Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-38191277-20190405122425/@comment-35711173-20190405235606

Antsomnia,

You brought your story to the right place. Many authors who are better than I am will take time away from their writing to help others. I'm very grateful. So often, their advice has made the difference between not worth publishing on the Wiki and really good.

First, I am going to talk about basic English. You made a LOT of mistakes. Fortunately, there are free web sites to help you correct those mistakes.

I suggest you start at http://www.grammarly.com and try that. My minimum standard for checking the work of others that the story should be clean up almost all the "Grammarly Free" errors. Your story has 74.



In addition, Grammarly has "Premium" or "You Pay Money" errors. You have even more of those. I am too cheap to pay them, so I will clean through the story one paragraph at a time until I find the errors. Most of the time, I get the story to no free errors and like three Premium errors.



Grammarly is not the only one out there. I'm not even mentioning my favorite - it is too picky for you at this point in time. However, I suggest you use http://www.scribens.com to find run on sentences. Your story is so long that it can only load half of it, but in that half it found seven run on sentences. These REALLY grind the reader to a halt as they try to figure out what's going on.



Just Grammarly free and Scribens run on sentences would do SO much for your story.

On to the story itself. It's BIG for a creepypasta, 5,066 words or full short story size. There's not enough material for the length. If you ruthlessly edited it to get it up to shape, I think half would be pruned. That's line by line, word by word editing. Read it out loud to yourself several times. If you stumble over it, so will the reader.

This is a format of story I have seen get rejected here quite often. Most of the story is shooting back and forth gore stuff. Gore doesn't make a creepypasta. Horror is a slow idea, going from unsettling to fright. It's not shock. From going into that jungle to the big reveal, that middle section all reads pretty similarly and I think you really should go through it mercilessly.

Less than half of what I write on a story actually gets posted. It's a long, slow editing process. I have gone as many as five drafts here in the Writer's Workshop before publishing.

Dr. Bob