Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25941663-20180803171503/@comment-25941663-20180804135105

"the only thing blocking us from going out of it was a iron door" - The 'going out of it' is a bit awkward. I suggest you use something else, like 'leaving' or 'escaping'.

There are some typos here, like this: "The metal doors to outside opened". A 'the' is missing before 'outside'. I suggest you comb through your text at least a couple of times to make sure there are no such typos. This is especially important for shorter stories, where each word holds more wait and typos stand out more.

Towards the end, you use "into the woods" in quick succession. Repetition like this is generally bad, but in short stories it looks even more jarring. You should avoid these as much as you can, since they can break immersion.

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The main issue from the story, plotwise, is that it doesn't have much going for it. Usually, short stories throw in a punch that has a weight of its own, like a twist or a reveal, or something that stands out on its own as creepy (like the mother story, where a daughter hears her mother call her from another room, but then the mother says "Don't go, it's not me").

I'm afraid this doesn't have that. More than anything, it reads like a plot of a normal-sized story condensed to a short one. This plot needs build-up, suspense and a proper fleshing out of the characters. This cannot happen easily in a short story, unfortunately.

I think this is quite a big problem (taking a plot that needs a long text to back it up and writing a short tale out of it). I am not sure if this can be fixed so as to be put on the wiki, sorry.

This definitely shows you have potential though, so I suggest you just let this story go and move on to something different. Or, you can take this plot and properly flesh it out. That would require though a lot of time, and I am not sure it would result in a good story. The best course of action, for me, is to move on to something else. These experiences are invaluable and important to new writers.

Keep practising and writing, and I am sure you will reach a point of producing consistently quality work.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!