Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-37691073-20190826232304/@comment-35911608-20190828141216

As it was stated above, a lot of this story is missing pieces of information. The problem I tend to find 99% of the time when I see these time-coded stories is that they jump from moment to moment and don't fill in the gaps; it's just the important events that the writer wanted to get down on paper.

I get what the bird in the bathtub is supposed to be, what with it referencing Adam in the pool at the end, but with the story being so short and bare bones, it doesn't really pay off as a way to come full circle. Again, most of this is just stating a bunch of events: - I found bird in my bathtub, haha that's weird - I am going to pool party today - I am prepared for pool party - I am at pool party, it is fun! Adam has abs (?) and there was a hot girl - Adam is dead now, and I framed everyone else but also made the music play creepy funeral music when I killed him

This is Telling, not Showing, and Showing making for much more interesting reading. So when the music and cupcakes are supposed to pay off in the end as actually being more sinister than initially thought, the reveal isn’t as satisfying or terrifying because there was barely any build up to said reveal. Within little over 100 words (I did a word count), you go from the first paragraph of how excited the MC is about the party, to “Adam is dead”.

Now for the murder. Nothing about this murder makes sense and feels very gimmicky at most. If the main character didn't want to get caught, why would they put funeral music on the playlist at the time Adam would die? The police would just have to find out who put the playlist together (which the MC says was their job) and they'd have their culprit.

And you can't say that the MC is just crazy and doesn't care if they get caught, because they actively tried to make everyone else look like the murderer with the icing from the red velvet cupcakes. Which also makes zero sense; the police would easily be able to test that the red marks on them are icing and not blood. An easier way to do this would just throw the cupcakes out of the equation; the pool water would clean the blood off of some while others might have it dripping down them, making it harder to differentiate who was in contact with the body. But then again, we have no idea how the MC killed Adam because it's not included in the story, so we have no idea how much blood has been spilled or if any got out of the pool.

And the worst sin of it all - there's literally no motivation to the murder. With no understandable reason for MC killing Adam, there's no emotional connection, so the reader just doesn’t care that someone got offed. The only discernible possibility for a motive that I could find was that… Adam was in better shape than MC? And they wanted the hot girls to like them instead of him..? There is nothing telling us why they wanted to kill their best friend. And saying it was an accident also doesn’t work, because everything here has been premeditated with the music, the cupcakes, etc.

I’d also complain about why this is even in a time-coded format anyways. It doesn’t aid the story in any particular way; you could just as easily remove the times and add in some transition statements so the main character can get from point A to point B and boom, no need for time codes. And yes, there are grammatical errors throughout the story that need to be corrected.

This story is going to need a lot of work. I hope this explains why, and I wish you the best of luck.