Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24686540-20140321223038/@comment-24077689-20140322052735

So don't take this personally. I'm about to be kinda mean. This is a reflection purely on the story, not on you. I encourage you to try again. Just not with this story.

This is boring as all fuck. You start this off exactly the same as literally thousands of other stories. What's the set this apart from any of the other banal pieces we get on a day to day basis? That's the question you need to ask yourself. Does this story grip you in the very first paragraph? This does not. Nor does it really have a first actual paragraph.

These are my thoughts as I read this story:

"Oh hey, another malevolent force breaking the 4th wall to give me a warning and/or offer me something."

"Oh hey, vague sense of played out mystery"

"And look at that poor usage of the ellipsis."

"Haha, raspy voice and shadow person that woke you up from stasis. How original. 2spooky4me."

"Oh look, now you're completely misusing the ellipsis."

That's all in the first 3 paragraphs, excluding the fuck all that was that introduction (?).

So, first of all, the whole breaking the 4th wall demon/entity/amnesic psychopath thing is really played out. Like it's so played out that in the last 2 weeks I've read at least 4. That's 4 too many. If it's that cliche it's not scary.

Alright, so here's something that personally annoys me so fucking much I actually twitch. Like it causes me anxiety because I hate it so much. And guess what's fortunate for me? Almost every 2-bit amateur writer does it! You're completely misusing the ellipsis. First and foremost when he says "Som... something happened.", while you do use it correctly here a dash would actually better serve the function of illustrating a pause in speech as so: "Som--something happened." it's not as distracting. Everywhere else that you use the ellipsis in this story is used in lieu of a comma. Don't do that. The ellipses is absolutely in no fucking way shape or form an automatic suspense builder. It does quite the opposite because it's distracting. Check out these Quick and Dirty Tips on how to use ellipses properly.

Dude, smiley? Really? It's bad enough that the whole smiley face fucking happy images turned evil thing is cliche as all hell, it's worse that they actually made a fucking movie called smiley. About this exact thing. Like, you don't see me using fucking hockey-mask slashers in my stories. OH HO HO AND HE'S A FIGMENT OF YOUR IMAGINATION TOO. Dude, this is not off to a good start, so far you've haphazardly strung together cliches and called it a cohesive story.

OH HEY MORE INNOCENT SHIT, A TEDDY BEAR BUT GUYS IT'S MENACING BECAUSE IT HAS A SINGLE BUTTON EYE HANGING LOOSELY FROM NEGLECT. In what way is this not cliche? You may as well have gone after the fucking evil clown bit. It probably would have turned out better.

So lets get a tally:

So far, you've introduced a guy of some kind (narrator? protagonist? anti-hero? down-on-his-luck cop with nothing to lose? the fuck is he anyway?). You've introduced a character creatively named Smiley, because God knows we've never heard of anything like that before, and you've introduced "the other creepy bastard", a teddy bear. And let me stop right here, your swearing is neither creative nor edgy. It just illustrates a lack of creativity and vocabulary. Cussing can be used effectively in a story, that is not how you used it. So smiley is a figment of his, presumably, "fucked up mind" or somesuch nonsense.

Do you have ANY IDEA how lame the image of your narrator strapping a teddy bear to a fucking chair is? Bro, they used an anthropomorphized teddy bear in a stoner comedy and not a horror movie for a fucking reason. OH MY GOD AND YOU TORE OFF HIS EAR JUST LIKE IN TED, I FUCKING CAN'T EVEN HANDLE THIS.

YOU DID NOT JUST GIVE YOUR MAIN ANTAGONIST A FUCKING SCENE HAIRCUT AND A LEATHER JACKET. LIKE ARE YOU FOR REAL? In what way do his questionable fashion choices progress the plot at all? And what's with the mask? It's metal? What kind of metal? You have any idea how strong your neck would have to be to support something like an iron mask? And little homie just breaks it into pieces? Just like that?

CONCLUSION

This was a genuine chore to read. Between the cliches, the ridiculous prose, the juvenile descriptors, the lack of punctuation. Your poor sentence structure. Like I said, this entire story is one HUMUNGOUS cliche. It's like you took the book of cliches and starting just taking things out of it to form this mess. There's no point in the story that it's ever really clear what's happening. Your character development is rudimentary at best. Your villains are laughable. Like I chuckled first at the "other creepy bastard" line then once again when you revealed that it was a fucking teddy bear.

You obviously have a desire to write. That's great, your grammar could use a small amount of work, go out and read more. Like a lot more, not just creepypastas, go out and actually read good stories. Think about what makes them work.