a new paragraphs. There are virtually no exceptions (well, there are a few, but I won’t go into them now). Below is the paragraph, and below that is the way it should have been. Note, however, that you can put voice tags in-between snatches of speech, which is why there’s no new paragraph for the second bit of speech.



"Sweet! Good job!" I yelled out as I high fived Buzz. "Now it's time to cature this little bugger. Go, Pokeball!"

I cocked my arm back and threw my Pokeball like a baseball pitcher. I watched the Pokeball soar through the air, as if it was going in slow motion, rotating and spinning until...

"WHAT THE!?" (I exclaimed.)

A full grown Staraptor swooped out of the sky and snatched the Pokeball at its apex in its giant tallons.

"Give me back my Pokeball!" I shouted angrily at the Flying-type.[/QUOTE]

The reason I used so many exclamation points was because I was trying to convey an excited young man, but I'm glad I didn't overdue it, haha. And about that last part, I always thought that the rule was "new speaker, new paragraph", so I thought that if it was the same person speaking, it was the same paragraph.

Grammar

Just like with your dialogue, your grammar was surprisingly good. You showed a good grasp of paragraphing and correct spelling, and your punctuation was pretty much exactly where it needed to be. You did make a few mistakes, but they weren’t recurring, and that’s the important part. I won’t go through and point out ever mistake, considering this grade is already longer than your story (>_>) but here are three of the worst offenders.



It’s spelt “talons”. Only one “l”.



That should be “Flying-type’s”. Without that apostrophe, it sounds like whatever you’re laughing at has multiple types, all of which are Flying.



Only one dash is needed, not two.

I shouldn't of let those mistakes slip by me, I just skimmed over it once real quick when I was finished. Thank you for pointing those out.

Detail

Your detail and descriptions were easily the most lacking part of your story, and something you need to work on. Like I said before, you should always assume that the person doesn’t know anything about Pokemon so that you do a good job of describing their attacks and their appearance and so on. I already talked about how you didn’t describe your character, but you also didn’t really describe the city or even the nurse. We can’t assume it’s one of the Nurse Joys, and even if we could, we don’t know anything about Pokemon, so we still don’t know what she looks like. Furthermore, just quickly – if something is “fried to a crisp” it’s probably dead, unless you’re invoking the Rule of Funny cartoon-style. Which your story didn’t.

It’s not all bad news regarding descriptions, though. The quote below was quite beautiful. You have the skills to write well, you just need to bring them out.



Your details and explanations of the Pokemon and their abilities were mostly alright too – if a bit rare – and there was only one glaring problem I found:



Bidoof are herbivores, meaning they don’t eat meat, which means that ravenous Bidoof wouldn’t pose any more of a threat than satiated Bidoof. If you really wanted to give them a reason to be dangerous, say the Starly was intruding in their territory, or even better, change the Pokemon to like a Poochyena or something.

Yeah, my descriptions are my biggest weak point in my writing, no doubt there. Thats something I definitely have to improve on. And with the Bidoof being herbivores... oops. Haha, I honestly had no idea and I picked Bidoof because they appear on the same routes as Starly.

Length

Quick note: there are plenty of online tools that can help you with writing, and pretty much all of them include a character counting function. This is what I use to check character counts – it’s simple and easy. Just bookmark it in your web browser or something.

Anyway, your story itself has 6,739 characters, and the amount required for a Starly (being a Simple rank Pokemon) is between 5,000 and 10,000, so you’re good here. You could have included a little bit more though – the extra descriptions and the hole I mentioned about your characters lying would have filled this up nicely. However, you’ve done the minimum required, and that’s pretty much all I ask for this section.

Thanks for that link, thats really useful.

Climax

This is the hardest part of a story to get right, even harder than dialogue. It’s all about the flow of the story, and making sure that the climax – the tensest, most exciting point – is right where it should be, at (or damn close to) the end. You did pretty well here. The battle with the Staraptor was quite tense and enjoyable, but for a bit after that I was worried. Worried that you’d just jammed some rubbish onto the end to reach the length requirement. However, the final ending, the part where Starly goes into the PokeBall? That’s suitably climactic. I especially liked the simplicity with which you ended your story.

However, my issue is that it’s not nearly as thrilling and tense as the Staraptor battle. Like I said, a story should have good flow – in my opinion, that’s the most important part. Your story starts, and flow quickens as he weakens the Starly. It builds up to its highest point during the Staraptor battle, and then ebbs back down as he recovers the Starly. You’re still fine up to here – stories should have both ebb and flow. A story that’s all up is usually very straining and hard to read. The problem is that the excitement drops for too long, and the momentary increase in tension given by the ending isn’t really enough to make up for it.

I guess what I’m trying to say is you did okay, but the most exciting part of the story should always be at or near the end, and while the ending is pretty exciting, it’s nowhere near as exciting as the earlier climax.

Understood, thank you for that. I will make sure I fix that next time.

Overall

Overall, this story was fair. It wasn’t great, but it certainly wasn’t rubbish. I enjoyed it, and everything required for a Simple Pokemon is here – plot, characterisation, good grammar, a reasonable flow. Next time you need to remember to describe your characters and surroundings a bit more, and your plot will need to be more interesting and complex, but for now:

Starly Captured!

You can now add this Pokemon to your stats and battle with it. Don’t forget to note down that you obtained it by writing this story – you have to note exactly where you got each of your Pokemon. Oh, and you should evolve it by battling my Burmy ;)

Thanks broseph! I was kind of hoping that the grader would finish off the end of the story with either the Pokemon breaking out of the ball or the ball being sealed, haha. And sounds like a plan, your Burmy doesn't stand a chance ;)