Talk:Blobster/@comment-4715955-20160701112941/@comment-4715955-20160701165108

Because using 100 words to say something that you could have easily said in 10 words makes a story a chore to read. Filling the story with long, clunky passages about irrelevant details doesn't make it interesting, it makes it tedious. Granted, King and Barker go overboard with characterization all the time, but they can tell us a lot in a single paragraph. After reading the first two paragraphs of this, all I got was "this girl needs to get out more."

Think about how many pages you spend on people handling and discussing the critter. There's no eerie events and no interesting characterization going on in the meantime to make the wait worth it. This passage actually personifies how I felt reading this: "We’ve been pushing at this thing for at least an hour now, have we made any progress? No, it’s still a massive carcass sitting in the exact same place it was when we first found it."

If you're telling a story with a lot of little details, you need to be concise so those details aren't wasting the reader's time with stuff that isn't relevant to the plot. If you're telling a straightforward story, you need to be concise so every sentence reads smoothly and easily -- reading the information becomes an afterthought and doesn't bog down the process, allowing for easier immersion. Either way, conciseness is key.

That's not to say that every sentence should be three words long. But you probably need the practice. Also need to practice chopping out whole sentences or even paragraphs that aren't really contributing anything.

I agree with MrDupin about the monster. It's not terribly interesting, and the psychic aspect seems totally superfluous. The characters were all pretty generic to me as well, and I saw nothing in them worth caring about. Even the name of the creature makes it hard to take seriously -- it sounds like the name of a children's cartoon character from the 80s.

Overall this is kind of a textbook "long" creepypasta. When I click on a story link, and see the scroll bar is super skinny -- indicating that it's a very long page to scroll through -- it's something of a red flag. There ARE a lot of good pastas that are long, but length is a warning sign for precisely this reason: the reason for the length. Is it because it's filled with engaging details, or tedious fluff in need of editing? Usually it's the latter. I'd have no problem with this story being as long as it is if it were engaging, but it simply isn't.

Don't know if any of these observations help at all, but there it is. Honestly, given the goofy critter name and his habit of making impossible promises, I'd have hoped for a comedy about a sea blob critter that actually grants people's wishes, but the wishes always go wrong somehow and send the victims on weird misadventures.