Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-27652016-20160121191936/@comment-26425680-20160122195926

The one problem that's most easily fixed is your paragraph formatting. You shouldn't indent here on the Wiki. It's okay for printed works, but it's not the current format online. Just leaving a space between your paragraphs will suffice.

As far as your grammar is concerned, you have a tendency towards creating run-on sentences. Here's just one example from your story:

"The heater had a tendency to get broken and at time randomly turn on resulting in the occasional night were the entire house was hot summer day and every once in a while the facet sink would release rusted water if you didn’t turn on it on for more than a few days but other than that is was a decent place."

When the ideas you're trying to present aren't broken up into easily digestible sizes, it becomes difficult for the reader to take it all in at once. The whole passage should be rewritten, with at least a few pauses somewhere along the way. Here's a simple example.

"The heater had a tendency to get broken at times, and it randomly turned on at other times. This resulted in the occasional night where the entire house was as hot as a summer day. The sink had problems too, spewing rusted water if it wasn't turned on for more than a few days. Other than those issues, it was a decent place."

See how it's broken into nice morsels that are easy for the reader to absorb? My advice would be for you to read your story aloud. That will help make it obvious where you need a comma and where you need a period. Also, don't be afraid to add a little bit of style to your basic descriptions (along with the requisite pauses). Here's another way it could be rewritten:

"The heater had a dual personality. Sometimes it didn't work at all, and other times it rebutted all attempts at shutting it off. The nights when it wouldn't stop running were the worst, because I'd wake up bathed in sweat. I'd try to rinse myself off at the sink, but the invariably rusty water that emanated from the faucet did little to make me feel better."

You also have some spelling errors peppered throughout (e.g. "new" in place of "knew"). My bet is that you spell just fine, but you simply didn't proofread your work. If you put your work aside for a couple of days, you'll be surprised at how many mistakes you find when you finally come back to it. The spelling errors can be easily fixed.

Now onto the story itself... you've actually got some workable ideas, but the downside is that there's nothing here that's new. Having your narrator move into a new residence, only to slowly discover that it's already inhabited by something, is an all-too-common plot device. I'm not saying that you absolutely can't use it (after all, there are very few completely original ideas anymore), but if you're going to take this route then your story needs to be top notch in other regards. As it stands, if all the grammar and spelling was corrected, you'd have a okay story that was otherwise unmemorable. Also, the ending feels a little abrupt; it made me wonder if you were done writing or not. On the plus side, your pacing is good, your characters behave in realistic fashion, and the story makes sense.