Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-5614678-20190722213537/@comment-35711173-20190723023603

Hi,

English: It's good enough for a first draft, but even for the Writer's Workshop it needs a lot of cleanup. You have dozens of spelling, conjugation, grammar and punctuation errors.

Entertainment Value: It was interesting. I'd give it a B here.

Nit Picking Department:


 * I know this is an alternate universe and an alternate reality. Why change the names of states and cities? The further away you get from our world, the more the timeline would diverge.  Would battles have gone differently?


 * The guy comes from Germany. As the son of a farmer, he probably didn't have a great education there.  When he moves to America, he has definite problems with his English.  "Even the very tone of his voice sounded... off. His accent sounded like some kind of weird cross between Elvis Presley, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. The way he'd pronounce words, or struggle to recall certain ones. He'd call a hill a "dirt island" and get embarrassed when corrected, he'd write words like "beer" or "new" as "bier" and "neu" in his writings, and the editor would take care of it. He'd enunciate certain words very clearly, or emphasize the wrong parts. He'd saw his Ws like Vs, and would over pronounce his Ts with the full weight of an angry god, and then stutter on his Bs in the same sentence. The way he'd pronounce "Bratwurst" as "b-b-brATvurST' was one of my favorites. He'd repeat it several times before he got it right."

This isn't a guy who is going to make it as a newspaper reporter. Why not make him a diesel mechanic or blacksmith from Milwaukee. That's an area with a lot of ethnic Germans, and a Germanic accent wouldn't be that unusual. If the guy is hauling 16 cylinder engine blocks around or pounding an anvil all day, it's natural that he's going to have muscles. Reporters aren't generally known for looking that strong.


 * Deliberately taking him to a death camp to give him a reason to hate the Reich seems weak. There were far more reasons to hate the Reich than that.  If you really want to use the camps, let him find out accidentally and in the course of his duty.  Let it grow slowly until he has no choice.


 * Why didn't the Nazis use this serum by the gallon? If they had it so early in the war, why not make armies of Ubermenschen?  Even by then, they had the human wreckage to burn.


 * Why put him through two years of training? After they know he will live for 60 days, make more and deploy them to the field.


 * Why keep him as a propaganda piece? Two years after Barbarossa, Nazi Germany desperately needed the win.  The Nazis had already been beaten at Stalingrad and at Kursk.  They knew the war was going VERY badly at that point.  They needed those wonder weapons, and they needed them NOW!

Story:

I would do it from his perspective. It's his story. He looks to the world like a quiet mechanic from Milwaukee, child of immigrants. Nothing unusual. But then he will go and save people. What is he? How does he tell his wife and family? How will she react?