Hi, you’ve submitted this piece with the critique function active, so I thought I might give you some critical food for thought.

Problem Areas

Character

Your characters are flat. Think of a character as a person. You even, think about how you yourself would translate into text. What traits would you add to this paper you? What would she look like? What does she hate? What are her mannerisms? How does she feel about herself and the people around her?
What makes you, you?

The only thing that can be garnered from the characters is the following.

She is a submissive bundle of nerves, sitting in a park at night with a guy that intimidates her and turns her on to the point where she’s inhaling his breath like a junkie inhales petrol and almost fainting. They have this paper between them that she seems to be avoiding like the bubonic plague until her orders her to touch it, and she instantly capitulates without much thought to the inner workings of her mind or who these people actually are and how they got here. There is no real character interaction, besides at the end and by subtle gestures throughout, so they only thing that can be made out of their relationship is that it’s destructive, passive/aggressive and he’s a bit of a prat.
It’s boring. I don’t mean to be insulting but pretty language, over zealous descriptions and lots of adjective don’t make a story interesting.
I suggest that you engage in some character building exercises.

A few good ones are:

Imagine an potato or other vegetable as a person and writer a characterisation for it, focusing on its inner conflicts, outer conflicts and its identity.

Sit in a public place and observe every detail about a person. Remember these details, and go home and write a short biography for that person.

Write a dossier for your characters. Interview them. Find out who they are and what makes them tick.

Expression

I’ve noticed with your writing, you tend to rely heavily on grandiose descriptions and lazy clichés. More words don’t make anything better. Repetition is actually your enemy unless used sparingly with a certain task in mind, and then, you have to execute it perfectly through carriage and writing. The more you describe things, the more you intrude to your readers thought process. We like direction, not dictation. You’re creating a situation, not ruling it with an iron fist. Think about the words you’re using, word choice is half of writing; what we read is the result of your capacity for expression and vocabulary.


Some Simple Construction Instructions

Think about what details are essential to the line.

Write them down.

Think about an operative image.

Integrate that into the essentials.

You have a basic web of sentence design you can now hone with word choice and positioning. Phrasing is a huge part of the carriage to your story, it dictates how we read and interpret the text. This is not an area in which you should be idle.

This also connects onto imagery. Your images are disjointed, forced and clichéd.

Think about how you would describe a tree. Think about every detail, every single little leaf and down to the rings inside the tree.

What details would you include in your description?

Why?

What details would better enforce and compliment the momentum of the story?

Are there any connecting images that you could use, subtle ones, that would propel the image from the page into the readers mind?

<b?Finally, I’d also like to say, read as much as you can, across many different authors and genres. Seek out a style guide to help you with your basic punctuation and grammar. And don’t emulate what you read in romance novels or Twilight.

<The In-Depth Part

So let’s go line by line and see what we can find. I understand you wrote this in seventy five seconds, but you’ve submitted it to an online community; from this, I am going to assume that you’ve gone over your piece and proof read it, making adjustments in the appropriate places.

Line 1

The square piece of paper lay between our knees as we sat cross-legged on the green grass beneath the even greener trees.

The Hook

The first line of a piece, especially as short as this, is known as the hook. That isn’t a metaphorical meaning, the hook it literally meant to spike into the reader and cast them into the story. There is nothing hooking about a piece of paper and grass that have more attributions than the physical bodies.

The only impression that a reader, or this reader, as I am being critical from my own standpoint garners, is that there is a square piece of paper between two people in a very green world. There is nothing intriguing about it, I don’t really want to find out who those legs belong to or how those knees are feeling, being tucked up. Your job as a writer is to communicate with your audience.

Okay, now we’ve gone over hooks, let’s go over
relevance and verbosity.

What relevant information is there in this line? A piece of paper is between two people who are sitting on the grass, under the cover of trees.

Line Reasoning

The squarepiece of paper lay between us our knees as we sat cross-legged on the green grass beneath theeven greener trees.

Now we have the bones of a sentence. Before, you were packing too much detail into what the grass looked like, using a tiresome repetition of the word and hue of green. Have you ever truly looked at grass? There are so many descriptors possible. Its textures, its feeling when you sit on it, its length, how it smells, if it has seeds. And you choose a colour, a general colour that everybody chooses when describing trees or grass. Of course there is no truly original idea but you have an opportunity as a writer to express an idea, an image, to try and achieve a sense of realism. Think about the most minimal way in which you can express your idea, then add a detail, a certain layer to the scene. Choose your words wisely and think about placement.

