One of the biggest issues that I've noticed is your dialogue. Every time the MC talks, it's more like he's just ranting at the person. Almost all the dialogue is multi-paragraph of text in quotation marks. I don't know about you, but I don't find it natural about talking that long to someone without them speaking The beginning of the story suffered from 'telling' instead of 'showing'. I get that you needed to quickly go through the beginning of the story, but adding some dialogue between time skips may have made it not seem as just a summary of what's happening. With that criticism out of the way, keep up with the good work. We could always use some more Harry Potter stories with the pragmatic MC.
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Yeah, even I realise that I'm a bit weak at dialogue. When there are long speeches, they usually are rants or arguments. Didn't really want to try to insert interruptions or one question/point at a time to their answer. I thought it would be a bit too robotic or fake. When I rant/argue at someone, I do my best to get my point out uninterrupted, not let them hijack me and ruin my momentum or stop me from saying what I think. I will try to fix this however or at least make it more believable/explain the situation. Thanks for the review.
If you still want to keep the blocks of text where he's speaking, I would suggest at least using new quotations for each paragraph. Especially when you have a new line separating two paragraphs of dialogue, it's hard to follow.
I thought about this, but using new quotations for each paragraph usually indicates a separate/another person talking. I separate the paragraphs in a long speech so it is not a wall of text and easier to read.
Well, there's your problem. I would suggest reading more about how to write dialogue and work on it if you want to make your story better. There's a reason you don't see other people write mutliple paragraphs of dialogue in popular novels.
Just googled it, learnt something new. Multi-Paragraph Dialogue: When quoting several paragraphs of dialogue that aren't interrupted by the author or another speaker, put an opening quotation mark at the beginning of each paragraph and just one closing quotation mark at the end of the last paragraph. Maci explained what happened. "We were afraid that our cat, Jet, had escaped because the front door had been left open. We went up and down the street calling his name and asking people if they had seen a small black cat. "When it got dark, we went home. Jessie sat down on the couch and felt a lump under the blanket. She lifted up the edge of the blanket, and there was Jet, sound asleep."
Wow, me too. I don't see that often, but I didn't realize people had standard practice for it.
