Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26027963-20150218010532/@comment-26007602-20150219055824

Crazywords, I see your stories a lot on here, and I feel the need to be rather blunt:  You need to slow down. You're an enthusiastic writer, I get that. But you need to seriously take a break from writing so many stories and sit down and try to perfect one of them. I don't want to discourage you from writing; I want you to write something that will actually pass on this site.

The grammar in this one is decent enough. You need to start a new paragraph after every line of dialogue from another speaker. "It was thirty or so years ago, I went to our local tavern, you know, the kind that you go to after a hard day of work." This is a run on sentence, either separate it with a semicolon or simply delete "You know".

There's also the question of what tense this story is supposed to be in. The first paragraph is in present tense but it ends in past tense.

But this story just makes no sense. It's stuck between deciding if it wants to be a journal pasta or a simple story. There's no point to the transition into the journal entries; all they do is describe various symptoms, something that could be easily done outside of journal form. The plot is too vague to work, random dude gives our narrator an illness and our narrator is sick. That's the plot. There's nothing creepy here because it's too vague and short. If you want to make a vague story, you need to fill it with enough details to let the reader's mind wander; this story lacks descriptions or details.

The first paragraph is contradictory to itself. The main character asks why he is crying and in pain and then immediately follows up with "I know why." Then why are you wondering dude? We then go back thirty years. This may not seem like an issue, but it is. It throws the timeline out of sync. So this is an old man (He must be at least eighteen when he's at the tavern) speaking to us? Because his symptoms apparently lasted for five whole days; that's it.

It ends with, "Ever since I wrote this, the seizures and hallucinations have come back..." Is he speaking as an old man? Or his younger self? There's no indication which, and the reader can't decide the timeline of the story.

I find it strange that this self described germaphobe goes home and simply writes down his symptoms. This dude rips off his fingers and decides, "Well, better keep charting this curious course of events." It's not believable if you don't give a valid reason. I feel you could expand on them too; they're far to short to be effective.

These journal entries are written very strangely too. Most journals are written in past tense because it makes sense to recant one's day. These just are not written well. Read this: "Today I have another seizure and I'm delirious the whole day." Does that make sense to you? It doesn't to me.

Finally the phrase, "Touch someone, touch someone, touch someone..." could be taken the wrong way quite easily. The title of the story, "It" is also rather uninspired and unoriginal.

I hope you understand (And I'm fairly certain you do) I don't give criticism to be harsh, I give it to help you improve.