Basic eg. The piece of paper lay between us, as we sat cross legged in the long grass, beneath the canopy of leaves.



Line 2

"Turn it over." He said, his voice rough and anxious.

Okay, when writing dialogue and launching straight into an attribution like, he said, the common standard is not a period/full stop but a comma, inside the quotation marks.

“Turn it over,” he said, his voice rough and anxious.

Another thing about your attributions, think about the timbre of somebody who is speaking roughly and then think of somebody who is articulating themselves anxiously. There is no real correlation between pitch and timbre, so the conjunction is odd in itself, if not baseless. So now you have to make a decision on which one you want to go with. Which is true to the character? Again, you should also be thing about expression and if you’re using the minimum words for maximum effect. Is there a better word to replace these two words?

Line 3

We were the only people left in the park by then, completely alone in the darkening summer night.

This is reasonably okay in terms of expression, but you have over written the sentence. In first drafts and even second drafts, we often leave in auxiliary words that fit in with the sentence but don’t really do anything for it. You can do this at any stage of drafting really. You can identify these words by taking them out and the meaning being expressed hasn’t changed.

Eg. We were the only people left in the park, alone in the darkening summer night.

Or even,

Eg. We were alone, in the darkening summer night.

Or for the complete minimalist,

We were alone, in the darkening night.

There are obviously other variations where you can experiment with your sentence order. This would include phrasing, word usage and general sentence fluidity.

Line 4

Even then, i didn't feel comfortable revealing the secret overleaf; i could feel his eyes boring into me, though I couldn't see them.

Even then, suggests that we as an audience already have some kind of invested meaning in this relationship. You’ve not introduced as to the main characterisation mostly, to assume that there is a precedent for discomfort. I do understand where your expression is coming from, but in this instance, it’s just bumbling the sentence and does nothing for cohesion or development – which in short prose, are two of your well vested interests.
You’ve also left the personified “I” to be non capitalised. I know it’s big in the post-modern poetry circles but in prose, you have to capitalise those I’s baby. This is the first time you’ve done this and I can see that you have done it off and on through the entire piece. Just remember, try to proof your work on the basic level before posting It eliminates the need for critic correction on the basis of simple grammar.
I’m not sure why you’ve put a semi-colon in there, it kind of fits but that’s just due to lazy phrasing. You’re making the expression more complicated than it has to be. Think about word usage. I know that sometimes we get taken out by notions of verbosity and that the maximum amount of explanation is awesome etc, but it simply isn’t true. And I’ll show you why. (I am going to omit “even then,” as it is superfluous and does nothing really at all).

Nerves fluttered as I felt his eyes boring into me, watching, waiting for the secret to be revealed.

Notice in the original sentence you had a lot of tell tell, I feel,I feel kind of stuff happening. It’s all very dictating and boring. It’s great that your character is feeling these things (although not I suspect, for her) but you need to actually sell it to me.

Writing down a bunch of words into a generally formed sentence isn’t selling me an atmosphere and that’s what you need to do here. You’re consciously trying to create an atmosphere, to create feeling instead of telling the reader about it. It’s probably one of the finest lines that most writers tread, so don’t worry if you trip from time to time

In the edit (which, as with all my edits, are just example edits and by no means fantastic) it’s less dictating, only referring to her actual feelings once (nerves), followed by his action (his eyes) and finally followed the subject of the contention (the paper). It’s a very simple formula but with stories you really do need to develop a formula that works for you, your piece and your audience.
Another thing I need to ask, are his eyes penetrating her or the paper? She says its herself, but if his issue of curiousity is what’s on the paper and its dark, he won’t be able to see a reaction from her, so he’s better off looking at this blank sheet of paper. Just a thought.

Line 5

I could hear his breath, heavy, over the trickling of the stream at the end of the park and the purr of the wind through the foliage.

Again with the over written content. This is so detail heavy, I don’t know where to direct my images. Your wording is your director, imagine a movie and you’re doing all of these scene cuts and the audience is frustrated by your lack of fluidity/sense. When doing a thread of images, choose one operative images and construct a web of sub images around it, to further compliment it. Right now you’re just listing sensory perceptions like bullet points and hoping it gets across a feeling of something tangible.

His breath was heavy on the wind, as the faint trickling of water drifted through the foliage.

What I have done in this example is cut of the miscellaneous details, the directions so to speak that chopped and changed the scene. It’s essentially still the same scene, the same imagery but refined and crafted to suit the structure of imagery.

