Newbelist For some reason I liked this one a lot, unique and has a flavor of gladiators, started off with a modern world where the male protagonist was just that depressed dude who didn't care for the world yet had filial pity to his mother. What makes confused is that the mother, I am a 100% sure she knew he was going to the future (People from his time were called ancients, from my guess we can conclude the world was either invaded by foreign monsters and that led to humanity survival which also returned the empire system within the world)

Summary (Spoiler)

  • Modern-day > Future
  • Normal life > Life With System
  • Depressed protagonist
  • Smart Protagonist
  • System Novel
  • 1.4-1.5k words
  • Smooth entry to the novel
  • Little mistakes found in chapter 1 and 2 but it is readable

Let us start with the mistakes on the first chapter, this will be something new that I will be doing in the future but it will be a more viable proof to the mistakes I have seen and how to fix it If i was in your place:-

Your writing:
"Alexander, are you awake? If you are, then prepare your things for the camp. And after that, come downstairs and eat breakfast," a shout from below broke through his headphones, despite the volume being max.

My Writing:
"Alexader, wake up!" A shout came from below, passing through his headphones "If you are awake then prepare yourself and your luggage for the upcoming camp !"

Simple, clean and much more readable than a clump of information all at once. Probably the most common mistake I have seen in this novel (the 2 chapters) is this. Do not edit it out but fix it on the third chapter, also no idioms, advanced English phrases which will express the emotions of the male protagonist for example:

Your writing:
With his vision blurry, he wasn't able to move around much. He blinked a few times and then his red eyes looked around, scanned the surroundings and let out a sigh of relief.

My Writing:
While his vision was blurry and he was grief-stricken, he was Ambivalent about everything around him. Blinking a few times while looking around the surrounding, after a brief moment he let out a sigh of relief.

This will need some work but the more you write, the more you learn which is a great thing. Good luck with the rest of the novel, it has been a great read so far :).

      Kulha No worries, I am actually planning to catch up to chapter 40 tonight, hate it when I get addicted to reading sometimes. It is a great novel and I love it so far, do not think too much about my review as I am barely considered worthy of reviewing anything other than academic papers.

        Sorahana ... Ok let us begin with the biggest mistake of all~ Universal mistake, Text-wall of information! Where is the nice chapter 1? We needed a formal introduction to the story where point 1 will be developed on point 0 (introduction) and ends at 1 (Chapter 1) long. We are talking about a clean yet simplified amazing start to any novel, the first chapter plays the crucial role in the foundational structure of the novel. Let us discuss the summary first and then we can begin with the other mistakes

        Summary spoiler

        • 2 people of the same coin
        • Useless side and a genius side
        • Medieval era
        • Rivals already appeared?
        • Usage of first and third person view smartly
        • Jun family being targeted by more than 1 enemy
        • Female protagonist

        First we can discuss the common mistakes which are the chapter titles (let us ignore the text wall part for a moment here and discuss why it titles gave a bad taste), "Imperial Party" [1]-[3]", "Test" [1]-[3], this keeps going and this stops me from reading, if your style is slow paced stories then this is perfect but from what I can understand we will be going through several wars in here and several action scenes, As an author can you handle that? It is very tough and this mistake will make you keep things longer than usual.

        Mistakes can be seen during the first chapters but from what I read later on everything got fixed, I applaud you for that as it made me happy finding someone improves on their mistakes. The only thing that holds you back is the lack of proper phrasing and words such as: "What's the use of it?" Lin San mock it a bit. [Chapter 3] that sounds bad, right? Improving can also be done on researching materials and wording that helps the author out produce a masterpiece, google scholar can help out and any site that can improve your phrasing too.

        Good luck with this amazing novel hopefully you can improve much more than now and become someone great later on!

            KCChakry Interesting stories, not my type of genre but I can point out some common mistakes, first is the Lines oh yes, chapter 1 that __________ even if you want to show a different scene that is a big no-no because I read with Font size 20 which makes the lines appear on 2 lines. To fix this I would recommend (Not now but the future novel you will write) to first make the character alive, a character that has his/her own voice and someone that can be easily identified without having to go through the first chapter first few paragraphs. summarizing is not my fort in this genre again, barely read this types before and I have 0 experience with it which leads me to go through the mistakes immediately!

