Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-34080568-20180108235507/@comment-27905100-20180110001329

What you have here is much more of a storyboard than a story. It's very very bare bones, and you tell us everything without really telling us anything. What I mean by this is that you tell us a story, but you don't show us the characters in it. You never describe your "surroundings", and never set the scene. You have all the major events set out in a list, but never show us the minor events that lead up to them. For example:

> Me and my mother had fallen out and so did me and the Butterfly man. I hurt him and crossed the line one day

Here you have a big dramatic group of scenes, and what do you do? You take two sentences, tell us that it happened and move on. It's almost as if those scenes never happened. You can't reasonably expect me to believe that those scenes, which later make the butterfly man kill you (I think?) were that unimportant.

You break your story up into "chapters". Trust me when I say this, chapters are for novels and novellas only (I believe it's 20k or 30k+ words but there's no hard and fast rule for it). Putting chapters in here bogs down and breaks up your story unnecessarily. It quite honestly serves no purpose, unlike in much, much longer works where it breaks up the story into more easily digestible pieces.

Finally, be sure to read through your story out loud before posting, or at least proofread it. There were multiple grammar errors, lots of choppy wording, and a part that I'm just gonna let speak for itself:

> I started to embrace this hybrid of a butterfly and

he helped me with my troubles

Had you proofread this you would have caught this and been able to fix it, but now rather than that, you have a post riddled with errors such as these. I'm not going to list all of them off here, if you take this advice you should be nearly free of them (everyone still slips up a little here and there).

I think this story could work, it has potential to have a scare factor. The issue is that the idea was poorly executed. Take my advice for this work or don't, whichever you're inclined to. I just hope this helps your writing in the future.