Line 6

My heart skipped a beat when i heard his voice again. It reminded me of chocolate mousse, deep, rich and creamy...sweet and delicious beyond compare. My will buckled upon hearing this, and he exhaled as i extended my right hand towards the page.

Again you have the uncapitalised “I” which you need to watch. It’s such a simple facet of writing that you shouldn’t be forgetting it. This is all very Twilight and swoony – the mousse it making the reader quite sick. I understand that this is infatuation and one is leaning toward the romantic teen notions of weak knees and verbosity, but the cliché of this is overwhelming. Not only that, but once again you are telling. You need to show you meaning through actions and atmosphere without spelling out everything for the audience.

My tongue tingled as he spoke, creamy with chocolate mousse, compelling me to turn over the page.

With this example, you still have the notions of infatuation, your chocolate descriptor and the main action of the sentence series. Brevity is not always awesome, but if a grouping works without certain words or images, it pretty much means that it can stand to lose them, if they are not further integrated into the structure.

Line 7

I paused and leaned forward

Why do you need to have both actions? Which one is the most important to story canon? Pick one, having both seriously just insulted the readers’ intelligence and again, dictates exactly what she’s doing. Create a general picture so that the reader can fill in the blanks with their imagination.

eyes closing with content

They can’t close with content, they can close with contentment but not content. They can even be contented. You could use content in the right context, but in its current sequence, it doesn’t fill that requisite.

drawing in towards his flawless breath, taking it in

More of the verbose infatuation. It just screams Bella/Edward tragic and despite the book sales, that’s not a good thing. There is no such thing as flawless breath. Breath is the result of microbes in your mouth. There can be pleasant breath, but flawless? Clap-trap. Aside from that, this also reeks of some odd sexual tendencies...breathing in your lovers breath? Eww. It may seem romantic, but the reality is not so much. I don’t often say this, especially in a critique, but if you’ve read Twilight, don’t try to emulate it. It’s just not good writing.

Line 8

He blew lightly on my face, and just short of passing out i looked up at him only to see that devious smirk make its way across his face, egging me on

Why would anyone blow lightly on someone else’s face? That’s not romantic, it’s just annoying. And it coaxes a hilarious image from the ethers into my head where this guy is leaning forward and blowing air onto a girls face, and she’s blinking and wincing. Also, why would you pass out from a guys breath? This isn’t realistic, this isn’t even Mills and Boon realistic. There are better ways to convey attraction than succumbing to the protagonist being physically overwhelmed by a person’s breath to the point where she passes out. She seems to be attracted to this controlling prat who smirks at her. And why is he smirking at her? A smirk isn’t something that would generally egg someone on, really, it would just infuriate you, wouldn’t it?

Line 9

"Go on." He urged, and with that his eyes sparkled like the stars above and i succumbed to the beautiful boy, finally placing my hand down on the sheet of paper

Again, your establishment and execution of dialogue needs work. This whole series of actions could be broken down into a constructed, concise sentence that encourages fluidity. Right now, it’s hampering your plot. Like most of the story, you’re relying heavily on clichés (which I’ve underlined in this instance). Your heroine is flat and vapid, if she gives in so easily based purely on physical aesthetics.

Eg. I leaned forward, closing my eyes for a moment before following his devious smirk across his face.

“Go on,” he urged, egging me on with a twinkle. I smiled at his handsome mouth and finally picked up the piece of paper.

The example still has the pertinent detail and imagery that you’ve conveyed, just changed by order of expression. It also cleans up the miscellaneous words and such, so this is what you should be aiming toward. Clean, spunky and flowing. I’ve cut down your description and dialogue attribution by more than half. This is what you have to do when you edit your pieces. Explore new ways in which you can express the message of the story.

Line 10

I picked it up and slowly turned it over, my heart beat so hard it made my hands shake in time with it

I know this isn’t mean to be satirical, but the comparison is really quite comedic. Your heart beat in time with your anxiety? Your heart beat is controlled by the pumping of blood and your nerves by chemicals that flood your system, so the comparison kind of sticks in the throat of reality and makes me laugh. This is a romantic moment, obviously, so you need to break away from cliché and explore some personalised original concepts. You’re a writer, you should be exercising your vocabulary at every chance you have. Right now, you’re accessing tried and boring clichés to get across this guy makes your character trip over herself. The phrasing is also quite awkward, and not in the way that it should be. I understand awkward language through characterisation but this doesn’t flow. It’s stilted by a jarring comparison.

I slowly turned it over, my heart beating in my hands as my eyes scanned the print, double checking until I was sure it wouldn’t disappear.

