Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35387722-20180915202232/@comment-25428589-20180915210901

Hi there!

There's definitely the beginnings of an interesting premise here. Hearing a knocking on the door and thinking it's from the outside when it's actually on the inside could definitely be used to great effect. However, right now, the story has a couple of issues.

To begin with, formatting. Don't indent paragraphs on the wiki, it makes things appear in that box with the scrollbar, like your second paragraph here. To start a new paragraph, add two newlines, and don't indent with spaces.

Moving on to the actual issues with the story, there's some awkward wording here. In the first paragraph, when you're referring to knocking on the door of your room, rather than saying, "I thought he was my brother," it would be more idiomatic to say, "I thought it was my brother." Later in that paragraph, the sentence, "But once without an answer," doesn't really make sense. "I didn't receive any answer," for example, would sound a lot better here.

The story has a serious problem with tenses right now. When the narrator's speaking, the tense should be consistent throughout your story. Here, you alternate between past tense ("The knocking stopped") and present tense ("I hear a voice"). It's often easier to write effectively in the past tense, so I might suggest trying to stick to that to begin with? It's quite distracting to deal with the sudden switches in tense at this time.

Looking at the bigger picture, there's just not enough story here, in my opinion. This is rushed. There's no detail or description, it's a list of events. You need some more than just "x happened, then y happened, then z". We can tell when horror stories are reaching their conclusion, because they tend to increase in tension up to a climax. Listing out events in sequence with no emotion or depth does not lend itself to this increase in tension, and left me confused as to whether the story was ending on a cliffhanger, or if it was just unfinished. Consider how you can better reveal information to the reader - when the character speaks, consider actually including the quote of what they say, for example. Help us connect with the narrator, and understand his fear, and I guarantee you the story will be scarier. This can all be done while still keeping the pasta short, if a micropasta style is what you're going for.

Best of luck with your story!