Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24434606-20150514233534/@comment-24434606-20150515210841

Whitix wrote: Alright, so first off, take a look at this, as it highlights many of the issues with your story. To paraphrase, this is a standard OC story where the narrator snaps and murders everyone (although this one has robots, which is unique, but they bring their own slews of issues). Your character even has a catchphrase, which is a huge indicator of a problematic OC story. The character's name is Spaura Fox...? And she becomes a cyborg fox...? Please realize how ridiculous that actually sounds.

There are a great deal of formatting errors here. You need paragraphs, not single lines. The font size needs to be default to match the rest of the text on the wiki as well.

As for the grammar, there are numerous errors throughout the story. The most prominent one is the high number of sentence fragments. To name a few:

"But somehow wearing glasses and being smart takes all that “sexyness” away."

"Except from the school angel, Caroline.

"But she comes in later."

These break up the flow of the story and give it a choppy feel. You need to combine these into complete sentences with a noun and a verb, along with them expressing a complete thought. There are also many missing punctuations. I don't feel like going over all of them, so I recommend running this through Word or another word processor to better clean it up.

But if we were to ignore all of the grammatical and formatting errors, along with the typical OC formula, there is still one major problem with your story: it makes no sense whatsoever.

Starting with Spaura (Who has a very specific and convenient "name" for her occupation), you state she is a normal girl. First off, don't tell us she's normal, show us through her character interactions. Second, you say she has yellow eyes. I don't think yellow eyes are a normal characteristic of any human ever. It makes me think she has Jaundice or something. Second, we know she's been murdering these people almost instantly, as the writing is way too obvious. "With a knife I tend to use when dissecting animals for science..." That's not something normal people would do.

"“Huh? O-oh yes I’m 100% perfectly fine!” *SLAM*" Why does Spaura slam her head into the table for no reason? There's literally no reason for her to do that. It doesn't even add anything to the story; it just sort of... happens.

Caroline and her "goons" (please call them something else, as they need some characterization) are standard evil characters that are unnecessarily and improbably evil for the sake of being evil. This is another pitfall of the common OC stories. They destroy this girl's magic robot... because? They have no motivation besides being evil and giving Spaura a reason to snap. The fact that they then freaking try to shoot her at school is also completely ludicrous.

But we're ignoring the elephant in the room. This girl just makes freaking robots in her spare time. You need to explain how and why she does this. You can't just say "she's really smart". How is no one amazed she builds humanoid robots? They all seem to just kind of ignore this. And what of her parents? How does she hide this from them, but not the kids at school? This is a huge issue; there needs to be a reason behind her building these animatronics.

The fact that she murders children and their souls integrate into the machine (As there is literally no other explanation why one of them gains sentience and feeling) is far too reminiscent of Five Nights at Freddy's. It also needs to be explained why. The story would benefit a lot from things being explained.

And finally, there needs to be some explanation as to why she has robot fox ears. Come on, I know she's "The Fox", but you need to at least try and explain it. Because it is utterly laughable currently. Better yet, delete that part entirely, as it only serves to unnecessarily further your OC in a non-developmental way.

I'll stop here, but if you do plan on rewriting this, you need to explain the various events in this story, as they make absolutely no sense on their own. Their needs to be something creepy as well; having our main character snap and go crazy just isn't scary. While I can see you were trying to add tension near the beginning, it falls flat because of the numerous plot holes and irregularities in the story. Personally, I'd ditch this and start fresh, but best of luck in whatever you decide on. I understand where your coming from, I wrote this a long time ago, and as I'm reading through it again. Yes, I can see that this is not really good. But I tried to make a sort of different kind of story. I should have goen into more detail. Which I will do.

The thing with the broken head piece goign into her head to make fox ears is that that makes her the fox, she sticks the thing in her head to try and commit suicide, and it fails, and instead she gains an advantage. I'll change the story, to fix its huge amout of shitty wtriting, but I'm not going to get rid of that part.

So I thank you for explaining the problems, but if you would be so kind as to list all the problems in a simple list and send it to me, I'll take a look and have a better plot line in about a week maybe. Thank you.