Talk:Crescent Forest/@comment-25052433-20140816072145

Alright party people. Let's hit the road and travel on down to this review.

What went right:

-Detail and description were all there. Great job on bringing the reader into your environment and showing us around.

-Small, abandoned towns are a classic setting for just about anything scary. You brought this into the story well, and executed the task of making me feel like I was standing there with your group of characters.

-You description of the creatures was well done. Adding in the mutilated deer was brilliant and really set the reader up for the horror that came next.

-The 'gore balance.' That's my term anyway. The gore balance is when a writer understands where to draw the line between a gory scene intended to create fear in the reader, and a gory scene that is just trying to be gross. You seem to have a good understanding of the 'gore balance' and execute it very well, better than a lot of other writers on here actually. Well done.

What could have improved my experience:

-This story has a bit too much filler. Detail is great, but you also need to adopt the concept of notions. It shouldn't take two paragraphs to describe walking down a road from one point to the next. I would suggest you look into using time elapsing techniques. Such as, "several hours later" or "about a mile down the road" to just sort of take out those spaces of unnecessary wordage and help the story move along faster.

-Nouns and adjective are your friends. You used the term "travelers" a lot, sometimes a couple of times in one sentence. You did the same with "figure" and "creature" quite a bit too. Go to an online thesaurus and try to use different names for people, places or things.

-Confusion about the setting. Honestly, I wasn't quite sure what the setting was here. For a little while, I figured this was a post-apocalyptic setting, and people were just wandering. Then the man with the pick-up truck showed up and I thought, well, maybe they're just hitch-hikers. Using the term 'traveler' invoked images of survivors going about in a fallen world. Honestly, I am still not sure if that was the case or not.

This was a good story, and has potential to be a great story. It needs a little work though. I would suggest condensing it by at least 30% content. Remove some of the redundant sentences, and find some other words for 'traveler,' like party, band, or group. This was an ambitious story that just needs a coat of polish.