Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-33904527-20190105174210/@comment-33904527-20190106191429

BloodySpghetti wrote: Well for the first half of the story, I didn't have an issue with this... for the most part.

Avoid the weird formating or the CAPITALIZATION OF WHOLE WORDS whenever you're trying to describe emotion or the voices. Just use italic font and a lot of punctuation. Short sentences. "You didn't listen to us, Eddy. Now we're going to ruin you! You can't avoid us! There is no hope. Not for you!" Something like that, it just looks more serious.

And the other thing that bothered me through this whole story is how whatever Eddy has is boiled down to him having a very weird psychotic episode from the stand point of symptoms. His train of thought seems completely straight, which isn't exactly how it works with hallucinating, you can't think straight and then you hallucinate. In the case of Schizophrenia, during an episode his speech should be random and weird.

Also, again people with Schizophrenia who experience hallucinations and dellusions who get medical help are taught how to recognize and how to deal with a situation when they're having an episode. I'm going to assume the same applies to Schizotypal Personality Disorder or any other condition that includes episodes of Psychosis that aren't dementia.

So yeah, work on the weird formating, ditch it, me thinks and try to make whatever Eddy has more grounded. I've made some edits. Let me give you a summary:

1: Eddy's dialogue is now much more broken and split apart, both during his encounters with the fake Charlie and the real Charlie. This is, like you said, to help make Eddy's condition more grounded.

2: The capitalisation of entire sentences is gone, replaced with italics, as you suggested.

3: The dialogue of the "monsters" Eddy envisions has been changed, as to make them seem more threatening.

Please try reading the story again and telling me is these edits made any difference!