Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-32461413-20170716232641/@comment-32461413-20170728150558

ChristianWallis wrote: You know what they say? When you're a child, your parents tell you that you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up. We've all been through this before; as children we want to be the next NFL quarterback, or the next Brad Pitt [rule of three means this sentence feels odd]. However, as we are conditioned through school, all those hopes and aspirations simply dissolve away into nothingness like a sugar cube in a cup of lemon tea. The young youthful [young youthful -> redundant] energy and motivation [energy and motivation -> redundant] is farmed by corporate business [passive phrasing]  essentially turning society [singular] into nothing but puppets [Plural – the transition from society to puppets involves a disagreement between singular/plural nouns.] with their strings played by “lucky one's [ones]” who were able to get ahead due to their fat father's wallet raising their status in society. [this whole line needs to be butchered down to a better length] How do you go from dreaming of being on top of the world to working your ass off for a degree in accounting?

In school, I was never the best student. I was always considered more intelligent than my peers, but my pure apathy always took over. I remember my parent's [parents’] concerned faces when confronted by my seemingly 500 pound math teacher during student conferences. His jowels [jowls but there may be some UK/US regional spelling involved so double check if I’m right] flapping uncontrollably as his plump lips spewed out the words [comma] 

[ALWAYS new line when a new speaker.] “you're [Your] son has potential, he just doesn't use it.” I never tried in school. What was the point? My parents first met during graduation as one was the valedictorian and the other was the salutatorian. Where did they end up? Working some mundane, life sucking [life-sucking] office job. I knew no matter what I would end up doing something I didn't care about, just like them. Sure I could have developed some amazing talent to bring me to stardom, but why bother? You're discouraged from following your passions anyways once you figure out that 99% fall short of actually going through with them '[you should be a little clearer – what does ‘them’ refer to here? Those who fall short? Or the passions the they don’t follow? Even a moment of deliberation on behalf of the reader during ambiguous phrasing will hurt the flow and inhibit the impact of your writing]'.

1989 rolled around. [This comes out of the blue, you ought to bring any reference to the time period up a little earlier] As I headed out of my putrid hell of school with my diploma in my grubby hand '[As what? This sentence starts “As I…” but that conjunction is never resolved]'. I was set. Set to do absolutely nothing with my life that is. While the masses skewed [<-this does not seem like the right verb] around me strutted out with high hopes, viewing their puny slip of paper as some kind of monumental achievement to set them for life, I stood there stone faced. I was ready to get on with the rest of my life. What's the point of celebrating when I knew I would be working with just about all of these people? The lucky one's [ones] dropped out, but my parents would never let me do that; “pollutes the gene pool,” as my dear father would say. I have a rather pessimistic view on life, but hey, I wouldn't think this way if it weren't the truth. Just look around you; it's true whether you like it or not.

You would be surprised to know that I actually married in life. I even had some children as well. A couple years after high school ended, I married my sweetheart who is just as sadistic '[<- this is not the right verb. Sadism means to take pleasure in causing others pain. You’ve made no reference whatsoever to the narrator being a sadist] 'as I am. I worked a few odd jobs just to tie things over. A couple times we had to flee our apartment because either we couldn't scrape enough dough to get by [authenticity; this doesn’t do much to stop a land-lord coming after you], or that we found out our landlord was a sex offender spying on my wife. Low income apartments just weren't doing it for us. With children on the way to be born into this disgrace of a planet, we needed a better living situation. The two of us working endless nights delivering pizzas or driving some drunk beer bellies home just wasn't cutting it. We needed better jobs. Thus started our job searching journey.

After countless searching, my wife was able to snatch up a “decent” job. Pay was acceptable, good benefits, what more could you ask for? The problem though is that I couldn't work there. The place was filled with stubborn balding men who would only give up their job once they dropped dead. With her in a decent place of employment, I had to remain searching for one of my own. It wasn't easy. It took quite a bit of internet searching and snagging up every newspaper I could get my hands on to do it, but I found one. Yes, I was finicky in my searches; I just didn't want to spend my days growing old while plunging some greasy bald man's toilet. Decent jobs are hard to find without an expensive and worthless piece of paper with a college's name printed on the top. Nonetheless, I found one. It was a customer service job at some oversized office building on the outskirts of town. It wasn't pretty, it certainly wasn't fun, but, it offered some great pay. So I applied and was asked for an interview.

