Death and Rebirth -- an exercise in first-person

[Sailerius]

A bit of a writing exercise that I did, since I've never really touched first person.

Spoiler: Chapter 1

I died once.

That’s how most stories end, but in my case, that’s how it began. The truth is, I’m a killer. I think part of you has to die inside before you can take someone’s life away.
Taking into account the fact that I died altogether on that cold October night, it’s only fitting that I’ve killed more people than I could ever dare to count. But before I get there, I should start with East Naven, the world I wanted to throw away.
I want you to see it through my eyes so you can understand why I made the choice I did.

Chapter 1: The Fence

There had been a murder the night before. Since it happened not far from the main building, school was canceled the next day.
I say that casually now, but you have to understand that the whole town was shaken up. East Naven’s the kind of town where any news is big news. This was the biggest news since the serial arsonist from the year before.

That’s the kind of town I grew up in. I guess it sounds kind of morbid saying this, but a nameless something inside me always came to life when that sort of thing happened. It was like a relic from the real world was breaching the imaginary bubble of fairy tale harmony that encircled East Naven.

I know I shouldn’t complain; after all, my mom made enough money for us to live comfortably and we lived in a relatively safe neighborhood. But it was all too perfect. I yearned to see something upset that quaint sort of clockwork happiness. I wanted to see a rock thrown in the lake, to see something outside the norm ripple across the surface.

I found myself leaning against a familiar wooden fence, the only barrier between myself and the cliff that served as the effective border of the town.

As exhilarating as it felt to imagine, it was hard to envision that in only two years, I would be standing against another fence in another town, writing under another tree in another park, studying under another roof in another school.

“Hey, Auria, what’s a week from tomorrow?â€

 

[serrated_colon]

You know, this actually has a lot of potential. A broad, thought out concept leading to a deep developement is the impression I got from this text. I did around the same kind of thing 2 years ago, though I ended up hating my work because it was pretty badly written. Though the actual plot is decent so far, you execution is lacking for a few simple and understandable mistakes.

First off, your writing style is pretty long-winded to the point of being sort of pretentious. Yeah, your teacher at school says USE DIFFERENT WORDS INSTEAD OF JUST SAID AND THEN SHOVE IN AN ADVERB but this is the wrong way of going about it. You can just use "said" and then instead of using an adverb, making you sound pretentious, rather take that adverb you were going to use and describe it, elaborate on it. I'll give you an example:

“Worse. Dad’s cooking,â€