            Your writing
            "Hey, Cousin." The guy with Buzz cut smiled at one of the guys, who gave him a curt nod.
            "Hey, this is my friend-" The 'Cousin' prepared to introduce but was cut off by his eager and excited friend.
            "Who cares? Tell me, what's going on here?" The 'Friend' asked, trying to look past the wall of students standing in the classroom. "Where is the guy who challenged Mrs. Abernathy?"

            No need to 'identify' cousin and 'friend' more than three times, it gets a bit annoying (Refer to other translated novels, notice how characters are identified simply? Let me give you an example of what I mean:

            "Run my love! The monster is right behind us" The male ape said

            "Awa..aa he looks handsome! " While blushing, she stopped running with the male ape and turned around to face the monster before getting caught

            A naked 3 feet tall human full of muscles who was running after the couple apes caught up and caught the female ape tightly before he screamed with rage: "MACHO UNDERWEAR, GIVE BACK!"

            Here I created three things, Identified the enemy, created their personalities and made them look idiotic. On the other hand, we have the main protagonist, Macho, from reading that he is a muscle-head who is a strong yet stupid idiot.

            https://www.wikihow.com/Create-Good-Personalities-for-Your-Characters

            Also, there seems to be a problem of starting a new paragraph, not sure if this is a long-term issue with your novel but it can affect the total overall rating of the novel because it starts off as a mistake which will grow bigger in the long-run. Let us go back to the basics, when will it be good to start a new paragraph? How do we start it? where will the story end up after this paragraph? Common mistakes such as this are normal and the best way to become a well-known novel writer is to fix your own mistakes.

            Paragraph (When to begin and end)

            • Location (Point a to b)
            • Time (After a thousand years of cultivation)
            • Different Speech
            • A simple change of topic
            • introduction of something or someone new

            That was long, I apologize for this long reply :smile: as I said I never liked that genre but I can help out with the common stuff, hope it helped and good luck with your novel!

                DKQ Thank you for your reply, I'm glad to know my mistakes early on. I will check more wording and phrasing. English is not my first language, but I will try to make the grammar better. Your suggestion really helped, thank you very much! :)

                    DKQ Thanks for your time and the review. I took note of everything you mentioned, and I'll rectify them in the later chapters. Thanks again :)

                        @DKQ I'll be shameless now. I don't really know anyone here in this site, so I would really appreciate any help. You seem like a respectable master, would you please accept this awkward, introverted thing as your disciple?

                          TrueDawn You have mastered the way of introduction my friend! That was the best quote I have seen that has been used on introduction, I wish others will also learn on this type of writing. We have a bloody bodybuilding fanatic, this alone is a motivation form for the male protagonist. This implies that we will have tons of cultivation but that also mean many fights to come. The mistakes are minimal but the thing that caught my attention the most is the use of transitional phrases (A discussion of transition strategies and specific transitional phrases) we are talking about emphasizing on something, proving something, sequences and concluding. This issue relates mostly to those who fail to read out their writing (I had this issue before because English is my third language, I would read any phrase I type before posting it, might be bad to some but at least it is easier to read)

                          Your written words:
                          Surprisingly, he found out that the name of the past owner was also Shi Li. Shi Li was born in the Shi clan of the Verdant Breeze Town and he was the son of the Shi clan patriarch, Shi Xingwan.

                          My words if I wrote it:
                          Although this may be true, he found out that the name of the previous owner was Shi Li, notably Shi Li was born within the Shi Clan of the Verdant Breeze town. In other words, Shi Li was the son of the Shi Clan Patriarch, Shi Xingwan!

                          Transitional phrases may be used in various places in a text:

                          • between paragraphs
                          • between sentences
                          • between sentence parts
                          • within sentence parts

                          Hope this helped a bit with your work, I have read a bit and might continue reading it tomorrow as I have several novels to read tonight :) try to focus more on paragraph usage too but it is really insignificant at the moment while the phrasing is the only thing to improve. Good luck and keep up the good work!

