Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29709755-20160903022833/@comment-28266772-20160905132300

Jason and his wife Meredith had been hunting nearly every day of the season so far, without luck. He was getting desperate. It was the last week before deer hunting closed for the year and they decided to try up north, in the Allagash.

The place they were driving [I feel like this clause doesn’t make sense on its town, even just adding ‘to’ helps a lot], it was old timber company land. It'd been clear cut years, decades ago, and the forest had come back thick and tangled. Not a single tree trunk much bigger around [I think the order should be; tree trunk around much bigger than] than his arm, and not enough space between them for a man to take two clear steps in any direction. The deer bedded down there in the days, when the hunters were prowling the fields, and you could run through a patch of woods, drive them out in the open while another hunter would post up on the edge of it, and he'd have his pick. [I like this detailed but effective and clear description of the process]

It was a long drive, an hour on the freeway and another 90 minutes on the state highways, [semicolon] desolate little roads that wound through the barren trees and the foothills while the flat gray skies pissed down icy rain.

When they'd gotten in the thick of it, the real dense woods where the night never really leaves the trees, he [I think this should be ‘Jason’] pulled off the little highway onto one of the crude dirt logging roads that cut an endless grid through the forest. Jason jumped from the truck with his rifle in one hand, called his wife over, sat her in the bed of the truck and told her where the deer would be coming.

She watched him walking down the road, a half mile or more when he finally stopped. He looked back and waved at her one last time before he stepped off, and then he was gone.

She waited, crouched in the truck bed, her finger on the trigger of her rifle as she scanned the periphery of the clearing. Looking for signs, movement.

A half hour went by. The woods were as silent as ever. Then an hour. She was beginning to get worried. She decided to give it ten more minutes.

When the time had passed with no sign she stood up in the truck bed and called his name. The woods ate up the noise and there was silence again. She yelled it now, and then louder again [this sentence feels awkward]. There was something coming into her voice, an edge of frantic excitement that lead into panic. She screamed until she felt her throat burn, she fired her rifle in the air three times, the universal distress signal. She listened. Nothing.

[She thought of looking for him, thought of going to the place where she'd seen him enter the woods and trying to follow his path, pulled up to the spot in her truck, but when she got out and stood there at the wood's edge, looked out into it, saw the darkness and heard the muffled silence, she couldn't make herself go.] '-> this is one long ass sentence that could use some better structuring. 'She got in her truck and went to find help.

He'd walked quickly through the woods, picking his way through the trees, kicking and stomping as he went, making as much noise as he could manage. When he looked back he noticed he couldn't see the road any more [anymore] and he figured he was deep enough in to start making his drive. He turned right and began crashing through the brush.



It was a while before he suspected something was wrong. He'd been walking for what felt like hours. Hadn't seen any deer, hadn't seen any signs of life, [not sure you need this comma here] as a matter of fact, and he figured he'd have to have gone at least as far as the truck by this point. He turned to the right again. When he'd been walking, he'd turned to the right for a while, [so there’s repetition of ‘turning to the right’ here]looking for a way to cross a stream without getting his feet wet, turned to the left for a bit, trying to avoid a particularly thick patch of undergrowth, always trying to correct himself so he stayed traveling in a reasonably straight line, and he was confident he'd kept going in the same direction, thought he couldn't check the angle of the sun to confirm it. Either way, he doubted he'd gone off enough that a 90 degree turn to the right shouldn't face him towards the road, at least obliquely.

'[the way you try to convey a spatial image in the paragraph above starts to falter. Not only does it require the reader to construct a mental map, but they need to plot Jason’s movements like a set of linear instructions. This Is confusion but isn’t conveyed in a way that’s clear, and it feels too in-depth. I think in this instance you could get away with just conveying the basic ideas of “Jason figured he should have reached his truck by now/Jason was forced to detour around a stream/Jason was sure he’d gone in a straight line but he couldn’t confirm from the angle of the sun/Jason was sure he’d have seen the road by now” etc. Also it feels like a distraction from what should be the actual subject matter of this paragraph which is Jason getting lost. It’s hard to concentrate on this when I’m plotting several consecutive right angle turns]'

He walked again for a few more hours. Now he was starting to get worried. He hadn't heard a sound outside of his own feet crashing through the saplings and it was beginning to worry him. These woods were oppressive. It wasn't quite as cold as it had been when he first started off, but he was beginning to shiver every time he took a break. He wanted to get in his truck and drive off out of the woods and stop at a warm, dry restaurant full of noisy people, eat a big hot greasy hamburger, with salty french fries that sizzled and crunched when he bit into them, and a thick milkshake he'd have to eat with a spoon. His stomach cramped up. '[this last line feels a bit… I don’t know, matter-of-fact. It lacks presentation when compared to the in-depth description of fries and hamburgers so it feels out of place, and a bit weird.]'

He kept walking. The gloom under the trees was beginning to look a little darker, or so he imagined, and the thought panicked him. He picked up the pace. Now when he came to streams he didn't look for narrow spots to jump over, or logs to balance on, he marched straight through them. The water was cold, it burned his skin like it was boiling, and soon his feet went numb. He crashed through brush, he tore his jacket, he cut his face and his hands on the thorns. He fired his rifle in threes. When he heard nothing he did it again. Every few minutes until he was out of rounds. '[this last sentence is a dependent clause and could/should be attached to the last sentence before with a semicolon – also it occurred to me but is this guy at risk of a bear attack? I’m just trying to gauge whether firing your rifle until it was empty is the sort of thing a seasoned hunter would do? I thought “yeah sure maybe, but only if there were no bears around?” – I’m just jotting my thoughts down here. Do with them what you want.]'

