Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24037587-20140911164319/@comment-25558572-20140911212142

The first two paragraphs are pretty much just exposition. They don’t further the story and it is not necessary to know what your character(s) look like unless their appearance matters to the plot. Cut out filler and get to the actual story.

“When Cherri turned eighteen, we found out how brutal and harsh our father really was.”

Is this going to be a typical abusive-parent-causes-conflict pasta? Huge red flag here for me.

An arranged marriage is a distressing thing, but why on Earth does the father want to do this to his daughter? And if she’s already eighteen years old, then why was this the first sign of her father treating her in any wrong way?

Why is her name Cherri? Even if it a nickname, it sounds off-putting because of its informality.

You gloss over a lot of details. There is a lot of telling-oriented phrases like, “Mother started noticing this as well and she spoke to me about it and I explained that I begged father to stop but he wouldn’t listen.” (Why is there no actual dialogue for this scene?) and “I saw her leave once but when I tried to ask her where she was going, she wouldn’t answer me.” (At what time of day was this- morning, night, afternoon? How long was she gone for? What did her parents do about her sudden departure?)

No need to describe what the doctor looks like (or anyone else, for that matter) unless it’s relevant to the story. It’s a lazy way to introduce characters and potentially overloads the reader with information.

So this is where the story leads? I was able to predict very early on what the ending would probably be. This formula is tired and unoriginal and may have resulted in the pasta’s deletion as is.

<span style="font-family:"Constantia","serif"">The journal entries read more like a story itself than an actual journal. I have a journal, and when I write in it I pretty much just put in how certain events have made me feel. I don’t specify places I’ve gone too or any details that aren’t relevant. Exposition in a journal is almost always unneeded.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Constantia","serif"">“I can barely think rationally while I’m writing” is not necessary at all.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Constantia","serif"">Why did you make the last part of the story into a journal? Why couldn’t you explore what the sister was doing BEFORE she killed her father?

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Constantia","serif"">The journal entries don’t really tell me anything in the first place. Anger alone would take at least years to drive someone completely insane, especially if they’re already an adult and the only thing they have to be angry about is an arranged marriage. If the MC had the maturity of her age, she probably would have looked for ways to stop the marriage instead of just trying to avoid the inevitable.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Constantia","serif"">The story ends so abruptly it feels as if you didn’t even finish writing it. There is a completely meaningless line and every detail is again glossed over with no real description.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Constantia","serif"">Overall, this is a forgettable and somewhat poorly-written pasta. The premise was nothing really new, and the story itself felt quite rushed, especially near the end. Nothing was really engaging throughout the whole thing and as I mentioned, the ending was extremely predictable and clichéd. I think you should forget this idea and move on to a new one, because even if it was much more effectively written, the clichéd plot and shallow character would probably be grounds for deletion.