Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-44713211-20191224011855/@comment-28266772-20200102165426

Hi Creepyfranky, congratulations on writing your first story. It's a big achievement for anyone. Unfortunately, it's common for early attempts at writing to have the same few common mistakes. You have a lot of these mistakes here and that means your story isn't a good fit for this site, and that you have a fair amount of progress to make before you'll be able to write stories that meet our [https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Creepypasta_Wiki:Quality_Standards Quality Standards. ]

Moving forward there are a few things you're going to want to do. First of all, you're going to want to read the advice pages here, here and here.

Second, you're going to need to practice descriptive writing. Before you worry about plot or anything else, you need to be able to use words to make your reader feel what you'd like them to feel. That's how you give a story atmosphere, and it's how you make it scary.

Descriptive words and passages will often focus on how characters feel, as well as what they see, hear, touch, smell, and can taste. For example, instead of saying:

The toy started making strange and scary noises that sounded like screaming.

You can let us know about how that screaming made people feel in specific ways. Did it make them feel ill? Nauseous? Dizzy? Disgusted? Terrified? Try to be more specific than "It was scary". There are lots of different ways to be scary. Seeing a spider crawl up your arm will feel quite differently to being told your mother has cancer, or seeing a truck driving towards you on the wrong side of the road.

Another way to be descriptive is to tell us how the scream sounds. Does it sound like something we know? Like an animal? A cat or fox perhaps? Or is it something else entirely, like the sound of a loud industrial drill, or the noise nails on a chalkboard make? Is it deep like a gunshot's echo? Like high pitched like a pig's a squeal? Or is it loud like a person shouting? Or is it quiet like a scratchy whisper?

And finally, you should start revisiting stories that you have enjoyed in the past. Re-read them and look out for sentences or passages that you really enjoy. Stop once you reach them and look carefully at what words the author used. Feel free to borrow words or even phrases from these sections and always feel free to experiment by mixing and matching them from different books and authors.

Over time you'll learn that there are lots of different ways to use words and it's really important you start this step early and work hard on practicing description. Writing can be very hard, but if you put the time and practice in you'll see yourself grow and it can be very rewarding. I hope we see more from you in the future, don't give up.