Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-27622208-20160116181426/@comment-27622208-20160127130556

Mikemacdee wrote: Mostly have rhetorical tips here, not content feedback (it's past my bedtime by about four hours). There's a quote I love citing, but I never remember who said it: "Say what you mean to say in as few words as possible."

You have a lot of rhetorical "clutter" in the form of unnecessary words. Applying the above quote to the story will help clean it up a lot. For example:

A boom from the skies madly startled the good spirit out of the traveler, to which he responded by whipping back in fright.

Man, that's a mouthful, and it tells us so little. All it tells us is, "The traveler jumped in fright at the thunder."

He felt his two ears explode and his eyes temporarily blinded by the white flash. => "His ears exploded and his vision went white."

When you make the writing more concise, you can then go through and start spicing it up with simile and metaphor, the most important weapons in a writer's arsenal. They're important because, by comparing your things to other, more familiar things, your things become more relatable to the reader, sometimes in a visceral way. Compare the thunderclap to a gunshot, for example. Thank you for the input. I will have that in mind when I write another one. Also, what do you think of the plot?