                          Reference to Transitional phrase and word:
                          http://www.smart-words.org/linking-words/transition-words.html
                          https://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/Transitions.html

                              Scherazade Trust me, this is tough, I would love to and discord might be the last thing I do if this thread reaches 100+ posts. My favorite hobby is rating papers (in uni) where I can decide who fails and passes. If I feel like the essay of my fellow uni-mate is good, I give him a full grade while talking to him about his mistakes, sometimes I am bored enough to even take my Professor work and rate it alone.

                              Disciple Scherazade huehue sounds nice... help me out with rating if you are bored.

                                  TheAdventurer Remove that book cover first, this will undervalue your art! Let us move to the chapters good work on the volume part, having same titles with prolonged characters needs to be separated into volumes to keep it clean. I would recommend this way of titles and volumes compared to a previous review I have done on this thread. Mistakes I have seen repeated many times within most novels which I have most common here is the use of Clichee words! Not Clichee things that other novels does but words repeated within a paragraph, this repeated it self a few times but I would mention it here and try to fix this problem hopefully! Before we even begin with this, the story itself is great +Library, we got cultivation and modern world. Let us begin with the mistakes as no spoiler summary is needed for this :)

                                  What is a Cliché?

                                  A cliché is a word or phrase that has been overused in writing.

                                  Clichés such as “leave no stone unturned” have been used so much in writing that they have lost all their effectiveness. These phrases have become weak and meaningless. They usually contribute nothing to the message you are trying to convey and will be viewed, by the reader, simply as padding.

                                  Reference: https://www.skillsyouneed.com/write/cliches-to-avoid.html

                                  This should help you out with this mistakes, other mistakes such as the phrases and paragraph spacing can be seen from time to time but fixing it is very simple and it has been mentioned above. The use of adverbs in the first chapter was minimal which needs to be worked at such as: Kindly, slowly, here, often, and very.

                                  Reference to relate to adverbs: https://www.english-grammar-revolution.com/list-of-adverbs.html

                                  Good luck with your novel and keep up the good work!

                                      ZuluA#179154 I have been following your novel since the start! Loved it from how unique it was, somethings did annoy me though which is the numbers in the status system. It gets confusing in the long run where I had to re-read from chapter 1 again after a few days of not reading your novel. I might be inexperienced in novels but from the comment section itself, this seems to be a huge issue. To fix this we would need to go through v2.0 Idle system or v3.0 idle system which will permanently remove the idle speed and random 0/1 (a skill which suddenly became unimportant 4 chapters later). Here is a quote on how an Ideal system should be:

                                      DKQ Points to think about before writing a system novel:
                                      Instead of using numbers for attributes why not use letters? (Not everyone is good at math)
                                      Classes are the most important thing in games and systems.
                                      Never create a thousand skills and throw them, focus on one and evolve it
                                      Reputation plays a big part in any system, create a page for it
                                      Always simplify your Character status and do not make it 2 pages long
                                      Every attribute is important, think before you upgrade your character
                                      A level number is indeed important but how about changing it to [Normal 1, Rare 1, Epic 1... God 1...etc]

                                      sounds simple and tidy to authors and readers. The first and second chapter of the Idle System is also part of this confusing cycle where I dropped the novel at first then re-read it, later on, to understand it furthermore than I did before.

                                      Half a page for the status screen, that needs to be removed immediately! Do not ruin your novel for something inconvenience as being OP, there are many ways to do it. Grammar mistakes can be seen from time to time but it isn't that much which is why I would recommend the usage of Grammarly to fix that part.

                                      After talking about the major issues of the novel let us talk about the synopsis, it is vague which means no one will bother reading it because the title contains everything (The Idle System). How to fix this? Re-work on the synopsis and make it a bit mysteries, the goal is to attract the reader into the story with something much more fabulous and alluring. How to do that? simple, follow what the site I will mention tells you and avoid the common mistakes.

                                      Reference : http://www.writersdigest.com/editors-picks/learn-how-to-write-a-synopsis-like-a-pro

                                      Hopefully, you don't ruin this masterpiece that I have been reading and upgrade it from being epic to legendary in the future, good luck with your novel and keep up the good work!

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