Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28841537-20160625053219/@comment-28266772-20160625105648

Capitalization:

Today has been a great day for mankind, As we have finally set up a sustainable colony on mars! -> ‘As’ shouldn’t be capitalized

ESPECIALLY this close to their origin / Somehow, still NOTHING! -> To place an emphasis on something you should use italics, this is just a wikia standard but it’s not something I disagree with either. There are more instances of this than just these two as well.

Punctuation: We seem to have pinpointed the origin of the object! It appears to be coming from the planet Neptune, a planet that has appeared to have a very large kinetic storm since the year 2016! I have informed Earth High Command of my discovery, and they have reassigned my team from colonizing mars, to investigate the origin of the object! We are set to leave in one earth week! This may be very interesting! -> I used this entire section because every last sentence ends in an exclamation mark. Use these very sparingly, certainly nowhere near the amount you use them in this story.

its over. / ships functions. -> you need to use an apostrophe here to denote possession.

Story issues: I put them in lock down, just in case of some sort of parasitic mind worm. -> this foreshadowing is too specific and ruins any surprise. It also doesn’t make sense as to why the captain would assume something like this if it wasn’t something humanity was familiar with at this point.

they gain superhuman strength. This is how they escaped the lock down chamber -> this feels contrived. I’m not sure you need to elaborate why on why they escape. And if you do, you need to establish it a bit more. You should show, not tell.

I have sent part of my team to scout the kinetic storm, of course wearing high end hazard suits as just a fraction of the Pym waves would horribly mutilate their bodies, ESPECIALLY this close to their origin. -> this is an example of how this captain doesn’t really speak like a captain. The ‘voice’ is all wrong, especially considering it’s an official log of events.

Wording: We seem to have pinpointed the origin of the object! It appears to be coming from the planet Neptune, a planet that has appeared to have a very large kinetic storm since the year 2016! -> We seem to, it appears, has appeared etc. There’s repetition of unsure language, and it hurts the tone and feeling of the story.

It seems they lock into their victim, and they seize control of EVERYTHING. Once they lock onto you, its over. Don’t even struggle, that only makes it worse. Once they lock on, -> repetition of ‘lock’. You should avoid repetition as it severely damages the flow.

General story issues:

Show not tell: So, the basic gist of this story is that it does too much telling, and consequently doesn’t build any atmosphere or tension. The captain just states what happens, and no real mystery is built. There’s no atmosphere, and very little use of descriptive language.

Scientific terminology: This guy doesn’t seem to use terminology in a serious way. Pym waves, Earth High Command etc. I think this serves to further undermine the authenticity of the logs/narrative.

Premise: they have reassigned my team from colonizing mars, to investigate the origin of the object -> I don’t buy this premise. I don’t think people would redirected from colonizing mars to an unnecessary scientific mission, especially since you emphasise that it’s the first colony mars to ever be established. That’s far more important than investigating a storm. Plus the general idea of worms that invade your mind isn’t very interesting, or even original. This would be forgiven if you had made the presentation original, such that the story itself was compelling and frightening, but because you never go into much interesting detail we’re left only with this, not very inspiring, concept and nothing else.

So in conclusion you need to proof read the story before posting to catch errors with punctuation and capitalization. You should use italics to denote emphasis, not all caps. You need to try to phrase the narrative in a more appropriate way i.e. he’s a captain, he should write and speak like a captain. That means not using exclamation points every sentence, and it means trying to refrain from overly cheesy and unnecessary scientific terms (pretty sure Pym waves are from Marvel), repetition, and overly informal language. You need to show the events occurring, and not just tell us about them. You need to use language to develop a tone, and atmosphere, and offer more descriptive passages to draw us in. This doesn’t mean changing it to a conventional narrative instead of a series of logs, but it means offering us something to at least picture in our heads. Perhaps the captain – perplexed by the inexplicable phenomenon – could offer just a few words telling us what these zombies look like. Try reading other stories that take a log/diary format to get a sense of how they balance a believable communication with storytelling, to get a better sense of what I mean.