Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25193000-20141007032712/@comment-24077689-20141007194649

This story does not start on a terribly good note. It’s boring. Nothing terribly wrong with the grammar or spelling, but it just doesn’t jump, she’s pretty and smart and rich. She owns dogs. She’s obsessed with the number seven.

Enter unwarranted uneasy feeling, stage left.

There are some little things, “stomachache” is one word, read this out loud, some unnecessary punctuation, for example, “It took a long while, before she fell asleep.” There’s no need for that comma, it should simply read “It took a long while before she fell asleep”. Just read this aloud to yourself and you’ll be able to catch some of those strange beats.

What is the bad feeling? Is it nagging? Is it nauseating? This all goes back to the “boring” description. If you want to set up relatable characters don’t just tell us that her daddy’s rich and her mama’s good lookin’, think about the beginning of the film The Exorcist, in the first half hour of the movie they set up an excellent structure for their characters. Right now you’re telling us that the mother and daughter have a good relationship and they do things together. That really isn’t that great. You have to sell it. Instead of “they immediately spent time together”, try throwing some dialogue at us, they telling us what they’re doing together. As of right now, I don’t give a shit about either of these characters.

Check your punctuation. “…down AN abandoned alley…”, “…looked like no one else, besides her, was there.” Little things here and there that will greatly improve the flow of the story.



How is the music dark? Somehow? Boring. What did Bradbury do in Something Wicked This Way Comes? He described how the calliope music was dark. He gave us a cerebral explanation for why it was uneasy and why it was dark

Dear Christ. Stop using ellipses. These aren’t even ellipses, you’re just using 2 periods instead of three. This isn’t an automatic suspense builder.

Yeah, the rotten and desaturated carnival, that’s not cliché.

Heard a laughter? Just a single laughter? Are you sure?

She started coughing again? When did she start coughing in the first place?

Basically you described Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Here’s a tip for when you think you’re going to write a story about a sinister, killer clown: DON’T.

What I said about the grammar, I was wrong. Proofread. Then proofread again. AND AGAIN AND AGAIN.

So it’s a killer clown that is a dream/nightmare entity and needs belief and a cycle to survive? This is like a bad version of Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

Read this out loud. I’m serious. You’ll hear yourself saying shit like “she started craving for food” and you’ll cringe. The mother doesn’t find any of this strange? That her daughter is suddenly visibly pregnant? What? Are you serious with this?

Oh yeah, that dad is a drinker so it raises no alarms when he goes missing. Ugh.

OF COURSE SHE HAS A TRAGIC BACK STORY INVOLVING CLOWNS HOW SILLY OF ME, I THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO LET ME DOWN FOR A MINUTE.

<p class="MsoNormal">Wait, I thought she had seven dogs, not six. The significance of the number 7 just kind of went away.

<p class="MsoNormal">I really wish I could say something along the lines of “great job, I loved it”. Nothing about this story is haunting; nothing about the characters is very good. It’s hackneyed, it’s trite, your treatment of the alien pregnancy trope is juvenile at best. You say you’ll edit this a lot, if needed; you need to. Better yet, scrap this one and try again with something else. The entire concept is blah, at best. There’s little to no character development, the progression of the story is lumbering, I can’t even call this an homage piece, it’s like you just directly ripped off pieces of other stories and tried to patch them together into some kind of grotesque quilt. This was honestly hard to get completely through, it at its best was comical, at its worst purely cringe-worthy. Keep on practicing, you’ll get better. Go to the writer’s advice blogs and read everything written by myself, imgonnabethatguy, and all the others, following that advice and the style guide will help you improve immensely.