Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-31477126-20170823183346/@comment-30307610-20170828181533

EmpyrealInvective wrote:

Story issues: "I even looked up the science behind it on the internet, hoping that if I knew why it happen (sic) it would assuage my fears." feels at odds with "Then, for my 10th birthday, my parents deigned to buy me a computer." I am unsure why you think that looking something up on the internet is at odds with a child getting a computer later. Many kids go to libraries when they have/want to look something up as they do not have a home computer. This was especially true in the 90's when home computers were less common than they are now.

EmpyrealInvective wrote:

Story issues end: The largest issue in the story however is the plot itself. We have quite a lot of sleep paralysis stories here...For example, at one time we got dozens of Deep Web stories a week that were all nearly identical in premise (download Tor, go on Deep Web, see something disturbing) due to it being a popular YouTube theme.

While sleep paralysis isn't the most popular genre currently, we still have a dozen or so stories floating around on the wiki that tell a similar plot. Seems like you are comparing having 12/10,000 stories on this subject to having 12 posted a week. I would hardly call this over-saturation or something that this site would even currently have to worry about. Sure if the saturation gets too high then the content might get deleted as there are better ones that meet the standards better, but this should not play into the story being deleted as of now.

EmpyrealInvective wrote:

Just describing one feature really doesn't paint a vivid picture It would if that's the only feature available. For instance an invisible entity with only milky white eyes. It seems like you just want more imagery instead of accepting what imagery there is. Understandably more is better, but sometimes the monsters don't need to be described.

EmpyrealInvective wrote:

the confirmation that there is something else going on beyond the realm of typical sleep paralysis gives the story an incomplete feeling as it begs the question about what they're doing in response to this possible threat. Originally they were just unsettled by the sounds, now that they have a physical confirmation that something is at play here (due to its re-occurrence), it feels a bit anticlimactic to just end it there. Not really, the entity has not harmed him. There is probably something going on but neither the narrator or reader is going to figure it out. The narrator is clearly afraid of what might happen one day, but he would rather live in ignorance of this than face the monster. If he tells anyone he knows about it it is likely that he will be sent to get counseling or end up in a psych ward. The narrator is clearly accepting the monster as part of himself and just doesn't want to see the things that lurk in the dark anymore, I don't see why that holds less weight than if the monster was described in full and the narrator researched about these sleep paralysis monsters and then found a way to defeat them. It seems like you want a different story than what was written here and I feel like that shouldn't be a reason to delete the story.