Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-10502460-20190904074213/@comment-28266772-20190905104918

Hey Hopeless, I don’t have time to do a full annotated bit of feedback but that actually only really helps with individual errors and there’d actually be no real benefit for you given that the mechanics of this story are impeccable. With that in mind, I’m just gonna dive ahead and look at the style and plot.

Style issues: So the big thing I’d ask is: what do you want your reader to experience when they read your story? Because you have almost no imagery. There’s so much emotive language (fond, dread, wrath, etc.) but almost no actual imagery. Without the imagery and the action, you’re just telling us stuff that happened. Let’s look at two important paragraphs:

''I almost turned back on the easement as the house came into view. There were no signs that it had been occupied in the over ten years since they had died.''

And:

''The thing was, half the time we were going out to shoot things we weren't supposed to. My father was the type who believed hunting laws were the work of petty tyrannical bureaucrats and violating them at every opportunity was his own way of rebelling against the system. Any animal, any age, any weapon, any method, any time of year, any time of day or night, it was all fair game. Baiting, trespassing, spotlighting—it was as if legitimate hunts bored him, for rare was it that we would hunt without breaking at least a couple rules.''

So first off, in the second one you’re telling us the dad’s personality and not actually showing it. You should demonstrate what and how he hunts and let us draw our own conclusions about why he hunts. You could show him hunting clearly endangered animals, show him raging at the rules, and then show the background for his life that forces the reader to ask, “Why does he do this?” in a way that comfortably leads to the answer you want. In this story I inferred ideas about this man’s wealth, job status, mental state, and personality from your explicit description of his motivations.

It needs to be the other way around.

Now looking at the first paragraph: it’s utterly barren of any imagery. You need to show us the scenes you want us to imagine using clever and original descriptive language. It’s a real wasted opportunity to just state “I found the house abandoned” and offer nothing else. The closest you come to a description of the home is this:

Everything was still there, from the furniture to Mom's decorative knick-knacks, all covered in dust.

But it doesn’t really tell us anything we couldn’t imagine on our own. You don’t need to go into agonising detail but just a sense of what the place actually looked like. Paint a picture. Was the dust caked on? Were the knick-knacks colourful? Was it a busy home filled with things? Or an empty room with lawn-furniture? Were there old booze bottles tipped over by an armchair? Ash-trays filled with cigarettes? Glasses with lipstick still on them? Floral wallpaper stained  yellow by nicotine? Help us out here and give our imaginations something to work with. One or two details like these scattered around would tell us all we need to know.

Plot issues – None. It’s an original idea and I liked it. Although I do understand Bloody’s comment that it’s not necessarily out-right scary. Still, I think the muted spookiness works very well since the subject matter is so grounded.