After some long and mind-numbingly boring weeks later, I was allowed to get the job. All I had to do, was just sign my life away. Satisfied, I was able to rest peacefully knowing that between my wife and myself, we would finally be able to move into an actual house together.

-

Right so it’s going to be a long day if I go through and annotate everything that needs addressing so let’s get down to brass tacks. I split reviews into three sections. Mechanical, stylistic, and plot issues. Mechanical issues are typically grammatical issues like punctuation errors, synonym/homonym substitution, poor sentence structure etc. Stylistic issues refer to how you construct mood/atmosphere and use specific word-choices to achieve a specific goal (like constructing a character, or reinforcing a theme). And plot issues are just what they sound like.

Mechanical issues – there are enough of these to be a problem and they’re not really limited to one area. You mix words up, sentences are often too long and poorly put together, and you use filler words like always, seemingly, essentially, almost, nearly etc. Don’t use these words unless they are literally applicable. An essential idea to write with in mind is economics/efficiency. You have very little time to convince someone you’re worth reading. Every word you write must contribute to either setting, themes, character, mood, or plot. Phrases like “essentially turning society…” aren’t doing anything of the sort. Every word has to do something, and the audience has to feel it. If you can remove a word and keep the sentence’s purpose intact, do it and save the reader time. To address these issues you’re going to need to carefully proof your work for redundancies and errors. It can help to read it aloud to yourself, and MS word is pretty good at picking these sorts of problems out (it’s proofing options are very in-depth, and have a lot of optional extras that go beyond simply telling you a word has been misspelt).

Style issues – So is this guy meant to be despicable? It’s rare I’ve read a character so disgustingly adolescent. It’s an actual displeasure to spend time with him. The mere thought of having to endure the MC’s personality for another word is enough to have put me off reading any further. You’ve gone a little overboard with constructing an unpleasant person. An audience can’t feel like the story is taking them hostage. It’s clear this story has focused on character but if you’re going to do that, you ought to make sure that character is worth their time. An unlikeable character isn’t inherently problematic (lots of stories have unlikeable protagonists like American Psycho or Clockwork Orange) but you dedicate too much time to this character when there isn’t much more to them than “entitled man-child”. I feel an inherent lack of discipline. It feels like you’ve spewed this person onto the paper and there’s just excess everywhere. It needs reigning in.

Plot issues – Start the story where it starts. Not 800 words before where it starts. In this case, you take 800 words to convey a character that doesn’t need much elaboration. Entitled asshole, smart parents, didn’t try at school, is very bitter; asshole gets job. Boom – done. No need for 800 words. This goes back to economics – don’t piss away time. A story needs to be carefully engineered so that maximum information is conveyed in the minimum amount of time. This is not the case here.

Overall Notes – so here’s what you need to do to move forward. You need to spellcheck, proof your stories, and write with a little more discipline. When writing you need to shift focus away from characterisation and move towards building things like setting, atmosphere, themes and plot. You need to hook the audience quickly and start the story where it begins. Don’t waste time on exposition just to build a character that most of us are already bored of seeing in youtube comments. You need to make every word count and you need to know when you’re throwing words away on redundant aims.

What you get right – the plot. The actual story itself is solid. It’s interesting, weird, fun and imaginative. It’s everything you want to see in a good horror. You’ve obviously got the writing skills and the imagination to make it work, you just need to be a bit more restrained when writing in the future.

Thank you for taking the time to review my work. I will admit, this is just a crappy first draft so I know that there are tons of issues, and I'm glad you were able to find them. I will definitely get to work on some of the issues as soon as possible. I have a couple of comments however.

In regards to the character. Yes, he is supposed to be despicable. A highly unpleasant person to be around. As a person who writes mostly comedic stories that are a bit cartoonish, I can see how I went a bit overboard in making him unlikable. Reading over the story, I originally planned for him to gradually soften over the course of the story (however the only time he does is when thinking about his family in the pool) but it seems that fell flat.

Yeah, I can see the grammar issues now. I even used the wrong form of "your" (which is funny, because I'm on people for that all the time). I realized that I did spell "jowls" incorrectly and fixed it on subsequent versions (except this one apparently). I wrote this using some knock off of microsoft word so it isn't super keen on grammar stuff. Perhaps I'll take a look at some other word processors.

I thank you again for taking the time to read this story. I haven't written something like in an ungodly amount of time, and I hadn't realized how fun writing stories like these were. Again, this was the first draft and now I feel silly for some of the obvious issues here (I have critiqued other stories on this workshop for issues that I've done myself).