Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-30307610-20170828150610/@comment-29652084-20170829235612

I'm going to make this as quick as I can.

Correct if I'm wrong, but the plot is as follows: "I asked my mom for bison steak. She fed me a dog and cried about it."

There's a reason I say 'Correct me if I'm wrong.' The ending is a confusing mess that doesn't make sense. I guess one could infer that it was dog rather than bison. But to a person just reading your work, that's a haphazard guess at best.

You spend a good portion of the story battering us over the head about how the narrator lived on a farm, has dogs, likes bison, and grew vegetables. We get it. Keep K.I.S.S in mind; mentioning the same thing multiple times over gets redundant, and gets redundant quickly. A lot of the things you did write could easily be inferred. For example:

"Being that we grew only vegetables, we never had much in the way of meats."

That's something that can easily be inferred in the context of the story just by reading a few lines earlier:

"We didn’t raise animals or anything just grew some vegetables."

Cutting out a lot of this would pretty easily make your story roughly a paragraph long and it would still say the same thing.

Vague writing is fine. It's not a bad thing. But when you bat us with what we can infer and then don't write what we can't, it turns your story into a confusing pile of words.

But while we are on the plot, this is one of those stories whose biggest problem is that it could have been avoided with the word 'no.' The mother could have easily said 'Well, I can't get any bison right now. Maybe when the harvest is better.'

I could go on forever about the ending. It's anticlimactic, doesn't make sense, and could've easily been avoided. Yeah, harvest wasn't the greatest, but are they that starving? Are they down enough that the mother can't trade? Are their neighbors that unkind that they require something to trade, rather than helping out what is obviously a mother and her son who are in considerably bad shape?

Then we have the beginning, which doesn't help. Is the son making enough headway that he can't help his mother out?

Your biggest problems are that you leave out the necessary details but bat us over the head with everything else. You haven't given us any reason as to why the two people are in the position that they're in. What you have is what I like to call the 'bare bones' of the story. There's no meat.