I’ve integrated both Line 10 and 11 into one example, to show what I mean about word choice, the power of vocabulary and effectiveness when writing. And also, to exemplify that you needn’t give up romantic notions while writing in this way, they can be explored through metaphors (as I’ve done above) and other writing devices.

Line 11

My eyes scanned over the print again and again, and eventually my eyes grew dry. I fought the urge to blink; surely it would disappear once i took my eyes off it

There is a shorter, more effective way of saying everything you’ve said here. This is fine as a first draft, but what you now need to do for this part and the whole piece, is to look for more effectives ways to write and deliver your message. The harder you make it, the more dissatisfied your audience is. You mention your eyes three times in the space of thirty two words; read it back to yourself, do you see how wandering and blithering it is? The repetition is a disaster as it says to the audience, I couldn’t think of a better way to put this or I just didn’t want to. There’s so much detail and action happening around her eye and all I could think was, who cares?

Line 12

A warm breeze that passed momentarily forced me to squint and eventually close my eyes altogether, momentarily

Again with the word repetition, especially with a word as noticeable as momentarily. You really do not need this much description for one action and one atmospheric and also, we are again focusing on your eyes. I as a reader, don’t care about what your eyes are doing unless it’s pertinent to the story. And it isn’t, these are auxiliary little details that can be worked into the sentence but shouldn’t be the subject of the sentence. Again, your phrasing is awkward through your chosen word order and expression, it feels awfully forced and caught up on diction.

I squinted against the breeze, closing my eyes as he took my hand, lacing our finger together.
“Read it,” he whispered gently, compelling me to obey. “Read it.”

Once again, in this example, I’ve integrated two lines (12 and 13) into one and played into the tension of the situation. There is tension there, but you had it so obscured under so many descriptors and directions, a reader couldn’t find it. If somebody orders another, it has to SEEM like an order. It has to feel legitimate to your audience. The original version was weakened by phrasing and structure, two aspects which you’ll have to work on in your future endeavours and your redraft

Line 13
He took my free hand in his and whispered "Read it." in his lustrous voice, and i mused at how he now was speaking only in orders before doing as i was told.

It’s obvious that he’s taking your free hand in his if he’s taking your hand at all, as his instructions would negate taking your commissioned hand. Also, the hero worship in this isn’t particularly healthy, this isn’t love, this is control. If you’re going to create a submissive character, make her less tiresome and annoying to the readership. Right now, she had no depth. And yes, you can create depth in a fragment of writing, you just have to develop your characterisation a little more You’re dialogue is incorrect again and the attribution is too much. Give us an impression of his voice if you must but don’t dictate. Just because it sounds pretty, doesn’t mean it works. (Also, don’t forget the capitalisation of the I’s).

Line 14

The words remained in place on the sheet of paper - "I love you.". The beautiful boy squeezed my hand gently, and i said, honestly, "I love you too.".

This is a half decent line wrapped up in bad phrasing and punctuation mistakes. I’m not sure if the first I love you is spoken or written on the paper, it’s unclear by the transition and indication.

If it’s dialogue, it should look like this:

The words remained in place, on the sheet of paper.

“I love you,” the beautiful boy squeezed my hand gently.

Or if it’s written on the paper, it should look like this:

The words remained in place on the sheet of paper, I love you.

There is no reason you should be using a dash to separate the words. You need to make which one of those options it is and proceed from there. There is also again, a lot of description in this sentence, over blowing a subtle and romantic moment. The phrasing after the first I love you proceeds down the same awkward track as the rest of the piece, although the language is much simpler which gives it a better edge.

They hadn’t disappeared, the words remained there heated and honest, I love you. He squeezed my hand gently as I swallowed a thought and said, “I love you too.”

This example assumes that the words are appearing on the piece of paper, not in dialogue. The reasoning for this, pretty much follows the reasoning of previous examples, in terms of expression, word choice and execution.

The Conclusion

As a conclusion, it wasn’t thrilling. It didn’t seem to have any point other than to proclaim love in a roundabout way. There isn’t much really known about either character by the end besides the archetypes they fit into and the standard of their relationship. It was really a conclusion of nothing, in a story almost as equally about nothing.

Your story needs to develop a plot, right now, it's just existing on a thread of wayward romance. What's the point of their meeting? Why is he expressing his love in such a juvenile manner? Why does she let herself be so overawed and controlled by this man? How did they come to be here? How did they come to be together? What do they people around them think?

Question like this, will help you develop your story line.

Well, I hope this has been of some help.

Good luck and happy writing