Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26067056-20170716174602/@comment-26067056-20170717010012

Misoka the Witch wrote: Let me give you a general run-down: Your story lacks consistency. For example:

'A day later James called me and asked me if we could go to the old house, I said no until we reached an agreement to go later that night.'

What convinced him to go? Where's the rest of the story? If he said no, why is he making the agreement to go?

Bringing me to the next point. The phrasing is awkward, there are TONS of spelling, sentence structure, and grammar errors ( 'The reason I'm mentioning him is because Me and James because we did something stupid.' <-This entire sentence needs a complete rewrite. 'The reason I mentioned him is because we did something stupid.' However, it would be better off omitted since James plays a major role in the story. Show, don't tell.) and you aren't really describing anything. You have the bare bones of a story, not a story.

The plot is uninteresting and could basically be summed up as 'We went to a scary house and there was a scary book. The end.' There's no hook, no consequence, nothing to maintain interest or even grab the reader's interest in the first place.

There were a lot of sentences that could have been straight up omitted due to having little to nothing to do with the story, being filler, or just wasting time. ('My friend lives in the same building as me, So we have a lot of hangouts and parties from time to time.') Capitalization errors are all over the place too. Proper nouns and the beginning of sentences are the only things that need capitalized, with the exception of 'I' which is always capitalized when referring to oneself.

Overall, it's.... bad. It's in need of lots of work. Hence, I didn't list many examples to all of my points, since it would've been most of the story. Gain a hook, fill it in with more meat, and correct the errors. Provide a consequence to entering the house - give stakes behind that fear factor. What is the reason we should be scared? Right now, it doesn't have any of that. But shouldn't you always capitalize the I as in the narrator?