Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-32864316-20170815172509/@comment-24101790-20170815184740

Capitalization: "know; What (what) if I already had these dreams before the accident?", ""It will be morning soon, there is not much time." Said (said) the cat", "On the paper there was a piece of text; My mother had written that she would be back early in the afternoon so we could have dinner together and maybe watch a movie.", etc. Additionally ellipses that are used to signify a pause in a sentence should not be capitalized unless it's a completely new sentence or proper noun. "Reliving a moment… Yeah (yeah), that is indeed", "nice… But (but) sadly my mother hoped to bring back some good memories with it, but that did not happen.", "If so, then… Why (why)?", "I know it is not good to drink coffee at night time, but… I… Can better stay awake", etc.

Punctuation: There are a number of sentences missing proper commas “But Doctor(comma missing) it is real", "When looking over I saw a piece of paper lying on the coffee table.", "Why the hell would I believe anything you say?" The man stood up, he was a lot taller than I thought he would have been. "Because I am the only one that can save you and get rid of these nightmares, do you hear me you brat?!", etc. You also mis-use periods in dialogue that should be commas. ""It will be morning soon, there is not much time." Said the cat" A period is only used at the end of dialogue if it's the end of the sentence and there's no dialogue tag following it.

Punctuation issues cont.: You tend to excessively use ellipses in your story. Ellipses need to be used sparingly to be effective. To give an example of this, your story is about three pages long. In those three pages, you use ellipses for dramatic pause over fifty times. At a certain point, it dilutes the effectiveness of the pause and makes the text seem melodramatic.

Redundancies: You have a tendency to re-state and re-use words in a manner that comes off as repetitive. "The darkness scared me, but the thing waiting for me in the darkness would be even scarier.", "I was scared. Scared of the dark… Scared for what the things that saw me in the dark… Scared to be alone…", "When it jumped I could feel the ground shake and I almost fell to the ground.", etc.

Awkward wording: "I came in the room of my parents where I met a the cold air blowing though the room", "I got in a car accident and after that my dreams kept hunting me", "A feel of relief rushed over me and I realized I had been holding my breath for far too long.", etc. I would suggest reading the story aloud to yourself. A general rule of thumb is that areas where you stumble when reading it are typically places that need revision.

Wording issues: “It was is (keep it in past tense) in my room", ""There has to be an (a) way!", "Nothing weird at al (all)", "I stepped out of bed and started looking for were (where) the voice came from.", ""Monthy (Monty) … come to me…"", "I changed into my pyjama and noticed a strange man sitting on the end of my bed.", "I was dumbfound, there was no way, no way that this was reality.", "It’s (its) face started to run, like it was made out of wax." etc. There are a lot of other issues here that need revision and review.

Story issues: Your dialogue needs to be spaced out so two speakers are never on the same paragraph. This is done to improve story flow, prevent misattribution, and is pretty common in all forms of literature. ""Why the hell would I believe anything you say?" The man stood up, he was a lot taller than I thought he would have been. "Because I am the only one that can save you and get rid of these nightmares, do you hear me you brat?!" I turned around and opened the door that led to the balcony. "Hey, what are you doing?" "I am going to fly.""

Story issues cont.: A lot of your story feels like you're telling the audience rather than showing them what is happening. Lines like: "I felt a bit depressed, the thought of never being able to dream normally was making me feel so sad. It hurts…" really feel less effective when you're telling the audience the protagonist is sad rather than showing them.

Story issues cont.: The final act feels extremely rushed as well. It comes off as an information dump to hear this towards the end ""My name is Deron, I am a Dream reaper. To be exact, your Dream reaper. My species lives of feeding of human dreams to survive and each of us is bonded to a human by their souls to do so" and the fact that the story ends shortly after that with the protagonist dying doesn't really help much. It makes it seem like this information was shoe-horned at the end of the story to give it a conclusion, but it doesn't feel like it has much impact on the plot itself.

Story issues cont.: Additionally it feels a bit odd that a majority of this story is told in epistolary form, but the protagonist dies at the end. ("He ran towards me trying to save me but it was too late, I lend backwards and my feet had left the balcony. I felt like I could fly, but in harsh reality my body touched the cold ground and my vision became black. "Police have found the body of the 18 year old Monthy (Monty?) Davis in the backyard of his adoption (sic) parents.") How exactly does he write those last lines if those are his final moments? It creates a bit of a plot hole. I'm sorry, but this is going to need quite a lot of revision and re-working to be up to our quality standards as currently it has quite a lot of mechanical and plot issues.