Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-10319977-20151014231140/@comment-26475800-20151016000545

Okay, so I suppose I'll jump on the bandwagon with this one. I will give you the best advice I can, and because there is so little to work with it will be hard to do. However, I will address all of the stories as one story, so unless otherwise stated the advice I am going to give you applies to all of your stories.

It is incredibly hard to write a two sentence story, and because of that I feel you fall flat. Everyone of the stories you have written has been so short that there was nothing to it, a glance at the story and it is already finished. I cannot speak for everyone, but when I read something I want to be involved in the story. I am investing the time and would like to be rewarded with something that I can get into. So in that respect it is so hard to write a good two sentence story, although it's not impossible to do.

I don't really care about anyone or anything that is happening in your stories. So what if someone killed their best friend, I don't care about the friend or the person who killed him. If I was going to write a story, or read a story, I don't shoot for it to be super short. The shorter the story the harder it is to write, until you get to novel level, but let's try and get a good short before we go for a novel.

So basically, there is not enough information, emotion, or build up in any of these stories. Think about it, if someone told you that a stranger was hit by a car, would you really care? Most likely not. But say that person was a family member, that makes it much different; you know your family, care about them. Now, that may be a little extreme, so lets take the same stranger and make you care about him being hit by a car, let's make him a pedophile. Knowing that it makes the reader feel glad, or amused at least, that a scumbag was killed. That little bit of information will make all the difference.

Now the plots behind all the stories, of all of them the only one which was a good idea was the movie one. Everything else was either confusing or dull, the first one (about cutting you throat) was both; very little was original. Now back to the last point, if you added more to the stories it would make them stand out, be more unique, and perhaps even get onto the site. Don't worry about word count, worry about the story. Let the story tell itself and you won't have that much of a problem.

When writing a story, have the basic idea of where you want to go with it, some people like to write out plot points on index cards, or a rough draft before they really even start writing the story. I personally like to just go off the top of my head, I think about the story for a while before I sit down and write, but I don't know everything that is going to happen. In fact, I have written a story which has been nominated for PoTM which had gone completely differently than I thought it would have.

So think about the story, and yes a story could be two sentences, but it is rare that you will find a great work in that short amount of words. Get the idea, maybe start with the ending and place the main character as far away from the end as possible and travel with them as they make their way to the fate you have in mind. Maybe they don't follow the path you thought they would and don't even end up at the same end you had first thought. And that is fine, so long as the story is being told as you, and it, needs to tell it.

Length should always be the last thing you think about when writing. Once you have a few stories under you belt, good stories that can be published here or on an actual mag, than you can gauge how long the story will be and work to make it that length.

I didn't read all of the comments above, but these are the main issues you are lacking in you stories.