Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24486291-20140405231955/@comment-24077689-20140411170120

Ask and you shall receive:

You’re off to a good start. This first paragraph is fine, with the exception of the first sentence which reads a bit awkwardly. Because it’s huge. “I didn’t see the silhouette moving down the dark sidewalk until after it had knocked me down hard into a roadside puddle as it rushed by, following after another figure.” Read that out loud to yourself, it’s hard to digest it because it’s so fucking much. This would read better if you broke it up into a either two sentences, i.e. “I didn’t see the silhouette moving down the dark sidewalk. Not until it knocked me down hard into a roadside puddle as it rushed by, following after another figure.” I like how you’ve set this up, I dig stories that don’t pull their punches and just put you straight into verbage.

So I’m a bit confused, did they come from behind or in front? The way he’s acting, they came from behind him, so he followed to the dark alleyway. Which, if this is the case, it’s irrelevant that he didn’t see them; he’d hear them before he saw them as he was facing away. If they came from in front of him, why would he follow them? Most people wouldn’t have the overwhelming urge to follow a couple of d-bags who’d just knocked him into a puddle of water.

What the fuck kind of alleyway is this anyway? People come to do drugs and fuck and drink. Like I get it, I’m just a guy from a small ranching town in Hawaii, I don’t live in a big city, all my family is from the south and are farmers of some sort. I’m not super exposed to big city living, but is this really a common thing? I’ve experienced half-way houses, slums, junkie dens, but I’ve never experienced nor really heard of outside of the Spawn movie adaption of people chilling in an alleyway to do this kind of nefarious shit. Plus right between a McDonald’s and a Gold’s Gym? These are big corporations, such an area right in their shared backyard would not go over well, they would have these people ejected pretty quickly. And again, the homie is wearing a leather, minding his own business, for all intents and purposes, he’s a normal dude. Normal dudes don’t typically have the overwhelming urge to go down dark alleyways where people “throw their lives in a garbage disposal”. Which, by the way, I chuckled at that; I thought that was an interesting image.

The implication here is that the protagonist thought that the thing that knocked him down was some foreign creature. Why did he think that? Where is the previous mention of that? If I were you, I’d introduce that a bit earlier, like “it looked like a critter of some kind” and then go into this paragraph. And a man in all black clothing isn’t very intimidating. Why would he think that it was a foreign creature in the first place? Make this man some kind of behemoth “I could see that it was not some foreign creature now; it was a behemoth of a man in all black clothing, he wore a large hat, but his face was not concealed.” I included the “large hat” because that would lend to the image of why he could be mistaken for a creature, a huge man, all black, big hat, low visibility because of the rain.

“Before he faded away in the light mist that the downpour had created…” amend this. The downpour wouldn’t just create a light mist. Specify why there’s a mist the combined overhangs of the neighboring buildings could rebound the downpour into a light mist, potentially. This description doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you’re specifically talking about an alleyway, which is usually open.

HELLO MY NAME IS. WHAT. MY NAME IS. CHICKA CHICKA SLIM SHADY.

So… is he going down the street after the man or is he going down the alleyway to help whomever screamed? At first he’s going down the street avoiding street lights then all the sudden he’s hearing a voice from the alleyway.

I’m sorry to be nit-picky but you mention Goodfellas but you quote The Godfather. Get yo references straight, son.

You develop the dialogue a little half-assedly, the way it reads is somewhat awkward. But, you develop the voice of the Italian very well. He’s got personality, something your protagonist is severely lacking. The protagonist at this point seems like your typical clueless dick.

I know the emergency buttons are commonplace on college campuses (in fact, when I first went to college my mom embarrassed me because she was worried there weren’t enough and I might get raped. I’m on the thin side, but when I came to college I was beefed up from building fence for the entire summer, and I’m an adept boxer. She said that in front of my new friends, I didn’t live that down for almost a year) but are they commonplace in the inner city? Which is where I presume this is happening, the setting seems to jump around a bit, it’s a little unclear.

Man, the way you keep indicating that he’s talking in a soothing tone is really fucking annoying. We get it, he’s being nice and motherly. Again, the typical person wouldn’t go in for a round of questioning. Honestly, the typical person would more likely try to remove the blade, or if they’ve got medical training stabilize the knife and try to stop the bleeding.

You don’t need to have “snowflakes” in quotation marks. Anyone over the age of five understands that they’re not real snowflakes and the way it is changes the tone of the sentence.

There’s a lot of yelling and bellowing going on, it is kinda strange.

WOAH-HO FUCKING PLOT TWIST GODDAMN.

So he’s kicking the knife? Rather than stomping on it? Even if he did just stomp on it, that’d be hard to do. It’d be far easier and better if he just stuck the knife in his throat, embedding in his spine, it’d make more sense than him just trying to kick the damn thing. I get that he doesn’t want to do this shit, but the back half just seems to rushed.

<p class="MsoNormal">“A tsunami-like monsoon”? A monsoon already implies a deluge, this description is just silly. A tsunami, as in the natural disaster?

<p class="MsoNormal">Why does it matter for him to knock Thomas down if they’re both already getting away?

<p class="MsoNormal">“Karma, bitch!” Easy there, Jesse Pinkman.

<p class="MsoNormal">Was he working? Why was he out on the street in the first place? Why doesn’t he just quit?

<p class="MsoNormal">I was disappointed in how you ended it, you missed an opportunity to be pretty clever. I was hoping you’d have the sign say “shoplifters will be executed”, see, “prosecuted” means that they’re going to have legal action taken against them. Being murdered isn’t exactly legal action.

<p class="MsoNormal">The dialogue set up leaves a lot to be desired. You paragraphs need to be lengthened for sure; some of the things he does and says are just unbelievable. You need to more concretely establish a setting here. I think the sounds are interesting, it’s not a device you see very often on this Wiki, or in horror fiction at all, for that matter. I like it. It adds an interesting element to the story.

<p class="MsoNormal">The rushed-ness of the ending is just kinda… eh. If he was planning on killing the poor bastard the whole time, why did he call the medics? He could have just as easily pretended to push the button. The whole escape thing is odd, like he pushes him down; he gets back to the store. It just all happens so damn fast.

<p class="MsoNormal">I think this is an interesting concept, these people are absurdly devoted to the duty of tracking down and killing shoplifters, but I have to question their intelligence. Why leave the switchblade? Which, by the way, is an illegal thing to carry. I think this story has a lot of kinks that once worked out, will leave this a fairly fantastic example of a thriller style pasta.