Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-32299870-20170615212900/@comment-24101790-20170615221707

As I just deleted this story before I noticed this was up, I thought I'd put my reasoning for the deletion down here. The story has quite a lot of mechanical and plot issues. Grammar: It's=it is, its=possession. "The blaze seemed to extend to every tree, it’s flames licking the trunks, crawling their way inside the bark. Smoke billowed", "The remaining entity, the ‘corpse’ dusted itself off, and cast its’ eyes upon the jerry can, picked it up, and emptied the liquid upon the unconscious man.", "It then looked at the lighter in its’ bloodied hands,", etc.

Overly complex sentences: "If an individual decided to stroll into the spacious woodland prior to the event, they’d have come across a rather peculiar event, that being two men, one seemingly dead, being dragged along the brown autumnal leaves, his blood-stained boots hanging limp against the hard earth." I'd suggest reading the story aloud. Typically if you find a sentence long enough where you need to pause in the middle of it, it's generally better to break it up to improve flow. Punctuation missing from dialogue: “Killing an arsonist is harder than you think, officer(period missing)”

Wording: "A wall of crimson blocked the way on all sides, preventing any progress into or out of the forest." (Typically fire isn't crimson (a deep red) so you might want to re-word it a bit), "If an individual decided to stroll into the spacious woodland prior to the event, they’d have come across a rather peculiar event" (avoid redundancy where you use the same words/phrases multiple times in a short period.), "He lit the lighter" (You typically light a candle or a fire, 'lit the lighter' feels out of place here), "He looked around, scouring the environment for any sign of movement. With a long sigh, he decided to look around, to ensure he was truly alone." (it feels redundant to state that he's looking around multiple times.)

Story issues: This really could use quite a bit of re-tooling as there isn't much story here. It just seems to be two people fighting in a fire and then the arsonist is burnt alive. This comes off more like we're reading a story where the introduction was left out that set up the characters and scene. For example we don't really know how the arsonist and the 'corpse' got into this situation to begin with as the story picks up with the arsonist just dragging the body.

It feels a bit confusing to organize it in this Tarantino-esque format (of showing the ending first and then replaying the events to see what led up to that point). Here it more feels like the audience is reading the ending to a story that we're unfamiliar with and uninvested in. For example, while the topic of an arsonist can be a creepy theme, there isn't much here to really build up any sense of terror or drama. I'm sorry, but this still needs quite a bit of work. I suggest a heavy re-work if you're planning on making a deletion appeal for this.