Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-30307610-20170828150610/@comment-29652084-20170901025403

I'm going to go ahead and do this paragraph by paragraph, but this iteration is better. I'll point out what went right before digging into the rest.

First, the ending; since that was the part that had the most trouble. With one addition to the first line ("When the waiter brought our food"), you made it significantly clearer and much easier to infer. See what I'm getting at yet? Subtlety is key. Dropping the small hints without letting it loose makes it a hell of a lot better than not giving us anything at all.

The redundancy is reduced some, which is good. Now, onto the rest of it:

"See I grew up on a farm. We didn’t raise animals or anything just grew some vegetables. With only me and my mom, we pretty much grew enough to sustain ourselves and a little extra for trade. But we always had dogs. I loved those dogs. If people couldn’t take care of them or they were moving somewhere they couldn’t take them, they always ended up at our house."

I'm starting here since the first paragraph is mainly introductory. I'm going to first embolden one of the things I pointed to previously, that makes the whole 'infer they were starving' thing a fairly moot point. Your story directly tells us that they grow the minimum for what they need - that they are not in that bad of a shape.

Now, for the paragraph itself. It would fit far better and improve the flow if it were edited into the next (2) paragraph(s). To give an example, something like this:

"I ordered a bison steak, my mother ordered a salmon salad, and we got some wine. We started reminiscing about life on the farm. We didn’t raise animals or anything; we just grew some vegetables. With only me and my mom, we pretty much grew enough to sustain ourselves and a little extra for trade.

But we always had dogs - anywhere from five to twenty dogs at a time. I loved those dogs. If people couldn’t take care of them or they were moving somewhere they couldn’t take them, they always ended up at our house. People occasionally stopped by and adopted some of the dogs, but most ended up running away."

Now:

"I ordered a bison steak, my mother ordered a salmon salad, and we got some wine. We started reminiscing about life on the farm. We had anywhere from five to twenty dogs at a time. People occasionally stopped by and adopted some of the dogs, but most ended up running away."

There's a reason this area is bolded. Start a new paragraph when you switch subjects. They started reminiscing about life on the farm, then the narrator goes to dogs.

"When my mom took our excess harvest for trade, she would always try and get bacon for our breakfasts and, if it was a special occasion, she would get steaks. This is what I always had for my birthday. One day, however, she came home with something new: bison. I was instantly in love with it. I still don’t know why. It was a little gamey, but so tender and juicy.

Alright, I've made some corrections grammar-wise here. But my primary thing to point out is in the next paragraph:

"I asked my mom if we could have bison for my birthday from then on instead of steaks. I remember her looking a bit worried, maybe it was harder for her to get, we didn't have the best harvest that year and someone might have charged her more, but she just smiled and said, “Sure honey.”"

Here's what I'm getting at when I mention the whole 'avoidable plot' thing. Every birthday, the narrator has steaks. You might not have had the best harvest that year, but as I pointed out above, the paragraph implies that they mostly get the minimum needed to sustain themselves. She could have said 'no'. In fact, roughly, her reasoning for killing the dogs is negated from that line by itself. She could have even given an explanation as to why it could not have been steak.

Once more, it makes the plot avoidable. This is what I've been trying to get at: children are not stupid. They tend to notice bad situations from context clues: they stop getting toys because their parents have no money, they aren't eating as much as they used to. There's a change in diet (even on special occasions) due to the fact that their parents can't afford what they usually get. If the mother is in a bad position, especially considering that the son is probably helping on the farm, he'll know about it.

Now, if you improve more on it, then I'll gladly review it again. But what I'm not going to do is continue debating criticism with you; especially because with the way you were going at a certain admin who pointed out the same issues and the near back-and-forth in this thread, I was almost certain you'd make a response to this and considered abstaining from making another review.

Because all the people who are pointing out these things clearly don't understand the plot, and you're just correcting the record, right? Do so in the story. Because if it's that great, it should more than be able to stand on its own and prove the critics wrong by itself.