Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-4138999-20150116202428/@comment-25170312-20150118031854

Aside from the poor spelling, grammar, and sentence structure, the story is boring and unoriginal. The main character has aliens land in his backyard, he goes to check it out, and they shoot him with a laser. That's it? We are told that the character is curious and scared, but I couldn't sense any of it.

There's too much extraneous information. The relationship with the dog serves no purpose. I was waiting for the fact that the dog never really liked the main character to come into play at some point but it never did. All the dates at the beginning and details about the town serve no purpose. The year, the address, the age of the main character, how long they lived there, the names of the other family members -- none of it has anything to do with the rest of the story. We especially don't need to know their musical tastes, favorite shows, or movies they've seen (Jazz / Simpsons / Alien).

No one is really scared of this type of alien story anymore. They can't be scary just because they're aliens, there has to be something more. The ending, as it is, is just silly. I don't know if there's really anything you could do to make this story original, and the grammar is so bad I wouldn't know where to begin. You might want to start over with a more original idea. I usually don't tell people to scrap something, but in this case it might be the best thing to do.