It was definitely getting darker now. The gloom was closing in tighter. He felt it constricting like a straight jacket [MS word is adamant that needs to be a hyphen in there a la ‘straight-jacket’ but I’m not sure]. Stifling him with the dead quiet and the endless forest. He wasn't even sure he moved. Everything looked the same. For all he knew it was the same. The thought panicked him.

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<p class="MsoNormal">As he looked around him the trees began to feel ominous in the dying light [great game]. Wherever he stood they seemed to lean in over him, leering and thirsting for something. Dead sentinels, cold as the mud under his feet.

<p class="MsoNormal">It was very nearly dark. He was frantic. Running as best he could, his clothes catching on the trees and tearing off, his breath clouding the air and steam rising off him in the bitter night winds that were just beginning to sweep through the trees. He ran while the branches moaned and rocked and his feet began to freeze.

<p class="MsoNormal">It was just at this moment when the panic threatened to overtake him that he saw something that brought him relief. Far off through the trees, there were two circles of light, headlights from a truck. When he saw them he felt a warm comfort rising up in his chest. He was going to get out, get back to his truck, leave the woods. He called out and waved his hands and the headlights turned! Then he saw something that puzzled him. They were coming towards him, through the woods. As they got closer he noticed something else. They seemed to be going between the trees. He was confused by the sight. It didn't seem to make any sense. As they got closer he noticed they didn't move like a car either. They turned, bobbed up and down, went over and around all the felled trees and stumps in the ground. Closer still and he suddenly realized they were much smaller than he thought at first. Maybe the size of golf balls, which meant they were much closer too. And somehow, they weren't lighting up anything in front of them. He was feeling very strange then, the beginnings of real fear, when he caught an odor, the smell of must and decay, old rot. '[like the inclusion of the smell – I feel as though a hunter would recognize the image of two reflective eyes quicker than this though. It’s something that is weirdly easy to identif. Maybe you could attribute it to his weakened and frightened state?]'

<p class="MsoNormal">Finally they began coming faster, straight towards him, and he felt his heart seize up, his legs cramp. His whole body tightened and clenched, and at the last moment of his life he realized that what he saw was two perfectly round eyes that glowed white hot and tore into him, even as the claws did the same. His scream was cut very short, though it wouldn't have mattered anyway. Sound does not travel far in such forests.

<p class="MsoNormal">'[so this last paragraph, imo, needs a wee bit of work. It’s too vague. You bring up the following imagery – seized, cramp, tight, clench, white hot, tore, claws scream – great imagery but it feels like a bland continuation of the atmosphere you’ve expertly crafted up to this point, when really you should be cashing in on it. This is the climax, the catharsis for Jason’s terror, but we get only a vague outline of him getting eaten when some other details would be helpful. I’d like to point you to how Lovecraft usually handles this sort of scene wherein his protagonist will catch a glimmer of some horrible monster. He doesn’t go into gory detail, he keeps things vague too, but he also gives us enough info to cash in on the atmosphere he’s built instead of just letting it fizzle out. The imagery may be vague, but it’s also specific – it’s rugose tentacles slithering across enormous crumbling cyclopean turrets, or polypous grotesque albino monsters that shudder across abyssal ceilings. He isn’t sitting there and painting a picture word by word, but the reveal is more than just a continuation of what came before, it instead offers something distinct and unique from what came before. Like I said – it’s cashing in on that well-earned mood and atmosphere.]'

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<p class="MsoNormal">Meredith sighed. It had been two weeks and there was no sign of him. Not a trace, as though the world had opened up and swallowed him whole. Today would be the last day of the search. The winter snows had come and even she had to admit the chances of finding him were nearly nonexistent. She'd vowed to keep looking though, right up to the last moment. Now here she was, on the cusp of nightfall, the other searchers gone already and not a single thread of his clothes, a footprint in the snow, a rock cairn to show that he had ever been there. She gave one last look around the clearing as she climbed into the cab of the truck, started it up and flipped on the lights. As she turned to her left to put on her seat belt she was struck by the sight of a pair of headlights coming quickly towards her. For a brief moment she was ecstatic with hope, maybe it was one of the searchers. Maybe they'd found Jason after all and they were rushing to tell her now. Maybe. But this thought was interrupted by another, one of confusion. The road was in front of her, where were those headlights coming from? [this paragraph is a great epilogue]

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<p class="MsoNormal">So once again you’ve shown a tendency to craft a brilliant atmosphere and mood. I think my annotations sum up my notes neatly, but I’ll just reiterate and say that the story is great, but could probably use some minor work here and there in terms of Jason’s ending. Other than that it’s a great effort and I think it more than meets the QS.

<p class="MsoNormal">One more thing – I have a small curation blog and for what it’s worth I selected your last story for attention. It’s not exactly Spotlighting, but it should at least help your story get a bit more attention, and I usually select authors who I think make consistently high-quality contributions. As this story goes to show, you are clearly of a consistently high quality.