Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26113663-20150123095702/@comment-24686384-20150126041542

Whitix wrote: The potential for a story is there, but the execution is sorely lacking. Your grammar is noticeably shoddy; I'd run this through word to catch most of the errors.

First off, you need to give the robots some description. I believed them to be self replicating nanobots of the sort but then realized that they were apparently humanoid. Give the reader something to work with in their mind.

In fact, the whole story is lacking description. This whole thing is a loose string of events without any real element to keep the reader engaged. I don't care about these random reporters (whose dialogue is rather poor by the way), not do I think there news casts really add anything to the story. I'd scrap these in favor of going into more detail about mankinds collapse. Also, the narrators personal connection with these people has no effect because I have no reason to care about any of them. You introduce them and then bump them off; this doesn't let readers for many emotional attachment and as such, the attempts to add tragic backstory are rather lame.

There's nothing scary or creepy in this story. Your only attempted scares involve the use of pointless gore and dismemberment; these fall completely flat without some larger threat or reason for being there. You need to provide better tension as your building up the backstory without straight up telling the reader the robots are evil. '''Also, why do the robots consume humans? That makes no sense unless they are powered by biofuel or something, in which case you would need to explain that. ''' I agree, robots don't necessarily 'eat' people just because their hungry, because that makes no sense, a robot doesn't have the emotion to feel hunger for food (maybe fuel), nor does it have a proper digestive system to actually 'consume' a person or any type of food. If you were talking about a cyborg, then that might make things clearer. I was rather confused when I found out you had essentially written two stories: one on mankinds collapse and another on some random survivor guy. You either need to make it more clear who is speaking or separate these stories entirely. I'd recommend the latter; the first part of the story has much more potential and is more interesting than the second half.

The second half is where this story really falters and the lack of detail really hinders it. There's no easy flow in the writing: the protagonist does this and this and this... You need to slow down when you get to action so the story has a coherent plot. I can't say that this part was particularly interesting either; it would very much benefit from deacriptions.

All in all, the story has potential, but needs a heavy rework to be accepted on this site.