Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-30692969-20161215225517/@comment-24101790-20161216011515

Sorry for the wait, here's what I noticed while looking through it:

"The knock came again, this time followed by a deep voice." As you're introducing dialogue on another line, that period should probably be a colon to keep the story flowing and more connected. (It likely works either way, I'm just a proponent of connecting things rather than leaving them separated as it makes me wonder why they weren't in the same paragraph to begin with.

"He finished hastily drawing the Department of Population Controls logo on a man’s wrist" If you're going for a more terrifying aspect, I might replace the word 'drawing' with something more forceful like tattooing/branding/carving/etc. as drawing makes the tattoo seem like it's something impermanent.

"“The lottery is closed. No more names can be put in,” the man overviewing the process boomed." You might want to switch out overviewing with overseeing as overview generally means 'give a general review or summary of.' in the basic terms whereas overseeing implied authoritative watching and paints a bit more of a dark picture.

“Nick, I swear to god, don’t go. Please,” God should probably be capitalized as you're referring to a singular God.

Story issues: The dialogue could use a bit of work. Lines like: “We’ve been lying on the couch for hours, not talking to each other, just barely laughing at the funny parts. We’re 19, shouldn’t we be out partying or studying for classes or something?” feel overly expository. It also doesn't feel like something that would be said in a natural conversation. You might want to try moving that bit of information (age and activities) to the protagonist's thought process to make it a bit more natural. ("We were 19 for Chrissakes, we should have been out partying or cramming for school, not just lying around and watching tv all day doing and saying nothing.")

Additionally this line might need some revision: "“No, you dirty traitor. I thought we were friends, that we’d give it all for each other. I see how it is. It’s starting to make me wonder whether I ever truly knew you in the first place."" as it feels a bit too much like you're trying to convey your point rather than having the story describe it through their words.

I definitely think you have the emotional component down, but I have some suggestions about the horror aspect. I think the story would benefit from a bit more description/implication.

"My friends were trapped in a hellscape that I was one of the ones lucky enough to escape." I think if you really want this to be more effective you might want to be a bit more descriptive of the population control area to drive home the horror (Maybe describing what filled the lower cage, possibly people without enough room to move or even turn around dealing with the waste of people above them, etc. Go for some real factory farm imagery to make it feel like the protagonist is abandoning his friends to a horrible fate).

That's about all I could come up with, I might suggest also finding some way to reference the over-population of the world (Ala Harry Harrison's "Make Room, Make Room" or Robert Brockway's "Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity" for a more recent example.) Hope that helps some.