Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35911608-20190730183504/@comment-35911608-20190801201724

DrBobSmith wrote: RedNovaTyrant,

I have read Draft 2. I see improvement. We now know what the motivation is for the assault.

Who is the person who is assaulted? We know they are a computer science graduate student. We know that the protagonist had unrequited romantic intentions for them and blames them for washing out, but we don't have ANY sort of a mental picture of them, not even gender or other physical description. It's hard to have an emotional connection with someone when I have no image of them whatsoever. You could add a picture of them in so many ways.

"Working your lovely little legs until they burned, your lungs pumping oxygen until they felt ready to explode, your delicate throat growing tight and constricted."

From this, we know that the protagonist's target is female and that he has romantic or sexual intentions. This gives us more of a connection and we have a building sense of anticipation.

When I name a place, I prefer to name a realistic place and to use the details. Real street names, real stores. Maybe not my school, maybe not even my state. There are many good universities in areas with really lousy crime rates. My first suggestion would be Michigan State or Wayne State. Good schools with Canadian weather and a very high crime rate even by USA standards. You should be able to Google Maps walk from a nearby house to a market and back.

Think of the logistics here. This guy is hanging out in the rain until one given person happens to go out on a dark and stormy night. He is going to be sitting there trying to hide behind a bush and getting soaked for a LONG time, waiting for some cop to come on by and ask inconvenient questions. My worry about defining the protagonist that way, or at least at that point in the story, is that it would make it very obvious of the twist. But while typing this I thought of how to incorporate it, so thank you for that suggestion.

As for using a real location, I personally prefer to avoid using them unless they are absolutely integral to the story, or if I really know what the place is like, as to avoid getting something big wrong and having someone from the area point out how wrong it is, or take it as an insult to their area if I describe as a "bad" area. Just a strange personal grievance I have, I suppose. I did base most of this story on an event I had a few months ago at my own university (minus the whole assault bit), but I'm sure you understand that I don't necessarily want to share my location.

I don't believe I was incredibly clear on this when mentioning the stalker was in the bush, so pardon me on that. The stalker was not in the bush the entire time; he had been following the protagonist the entire time - hence why he's able to tell this whole story. He was only in the bush for a short time, but the cat had almost given him away, hence its specific mention.